by Reed Karaim
“Dwight’s coming over from Wheaton,” the deputy said, referring to his boss, the sheriff. “He should get there first.”
He’d already told me the little he knew. An accident with a school bus. A vehicle overturned on a narrow county highway. He kept his eyes on the road but there was a tremor in his voice. I looked at his profile, the comically strong chin, slightly too long nose and forehead, a face of carved angles and planes interrupted only by his gentle eyes and absurdly long and feminine eyelashes. I realized he wasn’t much older than I was, and he might well have gone to the local school.
He almost missed the turn and had to brake hard. I waited for the patch of ice that would add us to the accident list, but the car fishtailed into the narrow county highway and he accelerated again. “Icy,” the deputy said, and I felt him lift his foot off the accelerator. We had the wind at our back now; you could see farther ahead. The road was as straight as a road in a dream, seeming to rise slightly as it disappeared into the sky. The bus appeared first, a yellow smudge in the white, becoming a lozenge the color of an old lemon and then clearly a bus, sitting upright, seeming to float in the middle of nothingness, but on its wheels on the side of the road. The deputy had slowed even more as soon as we saw it, and now he approached cautiously, as if some trap had been set. I couldn’t see the sheriff’s car, or anything else, but my eyes caught something black in the ditch, and beside it the eroded, wavering stick figure of a man clutching his hat.
“There’s something in the ditch.”
As we pulled over we saw the corner of the sheriff’s car parked behind the bus. The deputy left his car running, gave me a brief, confused look, and opened his door. The wind bit my face as I stepped out on the other side of the car. The bus was only a few yards ahead, young faces pressed against the dark glass as if peering up from underwater. The deputy was already sliding down into the ditch toward the sheriff and the black object, which I could see now was an overturned vehicle, possibly a Jeep. I skated across the asphalt, which had a fine, nearly invisible scrim of ice, crossing the front of the bus to the door, which opened as I reached it. The driver was perched above, still in his seat.
“Are you all right?” I shouted. “Is everyone all right?”
He looked down at me, his eyes wide in shock.
“The back end’s all messed up. I can’t move.”
“The bus?”
He seemed to consider this for too long. “Yes. The back end. Something’s wrong.”
“But the kids? Is everyone all right?” I stepped into the bus as I spoke, rising out of the door well into the long, cold interior, thirty or forty pale faces staring at me in unison.
“Are you all right?” I was still shouting, although it was oddly quiet inside the bus, the wind a flat, distant moan.
There were scattered, hesitant nods, a few murmurs of assent. Stephen, Anna’s son, was sitting halfway down the bus on the left.
“Stephen. Is everyone all right? Is anyone hurt?”
He seemed embarrassed at being discovered.
“A few kids got knocked over. Jimmy’s got a bloody lip. Lisa hurt her arm.”
“I’m okay,” a girl’s voice said from the back.
“We got knocked down! Some kids were in the aisle. They shouldn’t have been standing but they were and they got knocked down!”
It was a girl I didn’t know, wearing a multicolored stocking cap over her pale yellow hair and standing as if she had been called on at school. Weak protests rose at being ratted out for standing.
“But nobody’s hurt too bad?”
Head shakes now and louder reassurances.
“What happened?” I asked the driver. He stared at me. There was something wrong with him. “Everything’s going to be all right,” I announced uselessly to the rows of quiet children. “I’m going to go talk to the sheriff.”
The blowing snow was pulsing red and blue on the highway. I crossed the front of the bus to see that an ambulance had pulled past and two paramedics, nearly invisible in their white jackets, were hurrying into the ditch. I followed them, taking short, careful steps along the glazed surface of the road, feeling the wind push at my back. The rear left quarter panel of the bus had been smashed in and the wheel was canted drunkenly inward. The black bumper trailed in the snow.
I was about to descend into the ditch when the EMTs reappeared out of a gust of blowing snow, inching uphill with a stretcher. I slid down a few feet to help. A dark-haired young woman, hair clotted with flakes, skin pale and wet, stared up at me as if I had dropped from heaven. She was blinking rapidly and I could see the skin in the small declivity where her throat met her breastbone moving in short, quick breaths. I had taken ahold of the stretcher right near her head and her eyes fixed on me as I helped them steady the stretcher on the asphalt.
“We got it. Thanks.”
They slid her into the blackness of the open ambulance. I nearly fell as I slipped back down into the ditch, where the deputy knelt by someone stretched on the ground beside the Jeep, which lay on its side collecting snow. It was quieter down here. The snowflakes turned and danced in strange pockets and eddies of air. “Just a minute, now. Just a minute,” I heard the deputy say. I could feel the stretcher-bearers coming down behind me. They were quick, but when they reached beneath the young man to slide him onto the stretcher he groaned. “Oh, Jesus,” one of them said, pulling his hand away and staring at his glove covered with blood. “Farther down his back.” They reached into the snow beneath him, exploring carefully. He groaned louder and shouted something I couldn’t understand. Their eyes met and they lifted him quickly onto the stretcher as he screamed, “Linda!” The deputy helped them carry the stretcher up the slope.
The sheriff stood at the back of the Jeep, hands tucked into the pockets of his black nylon jacket, cap pulled low over his graying hair. He considered the interior of the vehicle, the space behind the seat open to the air and filled with a jumble of things my mind couldn’t sort out. He crossed to the side, looking carefully at the snow, speaking absently, figuring it out for himself.
“The storm was worse. They come barreling down the road. They can’t see fifteen feet ahead and they run into the back of the school bus. They don’t hit it straight on. Maybe he jerks the wheel at the last minute. They hit it sideways and knock themselves into the ditch.” He gestured back into the tumbled whiteness. “They turn over once. They don’t have their seat belts on, of course. She’s ejected from the vehicle. He goes up into the steering wheel, but probably would have been all right . . .”
The sheriff knelt and reached into the snow where several, small perfect holes were ringed with a tracery of pink.
“ . . . except he had a toolbox in the back and it flies open . . .”
He pulled a screwdriver out of a hole in the snow, the metal point slick and wet and gleaming but still holding red flecks of flesh.
“. . . and these tools come flying out and nail him right in the back. Like a bunch of arrows.”
He reached into another hole, a gash, and pulled out a chisel, sharp-edged, the handle stained black.
“What are the odds of that? Bad luck.”
He considered the spot where the driver had fallen into the snow, a few feet ahead of us.
“Do you think he pulled them out himself? . . . Jesus . . .”
I could picture everything he had described. It was all very clear and easy to see, and I didn’t want to see any of it so I looked up at the road. The ambulance was gone. I had missed it leaving somehow. The storm seemed to be abating. There was a faint sense of definition along the horizon.
“There’s something wrong with the driver. In the bus.”
The sheriff looked up from his contemplation of the chisel.
“He’s not right. There’s something wrong with him. You need to get him to a hospital.”
Staring into the blankness of the storm, I saw something at the far edge of the world. Moving too fast. I slid up the ditch to get a closer look. Behi
nd me the sheriff raised his voice.
“There’s a tow truck coming. And another bus for the kids.”
I was on the road and I could see it now. Not a tow truck. A battered green car. Coming too fast. A car I knew. I didn’t realize what I was doing at first, but I started to skate down the road toward it. Raising my arms to be seen. Then I was running, slipping with each step, trying to close the distance before she got too close. I could see her sliding into the ditch or, worse, into the bus. Behind me I heard shouting—the deputy’s voice—but I was in the middle of the road now, waving my arms wildly. With each ragged breath I pushed a cloud of white into the world and I was temporarily blinded, unable to measure the shrinking distance between us, so when I could see again, it was as if the car had jumped forward, and I could make her out now, hunched over the wheel. She wasn’t going to be able to stop. My soul fled my body and I saw everything as I rose into the air. I saw the highway, ever so faintly glittering in its skin of ice, a gray line surrounded by white fields beneath a white sky, snow like brief erasures of reality falling across my vision. I saw the police cars behind me, the bright yellow school bus with ghostly faces floating in the dark windows, the upturned Jeep like a black tear in the day. My sight was so perfect I could see the blood creeping outward and thinning in its capillary action through the snow, each hole a tiny drain through which this universe would eventually collapse.
Anna’s Buick slid sideways to a stop fifteen feet in front of me, the nose dipping into the ditch, but the rear end clinging to the road. She slipped on the ice as she stepped out, pulling herself back to her feet awkwardly. I was halfway to her by then.
“They’re okay! They’re all okay!”
She had gone deaf and tried to push past me, slipping again and falling into my arms. We sat down hard on the road, a ridiculous tableau, Anna pushing against my shoulder as I repeated the same words over and over and she seemed unable to hear me. “Not again!” she shouted. “Not again!” She swung her arm wildly, hitting me as hard as she could just beneath my right cheekbone, and as I recoiled she tried to pull herself to her feet to reach the bus and I thought of Stephen and how he would feel, and I held on to her arm and she fell backward again. Her car was on the left side of the road, and I didn’t think the kids could see us, unless they had all crowded into the front. I thought there was still a chance this moment could not exist outside the two of us, if we kept it right here, if we held it close enough. I got a better hold of her arm and yanked hard, pulling her close, wrapping my arms around her. I pressed my lips into her ear.
“Stephen’s okay. I talked to him. He’s fine.”
She shoved hard against my chest one last time.
“Anna, he’s fine! They’re all okay!”
“You’re shouting,” she said. “You’re shouting in my ear.”
I let go of her and she slid sideways on the cold asphalt. I turned so we were sitting side by side, facing the front of the bus down the road. The driver, still at his post behind the wheel, was faintly visible through the window.
“Not again?” I said.
Chapter 26
THEY WERE DRINKING TOGETHER and it made them happy, or it made him happy, and that made her happy—or happier, anyway. She sometimes felt, in the painful clarity of morning, lying dry-mouthed in bed while he slept soundly beside her, knowing she had to get up to start his breakfast and attend to their child, that she wasn’t seeing it right, that she was mistaking something for something else, as if she had misunderstood a key word in a definition or lost track of a concept she once knew. But she pushed herself out of their disordered bed and into each day because there were chores to be tended to and they were happy. They were making it work.
The winter was a bad one, endless and raw, working its way through every crack in their tin box of a home. They were trapped indoors for days at a time. It was hard for all of them, but they were making it work. He hadn’t hit her in a long enough time that she no longer flinched when he moved suddenly toward her. And he moved toward her a lot. He seemed consumed by a restless, furtive lust. The worst storm of the year blew in. His work shut down and it was impossible to get out of their tiny valley. By the second day the child was bouncing off the walls, tugging at doors, climbing headfirst over the tops of furniture. Anna remembered the striped blue shirt, saggy secondhand overalls, and mop of tousled, still-fine, sand-colored hair that always seemed to be scrambling around a corner, just escaping her grasp. By the third day she felt the trailer shrinking as rock-hard drifts rose around it. Her husband had ventured into the storm twice, once to check the car and another time because he worried the insulated pipes under the trailer might be freezing—both just excuses, really, to escape briefly into the wild air and snow-blind world.
The wind came around the front door and they had to push hard to get it latched when he returned. The storm door was loose and banged endlessly in the wind. Her husband, still in his heavy boots and sweater, sat at the small Formica table in the kitchen sipping coffee while snow melted out of his hair. The wall of white outside the window was turning an ashen gray that signaled the retreat of the day. She could see how hard he was trying, and it terrified her.
“Let’s have a blizzard party,” he said.
He made a special drink he had been served down home in Tennessee. It was so sweet, she thought she might gag, but he poured more sugar into his own glass and his smile was wide and eager and desperate and they drank more, straight bourbon now, and the country-western singer on the record he had chosen was singing about a swimming hole and it suddenly seemed funny, and when she laughed, she felt a glow settle over her and she thought this was all right, this was a good idea, after all, this was something to do. “Tell me what you’d do if you had a million dollars,” he said, and Anna was speechless confronting the collapse of her own imagination. She had no idea. She could barely imagine what she would do with a hundred dollars. But when she shook her head, laughing helplessly, he was off, talking fast. It started with cars and went on to the very biggest Sony Trinitron television and a stereo system capable of waking the dead two states in every direction, and then he was learning how to play a Gibson electric guitar and there was something about NASCAR and a king-sized bed and a house on a lake with a powerboat. The room was rocking back and forth with his words, and she felt her heart rise at the size of his dreams and their impossibility. A million dollars had already been spent, but it was exhilarating to hear him go on and on, even if it seemed to her obscurely that it had stopped making sense some time ago, that it had simply become a list of things. She had so given up on the possibility of the world outside her sight that it left her dizzy and breathless to hear it piling up in all its riches in their tiny kitchen.
He ran out of words, staggered to the door, threw it open, and shouted, Bring it on! into the storm before he put on AC/DC, music she always hated, and he swung her into his arms to dance, although how you danced to this she wasn’t sure; it didn’t matter, the room was dancing, swinging wildly around her now and shifting colors as she hung helplessly on his shoulders and then they were in bed, and it was a tumult, and she reached for him desperately, threw herself at him because it was all she could do to keep from slipping into the blackness rising out of the corners of the bedroom, that swallowed her as soon as they were still.
She awoke hours later, feeling the room was colder than it should be. The storm door banged like a drunk pounding unevenly on a snare drum, each blow landing directly on her left temple. She staggered into the bathroom and was sick. She avoided her reflection in the mirror and stumbled back toward the bed, shivering uncontrollably. The wind seemed to be sweeping through the walls. She stopped beside the bed, hugging herself against the cold. Something wasn’t right. There was something wrong.
She threw herself toward their child’s room, hitting their closed bedroom door first with her shoulder, wrenching the latch out of the frame and knocking it into the wall as she fell into the hall. The wind sweeping through
the trailer hit her and she saw the open front door in her mind, saw it clearly, a perfect rectangle opening into darkness, even before she slid on her knees into the kitchen and saw it waiting for her, not wide open, but ajar, the broken static of the storm reflecting the outside light above the entrance, the snow reaching across the linoleum like an encroaching flood, the narrow space through which frozen air rushed opening into the rest of her life.
• • •
“SHE MADE IT ABOUT FIFTY YARDS,” Anna said. “She was walking in the direction of the stream. The snow had covered her and we didn’t find her until the morning.”
We were sitting in her car outside her house. We had been sitting there for some time.
“She? But your son is your oldest . . .” I stopped.
“Stephen is my second child. I got pregnant again sometime during that storm. Maybe that night.”
Her second child. Not her first. Her second. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. We sat there for a while, the heater rattling, snow still falling outside.
“What happened to your husband?”
“There was an investigation. I wanted them to throw us in jail. I hoped they would,” she said with a sudden fierceness. “But they didn’t. And then he left. Back down South.”
I shook my head and, after a time, another question occurred to me.
“But Sam . . .”
Anna’s smile was fleeting. “A man I met on a bus.”
“Right.”
She said nothing.
“Really?”
“On a bus from Dickinson to Seattle. Have you ever had something you wanted to do forever? Some silly thing? When I was a little girl we went to Dickinson to do some Christmas shopping. It was a big trip for us, and we passed the Greyhound station and there was a bus with those end-of-the-line glowing letters up above the front window. Seattle. And I thought, what would it be like to ride the bus all the way across Montana and through the mountains and to the sea? And it was something I always wanted to do after that.”