by David Wright
I look around Sam’s lit room, untouched since the accident. Neither Meg nor I can bring ourselves to change the nursery just yet.
“Daddy, are you awake?” I hear Kayla’s voice behind me.
I turn, expecting to see her ghost in the doorway, but then remember she’s alive. All those memories of the accident with her were false, an accident that never happened. Did it? Or were there two accidents?
I can’t remember anything after Ruiz found me. Nothing real, anyway.
“Daddy? Are you awake?” Kayla asks again, her voice sounding even closer.
My heart pounding hopeful in my chest, I go to the door and open it, but Kayla’s not there.
So, how am I hearing her?
Where am I?
The man in black steps into the hall, coming from her room, his bright-blue eyes looking me up and down. “Do you remember now?”
“Yes,” I say, wiping tears from my eyes. “What’s happening to me?”
“You’re in a coma, Tom. You tried to kill yourself.”
The way he says the words ‘kill yourself,’ it sounds almost as if he’s judging me.
“Who are you?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he puts a hand to his ear, cupping it, “You can hear her, can’t you?”
“Kayla?” I ask.
“Yes, she’s sitting in a hospital room right now, waiting for her Daddy to wake up. And Meg is there waiting, too.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Long enough to spin this elaborate fiction around a truth you couldn’t face. That is some world-class lying to yourself there, son. No wonder you’re a writer.”
I shake my head.
He continues, “You’ve also been gone long enough that the doctors are starting to give up on you. If you don’t respond soon, you may never wake up. Once you pass a year, the odds of returning to anything resembling normal are astronomically against you.”
“Good,” I say. “They’re better off without me.”
“Who’s better off without you?”
“Them,” I say, “you know who I’m talking about.”
“Say their names, Tom.”
I look at the man in black, wanting to punch his smug face.
Who the hell is he to talk to me like this?
I look at him, annoyed. I want to yell at him, ask him how the hell he knows what’s happening in my head, but I assume he’s just one more elaborate fiction fashioned by me. I’m arguing with my subconscious.
But looking into his bright-blue eyes, I can’t help but feel like I’m in the presence of something else — something close to an angel, if I believed in such things.
Man, they must have me on some excellent meds.
“Say their names, Tom,” he repeats. “Who is better off without you?”
“Meg and Kayla,” I say.
The man in black shakes his head, lips pursed. More judgment.
He says, “You’ve been trying so hard to remember what you forgot in the accident. And you were so eager to have your daughter back in your arms when you thought you’d lost her, but now … what? You just give up? I thought you were so much stronger than this. But I guess it’s true what they say about suicides being selfish cowards.”
“I’m not a coward,” I yell. “I was trying to help them. They got insurance money. They wouldn’t have to see this constant reminder of the life we could’ve had. The life I fucked up! I killed him! I killed my son! What kind of monster does such a thing? Forgets his son in the back of a hot car? What kind?”
I break down, unable to say more. I just want the man in black gone.
Let me return to the fiction I created. Perhaps I can do better with the next iteration — spin a world where I have my daughter and my son, and my wife, and we all live happily ever after.
The man in black won’t shut up, though. “So, this is better? Your wife and daughter watching you slowly creep toward death? Waiting for you to wake up, and holding out hope against hope that you’ll beat the odds? That you’ll be one of the people who comes out of a coma and can live a normal life again? But you choose to reject them — choose to be selfish and die rather than stay and fight. They come here every day, waiting for you to wake up, man. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.”
“Daddy, are you awake?” Kayla asks again. “I swear, he was awake. He looked at me and talked to me. He said my name.”
I hear machines beeping, the sound of something else clicking, all of it sounding almost as if it’s underwater.
Meg asks, “Are you sure he said your name, Kayla?”
“I swear, Mom, he said my name.”
“You know that sometimes Daddy seems to be awake, but he’s really not, right? The doctor told us about that, remember?”
“He was awake!” Kayla yells.
The man in black comes closer, “Are you going to prove your daughter right, Tom? You have the power to wake up now, and rejoin the world. Or you can stay here in this … whatever you’ve created here … living out these lies.”
“I want to wake up,” I say, “but I don’t want any more pain. I don’t want to cause them any more pain.”
The man meets my eyes, and seems to be almost staring through them, into my soul. “Life is full of pain, Tom. Do you remember when you brought your daughter to the hospital with the croup? Remember how scared you were, and how mad you were at that X-ray technician who held her in the machine?”
“Yes,” I say.
“But that’s not the part of the story you remember most, is it?”
I look at him, wondering what he means.
“You remember the after, right? When you held Kayla in your arms again, comforting her, telling her how much you loved her and that she’d be OK.”
I nod yes.
“If you don’t wake up, there won’t be an after. This will be the last thing your family remembers, and you’ll never have a chance to tell them how much you love them, or that you’ll all be OK.”
“Will we?” I ask. “Will we be OK?”
“There’s only one way to find out, Tom. There are no guarantees in any of this. But you’ve been given something most people would kill for — a second chance. But you must wake up.”
“How?” I ask, tears streaming down my cheeks.
I try to imagine myself waking, but nothing’s happening.
“Daddy?” Kayla’s voice calls again, sounding even farther away.
“Come on,” Meg says. “We need to get home.”
“I want to wait for Daddy,” Kayla says.
“We have to go, honey.”
“Daddy, please, wake up,” Kayla cries. The sound of her crying feels like a knife in my gut, twisting harsher because I can’t answer her.
I try to wake again, but nothing’s happening.
“How do I wake up?” I yell at the man in black as I hear Kayla crying, “I don’t want to go.”
Meg says, “We have to, we’ll come back tomorrow.”
But I know there won’t be a tomorrow. Not if I don’t seize it now.
“How do I wake up?” I yell again.
The man meets my eyes, “You must want to live.”
“I want to!” I yell.
“Don’t tell me, tell them.”
I hear Meg pulling Kayla outside the door.
No! Don’t leave !
I wake with a scream.
I’m in the hospital room, hooked to machines, tubes running through my nose, seeing the door swing shut.
I’m too late.
I want to get up and chase them, but my body refuses to obey.
I’m too late.
And then the door swings open.
Meg and Kayla stand in the doorway, eyes wide in shock.
They heard me.
“Daddy?”
I look into Kayla’s eyes and then Meg’s, both of them filled with tears as they try to believe the impossible.
I try to talk, but can’t form the words I’m longing to say — to let them know how
much I love them.
But as they come toward me, and embrace me, I realize I don’t need to say anything.
They already know.
THE END
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Hello there, Dear Reader. Here’s the part of the book where I tell you a bit about my inspiration for Crash and why we wanted to write a standalone story as opposed to the series books we’re known for.
If you’re the kind of person that likes to skip straight to the Author’s Note first, I suggest you turn back as this WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS!
You have been warned.
While Sean and I are known for our series work, we’ve got a LOT of stories in our heads — things we want to bring into this world — we’re not going to create series for them all!
For one, not every story should be a series.
Two, it’s hard enough to manage six series, let alone add more to the plate. We pretty much decided not to start any new series until we close out a few (starting with Z 2136 which ended the Z trilogy for 47North).
And then there’s some readers who don’t really like series, not until they’re all wrapped and done, anyway. Those people have been waiting for us to do a proper book — with a beginning and end!
So we decided to dip into our story garden and write two standalone titles during a brief break between our other series work.
We each had these ghost story-type novels we wanted to write.
The idea was that we’d each take lead on our own idea, and then we’d work together on the edits (like we do with our Dark Crossings stories).
We figured we’d take a month, two tops, to write our books.
That was last summer!
Turns out that these two titles took longer than any other project we’ve written!
I’ll let Sean tell his story about Threshold in his Author’s Note when the book comes out next month. But here’s a bit of the behind-the-scenes on why I took so long to write Crash.
First, though, we have to talk about the origins of this story.
The original version of Crash, which I conceived in 1988, was about a writer who was in an accident which nearly killed him, and left his girlfriend in a coma. In fact, I was going to call it Girlfriend in a Coma, which a year earlier had been a Smiths song (though I didn’t hear of it until I had cooler taste in music than I did in the 80s). Later, in 1998, Douglas Coupland wound up writing a book of that title, which made me drop it.
Anyway, back to my story premise — Thomas Witt spent his waking hours by his girlfriend’s side in a hospital where he … (wait for it) … saw dead people.
He helped these dead people finish their unfinished business. He even solved an ancient murder at the hospital. And the end of the story came with the twist that Thomas Witt was dead all along.
It was going to be so damned awesome an ending. Nobody would expect it!
But then the movie The Sixth Sense came out and I felt like M. Night Shyamalan had reached into my head and stole my story!
I was soooooo pissed.
I ditched my book idea for a long time after that.
Sean and I have a recurring disagreement about what happens if we write something and then find out afterwards (or after we start) that someone else did something similar. I’m tempted to trash the whole thing and start over, trying to be “original.” He’s of the opinion that if someone else does an idea before you, it’s not a problem. You just write something better, or will, by virtue of being a different person with different experiences and tastes, will come up with something different enough that it won’t be the same.
As many creators say, there are no New Ideas. It’s what you do with the idea. How you make it different or new. What you bring to the story.
But every now and then there is an idea that is executed so well, like the ending of The Sixth Sense, that it becomes part of pop culture knowledge. And anyone who does anything even remotely close is either ripping it off or offering a weak homage to it.
That movie ruined my ability to write the story I originally thought up.
So I had to think of a different ending and change the story — a lot.
My back-up idea was that Thomas Witt was the one in a coma. He just thought his girlfriend was. I spent a lot of time researching comas, too, which gave me some cool ideas I wanted to include in the story. But that ending, too, felt like it had been done to death. That alone wouldn’t work.
So I had to think of something else.
And I spent the next couple of decades writing parts of the story over and over, trying to come up with the right story, and ending.
I’m not usually about the big twist ending, but seeing as Crash started with one of the best twist ending ideas ever, long before it became cliche, I felt like this story needed something big — something that would shock people.
One idea I had was to have this big reveal that Tom, or perhaps his wife (no longer just his girlfriend), had been unfaithful. That seems like a pretty big thing that would be traumatic and hard to get past.
But it wasn’t enough of a trauma. And it wasn’t a terribly surprising twist.
I wanted to hit this family where it hurt most.
In 2007, my wife and I had our first son. And around this time, she got this sticker which reminds you not to leave your child in a car. Oddly, it was a one-sided sticker which faced outward. I thought it would’ve been better as a two-sided sticker or peel away to remind both other people and the driver of the message — “Hey, don’t forget your kid!”
Because leaving children in a car is an avoidable tragedy. But it’s also a fairly common one.
As impossible as it is to believe, people sometimes forget — even something as important as their child being in the car.
I can’t imagine how I’d handle it if I’d done something like that. That would be the end of me, I think.
As I thought more about how tragic losing a child this way must be, I wanted to write about it. That’s how I process things that terrify or anger me — I write.
I began to wonder — What if this happened to my character, Tom Witt?
I’m guessing that forgetting something like your child in the car feels like the ultimate betrayal of one’s brain. I would imagine that anyone who has lived through this must be in constant torture and regret.
And I can’t even imagine how it would feel to be the spouse of someone who did this. You’re sad and angry. But how can you maintain an anger at someone who didn’t mean to do it? Where do you, as the spouse, put your anger when it’s a tragic mistake?
It’s got to be the emptiest, most devastating feeling ever, something damned hard to come back from.
The more I thought about how tragic this ending was, the more I felt like I had to write it. It felt right for the story. This is a writer suffering from the greatest of all guilts and tragedies. One so horrible, he has blocked it off in his mind, created this false reality in his coma state.
In a way, this is even a better story than my original idea. This feels so much more real and raw than the “I see dead people” story I would’ve written.
And, to my knowledge, this particular story hasn’t been done. Of course, I could be wrong. In which case, I’m blaming M. Night!
By the way, one of the reasons M. Night ruined my story isn’t just that he did it first, but he did it so much better than I would have! The Sixth Sense is a masterpiece! I don’t think I would’ve written something even half as good.
So, after many years of thinking and working on this story, last summer I sat down and started to properly write (and complete!) Crash, with this darker ending.
But then something happened while writing it.
I wondered if perhaps this ending was too dark?
Maybe there’s a reason this story hasn’t been written, or at least become a common story to tell.
It’s tragic! It’s dark. And nobody with children will want to read this book!
Halfway through the book, I froze, afraid to
continue.
I didn’t want to write something this dark.
I know that comes as surprising news to people who know of our penchant for putting children in jeopardy in Collective Inkwell stories!
But in a way, putting children, and adults, in jeopardy is our way of working through the things that scare us. It’s cathartic. And there’s always a bit of light at the end of the tunnel.
In this case, the light at the end of the tunnel was a train barreling towards the reader, the No Hope Express!
The ending was even too dark for me.
So I stalled, not wanting to write THIS ENDING, and the book continued to linger half done as I worked up the courage to finish it. And our regular readers wondered why the hell it was taking us so long to finish a single book? After all, we’d written a LOT over the course of the past two years. Why should one little story take so long?
After a month or so of inactivity on the title, I decided to start over. Not completely from scratch, but rather re-read the story and try and find what I was really trying to say with Crash.
A lot of what we write is fun, or we write it for thrills. But we don’t typically have strong messages we’re trying to deliver or Important Things to Say!
Crash, though, feels different.
I’m clearly trying to say something. A story doesn’t demand to be written for nearly 30 years if you’re not trying to say something. I knew it was about death.
I lost my best friend in an accident, and another person I had been close to was murdered. Both of these things weighed heavily on me, in addition to losing family members.
What was I trying to say with this story?
What question was I putting out there?
I think a lot of the best stories ask a question. What you would do if this happened to you? What would you do in this situation?
As I was getting deeper into the story, I realized I wasn’t writing about death. I was writing about fear.
And fear is something I’ve been dealing with for most of my life.
Yeah, I thought I was writing about death, but the story is about Tom being afraid to live with what he’s done. He doesn’t think he can be forgiven. He thinks his family will be better off without him. He doesn’t want to screw things up again. And he can’t stand the notion that he can’t control fate — that he can’t protect his family, least of all from himself.