The Shadow Between Us

by Carol Mason

  Someone is lying on the ground. A person. As far as I can see, they don’t appear to be moving.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Other drivers are getting out of their cars. Anxious faces. There are people on cell phones. I see them through a fog of remove.

  Somehow, even though my legs are sponge, I manage to get out of my car too. There is a man hovering by my door. His hand is just above my elbow. The dampened feeling in my head clears. It’s as though someone has just switched on sound.

  I hear the terrible scream. No, no, no.

  Then I realise it’s mine.

  ‘It’s all right,’ a voice says. This man. Fatherly. ‘It’s all right . . . Calm down.’

  But it’s not all right. I am walking towards the person on the ground.

  I have hit someone.

  Hit someone.

  The incongruous arrangement of arms and legs. The long blonde hair.

  ‘I thought I hit a deer,’ I hear myself saying. Over and over.

  This man is trying to stop me but I need to see this for myself. I need to see she is OK. I shake free of his hand.

  But as I get closer I can’t focus. I am toggling in and out of comprehension. She is face down, prone. The position of the head doesn’t look right. I make an inventory of the tight black exercise pants, the black and silver running shoes that are at odd angles; I don’t know how her feet can look like that in relation to the legs. I can’t take my eyes off them until I work out how.

  There is a hand on my back, rubbing in circles. ‘It’s all right . . .’ the same voice is saying.

  Her eyes are staring hard, and for a moment I think, OK, this is good. Her eyes are open so she’s OK. I am trying to will myself to do something productive, but then someone is placing a black thing over her, a jacket. I can’t see the eyes any more. They have covered her entirely from the waist up.

  But how is she going to breathe?

  I place a hand over my mouth, look from her to this man beside me. Vaguely I hear Jessica crying but I am unable to comfort her because I am looking up at everything from a new perspective. I’ve fallen to my knees. The man on the bike is still hovering high above me, only higher now, frozen in time. Far off, the dim scream of sirens.

  I am on eye level with her lower body. The long, slim legs. The under curve of her bottom. Soil on the soles of her runners. Her left hand. The olive skin. An orange reflector-type sleeve that covers her knuckles. I want to touch her curled fingers. Someone needs to comfort her until help gets here! I look up at people, wanting to communicate this but I am cold, so very cold. My teeth are chattering; I don’t think I can speak.

  I don’t know what happens next, if I have fainted. A paramedic called Andy is telling me to drink this. I stare at the paper cup he’s holding out. I am clutching a huge sheet of foil draped over me like a blanket. I am half aware of needing to hold my daughter but my head is a fog, my field of vision shallow. The sound of my pulse rushes in my ears. A policeman is asking me if my daughter and I can manage to answer a few questions.

  All I can do is shake my head. ‘Please call my husband,’ I hear myself saying. I am very calm. ‘Please call my husband.’ Andy tells me to sip my tea.

  The tea is warm and sweet. I concentrate on doing what I’m told. One sip. Two. But it makes me want to throw up. I hold it out to him, lower my head. I feel the graze of his warm fingers as he takes it from me. My ears are fading in and out. Periods of sound blocked by periods of silence, where realisation and disbelief want to collide but can’t just yet. When I next look up, when the urge to puke has worn off a little, there is a stretcher and a lot of emergency vehicles – I count two fire trucks and two ambulances. The paramedic, Andy – he keeps telling me his name – removes something from my nose. A long tube split into two prongs; I hadn’t felt it in there.

  ‘Is she going to be OK?’ I say to him. To Andy. I am getting a grip on things now. My voice sounds so very far off, though, like I am out of my body. She is being lifted, raised, like one of those effigies of saints carried through European streets. I can’t peel my eyes away. About three inches of blonde ponytail dangles off the end of the stretcher. ‘No, ma’am,’ Andy says. I can’t stop staring at the hair. ‘I’m afraid she didn’t survive.’

  As the words imprint I look up and see Mark and, at the same time, Jessica tumbling into his arms. There is an implosion inside of me while I watch him hugging our distraught daughter and then his arms are around me and my face is buried in his armpit, in the soft merino of his pullover. He is holding both of us. We are both crying. I try to breathe like I’m breathing into a paper bag.

  ‘What happened?’ I hear him ask.

  My brows are knitted tightly; I can’t release them. Jessica just keeps saying, ‘It was my fault. It was all my fault.’ I just keep shaking my head. I can’t unsee the image of her face pressed into that ground. ‘I’m not sure.’ I look at both him and the policeman. ‘I thought I hit a deer.’ It sounds absurd.

  ‘No pressure but just tell us everything you can recall, if you can,’ the policeman says. ‘In your own good time.’

  The man who told me it’s all right is talking to another policeman, who is making notes. He seems to have a lot to say. I strain to hear but can’t. I tell them all I am able. There’s not much. Another officer is taking photographs of the road; I watch him, trying to work out why he’s doing it. Mark tells me to take a sip of my drink that the paramedic has given him to hold – and I do, obediently, focusing on the sweet taste and the deliberateness of my swallow to get it down, concentrating on not throwing up.

  The guy on the bike is talking to the policeman now. The ambulance with the woman in it leaves in a slow roll. I watch it until it’s out of range. The policeman asks me a few more questions but I sound vague. Then he starts talking to Jessica. I manage to finish the tea. After a time – I don’t know how long – the scene that was before my eyes starts to recede. Gradually, everything reverts to as it was before, a blackboard wiped. The only evidence that anything happened is my car half turned in the middle of the road, and a police car.

  Eventually the policeman says, ‘You’re free to go.’ I hear him saying something to Mark about leaving the car behind for now, and how they’ll give it back later.

  I stare from one to the other, uncomprehending. ‘Go where?’ Aren’t they arresting me?

  ‘Home,’ Mark says. He cups my neck and softly rubs my cheek with his thumb.

  I look at the policeman for confirmation of this. I want to argue but recognise I don’t quite know which position to take.

  ‘It was an accident,’ the policeman explains. ‘There were witnesses. You were not at fault. It was the pedestrian’s mistake, ma’am, she ran out in front of your vehicle. You are not being charged with anything at this time. You and your daughter are free to go home.’ His words are precise and formal but he is not hostile.

  ‘At this time?’ I hear the worry in Mark’s voice. His hand has moved to my back.

  ‘There will be no charges,’ the policeman clarifies. He looks at me as though he’s very much on my side. ‘It was an accident, Mrs Chapman. You’ve had a tremendous shock. You should let your husband take you and your daughter home now.’ He gives a short nod meaning there’s nothing more to be said.

  I watch him walk off. There is a certain ‘business as usual’ quality to the moment, to life. Mark and I look at one another, waiting for the caveat that never comes.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Present

  ‘She was a thirty-six-year-old paediatrician from England.’

  I pull up her Facebook page on my phone and find the photo of her at the Christmas party. The one of her in the teal dress, where she’s reaching down to her shoe, making a face. ‘Her name was Sarah.’

  He takes the phone from me and studies her.

  At some point he made me a cup of tea but I have let it get cold. He lit a fire because I was freezing. It spits and crackles, filling the depth of the silence that occurs whe
n I just can’t go on with the story. On a small table a salt lamp gives off an orange glow, the only light in the room, save for that of my phone.

  ‘She was over here for a conference on meningitis and septicaemia in infants.’ My brows knit together. The pain is like a headband, tightening. ‘Apparently she’s a leader in her field and flies all over the world for speaking engagements . . . She was staying at the Sheraton in Bellevue.’ I gaze into the glass top of his coffee table where the salt lamp is reflected. I can see the road that bisects the park, the thicket of tall cedars, the path that exits the trail right on to the road.

  ‘She just ran out. I honestly didn’t see her. I don’t know how I couldn’t have. I’ve asked myself this so many times. How could I not have seen her?’

  He passes the phone back to me. I am powerfully aware of the shaking of my hands, of an echo of Jessica calling me a hypocrite. ‘Sometimes I think maybe I go through life a bit zoned out or something . . . Or maybe I’m just not a very safe driver. I mean, I’ve had times where I’ve almost not seen someone . . . Maybe I should never have been given a license in the first place.’

  ‘That’s insane,’ he says, as though he can hear the peal of my despair. And in a way verbalising these doubts and fears that have until now only played in my head makes them sound more hollow than resonant – almost absurd. ‘Every driver has had some kind of near miss.’

  ‘Mine wasn’t a near one.’

  ‘No. But you weren’t charged with reckless driving. They took statements from witnesses. They found no fault with your conduct. There was nothing you could have done differently.’

  ‘Wasn’t there?’ My heart beats hard. ‘Why did I let anything she said bother me? Why didn’t I just tell her, “Look, I can’t talk about this while I’m driving”? Instead I sat there fuming and turned the damned music up. And then I killed someone.’ Those three little words beat hard on my temples.

  An unvoiced despair for me registers in his eyes. ‘We’ve all had hot words in a car before. And it wasn’t exactly a raging argument . . .’

  I can’t listen to any well-meaning attempt to tell me I’m not guilty. ‘A couple of weeks or so after it happened, the man who had been very kind to me and Jess at the scene – John Hemmings – came to visit me. Mark had taken his phone number. He’d thought I’d want to hear an eyewitness account . . . You see, I wouldn’t accept appeasing words from him because he wasn’t there and none of it was happening to him – not really, not in the same way. He hadn’t been behind the wheel. He didn’t have that unspeakable guilt . . . I used that against him for a very long time, which wasn’t fair.’ I restrain my impulse to digress. ‘This John Hemmings said he’d been out for his usual pre-dinner walk. He’d been coming off one of the trails that joined the one she was running on. He said she’d glanced in his direction but kept going . . . “I suppose I’m neither Brad Pitt nor an axe murderer,” he joked. Anyway, he said it occurred to him that she should have been slowing down given the road was coming up. He said he thought to say something but it just happened so quickly. He saw her run out and look to the right.’ I swallow hard and for a second it seems to paralyse my throat. ‘He said, “I just thought, Oh my god, she’s looking the wrong way.”’

  I can tell Ned doesn’t get what I mean.

  ‘In England we drive on the opposite side of the road. She was expecting traffic coming from her right. I was coming from her left.’

  ‘Jeez,’ he says, and rubs his palm across his mouth.

  How many times have I gone back to England and been aware how much more vigilant I need to be when crossing the road, because looking left is now my default? It is particularly treacherous in London, where black cabs hurtle around corners. It is one of the reasons I never drive there any more – it just isn’t worth the stress.

  ‘She ran right out in front of me, not expecting me to be there. Other eyewitnesses said the same – that she just bolted out . . .’ I shake my head in despair. ‘To make matters worse, she was wearing earbuds.’

  ‘So she wouldn’t have even heard the traffic to have had any kind of warning.’

  ‘No.’ My brows knit, picturing her in the last seconds of her life, as I’ve done a thousand times before – trying to rewrite fate. In my version she would have realised it was dumb having them in, and would have taken them out at the last minute. In my version that would have spared us.

  ‘This John Hemmings said the whole thing was plaguing his mind and he decided he had to force himself to stop dwelling on it, and I should too. I remember looking at him and thinking, A woman is dead and you’re bothered because you’ve been thinking about it for two weeks?’ I meet Ned’s eyes now. ‘It was easy for him though, wasn’t it? He hadn’t killed her, had he?’

  He sighs. ‘Look, Olivia, I know all about beating yourself up. You’ve found every possible way to blame yourself but, like I said, the reality – the sad reality – is you were actually as much of a casualty as she was.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’ I stab a finger into my chest. ‘I get to live. No one took that away from me in the blink of an eye.’ A fresh surge of sadness and self-reproach ambushes me.

  ‘People are victims of freak accidents all the time. Not everybody gets a long life. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And so was she. In her head she was back in England.’

  No one has said anything quite as humanising about her before. No one has attempted to imagine what might have been in her head. My eyes tick around his face like the second hand of a clock. There is a suspenseful moment where he returns the same scrutiny, and we are held there in a bubble of anticipation, in an alliance.

  ‘I just can’t stop thinking, What if?’ My voice comes out so quietly it’s barely there. ‘If I’d gone the other route? If I’d let another driver cut in so they would have hit her, not me. Or maybe they’d have reacted faster! If we’d never moved to that damn house I’d not have been driving down that street! If I’d just told Jessica, “I can’t take you.” If I had just reacted better when she told me about stupid Europe . . .’ My heart judders. Sometimes reality hits and I am thrust, slam-bang, into it – a mind-splitting outing from the sanctuary of the half-knowing. It happens now. Tears burn a trail down my cheeks. I taste them pooling around my lips. I am aware of that same quiet panic starting up. At one point the silence is broken by the short keening of my breath.

  He slides his left hand along the sofa cushion. I’m not expecting the movement so I find myself staring at it, oddly fascinated. It stops just an inch away from my leg. The long, tapered fingers, artistic for a soldier. The pale pink patches on the knuckles, like bleach spots. Gingerly I reach out my own. The tips of our fingers meet and stay met. There is a moment or two where we both just stare at our hands, like they’re their own life form.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him once I’ve gathered myself a little. ‘I didn’t know what it would be like to talk about it. I’ve never done it before . . .’ In the back of my mind I am remotely pleased with myself, and then I think I have no right to be pleased about a small nudge in the direction of progress. I have no right to ever feel better. I need to pay for this until the day I die. Through the ceiling I can hear the canned laughter of a comedy show – the older couple who live upstairs, who he thinks might be deaf. I gaze at our hands there, our fingers still touching. The disarming tenderness takes me out of this. I long to preserve it, to just stay like this forever.

  When I feel I can, I show him the rest of her pictures. He lets me, which is already more than Mark ever did, and I don’t even sense he’s humouring me. I explain who I think everybody is, going through them one by one, until we arrive back to Daisy in her water wings in the pool. ‘I felt so heartbroken for them! These two lovely little kids lost a mother because of me. Because of my actions, they’ll probably only ever have very sketchy memories of her. They’ll end up wondering if they’re real or if they’ve invented them, if they’ve invented her.’

  I can tell he’s thinking hard abo
ut what I’ve just said. ‘You’ve taken a lot on board,’ he says eventually. ‘You’ve thought of the impact of this in ways a lot of people wouldn’t have. You’ve made her very real. And that’s a hard thing to do with someone you know nothing about.’

  So different to Mark saying, ‘You’re obsessed with her. Don’t you think your energies are a little misplaced, Olivia?’

  I don’t tell him I’ve watched videos of Sarah giving a speech at a conference. That I’ve listened to her voice until I’ve fallen asleep. That I’ve practically memorised the cadence of her Welsh accent. I don’t tell him I’ve seen a YouTube video of her at a friend’s wedding where she’s doing a brilliant if slightly comical karaoke performance of ABBA’s ‘Thank You for the Music’, with the camera cutting away to Glen’s face and holding there because the person filming it wanted to make sure they caught his expression, the smitten pride. I don’t say I’ve read an academic paper she wrote from start to finish even though there’s barely a word in it I understand. That I’ve scrutinised all thirty-five of her patient reviews on ratemds.com, Google Earthed her house, her office, the hospital where she performed her surgeries, even the church where they got married. That I know the colour of her front door. They’ve got an abundant tiny blue flower decorating a rockery. I even know what that flower is called. Blue lobelia.

  That I’ve been stalking a dead person. That in many ways I still am.

  ‘Then it was the one-year anniversary and I found this online.’ I show him the article in the Eastbourne Herald. ‘So his wife goes off to a conference and never comes home. But he’s a dad and a doctor and he’s got to get on with it. But he isn’t superhuman – there’s a minute or two when his head isn’t on the job and he reads a CT scan the wrong way round. He operates on the wrong lung, and the patient could have died because of it, then he would have been sued and probably struck off.’ I suddenly find a voice for what I’ve wished I could have articulated better to Mark. ‘You see, it was all this horrible domino effect. I felt so guilty about all of it. If I hadn’t hit her, none of this awfulness would have happened for any of us. And I know you and everyone else will tell me I am not responsible for a doctor’s ability to do his job, and you might well be right, but at the end of the day, it’s how I think and I can’t help it.’