Permanent Marker

by Aimee Ross

  As he questioned me, I heard my own words as if I were the doctor listening: “No, I don’t talk about the accident. Yes, I still avoid driving by where the accident occurred. Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I feel guilt. Sometimes things irritate me or cause anxiety. I don’t like the idea of traveling much anymore. Sometimes the idea of social situations bothers me.”

  “Why do you feel guilty, Aimee?” he asked.

  Shit. Guilt.

  I had said the word too quickly, but as soon as I did, I knew he would question it. He was a psychologist, after all.

  “Because someone died. Because I couldn’t protect the girls who were with me.”

  I hoped that was enough of an answer to get him talking again.

  He didn’t. He just kept writing, looking down at his paper. The pause was unbearable, but I could do it. I could wait it out.

  When he finally lifted his eyes to me, he didn’t speak. He just cocked his head to the side and stared, waiting. He wanted to hear more.

  And I gave in.

  “I feel guilty because I didn’t die, and he did. I know the accident was his fault, but I don’t know how or why I stayed alive.”

  I started to cry, and he moved a tissue box across the table toward me.

  “Because medical professionals were able to save your life, Aimee.”

  I was off the hook. He had finally spoken, so I stopped there. I didn’t feel like sharing the rest of the guilt I still hung onto. I couldn’t.

  Guilt for what my children must have gone through. Natalie told me she fell to her knees and hyperventilated when she found out it I was in the wreck. Jerrica was all the way in North Carolina—she must have been worried sick that whole drive home.

  Guilt that this happened to me so soon after the divorce. Jerrica had just turned eighteen, and as the oldest child, that made her next of kin. She would have been the one to decide whether or not I stayed on life support. I just can’t imagine my baby put in that position.

  Guilt that Kenny had never gotten to come to the hospital to see me. I didn’t think it was a good idea, because of the divorce and my family, but he was at the accident scene that night and spoke to me. He’s the father of my children. I should have let him come.

  Guilt because my mother dropped everything, including being with my father, to come take care of me for two and a half months.

  Guilt because someone—a mother’s boy, a father’s son—died. A young man with his whole life ahead of him. If my car hadn’t been in his path at that moment, maybe he could have sailed right through his bad decision with no deadly consequences.

  All that guilt, newly stirred, circling inside and trying to settle. Yet again.

  The appointment was over, because I was done talking.

  “Are you currently in therapy, Aimee?” the psychologist asked. I didn’t want to lie—it was obvious I still needed it.

  “No, not yet. I have a list of providers, but honestly, I don’t know how to choose. I don’t want just anyone.”

  “I can help you out with that,” he said. “I have a colleague, a woman, who deals with almost only PTSD patients. How about if we set up an appointment for you right now?”

  I was surprised, thankful someone was stepping in to help me.

  “Sure, that’d be great.”

  I left with an upcoming appointment on the calendar (psychologist number five, maybe) and a bit of a burden eased.

  • • •

  Psychotherapy didn’t work.

  At least not for me.

  I tried it—I knew I had to—but forty-five minutes of a psychotherapist asking me question after question with none of her own input or thoughts got old fast. I left confused: That was psychotherapy? I had already asked myself the same questions she did while sitting at my desk putting pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, and I already knew the answers. In fact, I had them in writing.

  What I wanted was help, and she didn’t provide it.

  So I canceled my next appointment.

  One of the first psychologists who diagnosed me with PTSD told me that if not treated, PTSD would grow worse with time. Writing and analyzing my story must have been just the treatment I needed then, because I had been feeling better, not worse.

  Better enough to decide against expensive therapy that did not feel worthwhile.

  Instead, I would just keep writing.

  • • •

  Springtime: the symbolic season of renewal, rebirth, and hope. The color green prevails as motif, and April showers bring May flowers.

  But on this warm spring afternoon, almost three years after the accident, May showers rained down on me when I got caught—just hours before a hair appointment—in an out-of-nowhere downpour. I knew there was a chance of rain, but the cotton-puff gray clouds didn’t look like rain. I wanted to squeeze in a walk after school. I had been trying to exercise more regularly to shed winter’s hibernation from my frame.

  And I knew, based on my experience with weather and natural phenomena as portents, it had to mean something.

  My first and only high school boyfriend broke up with me on a cold, rainy April afternoon. The tears I cried matched the streams of water running down the car’s windows as Dad drove me home after the breakup.

  I married that boyfriend five years later in a winter solstice ceremony as large December snowflakes fell, their lacy edges matching my white wedding dress. I had a heart attack eighteen years later in one of the last snowstorms of the season after telling that boyfriend-turned-husband I wanted a divorce. February’s end of winter and a piece of my heart dying—both symbolic of the end of my marriage.

  The dissolution was finalized on a sunshiny June morning, when I couldn’t help but smell fresh-cut grass and think of a fresh new start, and I was in a fatal car accident as the summer sun set one July evening, the light of a young man’s life also fading.

  On this particular day, I had just crested the hill in front of the white house with the weird windmill sticking out of its roof when I heard the soft swoosh of rain sneaking up behind me as it swept across farmland fields. I smelled it, too, the muddled scent of wet dirt, almost metallic, sideways in the air.

  I was almost home—at least it was within sight—when huge soaking dollops of rain caught up to me, pelting the left side of my head and my body—the side scarred from the blunt force of the accident, the side where my heart is located.

  My hair was suddenly plastered to the left side of my face, stuck against the headphone bud in my ear. Drops of rain dripped into my eyelashes, clotting mascara and blurring the edges of my vision.

  I realized that if I didn’t act quickly, my iPhone was soon going to be water-damaged. I pulled on the front of my T-shirt, already suctioned against the whole of my back, to expose my bra and then shoved the phone down inside of the left cup. I put the shirt back in place, noticing that my shorts, hanging around my thighs at the start of the walk had now shrunk against my skin. The clinging, wet clothes made me feel naked. I felt exposed.

  I started to run.

  But I can’t run, really. My rebuilt left foot has arthritis and two screws still in it, and I’ll probably never even walk the same, much less run.

  Still about five minutes away from home, I did my best hustle, jogging—but mostly walking fast—to get back to the house and out of the downpour. My home, now bleary and dreamy, just didn’t seem to be getting any closer.

  Weird. Time slowed down, I slowed down, when the rain hit me, and so I gave in. Why hurry? I was already drenched and dripping, and strangely, it felt good.

  By the time I reached the garage, I understood it, this sign from the Universe. I grinned, pleased.

  Finally.

  Nature’s tears had washed me clean, and now I could forgive myself. My children already had—it was obvious in hearing ho
w they loved Jackson and in their encouragement toward my own happiness. It was time to resign the guilt I felt for the end of my marriage, a marriage I would still be in, unhappy with myself, had I not been what others might think was “selfish.” It was time to let go and continue moving forward with Jackson, and this was the sign I’d needed.

  Baptism in a spring downpour: There was no other way to explain what had just happened, especially to an English teacher who believed in the literary devices of life.

  Maybe its symbolism could help me with the anger I still had about the accident. Maybe it would even help me find forgiveness for Zach.

  I didn’t want to be defined by those things, either.

  I ran into the house and up the stairs to blow dry my soaking wet mop and change my clothes. It was almost time for my hair appointment.

  • • •

  As the flashback of the night of the accident, once a sharp and terrifying endless loop, started to fade into a fuzzy memory, I couldn’t help but think of the crash as a story problem from high school physics, especially after visiting the site of the wreck.

  A red Mini Cooper travels west at an unknown high rate of speed. A gray Saturn Aura moving south at 55 miles per hour is broadsided by the Mini Cooper when it runs a stop sign. Momentum propels both cars off the road and into a small field. Solve for the force of impact.

  Solve. That’s what I still needed to do. My body had recovered from suffering the force of impact, and my brain had come a long way, but some calculations still needed to be made.

  The cross my mother had mentioned to me in my hospital bed still stood at that corner three years later.

  Fifteen minutes from home. Almost there.

  Though I had been past the site since the summer night he smashed into me and the girls, I had never stopped. I never wanted to be in the space long enough to think.

  Until now.

  I had been washed clean, I had finally forgiven myself, and now, I needed closure. Besides, something kept telling me to go there. I had to.

  I drove there alone one mid-summer afternoon hoping for something—anything—to provide closure. Armed with my notebook and pen, I was ready to record my anticipated epiphany. I expected to cry, feel relief. I expected for the trauma to finally make sense.

  As I approached the intersection from the county road and pulled up to the stop sign, there were road construction signs: “State Route Closed,” “Detour.” I parked across from the site. I had no intention of leaving my vehicle. It was a busy road, and from what I understood, Zach’s home was nearby. I didn’t want to be noticed. Instead, I would just be here, feel here.

  Beyond the intersection, a cross made of two perpendicular skateboards—not beer boxes—jutted crookedly out of a grassy slope. The ground climbing from the ditch to the tilted cross was still scarred. Dry brown gashes in the earth, like my three-year-old wounds, littered the rise where energy from an inelastic collision was absorbed. The scars, evidence of an outside force. Inertia disrupted.

  As I sat staring at the cross, I could almost picture my car, having just landed, airbags deployed, windshield shattered, driver’s side crushed. I imagined what onlookers might have witnessed that July evening. A car shooting from the darkness and crashing into another. Impact in the intersection. Crunching metal, shattering glass. A body catapulted through the sunroof and against the unforgiving road. Momentum shoving the cars over a ditch and less than twenty feet apart. My smoking engine, four trapped inside mangled metal.

  Natalie told me that she and another teammate had left the dance camp a few minutes after us. By the time they approached the scene, the road was already blocked by accident personnel.

  “You can’t go this way,” a man told her. “There’s been an accident. It’s bad.”

  Meanwhile, my cell phone, lost somewhere in the wreckage, must have been ringing. Natalie wanted to warn me of the accident, the closed road. When I didn’t answer, she called the other girls in the car, but they didn’t respond, either.

  Fifteen minutes later, as she turned into the driveway of her father’s house, alarm set in.

  Natalie jumped from the car screaming, “I think Mom’s been in a bad accident!” Kenny ushered the girls into his own vehicle and raced to the chaotic scene flooded with light, engulfed in disembodied voices, and swarming with firemen, ambulances, and highway patrol.

  But it was quiet here now. Bright sunshine, a gentle breeze, midsummer warmth. The perfect setting for something—anything—to offer understanding. Or forgiveness. Maybe even redemption. I was alive, but another mother’s son never went home.

  I waited.

  Nothing happened.

  I didn’t even cry. I slid the pen back in my purse, tossed the notebook to the front passenger seat, and headed home. If only the intersection had been closed that night. If only we had taken another way home. If only he had been sober. If only he had stopped at the intersection’s sign. Then we would not have had our paths crossed. T-boned. Crushed.

  Four lives changed forever, another life lost. A cross marked the spot.

  Almost like that story problem from high school physics, except this one was real. And it was mine to solve.

  The force of two cars, colliding at 55 mph. The punching blow of one car hitting another, the impulse of impact rippling through both. Velocity, momentum, and energy absorbed from one car into the other, from both cars into the ground.

  A lost pulse, spattered blood, splintered bones. Solve the equation to determine the force of impact.

  According to the laws of physics, it takes less than a second for two objects set in motion by impact to come to a complete stop. Less than a second.

  “One one thousand” measures a second.

  Less than a second to see headlights, feel impact. Less than a second for a life to end.

  Less than a second to alter the course of a life.

  No matter how many times I tried to solve it differently, the outcome was always the same.

  One one thousand.

  • • •

  A few weeks after I visited the crossroads, I wrote Zach a letter. Finally. When the words, containers of sorts, spilled onto the page, releasing all the pent-up emotions from inside to freely roam in a separate space, I felt relief. I felt the possibility of resolution. Finally.

  The letter, self-intervention. And a way to digest all I had been trying to grasp.

  Dear Zachary,

  I’m writing this letter to you because I feel like I have to, even though I don’t know you, and I never will. I can only know my version of you, an idea in my head, and to be honest, it’s not a good one.

  I know you were the driver of the red Mini Cooper who ploughed recklessly into the side of my 2008 gray Saturn Aura, oblivious to the stop sign that warm July night.

  I know you were only nineteen, and not one of my former students.

  I know you died the next day in a room across from mine in the Trauma Center after doctors declared you “brain dead.” The impact of crunching, crushing metal had launched you through the sunroof of your father’s car and onto the road.

  After the accident, visitors told me rumors about you. They knew people you partied with. My two teenage daughters knew people you were friends with. They warned me of a Facebook memorial page.

  I looked too soon.

  You—the party boy with swag—were loved, and by many. They called you Zach. I wish that throwing bangers, getting baked, and blowing smoke at the camera didn’t consume those posted memories and fuzzy photos.

  A friend of your mother’s told me you had been in trouble with the law, and I know your driver’s license was suspended at least twice. At only 19, that’s two times in less than three years. Now I wonder if other rumors I heard were true. That you spent time in a detention home. That you and your buddies pl
ayed a very dangerous game earning points for traffic violations.

  And then there’s your family. Good people, I heard. I know you had dinner at home with them that evening. You asked your dad for the car, the one titled to him but given to you, so you could go to a friend’s house. You were on your way when you crashed into us. I wonder if you brushed your mother’s cheek with a goodbye kiss, yelled “Later, Dad!” and hopped through the front door, your older sister rolling her eyes at you one last time.

  I know your family loved you. My brother told me your father and sister hugged him, moments after finding out you had passed, crying, hoping that I would pull through. I imagine that your mother was broken in a corner, lost in her own sea of tears. They had just been asked about donating your organs. I know your parents—an older, more settled couple—adopted you and your sister from another country far away. Maybe they couldn’t have their own children. Now they can’t even have you.

  The most devastating thing I know about you, however, isn’t that you ran a stop sign that night. It isn’t that you were most likely speeding, either. What devastates me is that you were driving under the influence. The highway patrol officer who came to inform me I was the “victim of a crime” told me. They don’t know how fast you were going, but they do know about the marijuana and benzodiazepine in your bloodstream.

  Why did you do that, Zach? Why?

  Did you smoke pot and do drugs so often you drove stoned all the time?

  Did you forget you had family and friends who loved you, a whole life ahead of you?

  Did you think you were invincible, maybe even above the law?

  Three beautiful girls, teenagers on the dance team I advised, were riding with me on the way back from dance camp that evening. I couldn’t protect them from you. You could have killed them. You almost killed me. Four more lives could have been lost. I believed my daughter, also on the team, had left ahead of us, but in fact, she was only moments behind in a different car. You could have killed her that night. The thought makes me sick.