What It Was Like

by Peter Seth

  Then . . . silence.

  We looked down. It was still kind of dark at the water’s surface far down below us, and it was hard to see, but when the splashing cleared, we saw that the Caddy’s back end hadn’t gone all the way under the water. The car stood there on its front end, half-in, half-out, with its fins sticking straight up in the air, well above the surface, not moving at all.

  “Ohmygod,” Rachel whispered. “It’s not sinking.”

  I waited for the car to start to sink, but it didn’t.

  “It must have landed on top of something,” I said, not taking my eyes off the Caddy, its shiny chrome bumper glimmering in the dark, as it stood there above the water. “A boulder . . . or something . . .

  “I opened the windows,” I continued. “It should fill up with water, and then sink.”

  She squeezed my arm even tighter.

  “It’s got to!”

  “Everyone can see it!” Rachel whispered. “What are we gonna – ?”

  “Just wait!” I told her, putting my hand on hers.

  We held our breath and, just as I had planned/hoped, the Cadillac slowly, slowly, slowly started to pitch forward as the car gradually filled with water. We both leaned forward, as if we could help it fall over.

  “Go! . . .” said Rachel. “GO!!!”

  And finally the Caddy tipped forward with a splash – roof down, wheels up – floating for a long moment on the water, listing back and forth, then disappearing into the blackness. A cloud of enormous bubbles came up to the surface and burst, one after another. We watched as the water gradually re-leveled and became absolutely still. Everything became calm again; nothing protruded above the waterline. No tires, no bumper, no fins: nothing.

  “It’s gone,” said Rachel. “They’re gone . . . She’s gone. . . . I can’t believe it.”

  I believed it. I started to shiver. I don’t know if it was the cold air of dawn or what.

  “You’re shaking,” she said, turning me by my arm. “Here, hold me.”

  “Can we get out of here?” I asked.

  Rachel turned my face so she could look straight into my eyes and said, “Now I know that you truly love me.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said, not wanting to think about anything. “Now can we get out of here?”

  She wouldn’t move, holding me by my arms. “We’ll get past this, baby,” she said. “And everything will be all right. Now that she’s gone, we’ll be free.”

  “We have to go,” I pleaded, not wanting to hear any more of her plans. “Do you want me to drive?”

  “No,” she said. “I want to. You’ve done everything.”

  “Yes, I have,” I said. “I’ve done everything. I was your lapdog. Just like I’ve always been.”

  “Oh, don’t say that!” she said, grabbing me by the arm. “Don’t you believe anything Nanci said! You know she was a liar and always was really against us!”

  “I suppose so,” I said, unable, as usual, to forget anything.

  “No ‘suppose so’!” she said decisively. “Come on! We’ve got to get home. We don’t have much time. We’ve got to give that floor another good scrubbing. The cleaning lady comes on Monday. I wonder if Max would lick –”

  “OK-OK-OK! Can you please just stop for a second!” I implored her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said dispassionately. “But didn’t you say that we had to keep moving? Mr. Ivy League is never wrong.”

  She pivoted and walked away from me, toward the Mustang. Wasting no time, I ran and got in the passenger’s side.

  “OK, let’s just go,” I said, as I settled into the seat. It was pretty light now. People would be starting to go to work, and trucks and cars would be on the road. Wait, it was Sunday morning; people would be going to church. We definitely had to get out of there.

  She slammed her door closed and put her key in the ignition.

  “This never happened,” she said confidently, turning on the engine, flipping on the headlights, and shifting into gear.

  She gave it gas, made a wide circle, and found the trail in the dark trees that would lead us back through the forest, and away from the Quarry forever.

  “This never happened.”

  The Mustang rode low to the ground, and Rachel scraped the bottom as we dipped down into the deep ruts of the trail, even worse than the heavy Cadillac. I thought I saw the reflection of some animal’s black eyes in the light cast by Rachel’s headlights. She swerved the car and the bottom scraped again, making a ripping sound.

  Finally, I said, “Do you want me to drive?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said, sounding annoyed. “I can drive perfectly fine. Didn’t I follow you all the way up here? Which wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. You’re no great driver yourself.”

  “It was a brand new car,” I protested. “One I had never driven before.”

  “I know,” she said tartly. “You’d never driven a Cadillac before. You told me.”

  I didn’t say anything as we slowly rambled along the bumpy trail.

  “The thing is,” she continued. “We’re in this together now – like in The Zone. And this will keep us together forever.”

  I knew that she was right about that, but The Zone never felt like this before.

  “If we just keep our story straight,” she said. “We’ll be fine.”

  “And what is our story?” I asked, my voice sounding far away from me.

  “She never came home,” said Rachel firmly.

  “‘She never came home,’” I repeated.

  “Anybody asks us anything,” she said. “She never came home. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ All the way on the drive up, I rehearsed what I’d say. What you’ll say.”

  “Then how did her car disappear?” I asked.

  Rachel paused.

  “OK,” she recited innocently. “She must have come home for her car, but I never saw her, Officer.’”

  Through the trees, I could see the highway coming up in front of us. We were almost out of the forest now.

  “You’ve been thinking about this for a long time, haven’t you?”

  She just smiled and watched the road. “From now on, everything is going to be much, much better.”

  She looked sure of herself, gripping the wheel. I wanted to believe her, but I couldn’t help thinking about what we’d left behind, under that black water. And back at her house. And everything.

  “Be careful when you come out,” I said. “I don’t want anyone to see us.”

  “No one’s going to see us,” she said. “We . . . are . . . invisible.”

  She gave the car some gas and rolled up to the end of the trail. It was light now. The first rays of the rising sun were filtering through the trees. The dawn of a new day: I could definitely use a new day.

  We looked both ways out onto the highway. No one seemed to be coming, either way.

  “I think we’re good,” I said. “Go.”

  Rachel gave it gas and spun some gravel as she drove from the end of the fire road across the shoulder. She steered around the guardrail erratically and onto the road with a big bump, but she made it.

  “There!” she said when she got the Mustang up onto the blacktop. She floored it, and the Mustang took off, fishtailing down the road.

  I took a big, deep breath. I couldn’t believe it. We actually were finished. This horrible task, something that seemed so insane and awful to do, was over.

  But as we drove away, I felt no real relief. My life had changed, and nothing would ever, ever be the same again. The morning light was beginning to burn through the early mountain mist, and I was just beginning to realize how bone-tired-exhausted I was, inside and out. Maybe I should take a hit of that speed.

  “So where do you want to go for breakfast?” Rachel asked. “How about some Atomic Br
ittle at the Kandy Kitchen?”

  For a moment, my mind blanked.

  “Are you insane??” I said, turning in my seat to her.

  She just laughed at me. I should have realized that she was joking, but it really wasn’t a time to joke, was it? I felt all hollowed-out inside, and she was driving her Mustang happily down the highway, as if nothing had happened.

  “Don’t you have any heart?” I asked her.

  She looked straight ahead and said, “Oh, baby, baby, baby . . . You know they cut that out of me a long time ago.”

  I saw a tear form in the corner of her eye. But it would not fall.

  After a moment, she said firmly, “But it’s just like you said: just like you said. ‘We’re going to do everything right.’ You said that a long time ago, and I believed you. I believe everything you’ve ever said, and you were right all along. And now, for the first time, I feel free. Really free.”

  She was laughing and crying at the same time.

  “This is what I’ve been waiting for. I won’t have to worry about Eleanor yelling at me, or trying to control every inch of my life. And Nanci! That ungrateful pig, spying on me the whole time, after all I did for her! Can you imagine? And Manny? He’s actually going to be happy! I mean, he’ll be shocked, at first, of course. But when he realizes that he’s not going to have to pay alimony anymore to that witch . . . Dammit, I might get to trade this in for a Corvette!”

  She drove on, tears streaming down her cheeks, speeding up and taking the curves with ease.

  “You’ll see,” she said, her voice breaking with bravado. “We’ll get through this: we’ll forget about this, people will forget, and we’re going to be all right.”

  I felt a deep emptiness inside, where there used to be what I thought was the purest love, and said, “No, we’re not.”

  That’s when I looked in the side view mirror on my door and saw what I knew I was going to see eventually, but not really so soon: a police car was following us. At first glance, I thought it was my imagination, but no, it was real.

  “There’s a police car behind us,” I said.

  Rachel flinched.

  “No,” Rachel said. “He’s not following us. I’ll slow down a little.”

  She let up on the gas pedal, and the Mustang died a little.

  “They can’t be after us,” she said. “We can’t be seen in The Zone.”

  But the cop stayed right behind her. He was definitely on our tail.

  “You know I can lose him,” Rachel muttered, and she pressed down hard on the gas.

  Instantly, the Mustang surged ahead, and Rachel gripped the wheel harder, taking the curve of the highway

  “Don’t!” I said. “Just pull over.”

  “No!” she said, leaning forward into her driving. “You don’t know how fast I can go in this!”

  I checked in my side view mirror: the police car had turned on his lights, blinking all across the top of the car.

  “Pull over, Rachel!” I shouted. “Please! You’ve got to!”

  I reached for the steering wheel, but she swerved the car, throwing me back against my door.

  I rolled down my window, turned around, and stuck my head out of the window. The wind whipped against the back of my head as I saw that there were now two police cars behind us, both cars blinking wildly.

  “Pull over, Rachel!” I shouted.

  “I can’t!” she cried desperately, and drove even faster, thrusting down on the gas. “I can’t let her win! I’m not gonna die!!”

  I was thrown back into my seat with a thud. There was only one thing to do: try to stop the car myself. But as I reached over to try to grab the steering wheel from her, the oddest thing happened. From out of the forest, a huge deer bolted across the highway, right across our path. I remember several things occurring simultaneously, but almost in slow-motion. I braced myself, knowing that we were going to hit the deer and that it was the same white-faced deer – Bambi’s Mother! – that we saw at the Quarry during the summer. I remember thinking, what a strange coincidence, as Rachel screamed “I love you!” and there was the sound of squealing brakes, smashing glass, crunching metal, and then nothing: absolute, total, perfect blackness.

  That was the first ending.

  Record of Events #35 - entered Tuesday, 4:45 P.M.

  ≁

  I woke up in a blank, white room I don’t know how many days or weeks later. It took me a very long time to wake up and focus my eyes, and even longer to realize that I was in a hospital. Nurses came and went, but I couldn’t speak and nobody would tell me anything.

  At first I could not move. Everything – my mind, my senses, my memory – was frozen. My body felt sunken into the mattress. I thought that I was paralyzed, but then realized that I could move my head and my upper body a little.

  I think I had some casts or something on my legs, but when I tried to move and look, I felt that my left leg was attached to something at the foot of the bed. Painfully, I raised myself, little by little, onto my elbows and saw that my left ankle was handcuffed to the post of the footboard of the hospital bed. I fell back against the mattress, exhausted and defeated and disgusted with myself beyond measure as I remembered everything.

  Then two policemen came to see me. They wore suits, but they told me that they were policemen, so I believed them. An older one and a younger one.

  “Your girlfriend’s dead,” said the older one with a lifeless voice that I will never forget. “She went through the windshield. You got lucky and were thrown from the vehicle.”

  When I heard that, my heart broke . . . for good. But at the same time I was glad that Rachel wasn’t going to have to endure what I was going to have to endure.

  “Lucky . . .” I either thought or mumbled.

  “We know what you did,” he said. “We found the car at the bottom of the Quarry. Long Island detectives went over your girlfriend’s home and your parents’ house with a fine-tooth comb. They found everything except for the money.”

  “What money?” I said. And what did my parents have to do with any of this? Nothing!

  “‘What money?’” he repeated sharply. “How about the two grand we found in your girlfriend’s purse and the other four grand that’s missing?”

  “What four grand?” I said.

  “And there’s some jewelry missing too,” he continued. “The victim’s jewelry box was ransacked.”

  “What jewelry?” I said, my head spinning. “I don’t know what you guys are talking about . . . honestly.”

  “‘Honestly’?” the old cop repeated with a huff of a laugh and a sour smile.

  At that moment, I knew that no one was ever going to believe me and my side of the story. Ever.

  The younger cop said, “First, we’re gonna take your statement. Then you can see your parents. They’re waiting outside.”

  That’s when I felt a new kind of pain: deep, deep, ineradicable shame.

  “Don’t,” I mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Don’t let them in,” I whispered. “Don’t let them see me.”

  “Sorry, punk,” said the older cop. “Live with it.”

  ≁

  I don’t want to talk about what it was like when my parents came in to see me at the hospital, that first time. I’ll just say what I told them – and what is true:

  “I didn’t kill anybody.”

  Even as I said it, it really didn’t make me feel better. The words felt like cold ash in my mouth. It was the truth, but my actions were nothing to be proud of. I should have – I don’t know – known that Rachel was going to do something to Eleanor, and stopped her. I should have done something when she was fighting with Nanci. Instead, what I did was help her conceal the two deaths. I was loyal to Rachel instead of to any normal code of morality, and it was simply wrong. I put blind love above com
mon decency, and that’s really not a good love, is it? What we did dishonored our love, and to this day that still makes me sad. Very, very sad.

  It was the first time that I ever saw my father cry. I had seen my mother cry a whole bunch of times, but to see my father cry was . . . well, I was discovering new lows by the hour.

  A doctor came and told me that both my legs were broken: compound fractures of both fibulas, both tibias, and my right femur. I also had a severely collapsed lung and several crushed ribs.

  “Does he have to be attached like that?” my mother asked the doctor, pointing to the handcuffs that chained my ankle to the bed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sheriff’s orders.”

  “He’s not going to run away with two broken legs,” my mother said louder.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor repeated. “But that’s what I’ve been told.”

  “Stop it, Ma,” I said. “It’s all right.” The handcuffs actually were uncomfortable around my ankle, but I already knew that it made no sense to ask for what I wasn’t going to get. I remembered the stony looks on the faces of those cops, a look that was soon to become quite familiar to me.

  I was in the Towanda State Hospital for a long time, learning to walk again. I was kept in the prison ward, handcuffed to my bed whenever I wasn’t released for physical therapy, some test, or some other reason like an operation. I had five. My legs were pretty well smashed in the accident, and my right lung was damaged, too, so my energy level was low at the beginning. I wasn’t getting enough oxygen so I couldn’t build my strength back up, but I couldn’t build my strength back up because I wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

  My surgeon was a dry, old guy with a very thick German accent.

  “You’re young,” he said when he showed me the before-and-after x-rays on the light board in his office. “Theoretically, you should have a complete recovery.”

  I wanted to tell him, “All theory, dear friend, is gray,” but I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and did all the physical therapy as hard as I could. Whenever they uncuffed me from my bed, I was down in the Rehab and Fitness Center, trying to learn to walk again. And I did. Today I don’t walk with much of a limp, and I’m working on it every day. No one would ever know that my legs were once smashed to pieces on a highway in the middle of nowhere on the last drive ever with my one true love.