May 2011
One second we’re driving, just cruising, crossing the intersection at Westheimer and Chimney Rock.
The next second, I’m staring at Dad’s wide eyes and pale face in the rearview mirror, as the world outside the car spins.
The light turns green and the hunter green Jeep Grand Cherokee pulls forward. It’s the first car at the intersection, gently accelerating (the driver is always careful when his little girl sits in the back seat) past the other waiting cars. It safely crosses the first two lanes of Westheimer traffic, the lines of cars steadily lengthening every second the lights are red. The Jeep passes the median, then begins its seconds-long journey across the last two lanes of Westheimer. The Jeep gets rammed on the right and rolls twice before coming to a halt (luckily upright) in the middle of the Westheimer/Chimney Rock intersection.
“Do you remember the accident?”
Mom looks sideways at me, her face just visible through the descending darkness.
“A bit,” she concedes with a slight shrug, obviously wondering why I’m bringing this up now. Truth is, I have no idea. It’s just something I’ve thinking about; a memory I’ve had burned on my brain for twelve years. As we walked down our street, taking our semi-usual nightly stroll, a memory slipped into my mind: the memory of my Dad’s face as our world spun.
I didn’t know the car was rolling.
All I remember is my Dad’s face. I was sitting in the back, the middle seat (as studies indicate that this is the safest seat for a young child), my seat-belt securely fastened across my lap. The outside world was a blur, but I saw it only with my peripheral vision. In the few seconds we were rolling, I was staring at the rearview mirror, staring at my Dad’s panicked face. I only caught the upper half of it, but his wide eyes and blanched skin were enough. When I take the time to remember what I saw, I realize he was terrified.
“You remember it?” Mom asks me, breaking my reverie.
I nod, realizing as I do it that she might not see it through the dark. “Snippets,” I explain. “I remember Dad’s face in the rearview mirror.”
I hear the soft rustle of her hair as Mom shakes her head. “I didn’t know you remembered anything. You were so young.”
“What do you know about what happened?”
“Just what I was told about it afterward. Your dad has a spotty memory of the whole thing.”
I stay quiet, just watching the shadowy outline of her. “And?”
She starts, coming back from a reverie of her own. “Oh, just that…his memory is so broken up, so disjointed…I can only assume he blacked out.”
“Oh.” This spins a new view of the accident for me. Up until now, I’ve always assumed he was somehow in control; that as my dad, he was watching over me, taking care of me, even if the car was tumbling. It had never occurred to me that Dad hadn’t handled the mess at all.
It just goes to show that ignorance is bliss. Dad knew exactly what was happening, knew that we may very well end up dead—that his little girl could die in this wreck. Clueless to what was happening, I just watched his face in the mirror, wondering why it was taking so long to get home.
“He’s never handled crises well,” Mom tells me. “He’s always left the damage control to me.”
I think back to those moments in the car. After the car stopped moving, I just sat in my seat, holding tight to my stuffed bunny, wondering what would happen next.
I tell Mom that my first twinge of fear came when a woman walked up to the window and looked in. She looked mad, and I thought she was the other driver, furious at my dad and me for the accident.
“That wasn’t the other driver,” Mom corrects me. “She must have been one of the bystanders. People were afraid the Jeep would explode.”
I don’t know what to say to this, so we walk on in silence, me thinking about all the things I had overlooked. I don’t remember getting out of the car – I don’t remember who opened the car doors, or if they had to use the Jaws of Life, who undid my seatbelt and pulled me out. I just remember one moment sitting in the car and watching the angry woman through the window, and in the next standing with a paramedic who was crouching down at my level, holding out a wireless phone so I could talk to my mom before Dad and I were taken to the hospital.
Kids say the damnedest things. Everyone says so. And I proved it that day.
He holds out the phone to me, saying, “Don’t you want to talk to your mom?”
I stare at it a moment. Yes, of course I want to talk to Mommy. Then, I look down at Flopsy. I’m still holding the bunny tightly with both hands. I’ll have to put her down if I want to hold the phone.
Maybe the paramedic’s a dad, because he seems to get it.
“How about you let your father hold your bunny?” he offers, gesturing to Daddy. I glance to the side, then vehemently shake my head.
“His hands are bloody.”
The paramedic stares at me. Maybe he’s not so familiar with kids. The comment makes perfect sense in my head. There are three cuts on Daddy’s hand, three distinct, oozing cuts. Perhaps the paramedic hasn’t noticed, but Flopsy’s bright white. Handing her over to Daddy would stain the poor bunny’s fur.
In the end, the paramedic offers to hold the bunny, so I can talk to Mommy.
Mom is the one who handles crises. She’s joked before that Dad’s the last person she calls when something goes wrong. Generally, she just takes care of it, then lets him know about everything post-mortem.
Then, the universe decides to be funny.
I don’t remember what Dad was doing during the post-accident chaos, but since I’ve gotten older and come to know him better, I assume he was just letting others take care of everything. He didn’t talk to me because he didn’t have the slightest idea what to say. He was never the comforting parent – that was Mom.
“I remember talking to you over the phone,” I tell her now.
“You were so calm,” she responds. “I don’t think you really got it.”
She did her best through the phone, that much I remember. And I wasn’t hysterical or upset. I wasn’t freaking out or crying. My biggest concerns were getting blood on my stuffed bunny and getting home in time to see Wishbone. Maybe that was how I coped with the trauma, concerning myself with silly little inconveniences; but more likely, just like Mom said, I didn’t get it. I didn’t get the severity of the situation. I had no comprehension of how close Dad and I came to losing our lives that day.
“It was a three-car accident, you know,” she tells me.
“Huh?” I ask. I’ve always envisioned it as two cars: some stupid little car hitting our Jeep and causing us to roll.
Mom murmurs affirmation. “The Jeep had a fulcrum,” she explains. “The third car is what caused you to roll.”
I shove my hands in my pockets and keep walking, still trying to figure out how Dad and I made it out mostly unscathed.
Eventually, Dad and I were strapped to stretchers and taken by ambulance to the hospital. This stumped me at the time because I had one scratch – a superficial scratch that wasn’t even deep enough for a drop of blood to leak down my arm. It didn’t make sense, but being strapped to a stretcher wasn’t the worst that could happen, I supposed.
A few hours later, I had changed my mind. I couldn’t move, couldn’t change positions, and that drove me crazy; my body was camping up and parts of me were falling asleep. Dad and I must have been in our room for hours, lying on our backs, staring at an increasingly boring ceiling, waiting for a doctor who couldn’t come fast enough. We were visited by nurses every so often, but those freaking doctors took forever.
The nurses must have felt bad for me; I’m sure they just wanted to help a four-year-old survive the trauma of the accident.
But they made the same mistake the paramedic did.
“Do you want to hold your dad’s hand?”
I shake my head. The voice is kind and gentle, and I’d love to hold Daddy’s hand, but—
“There’s blood on it.”
The nurse presses a band-aid over the largest cut on his hand.
“There. Is that better?”
I shake my head. “There’s more,” I point out.
It takes two more band-aids before I’m satisfied. When all three cuts on Daddy’s hand are covered, I agree to reach across the small space between our gurneys and tuck my little hand inside his large one.
“I didn’t want to hold his hand,” I say out loud.
Mom glances over at me. We’ve been walking for several minutes in silence, but we’ve both been thinking about the same thing.
“What do you mean?” she asks curiously.
“I didn’t want to hold Dad’s hand,” I repeat. “It had blood on it.”
Mom actually smiles. “Well, that explains the band-aids,” she says. “I was wondering,” she explains, “why he had three band-aids covering the back of his hand. I guess I should have known it would come back to you.”
“The nurses thought holding his hand would make me feel better.”
“Tash, they probably thought it would make him feel better. Your dad was pretty shaken up.”
“Really?” I visualize my father, always calm and analytical. The thought of him needing anyone to comfort him can’t register; I’ve never seen him vulnerable, not once in my life.
Then, I remember that moment in the car, seeing his face in the rearview mirror.
I guess everyone needs someone every once in a while, even if that someone is their four-year-old daughter.
Mom nods, probably thinking along the same lines I am; I just barely see the movement through the dark.
“Did you hear what I said to him?” she asks, abruptly changing the direction of the conversation.
“If I did, I don’t remember,” I answer.
She smiles faintly before telling me.
She looked down at him, then cracked a wry grin, hiding her fear behind humor.
“You know,” she said, “if you didn’t want to take me to dinner you just had to say so. You didn’t have to go to this extreme.”
He gave her his signature glare, then muttered, “Get out your Swiss Army knife and cut me free.”
Naturally, she didn’t whip out the knife.
Her husband and daughter were apparently fine (minus superficial scratches from flying glass) since they were finally cut free of the stretchers and discharged. As they were preparing to leave, the doctor asked him if he wanted a prescription for pain medication.
“No,” he said. “I’ll just go home and drink some wine.”
“I can’t recommend that,” the doctor told him somberly, giving him a disapproving look over her clipboard.
Next to her, a grinning resident piped up. “But I can!”
I’m laughing with Mom as she finishes the anecdote.
“I don’t remember any of that,” I tell her.
“You were only four,” she reminds me, though I had forgotten that as well; for a while, I’d convinced myself I was five.
We keep walking and Mom tells me the rest of the story, about how she drove us home, Dad safely ensconced in the passenger seat and me in the back with a bloodless Flopsy on my lap. I think about what must have happened when we got back to the house, how the bunny must have been safely returned to the pile of stuffed animals on my bed, where she could tell all her friends about her harrowing adventure.
I remember that I missed Wishbone. By several hours. That was probably the worst part of the night for me.
Mom calmly continues with the end of the story, how she, Dad, and I had a quiet dinner of leftover French onion soup that Mom complemented with ham and cheese sandwiches.
“Did I actually eat that?” I ask incredulously; I’m a notoriously picky eater, and I’m fairly convinced that onions and ham were not in my four-year-old repertoire.
Mom laughs. “Of course not. I had to make you a grilled cheese.”
I grin at my own childish antics.
“What happened next?” I ask, realizing I have no memories of the following days.
Mom tells me that I stayed home from school the next day, and that Dad skipped work. Mom took the bus and left her car, in case Dad and I wanted to go anywhere.
As Mom continues with her story, I’m struck by just how little I remember after all. Apparently, Dad dragged me to the lot where his totaled Jeep was stored. He wanted to rescue his precious prescription sunglasses, which had apparently survived the wreck.
I do remember the CDs, however. More precisely, I remember how the CDs we kept in the console did not make it. I also remember that I spent the next several months mourning the loss of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, until Dad finally got a new one…which we put in his new Jeep—the exact same make, model, and color as the old one.
He’s had that same Jeep for twelve years. He hasn’t failed it yet; as Mom likes to say, lightning doesn’t strike twice.
“What happened to the woman who hit us?” I ask curiously. Naturally, I’d never asked this before. Dad doesn’t talk about the accident, making it somewhat taboo in our family. I’d never thought to ask Mom. Until today, I hadn’t realized she had such an integral part—it never occurred to me that between the phone call with me and picking us up at the hospital, she was soaking up information like a sponge.
“She was sued,” Mom says flatly. “Not by us,” she continues, “by the insurance company. They had to pay us for damages, and they wanted to get recovery of what they paid us from her. Unfortunately, she filed bankruptcy so she never had to pay them anything.”
I stop walking. “So…what? She never paid for what she did? Wasn’t she arrested or something for almost killing us?” I have no idea how the legal system works, but I’m certain something must have happened to her; she must have atoned for what she did somehow.
Mom shrugs. “I’m sure she was ticketed for a moving violation, but she was in compliance with the insurance laws so she was able to take defensive driving and get out of it.”
I turn and keep walking, my mood turning black. “So she almost killed me and Dad, but she was never punished for it.”
Mom shrugs. “Judges are reluctant to revoke drivers’ licenses. So yes, she’s still out there, driving around. It’s why your dad calls her a menace to society.”
My mood lightens, just slightly, as I hear Dad saying those exact words.
We’ve circled back to our quiet house by this point. We walk through the carport to our back door, entering the house through the kitchen. A soft blue glow emanates from Dad’s study off to the left. As usual, he’s doing something on his computer. I turn right, passing through our living room, down a hall to my bedroom, where a collection of stuffed animals still sits on my bed.
There, in the center, is a bunny, light grey now from age.
There’s not a spot of red on her.
This is a work of creative non-fiction designed to depict my memories of an event. The people and places mentioned are based on real people and places, but the depictions of them are based entirely on my memories and perceptions, and do not necessarily reflect how those people or places would describe themselves. This memoir is based on a real event that happened, but as mentioned in the story, I was very young at the time, and I almost certainly do not remember the details accurately. I did discuss the event with my mother many years after it happened and the depiction of that conversation is a true retelling of my perception of that conversation, but does not necessarily reflect what she recalls saying to me. Additionally, I’ve taken some creative liberties to enhance the storytelling. For example, I omitted some overly complex details to move the story along more smoothly.