Live Through This by Debra Gwartney Read Free Book Online

in a steady stream every night; if I couldn't think about him, he said, then think of our children, who would soon come unglued without both parents in the same house.
    In the rear storage section of the van I'd stashed a plastic bag I'd
picked up earlier at a friend's house. In it was an orange jump suit, the type made for an industrial cleaning team or a highway flagger. A friend had bought it for me because she and her boyfriend were going to a costume party that night and wanted me to go along; the three of us would dress as Biospherians, the faux scientists who'd been sealed up in a giant glass terrarium outside Tucson the month before. On their 3.2-acre replica of Earth, these orange-clad Biospherians were to spend two years learning to "harness nature," as the PR person told me at the sealing-in festivities. I'd covered the party for
Newsweek,
a job I'd landed only because the magazine's editor had called one of my old journalism professors in a panic and he'd given her my name. The press badge granted me access to the private gathering, to Timothy Leary, to the cast of
Cheers.
That night after the Biospherians were locked in tight, I went back to my apartment, the girls at their father's house for the weekend, and wrote a story that was faxed to New York by midnight. Now my friend wanted to celebrate my first national story—even though my name appeared only at the bottom in six-point italics—at this party. I didn't know if I should, or even could. Still, the idea of a party flooded my mind. Standing in a group of adults, holding a cold beer, talking to people who weren't thinking about how to pay for cheerleader's uniforms and who might want to ask me what it felt like to write for a real magazine. Was that what would make me happy?
    Fuming about Stephanie's mood and about Tom's ire if I went to a party without him, worrying about cookies due in the morning, and my wedding band that tapped, tapped, tapped against the steering wheel, I never saw the car. And the car's driver didn't see me. He raced through the intersection, blowing through the stop sign, and slammed into our silver van. His sports car was so low to the ground that it slid under us. I felt a slight rise and suddenly heavy, as if we were in an airplane whose wheels had just left the runway. The van tipped, pitched hard, and leaned in a way that no car should. I turned my head to try to see Mary next to me, thinking that keeping my eyes on her would prevent this daughter from getting hurt, but I was pressed into my seat as if by the gravitational
force of a carnival ride, the tilt-a-whirl or the space rocket. Mollie behind me and Stephanie behind her were a million miles away. It was dead quiet inside as we rolled like a steelie down the street: first sideways, then upside down, skidding, a screech of metal against roadbed. I listened for some sound of the girls above all that noise while the seat belt tightened across my chest and my ribs collapsed inward toward my stomach—hair flying in my face—but there was nothing. Nothing human, anyway. The movement of the car was slow and without human protest, as if we had already resigned ourselves to what was happening. What I knew was that we couldn't stop moving—because I couldn't face what was at the end of this when we did.
    Still upside down, we did stop, the force of nature and a jutting sidewalk curb taking care of that. I was able to move my arms, enough to push my dangling hair out of my eyes and turn to look around. Mary, hanging toward the top that was now the bottom, reached over to press the button on my seat belt, but it was jammed shut and wouldn't budge. Mollie whimpered. I twisted harder, enough to see my youngest child suspended from her car seat, and then to see the rear seat—the rear seat was empty. The window that had been next to Stephanie was gone, disappeared as if it had leaped off and run away like the gingerbread man I had read about to Mollie the night