Live Through This by Debra Gwartney Read Free Book Online Page A

before. I shouted Stephanie's name and then I screamed it. Mary said, "There," and I looked out her window, my head now so full of blood I felt as useless as a tick. I saw Stephanie lying on the road, curled into herself, the way she had looked once at the park when she'd fallen wrong off the monkey bars and sprained her ankle. Maybe that was all it was, an ankle or a shoulder. I called her name again. "Get up, Stephanie, get up!" I yelled. I knew those were the worst instructions possible to give a hurt child, but I had to see her move.
    She did sit up, legs spread in front of her and blood streaming down her face and hair. Onlookers gathered, pouring out of their houses and cars. "My mom and sisters!" she shouted at them. But no one stepped forward. "Somebody help us!"
    A woman's voice from far away: "Tell your mother to turn off
the engine." I pawed the space in front of me, what I thought was the dashboard, but I couldn't find the ignition. The steering wheel was cockeyed, staring at me blankly. Nowhere could I locate the metal jut of the key. Outside, the wheels of the van turned while the engine raced, as if the car were trying to find some way to escape through the air. My head was bulging now, or felt like it was; I was dizzy, and my body, like Mary's and Mollie's, hung in angled suspension from the seat belts. Five years of dust and grime crawled up my pants and covered my glasses, wove itself into my hair. I'd feel all of it later, the itchy dirt, the bruises and broken ribs. But right now, I needed to get my kids far from this car. I had to reach Stephanie.
    "Get us out of here!" I shouted at the people beyond the shattered windshield. They stood on the sidewalk, held at bay by the car whose engine roared and kept roaring.
    Stephanie stood up and moved toward the van. She pushed herself back through the hole from which she'd been thrown, first her head, then her chest, then her legs. "What are you doing?" I said, more alert by now, smart enough to know she needed to keep still until someone checked her out. "Sit down, don't move. Tell someone to call an ambulance."
    But she squeezed through the interior of the car, through the spilled milk and broken eggs, the bricks of cheese and smashed bread, blood dripping from her face and down her arms and legs, until she got to Mollie. I heard rather than saw what happened next: Stephanie pressed the button of her sister's seat belt and caught her as she fell free.
    "I want Mommy," Mollie whimpered.
    "She's coming," Stephanie said. "She's right behind us."
    A minute later I saw upside-down Stephanie and Mollie on the sidewalk, and an upside-down woman with a topknot of hair and a green facial mask hardened across her cheeks, chin, and forehead rushing toward them with an open blanket. I turned to Mary. "We'll be out in just a minute," I said, my head throbbing now. "I promise."
    A bare-chested man appeared at my window. He was huge, mus
cled, and had inky tattoos on both upper arms. He was talking to me but I couldn't tell what he was saying. He was on his knees, reaching toward me through the opening, pushing his wide body in the broken window until I saw rivulets of red across his skin. With the knife in his hand, he started to cut me loose, but I reached out and grabbed his wrist. "Get my daughter first," I said over the still-roaring engine.
    "I'm here already," he said with an exaggerated shrug, which for some reason made me furious at this person who was trying to help when no one else would. "Get my daughter first," I said through clenched teeth. He sighed and pulled himself out the window and walked far enough around the car that he didn't come anywhere near the spinning tires, and in a minute he'd cut Mary free—she braced her knees and palms against the floor of the van to hold herself steady while he moved her toward the blanket he'd packed across the jagged base of the shattered window. He lifted her out. Then he came back for me.

    The next day the girls