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

stayed home from school, and I called the director to say Amanda wouldn't be at rehearsal that afternoon. A few hours later Jesus phoned to ask about her. I told him she hadn't been with us during the accident, and he let go of the air I could tell he'd been holding in his lungs. The hospital had released Stephanie, stitched back together, jagged black threads poking like buried insects from her face and arms and kneecaps. Hair shaved in patches for more stitching, a purple ring of bruise around one raccooned eye. The doctor had pointed out the long dark streaks under her skin; he called them road tattoos and said that over the years as she grew and her skin stretched the wounds would reopen and gravelly remnants of that skid across asphalt would squirm out, the way shrapnel eventually worked its way out of a wounded soldier.
    My husband's mother, who'd not spoken to me since I'd left her son, came to sit with sleepy Stephanie and vigilant Amanda while Tom and I, along with Mary and Mollie, went to check out the car and to sign the papers for its dismantling. We drove to the lot on the outside of town where the van had been towed. It had rained in
the night, the sharp smell of creosote and new mud puddles attesting to the recent moisture. I held Mary's hand, and Mollie sat on her dad's shoulders, while we walked up and down the gravel rows, battered automobiles on either side, looking for the one that belonged to us. "There it is," my husband said, pointing to a smashed and twisted hunk of silver metal squatting on four flat black tires. Mary yanked at me as she came to a stop on the path.
    "What's wrong?" I asked her.
    She stared up at me. "Who turned it over?"
    "What do you mean?"
    I picked her up and she buried her face in my shirt. "Tell them to put it back," she whispered.
    And then I realized I agreed with her: if force and speed and gravity came together to create such havoc, it ought to have been left alone. At least until we could make some sort of amends with our rolled-over car.
    The sliding door had broken off and was resting against the van. During the rainy night, coyotes had smelled the groceries, the hamburger and butter and big ripe tomatoes, and I suppose Stephanie's blood, and had squeezed through the fence to consume what they could and to tear everything else into slimy bits. Their paw prints were everywhere, floor, ceiling, seats.
    Tom climbed in to have a good look around. "It couldn't be more wrecked," he said when he stepped back out.

    When we arrived at the apartment an hour later, papers signed, I went upstairs to check on Stephanie and Amanda while Tom and his mother muttered to each other in my living room. She left without telling me goodbye, which didn't make me seethe as it might have before; I was willing to concede that from her point of view my desire to be rid of her son was appalling. On the outside of Stephanie's closet, I hung the cheerleading uniform wrapped in plastic. I'd asked Tom to stop at the shop on the way home and I'd run in to pay for it.
    Amanda sat in a chair on the other side of Stephanie's bed, her legs curled under her. She looked at the costume without a word.
The evening before, after we'd come home from the hospital and were reunited with her, after I'd assured her that everyone was okay—even the out-of-control boy in the sports car had walked away unscathed—Amanda told me she knew what would have happened if she'd been in the car with us. She would have been sitting on the other side of the rear seat, opposite Stephanie. The point of impact. She'd probably be dead. That's what she said as I tucked her into bed.
I'd probably be dead.
I sat down next to her and put my hands on either side of her head. "No," I insisted, "that wouldn't have happened. You'd be okay."
    "I feel like a ghost," she said.
    But she was not a ghost and she was not an orphan. She wasn't a leper or a child at a master's feet or an agent of heaven. She was a child, wondering, I was sure,