* * * * *
I tossed my purse on the floor of the living room, pulled off my coat, shoulders still dusted with snow from outside, and plopped myself onto the couch next to Anna and my sister, Elisa, who'd been reading her a book. Elisa, two years younger than I, was home for Christmas from her freshman year in college and would soon return to school.
It was three days since Trev's funeral; a week since he died. A week wasn't a long time to mourn, Mom said, but I'd been feeling his loss for months already, if not years, from the first time he'd slapped me across the face and sent me spinning around the kitchen table. His death had only been the final note in a long, mournful tune.
"A guy at the community college just asked me out on a date," I said.
"Really?"
I gave Elisa a glance and a half-smile. "Do I have three heads or something?" And then I confessed before she could answer, "I was just surprised. It's been a while since I thought about myself that way."
"Since you stopped nursing and lost some weight, you look really great, actually."
What could I do but laugh? Elisa had a way of getting straight to the point. "Well, thanks. I think. I feel more like myself. Like I'm waking up from a long sleep, or as if I've been wrapped in Styrofoam, and I've finally broken through it."
"So you really are okay?" Elisa said.
"Yes. I think, finally, yes."
"No more losers. Any guy that you meet and start to date, you have to run through both Mom and me before you get serious. Bring him home, and he has to submit to twenty questions before you get any further."
"That's pretty strict!" I said. "What if I just want to go to a movie with him?"
"Nope." Elisa shook her head. She was very serious. Admittedly, she was always serious but I could tell she really meant it and it touched me.
I smiled at her. "You are what I want to be. I'm so proud of you."
"Me? You're the one who's had to deal with all this stuff."
"I'm the one who chose the wrong dream to follow. Is it too late for me?"
"Of course not!" Mom bustled in. "You're going to be fine. You're only twenty."
"I'll be twenty-one soon."
Mom shook her head. "You've just made a small detour. Besides, look what we got out of it!" She leaned over the back of the couch to kiss the top of Anna's head. "Cyn wired ?'r pader."
Elisa and I rolled our eyes in unison. 'As true as the Lord's Prayer!' Mom had said. She knew enough Welsh to get by, as she said, and she'd diligently taught it to us. That just happened to be her favorite phrase. She'd emigrated to Pennsylvania from Wales as a girl, settling in Radnor with an aunt and uncle (long since dead). She'd grown up in Cardiff, a city in south Wales, and one anglicized enough that she'd never quite become fluent in the language.
Yet, she'd found comfort in the Pennsylvania hills that reminded her of home and in the remnants of the Welsh language that she found along the Main Line. She'd never been back to Wales, though, and Radnor, where we still lived, was as close as she'd gotten to living in a Welsh community.
After working for twenty years as a housekeeper, she married Evan Morgan. He'd been ten years older than she and delighted to find himself with a wife-and within a few years of marriage, two daughters, long after he thought himself an established bachelor. Mom had already been forty when they married so they hadn't had as long as they would have liked together; she blamed my sojourn with Trev on grief at my father's death.
Unfortunately, none of us knew any more Welsh than Mom ... and what had Elisa and I learned in high school? French, and confounded our parents with our grasp of the language. Sitting on the couch with Elisa and Anna, I recalled that I used to be good in school. A lifetime ago. Maybe I could be again.
"Can we go, Mommy?" Anna said.
I smiled down at her and tickled her under her chin. She giggled. She had curly, dark hair, almost black, and her dark eyes looked at me with an intent expression. Her little legs stuck straight out in front of her as she held the book on her lap.
She was only two and a half years old but already talking in long sentences. Sometimes I was the only one who could understand what she was saying through her little two-year-old lisp, but at least she was saying it. I didn't need her to articulate "ice cream", however, to remember my promise.
"Yes," I said. "Let's go."
"What about dinner?" Mom said. I stood to look at her, not wanting to argue in front of Anna. Mom met my eye, and then nodded. "Dessert first, then dinner. Sounds wonderful."
"Thank you, Mom." I leaned forward to put my arms around her plump waist and my head on her shoulder. "Thank you for everything."
"Dw i'n dy garu di."
"I love you too." I held out a hand to Anna. She turned over on her stomach, letting her legs dangle over the edge of the cushion, slid down from the couch, and ran to me. I bundled her into her coat, put her on my hip, and reached for my purse again. "We'll be back."
"Bye," Elisa and Mom said in unison.
Anna waved as she always did, her little fist opening and closing. "Bye."
Once in my little blue Honda, with Anna buckled into her car seat in the middle of the back seat, I allowed myself a deep breath. I leaned my head against the seat rest. We'll be okay. I buckled myself in, started the car, and headed away from my mother's house.
It was only four miles to the ice cream parlor. I took the turns carefully, reliving again, as I did in my dreams, what must have happened to Trev that night. Halfway there, I realized we were approaching the spot where he died. I'd been avoiding it the whole week. How could I have forgotten to take a different route this time? The intersection lay ahead of us. My stomach clenched.
I come home from my job at the library on campus. I'd been able to put Anna in bed before I left, but as I push open the kitchen door at midnight, I can see through the space between the kitchen counter and the cupboards into the living room, which is dark except for the flickering light from the television. There she is, lying on the couch with her eyes open, watching something that looks like Jaws 17. I set my books on the kitchen counter, and Trev twists in his armchair. He has a beer in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other.
I just stand there, staring at him, anger, recriminations, and hatred boiling up inside me. There's a moment when I try to stop them, knowing it's pointless to complain, trying to make allowances for the crappy upbringing he had that led him to this moment. But then they spill out.
"Trev," I say, trying to keep my voice down and reasonable-sounding. "I've asked you not to smoke in the house. It's bad for Anna."
"It's fucking cold out there!" He hitches himself higher in the chair. He's lost so much weight, his body doesn't have the mass to stay fixed in the seat anymore and keeps sliding down it. "I'll fucking die if I go out there."
"Trev," I say again. "You're smoking."
He gets angry between one instant and the next. "And I'm fucking dying anyway. Shit." He reaches beside him and throws the pillow in his chair across the room like a frisbee. It hits the television, which fizzles out. We've never been able to afford a better TV and, in that moment, I'm glad. But Trev is mad.
He pushes out of his chair and approaches me, taking small mincing steps. He changes his voice to something whiny and high, a supposed imitation of my own. "Trev. Trev don't smoke. Trev, you're keeping Anna awake. She needs her sleep. Trev, you shouldn't be drinking while you're on your meds."
I back away, glancing at Anna to see how she's taking this. Her eyes are closed. I hope that she really is asleep, now that the glare from the television is gone, but I don't see how she could be.
"Trev," I say, one more time. "Don't."
"Don't fucking say my name!" He backhands me across the face before I can get out of the way. I fall against the kitchen table and onto the floor, and then crab-walk backward, hurrying before he can hit me again. He stumbles forward and leans down, getting right in my face, his hand fisted. "I'll do what I please in my own house!"
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sp; Then he straightens. He's breathing hard; this has taken more out of him than it used to. He staggers as he makes his way to the kitchen door and opens it. I don't say anything, and neither does he, as he walks away from me, into the night.
When the police officer came to the house, he told me that Trev hadn't braked at a stop sign where the road teed. Instead of turning right or left as required, he'd driven straight ahead into a tree. Facing that same junction, I eased up on the gas. My eyes blurred as we approached it, and I fought back the tears, wiping at my cheeks with the back of one hand while the other clenched the steering wheel.
I pressed the brake hard, as I knew he had not-but then ... I'm not stopping!
"Anna!" Her name came out a shriek as the car skidded sideways on the black ice I'd not known was there. I swung the wheel, struggling to correct our course. I managed to alter it enough to avoid the tree on which Trev had lost his life, but slid instead toward the twenty-foot high roadcut to its left which was fronted by a shallow ditch.
Time hung suspended during that half second before impact, stretching before me. My hands whitened on the wheel, my throat tightened from unshed tears, and Anna cried in the back seat, frightened by the panic in my voice.
Then everything speeded up as the car slid into the cut and then through it.
An abyss opened before me-a yawning blackness that gave me the same hollow rushing in my ears I'd felt in the morgue. A lifetime later, we were through it or across it-whatever it was. I registered gray-blue sky and sea before the car bounded headfirst down an incline and skidded into a marsh. It came to an abrupt halt as the world flipped forward. Instinctively, I threw up my hands to protect my head, but the steering wheel rushed at my face. I tasted plastic and blood-pain, and then nothing.