Accidents
Crouched in my driveway, I inspect the fender recently pried loose by a streetlight. I wouldn’t have backed into the pole if I hadn’t stopped for lunch, hadn’t finally dropped off the dry cleaning, hadn’t shoved an oversized envelope into the postbox. I tell my neighbor this, eyes red, as if she is a priest. She stands a few feet away from me, apologizing.
My father-in-law has been dead for six days. A nurse in his retirement home found him foaming at the mouth. Maybe it was the pandemic, raging into its second year, or the diabetes. My husband and I expected a call one day, news of a fall or even a stroke. Like all our friends, we feared waving at a sick parent through a hospital window. But the call, made by a young, twang-voiced orderly named Houston, was final. “Your father has died,” he told my husband, a question mark at the end. Strange how we have more warning if a storm hits; there is no death doppler.
After I texted her, my neighbor ascended my driveway with a roll of duct tape around her left wrist. We’ve become friends in just the few months since she moved in. Now I motion toward the SUV, my voice watery. “Can I drive this?” The energy between us is unsettled, not like the easy days of swapping recipes and children. I can’t think of words to make her comfortable with my distress.
“I can add more tape,” she offers.
Before my neighbor showed up, I had opened the rear door of my car and forced the fender into place, grinding it across the asphalt to get it loose. I took a photo of the damage, then resisted the urge to retouch it, erasing the gashes. Now my phone is streaked with blood from the slice in my index finger caused by errant metal. Blood drips onto the driveway. It is all so dramatic: blood and tears and shame—and none of it about this wreck, not really.
I’m familiar with damage: unnatural cracks and bends, flaking paint, glass shards. This is my fourth accident in as many years. My husband has come to expect taillights and explanations similarly garbled. Once after my infant twins shrieked in tandem falsetto on a long drive to the beach, I arrived and immediately backed into a parked truck. Another time I ran over a decorative rock in a parking lot, and last year I was T-boned at an intersection. After that I always began the story with, “It wasn’t my fault.”
Today, I do not call my husband. At the very moment I stand in our driveway deciding whether I can safely drive to pick up our kids from school, his father’s body is being incinerated. Last night we fought over interpretations of his parents’ divorce, which happened thirty years ago. His father was jobless, his mother afraid. “Did you want her to stay with him no matter what? What if he were a drunk? A cheater?” I know my husband has cried every day for a week, and yet I can’t stop asking him these questions. His mother’s few mistakes seem capable of burying untold sacrifices. “What was she supposed to do?” I say, surprised to glimpse in the periphery my own waving arms. My husband is crying again, and I become vaguely aware this has nothing to do with his parents. What I really want to know is whether a woman can be forgiven.
My father-in-law has been dead for seven days when the school nurse calls. My eight-year-old must be placed on mandatory quarantine for riding home with a woman who now has COVID-19. Three days ago, I let her go ice skating outside with friends, a brief distraction from our collective grief. While my other children screamed inside my illegally parked but not-yet-wrecked car, I agreed to let this mother drive her home. “Yes, yes, sure,” I said, waving and walking backward. “Thank you.”
Now I drive to the school, listening for a grating or flapping that signifies my car’s tail end is dragging the road. My daughter climbs into the car, her face fixed in fear. No one has told her why she is going home, and she is afraid someone else is dead.
“It’s okay,” I tell my daughter. “It’s you and me. We can hang out, just the two of us.” I smile into my rearview mirror until she looks out the window, and then my face falls. God, I am tired. The car is too big for me to drive. I can’t stop ramming into things I don’t even know are there.
Lindsey DeLoach Jones (@lindseydjones), a professional writer and editor in Greenville, South Carolina, has a BA and MA in English and an MFA in nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University. She has taught literature and fiction writing at Clemson University and served as Editor-in-Chief of Emrys Journal and Edible Upcountry magazine. Lindsey co-founded a regional writer’s network called WRITESHARE and is a member of the Board of Governors for the South Carolina Academy of Authors. Among other places, her essays have been published in Paste, South Carolina Review, Literary Mama, Relief, and Ruminate. She can be found at lindseydeloachjones.com.