them but she could not save them from the terrors of the world.
Aunt Sloane? said the older girl, charming in a white dress with a scalloped collar.
Yes, honey.
Daddy told us when you were sixteen, you wrecked his car.
The worm inside Sloane raised its head, pulsing, amorphous, unhappy; it hissed and spat. This happened on the inside but on the outside she was cool, hair perfect.
In the distance she saw her brother, drinking a bottle of Poland Spring. She could see him as his teenage self. She could go right back to the night of the accident. It was easy, just then, to call up. The sound of metal is always more disgusting than you imagine it to be. It sounds like the organs of a robot being ripped open. She remembered the car sideways, her neck jammed like she was in hell and looking up at a steel ceiling. Her friend, in the passenger seat, looked dead to her. For just a second. But a second is enough to think someone is dead. Then she saw that her friend was alive and realized it was she who must be dead. The lights of Route 684 were bright and monstrous. No sounds. In the middle of that panic you expect your parents to appear suddenly, to save you, but Sloane found herself expecting no such thing. The next thing she knew, she was her own mother. She was driving the car that had killed her grandmother. She was waking up to see her mother—face still warm but eyes vacant and opalescent—dead beside her, having moved on. Having taken leave of her duty to her daughter.
After the accident that night Sloane became an even more skeletal version of herself, sucking the salt off pretzel rods and drinking copious amounts of diet soda. And nobody said a word. Should she tell her brother’s daughters all that? How the doctors said she was punishing herself, which was, itself, a male notion? That in general it seemed people were grateful when a woman admitted she was bad and punished herself. It was the only way people would then agree to help. She wanted to tell them that.
Aunt Sloane? said the older niece. Tell us about the accident. How you wrecked Daddy’s car? Meanwhile the younger niece giggled.
Sloane smiled. She was still looking at her brother in the distance and feeling rage. Sadness, too. If only they could have talked more. Now they merely visited each other in beautiful places, where they each kept their own closets of shit.
She could picture him and his eagle-faced wife laughing, telling their kids, Listen, your aunt Sloane is kind of a disaster and one time she totaled your daddy’s car. Without even the class to say, Don’t tell her we told you. Maybe they even goaded the children to ask her about it.
In the past Richard has said to her, I can’t believe nobody asked you if you were okay. He has held her many times when she goes back over the incident, when she tries to figure out what made her unworthy of care. They never said, Thank God you lived? Richard has asked her multiple times, as though expecting that if he asks her on the right day, she’ll say, Oh, yeah, actually, they did. And I forgot until just now.
But this day, when, at her knee, her young nieces were laughing about an event that did, in a way, kill her, Sloane felt the worm turning in her throat. Perhaps the worm was most angry about the accident, but perhaps the real root of its rage was what her brother asked in her room on an earlier night. The way he had effectively obliterated her concept of innocent love. They never messed around, of course, which is why Sloane had been able to bury the memory. Nothing happened then, just as nothing actually happened the night of the accident. A lifetime of nothing bad happening and all around, sunshine and bright green grass.
She placed her hands on the older girl’s shoulders, firmly, and looked at both of them and said, Listen.
The sun began to set behind the course. All women turn into animals, at a certain point, Sloane knew, when they most need to.
Listen, girls. I was driving a friend home. And you know what? I did get into an accident but it was an accident, and I could have been hurt but I wasn’t. I could have been killed. But I lived. I survived. I’m