hair. I got closer; it was Ariel. But only her head. “Shit,” I said under my breath and then glanced back at the car, wincing, feeling a sudden weight in my stomach. This had been a bad idea. Mia would cry the entire way to Port Townsend over a doll that was now broken instead of lost. Maybe her dad could fix it; he could somehow tape it together. Then I saw the shape of the tail, fanned into two sections, but no sign of her shell-bikini-clad upper body. “Shit,” I said again. I bent down to pick it up, and heard it.
The sound of metal crunching and glass exploding at once. It was a sound I knew from accidents I’d been in as a teenager, but I had never heard it like this.
A car. Hitting another car. My car. My car with Mia sitting in the back seat.
That sound was the window next to my baby girl’s head exploding, popping like a glass balloon.
I dropped Ariel’s head, screamed, and ran. This isn’t real, I thought, running. This isn’t real. By the time I reached the car, my scream had turned into a repeated No. No. No-no-no.
When I opened the car door behind the driver’s side, Mia’s car seat faced me, dislodged from its place. The rear window was missing. Her wide eyes locked on mine, her mouth frozen open in a silent scream. I breathed, and she reached her arms out for me. I moved the car seat. Beneath her, the floor of the car was bent, smashed inward and upward, almost to her feet. She held up her feet, which were protected only by light-up sandals.
I unbuckled her and immediately felt her arms around my neck, felt her legs push against the seat with enough force to back us both away from the car. Her legs wrapped around me, and I hugged her tight and sobbed, turning her away from the wreckage of the car.
The cars in both directions slowed down as they passed, the drivers’ heads craning out the windows to see the damage. I stood in the grassy median, about ten feet away from the car we depended on, clinging to my three-year-old, feeling as if everything around us had begun to spin like a cyclone.
The other driver, a lanky teenage boy with spiked hair, walked up to us from where his car had stopped a hundred feet away. He had a gash above his left eye. His short-sleeved, white button-up shirt flapped in the breeze, revealing a ribbed tank top underneath.
“Are you okay?” he said. Then, his eyes fixed on Mia. “Oh, my God, was she in the car?”
“Of course she was in the car, you fucking idiot!” I yelled in a new voice, nothing like I had ever heard before. It didn’t sound like my own. “How could you hit my fucking car?” He didn’t respond. “How could you hit my fucking car?” I repeated. I said it again and again, not really saying it to anyone, burying the words in Mia’s shoulder. How could this happen to us? How were we standing in the middle of a highway, alone, with a smashed-up car that I still owed money on, that I needed for work, that we needed to survive? That was our car, as important as an arm or a leg to keep us moving.
The boy backed away, and I pressed my forehead to Mia’s and asked her again if she was okay.
“I’m okay, Mama,” she said, her voice uncharacteristically even and calm. “We’re okay.”
“We’re okay?” I said, gulping for air. “We’re okay?”
“We’re okay,” she said again. “We’re okay.” I held her tight, feeling my body starting to go from panic to grief.
A cool hand touched my shoulder, and I whirled around, ready to beat the piss out of that boy, before I saw that the hand belonged to a tiny blond woman. Her timid voice made it so I couldn’t hear her or understand what she said, but her face showed concern.
“Are you okay?” she asked. I didn’t respond. I stared at the woman for a second, so translucent she looked angelic. What kind of question was that? Was I okay? I had no idea. I almost lost my kid. This kid in my arms. This kid who’d placed her palm on my cheek that morning and whispered, “I love you.” This kid who shared my bed and loved pancakes. This kid could have died.
“My daughter,” I said out loud. It was