dad had about ten seconds to go from seventy-five miles per hour to zero.
He slammed on the brakes. That’s the first real part of what I remember, actually, the sensation of being flung violently forward, so hard that I got a hairline fracture on my collarbone from the force of me hitting the straps of my car seat. And then there was my mother screaming again, and me screaming, too, knowing as the car in front of us rushed toward the windshield that we weren’t going to stop in time. Then BAM—the impact—the sheer loudness of it was terrible, that huge, sickening bang, compounded by the crunch and crack of glass, the pop of the airbags.
And then everything, for a few seconds, anyway, was totally still.
Dust floated in the air.
The blinker was still on, and it went click. Click. Click.
I could hear my own breathing. In and out. In and out.
Then Mom scrambled out of her seat belt and reached over to me, her hand touching my face. “Are you okay, honey? Are you hurt?”
I shook my head. Something was hurt, of course, but I didn’t feel it yet.
My dad coughed. “Shit,” I remember he said. “The car is totaled.”
Mom turned on him with an expression I’d never seen on her face, before or since. “You,” she said, gasping for air, at first, but then starting to yell. “You asshole! You could have killed us!”
“I didn’t see!” he bellowed back. “It wasn’t my fault!”
“We could have died!” she screamed.
We were fine, relatively speaking. But it was obvious to me even at three that there was something really wrong with my parents, who shouted at each other until the police showed up. My mother was like a different person in that memory, so angry when I knew her to be cool and collected most of the time. In that moment, the world shifted from being safe to being scary. It became a place where people could get hurt. They could die. They could change.
Seeing my mother today, betraying Pop, it feels exactly the same way.
My world has stopped, but my body still keeps going, and something breaks.
15
It feels like forever before Afton and Abby arrive at the Lagoon Grill. By that time I’ve calmed myself. I even feel embarrassed at how dramatically I reacted. All the running. The hyperventilating. The huge emotions and hopeless thoughts. The flashback to a freaking car accident, for freak’s sake. I’ve pulled it together now. Still, seeing my sisters coming toward me holding hands, their faces both so innocent of the things I know, I feel my eyes burn. But I somehow manage to smile. “Hey! How was hula?” I ask Abby.
“Fun!” She beams up at me. “And Josie and her mom and brothers were there too! And we learned a new song.” She proceeds to sing an off-key ditty about the ocean and the silvery moon, but stops midway through to inform us that she’s hungry now, and we should probably feed her.
“How are you?” Afton asks, squinting at my face.
I nod. “Fine. Let’s get her something to eat.”
We find a table that overlooks the dolphin tank. It turns out that most of the things on the menu are sandwiches.
“I don’t like sandwiches,” says Abby.
“I know.” I scan the menu. “How about a burger?”
“I don’t like burgers.”
“How about a nice green salad?”
“Salad is rabbit food,” she says with a sniff.
“But you’re a little rabbit, aren’t you?” Afton says, and wiggles her nose.
Abby giggles. “No. I’m a girl, silly.”
“How about a salad . . . with pineapple in it?” I offer.
Sold.
I order a Hawaiian bacon BBQ burger for myself, which is an epically bad idea. My head feels full, but my body feels empty, and it seems in the moment like maybe if I eat something familiar, like a burger, things in my world will return to normal.
But instead the burger instantly gives me a horrible stomachache.
Abby picks at her salad and after about four bites announces that she’s done. I don’t try to argue. On average we can only get my little sister to eat about one full meal a day, and she did that at breakfast. I tell her that she can go over and look at the dolphins, and away she goes, half skipping, half running to the edge of the dolphin tank.
Afton and I stay at the table. Afton uses her debit card to pay for the meal.
“Are you okay?” she asks me. “You look . . . weirder than normal.”
I don’t