E. surprised me for our 13th anniversary with a trip to Portland. Thinking we were, I don't know, twenty-three or something, we drove seven hours on Friday, stayed in a posh hotel over night, walked around Portland for a few hours the next morning, and drove back. It was exhausting. Lovely. Exhausting.
On the way home we were hauling ass up a steep, winding, four-lane highway pass; around one curve was a red sedan, flipped upside down, wheels still spinning, bodies stiffly circling a car, something suspended upside-down from the roof. "Is someone still in there?" I asked Eric. "Should we stop?"
He said no, there were other people already pulled over to help, but I wasn't really asking a question anyway, and we pulled over. There were four women who had been in the car--a fifteen-year-old and her mom, two older ladies, aunties. A couple of other motorists had pulled whoever was still suspended in the car out. There were magazines strewn about the roof of the car; snacks; the contents of purses. It looked like the aftermath of a wild party, the floor of a messy dorm room.
Everyone was fine, mostly. The two aunties, stout, purses hung off their forearms, lips in tight lines and hair unmussed, seemed as if they had just strolled up. They were totally unfazed and it was hard to believe they had been in the car at all.
The mom, who had been driving, had blood pouring down her face from a puncture wound to her forehead, but she was still standing and seemed otherwise okay. She was shaking pretty bad, her eyes wide, and she kept saying, "I could have killed my whole family. I could have killed them all." She was clearly in shock and I just stood there and rubbed her back, tried to convince her to sit down, worried that maybe she was hurt worse than she seemed.
Someone else had a first aid kit and gloves on already, and kept asking me if I wanted gloves on too. I wasn't touching the blood or anything so I ignored them and finally got the woman seated on the rocky embankment. Cars were still flying up the hill, going so fast, then braking suddenly to look at us, and the road was wet from the rain that had just come through. E. said he couldn't believe how bald the woman's tires were, and that he was worried the whole time we would get hit by someone else who lost control.
One of the aunties said they had been on their way to a family reunion in LaGrange. The woman who had been driving said her brother had told her it was time to get a new car, but the car would be finally paid off in three months, so she had told her brother she had decided to drive the car into the ground. Then she paused. "I could have killed my whole family," she repeated. She grabbed her daughter and hugged her so tight and said, "I'm so sorry baby. I'm so sorry."
Ambulances from the nearby Indian reservation were on the way, and everyone seemed fine, and there were plenty of motorists on the side of the road now. Cars kept whizzing past us, and it became clear that we were more in the way than not. So I hugged the lady again, told her and her family I was so glad they were alive and okay, and we left.
I remember fifteen years ago when my then-boyfriend Pete and I drove from LA up to Boise so he could meet my family. On that trip, too, we passed a wreck, this time on a pretty deserted stretch of road in Northern California. There was a van, formerly full of people, pulled off to the side of the road, but facing the wrong way, its front end bashed in, windows collapsed; there was a big, overturned truck in the field next to it. Pete was an EMT, so we pulled off immediately to see if we could help the other motorists who had pulled over ahead of us.
There were bodies in the field. People had located them and then were coming back to us, their faces grim. A kid, in his late teens or early twenties, too, was seated by the side of the road, by himself. His brother, also young, was still strapped into the driver's seat, not moving. Pete was looking the driver over, and again all I could do was rub the kid's back, tell him it would be okay. He kept asking about his brother. Pete and I made eye contact and he shook his head. Somebody told him he was an EMT and needed to call it. He had just got out of training and hadn't done anything like this before, so he spent a few more minutes going over the driver again, standing still and quiet, feeling for a pulse, breath sounds. Then he shook his head a final time.
The kid, rocking now, eyes locked on the front of the van, told me he and his brother and the other passengers were on holiday from Australia. He didn't know what had happened to cause the accident. He kept asking about his brother, saying he needed to call his parents, and all I could say was, "Everything's going to be alright. It's alright." I lied, and hated lying, and didn't know what else to do. I tried to calculate the time difference between California and Australia, tried to imagine who would be responsible for making that call, what news would be given.
Eventually the cops and the fire truck came and we didn't need to be there anymore. We got back in the truck and left.
I felt the same way in both situations, as I got back in the car and sped off. Not lucky, not reminded of how it can all be over in a minute, not wanting to be more careful. Just shaky and filled with a sense of the strange, the uncanny. The weirdness of how you can be part of such a significant moment in someone's life, a moment where maybe their life is changed forever, and also be so totally outside of it, so useless, so extraneous. And then you can get in your car and drive away, untouched, never knowing anything about those people again.
haunting
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