He shook his head in admiration and said in an undertone, “It’s good, this one, Anna, it’s good stuff. He saw Princess Diana in his local 7-Eleven, buying a bottle of Gatorade and twelve doughnuts.”
“What flavor?”
“A mixed box. And last year, he saw the face of Martin Luther King in a tomato. Charged his neighbors five dollars a look until the tomato went moldy.”
Without warning, we zigged across Fifty-third Street and were thrown, with force, against the right-hand door. I clutched Aidan. “And, of course,” Aidan added, “there’s the quality of his driving. Brace yourself for a zag.”
Funnily enough the accident wasn’t the fault of our seven-out-of-ten driver. In fact, it turned out to be no one’s fault at all. Making quite nippy progress through the dense postwork cars, Aidan and I had moved onto a mundane conversation about the state of our apartment and what a pig our landlord was. We were totally unaware of the events playing out on the junction of the cross street—a woman doing an unexpected dash across the road, an Armenian cabdriver swerving to avoid hitting her, and his front wheel connecting with a pool of oil, there from when a car had broken down earlier and spilled its guts onto the road. In blissful ignorance, I was saying “We could try painting the—” when we passed into another dimension. With brutal impact, another cab had plowed into the side of ours and its front bumper was trying to get into our backseat—the sort of thing that only happens in a nightmare. My head was full of grinding and breaking, then we were spinning backward in the road, like we were on an evil merry-go-round.
The shock was—still is—indescribable, and the impact broke Aidan’s pelvis and six of his ribs, and mortally injured his liver, kidneys, pancreas, and spleen. I saw it all—in slow motion, of course: the shattered glass filling the air like silver rain, the tearing metal, the short gush of blood from Aidan’s mouth, and the look of surprise in his eyes. I didn’t know he was dying, I didn’t know that in twenty minutes’ time he’d be dead, I just thought we should be angry that some asshole, going far, far too fast, had side-rammed us.
Out in the street people were screaming, someone yelled, “Jesus, Jesus Christ!,” and whirling past me were people’s legs and feet. I noticed a pair of red spindly-heeled boots. Red boots are such a statement, I thought hazily. I still remembered them so clearly I could have picked them out in an identification lineup. Some details were imprinted on me forever.
I was really lucky, everyone said later. “Lucky” because Aidan took all the impact. By the time the other driver had had his momentum broken by Aidan’s body, he was nearly all out of steam, with barely enough force left to break my right arm and dislocate my knee. Obviously there was collateral damage—the metal in our ceiling buckled and tore and gouged a deep furrow in my face, and the tearing metal in the door ripped off two of my nails. But I didn’t die.
Our driver hadn’t a scratch. When the never-ending backward spinning finally stopped, he got out of the cab and looked in at us through the hole where his window used to be, then backed away and bent over. I wondered what he was doing. Checking his tires? Then, from the sounds he was making, I realized he was throwing up.
“Ambulance is coming, buddy,” a man’s voice said, and I wondered if I had really heard it or just in my head. For a short time, things were oddly peaceful.
Aidan and I looked at each other in a “can you believe this?” way and he said, “Baby, are you okay?”
“Yes, are you?”
“Yeah.” But his voice was weird, kind of gurgly.
On the front of his shirt and tie was a sticky, dark red bloodstain and I was distressed because it was such a nice tie, one of his favorites. “You’re not to worry about the tie,” I said. “We’ll get you another one.”
“Does anything hurt?” he asked.
“No.” At the time, I felt nothing. Good old shock, the great protector, gets us through the unbearable. “How about you?”
“A little.” That was when I knew it was a lot.
From far away, I heard sirens. They got nearer and louder, then they were right up beside us, when abruptly, midshriek, they stopped. They’re for us, I thought. I never thought this sort of thing would happen to us.
Aidan was taken out of the mangled car, then we were in the ambulance and things seemed to speed up. We were in the hospital and on separate gurneys and running through corridors, and from the way everyone paid attention to us, we were the most important people there.
I gave our health-insurance details, which I remembered with crystal-clear, photo recall—even our membership numbers. I hadn’t even known that I knew them. I was asked to sign something but I couldn’t because of my right arm and hand being destroyed, so they said it was okay.
“What is your relationship to this patient?” I was asked. “His wife? His friend?”
“Both,” Aidan answered, in the gurgly voice.
When they rushed him off to the operating room, I still didn’t know he was dying. I knew he was hurt, but I had no conception that he couldn’t be fixed.
“Make him be okay,” I asked the surgeon, a short, tan man.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “He’s probably not going to make it.”
My mouth fell open. Excuse me? Half an hour earlier we’d been on our way to have dinner. And now this suntanned man was telling me that Aidan might not “make it.”
And he didn’t. He died very quickly, barely ten minutes in.
By then the pain had started in my hand and arm and face. I was in such a fog of agony that I could barely remember my name, so trying to understand that Aidan had just died was like trying to imagine a totally new color. Rachel showed up with Luke; someone must have rung her. But when I saw her I thought they’d also been in an accident—why else would they be at the hospital?—and was confused by the coincidence. Sometime around then, I was given drugs, probably morphine, and it was only at that point that I thought to ask about the other driver, the one who’d rammed us.
His name was Elin. Both his arms had been broken but he was otherwise uninjured. Everyone was adamant that the accident wasn’t his fault. There were a million witnesses who insisted he’d had “no choice” but to swerve to avoid hitting the woman, and that it was sheer, unadulterated lousy luck that the patch of oil had been dumped right on that spot of road.