How Sweet It Is - Alice J. Wisler [2]
An officer pulls up behind me, and I hear the crunch of the gravel under his heavy shoes as he comes to my window. He uses a gloved hand to knock on the glass and then asks if I need any help.
I stop rocking, find the button to lower the window a few inches, and clear my throat. “No.” Chilling rain dribbles into the car, streaking the sleeve of my windbreaker.
“Are you sure?” His breath smells of coffee, which reminds me that I have had no caffeine today.
I speak to his shiny badge, which I’m sure includes his printed name, but my eyes are too blurry to read it. “I’m fine.”
Just three and a half months ago, another officer had asked me how I was as I lay in the passenger’s seat of Lucas’s 1987 Mustang. I’d passed out after that. I don’t want to look into this man’s face right now.
“Well, miss, you will need to move along.” His tone is compassionate, in an authoritative sort of way.
Nodding, I tell him, “I will.” My voice sounds tinny, like I’m talking through a pipe.
When he leaves in his red-domed patrol car, I resume my rocking. This time terror rumbles through my head like the wheels of a tractor plowing a dirt field, flattening every stem, every weed. If I look to my right, I’ll see a woman slumped over in the passenger’s seat, blood smeared on her forehead, shards of glass protruding from her arms. Gritting my teeth— a habit I have only recently formed—I look to my right. The passenger seat holds my worn brown suede purse. Jerking my head toward the back seat, I see only the gray upholstery. I’m really all alone.
Post-traumatic stress syndrome is what the doctor called this. PTSS for short. To me, that sounds like a brand of hair-spray. Or the sound of air slowly escaping from a lidded pot cooking collards on the stove.
I hear a scream identical to the one I recall hearing during the accident and realize it belongs to me. Clutching my elbows, I try to steady my breathing. But my breath is a series of gasps, and then a loud sob rushes out of my mouth. Tears much larger, I’m sure, than these falling raindrops slide down my cheeks.
I should have taken Sally up on her offer. She said she’d drive me and my belongings to Bryson City. She’s a doctor— her patients are the kind I’m allergic to. “You don’t do well driving,” she gently told me one evening when we were at Burgalos for dinner. “It’s natural after what happened for you to have fear. Just let me drive you. I’m off next Saturday.”
I let her comment slide off me like a loaf of bread out of a well-greased baking pan. She must have seen my knuckles turn harder than concrete last Tuesday when I dropped her off at her clinic because her car was in the shop. I was doing well until a trucker in front of me slammed on his brakes. “What is he doing?” I cried.
“The light’s red,” she told me. “Cars tend to stop at those.” She smiled, but I couldn’t return her smile. It was too hard just to breathe.
“Swallow, Deena,” she urged me.
This morning’s rainstorm was not predicted. I wouldn’t have chosen to leave Atlanta on a day with rain. Had I known the weather would be like this, I’d have waited. I would have sat cross-legged in my almost empty, one-bedroom apartment, dressed in a pair of gray sweat pants and billowy T-shirt, and listened to Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. At lunchtime, I would have eaten takeout from the Chinese place down the street and talked to Sally on the phone in between her canine and feline appointments at