Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [69]
“I know.”
“No, you don’t, Zak. You found yourself a good job and you’ve stuck with it and you’ve got a house that’s going to be gorgeous when you’re finished. You haven’t made any major mistakes with your life and I don’t guess you will. I’m just saying I love you and I know you love me, but don’t wait up for me again.”
“I told you I had a nightmare.”
Stacy gave Zak a tiny beauty-pageant wave and proceeded upstairs, where he heard the bathroom door close. The nightmare was bad enough, but seeing his sister step out of Kasey Newcastle’s car had put him into a black mood. That they’d gone someplace and had sex, or something like sex, before slapping the hell out of each other was almost too much to think about. He had no doubt she’d given as good as she’d gotten, though. His sister had a temper and was incredibly strong.
He was eleven when Charlene died at sixteen; Stacy was fourteen. Once again, sitting in the dark, he knew he would give anything to be able to go back and replay that night, that he would give anything if he could erase those thirty seconds of cowardice. It didn’t matter how many times he told himself he’d been a child, because the assurances never dissolved the cold, hard kernel of fear he’d cached away in the pit of his stomach, the fear that reminded him almost daily that his family’s implosion was all his doing. They all knew Charlene would be alive today if not for him.
They’d lived in Tacoma. It was raining that night. Zak was in the front seat next to Charlene, who’d only been awarded her driver’s license a month before. Stacy was in the back, a fact that probably saved her life. She’d been battling her older sister for some time and refused to sit up front. They were about to drop Zak off at a chess club meeting, driving up Sixth Avenue toward the library, when a truck in the oncoming lane blinded Charlene with its headlights, crossed the centerline, and hit them head-on. Zak didn’t remember the initial details, only that there was a loud noise, that Charlene said, “Oh, shit,” and then they were spinning in the road. There were more loud noises, and then Zak was crying. He’d broken his wrist. Stacy escaped relatively unscathed and got out of the wreck on her own. The car was upside down, and Zak managed to get his seat belt undone, which dropped him onto the crumpled roof of the car. Charlene, still hanging upside down, said, “Zak, help me. I’m stuck.”
It had been a simple request, delivered in a tranquil voice, and Zak would remember her calm resolve for the rest of his life, making it a model for everything he did. The smoke began to grow worse, but Zak crept toward her and then reached up and tried to manipulate the belt mechanism with his good hand. As he fumbled with it, he felt a searing heat and without thinking, slithered out of the car backward. The smoke flared up until he almost couldn’t see Charlene. Just as he cleared the car, a young man he’d never seen before knelt and began to squirm into the smoke until one of his friends pulled him back.
“Zak?”
Hearing her voice and realizing he still had time to get the seat belt loose, Zak crawled back in. Nobody pulled him out; nobody tried to stop him. He never did figure out why. Crawling on his belly, he reached his sister and began to fumble again with her seat belt. And then, without the heat becoming appreciably worse, without his sister coming free, without anything changing, he was once again overwhelmed with panic. The earlier terror had been a mustard seed compared with this. He didn’t know it was possible to have so much adrenaline in his body or to be so single-minded about saving himself.
Again he scooted out backward. There was still time, he thought, as he lay whimpering on the ground beside the car looking on as his sister tried to unloosen the seat belt herself. There was still time to venture in and try again. The worst thing about cowardice, he later realized, was that in even the most egregious cases, there were often multiple opportunities to redeem oneself, opportunities one could look