The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [125]
It is a fleeting scene, a tableau, and slightly comical. The O of surprise on the girl’s face, the commonsensical decision to carry the tricycle, the run-waddle to safety. And if Linda and Thomas had continued on, they’d have been at first horrified and then tickled by the scene, the scotch turning laughter into giggles.
But they do not continue on.
Thomas brakes and swerves to avoid the girl. Linda screams as a telephone pole and a tree fill the windshield. Thomas jerks the wheel, the car skids across the narrow road, and a rear tire catches in a ditch.
It happens that fast.
In the seconds they are airborne — in these, the last seconds of Linda’s life — she sees not the past, the life that supposedly flashes before one’s eyes, but the future: not the life she has lived, but the life she might have had.
A cottage in a field of chrysanthemums in a country far away.
A small boy she holds on her lap whose scalp is patchy with disease.
A white room with lovely windows, a drafting table at its center.
A child named Marcus who is more fragile than his sister.
A spray of oranges on a kitchen floor.
A hotel room with a mirror, her aging face.
A plane rising from the clouds.
A party to celebrate a book.
A beach house with a man — long and elegant and beautiful — sitting on the porch.
The Skylark somersaults into the January afternoon and tumbles down an embankment. The windows shatter inward. Linda reaches a hand to Thomas and says his name.
Thomas. Her beloved Thomas. Who will go on to write a series of poems called Magdalene about a girl who died in a car crash when she was only seventeen. And who will one day win a prize, and then will lose his daughter and, shortly before four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in Toronto, will take his own life — the weight of his losses finally too much to bear.
But not before he has known the unforgiving light of the equator, a love that exists only in his imagination, and the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.