Page 87 of All That We Never Were

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Leah

It was a sunny day, despite the presence of a few tangled clouds. I know because, as we drove down the highway to Brisbane, I kept my forehead pressed into the window in the back seat, thinking about how beautiful the cobalt blue of the sky was. I tried to imagine what paints I would use to recreate it, what the exact tones would be…

“How are your nerves, dear?” my mother asked.

“Good.” I brought my hands to my neck and remembered I had left my headphones at home. Then I slid my fingers down my seat belt. “Dad, can you skip this one?”

He did, and “Octopus’s Garden” started to play.

We were on our way to the gallery belonging to a friend of my parents who had come to our house two weeks before and had taken an interest in one of my paintings that was hanging in the living room. He had said they were thinking about setting up a small exhibition of young talent free of charge, and said we could go to Brisbane and meet with him and his partners to see if any of my work clicked for them.

“We can have lunch when we’re done. I know a place near the gallery that makes the best scrambled eggs you can imagine, with everything: mushrooms, shrimp, bacon, asparagus…”

Dad started laughing when Mom said, “Yeah, I get it, everything.”

I asked him to skip to the next song.

Here comes the sun. Here comes the sun.

“I love this song.” I sang along, excited.

“Good taste. It’s in the genes,” Dad responded.

I smiled when he looked at me in the rearview mirror and winked. And a second later––just a second––the entire world froze and stopped spinning for me. The song cut off suddenly and the deafening sound of the car’s frame tearing apart bored into my ears. It turned over and over, and with a scream caught in my throat that never made it out, I managed to glimpse a green stretch that told me we’d run off the road. Then…just silence. Then…a huge abyss.

My entire body hurt, and I had a busted lip and the metallic taste of blood in my mouth. I couldn’t move. I swallowed. It was like I had a stone in my throat. I couldn’t see my mother, but I could see Dad’s bloody face, the cut on his head…

“Dad…” I whispered, but no one responded.

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Axel

That week, i left her with her pain, licking her wounds.

Leah was hushed. She would go to school in the morning, and I would stay there leaning on the porch railing, watching her ride off until she disappeared at the end of the road. Then I’d have my second coffee, work, and count the minutes until her return. We ate without saying much, her slightly absent, me focusing on her every gesture.

The problem with Leah was that I didn’t need to talk to see more and more of her every day, to see how she was putting herself back together, picking the pieces up off the ground, storing them in her pockets, struggling to put them together again. I would have helped her if she had asked me, but I knew that sometimes there are roads you have to go down alone.

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Leah

It was liberating. and hard. And painful.

It was going back to that moment, remembering it, confronting it, no longer letting myself see it as something unreal, something alien, accepting that it had happened. To me. To us. That one day a woman fell asleep behind the wheel after leaving her twelve-hour shift at the hospital and ran into our car and knocked it off the road. And my parents died when it happened. And they would never come back. That was the reality. That was my life now.

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