“Oh, darlin’,” he says, and then I think he might be crying too. “I’m sorry. I’ll love you no matter where on this earth you are. I want you to be free to be what you are, to go where you want. I don’t want you chained to me.”
He isn’t John Torpey, frightened of having a wife who was wilder than he was, punishing her for it and living a life of regret. No, Niall is a different kind of man. He reaches to kiss my hand, to press it to his face as though gripping at life itself, or something more ardent, and he says, my husband, changing my life, “There’s a difference between wandering and leaving. In truth, you’ve never once left me.”
A gust of air beneath my unfurling wings and I am up, weightless, soaring. I could never love anyone more. And in the same moment comes a terrible awareness. He’s opened the cage door I closed on myself and now I’ll fly, I’ll have to. I see it all laid out before us, how I will wander away again and again, and I won’t want to have more children because of it, and no matter what he says, no matter how generous he is, it will ruin us both a little more each time.
“Franny, I think you should pull over.”
A snowy white owl flies low over the road, swooping up past the windscreen and into the black night, its plumage moonlit and portentous. I watch it, stunned, frozen. They are extinct, owls. But there one is. Maybe this means there are more hidden away, and maybe there are more of everything and the world is still breathing. My broken heart swells with it, flies away with it, seeks shelter within the night, and then it is gone in a flash of light, a sounding of noise and I see myself instead, myself naked and loathsome and for a split second I want nothing but to destroy myself and so that’s what I do—
“Fran—”
Impact.
* * *
There are few things more violent than two cars colliding at high speed. Metal screams and glass sprays and rubber smokes. Within it what chance does a human body have? We are liquid and tissue. As fragile a thing as there is. It’s like how people describe it, and not. It’s slow, and not. The moment stretches out and it doesn’t. I have a thought, both simple and complex. In its simplest form: I have killed us. In its most complex it becomes the days I will never have, the children I will never kiss. It lives deep, this thought. It is all of me and somewhere inside it, inside this infinite intimacy, is Niall Lynch.
* * *
I wake slowly. Or maybe fast. We are upright, but slanted. I don’t feel any pain, and then I do. In my shoulder and my mouth. Then my chest.
“—ny, wake up. Franny. Franny. Wake up.”
I open my eyes and for one second I am blinded by the brightness and then in the next second I’m blinded by the blackness. A sound comes from my mouth, something shocked.
“Good girl, you’re all right.”
I blink until I can see Niall beside me, still in his seat, still holding my hand. “Fuck,” I say.
“I know.”
We’re in a paddock. There’s a tree growing out of our car. Its trunk and boughs are skeletal for winter, silver in the night. The headlights carve two hollows out of the darkness; I can see moths flickering toward the source, atop a surface of white snow as unmarked as a pane of glass.
I struggle with my seat belt—learning the source of the pain in my chest—then remember to click out of it.
“Do you have any injuries?” Niall asks. “Check your body.”
I pat myself down and can’t feel anything bad. I’ve bitten my tongue. A shard of window is in my shoulder. And the bruises across my breasts. But otherwise … “I think I’m okay. Do you have any?”
“My foot’s a fuckin’ mess but that’s it,” Niall says. “We have to get to the other car.”
Oh god. I crane my neck and see it on the road, upside down. “Shit. Oh, fucking shitting hell.” My door opens with a creak but Niall isn’t following me.
“I’m fine,” he assures me, “I just can’t get my foot out. Go see if they’re all right, I’ll work on this. Do you have your phone?”
I search until I find my purse and then drag it free. “Dead.”
“Mine has no reception. Get to the other car.”
I meet his eyes.
“Easy,” he says. “Just breathe. Whatever you find.”
I pull myself out of the car. It’s freezing outside. My feet sink eight inches into snow and instantly go numb but I’m hauling myself back onto the road.
The car’s wheel is still spinning in the air. How much time has passed? Maybe whoever is inside is still … I can’t move, abruptly. Because I am unimaginably frightened of what I will find. Death, but worse than death, the absence of life within flesh. I cannot move.
“Franny,” my husband calls.
I don’t turn to him. I stare at the slowly spinning wheel.
“It’s only a body,” he says.
But doesn’t he know? That’s the problem.
“What if they’re alive?”
Of course. I am moving; the words don’t even reach my brain before they reach my body, propelling me to the car. I lie flat on the freezing road so I can see the driver. She’s alone in the car. A woman, my age maybe. Short black hair, shaved short.
“She’s not … awake,” I yell. “I can’t tell … Oh, fucking hell…”
“Try to wake her up!”
I shake her gently. “Hey, wake up. You need to wake up.”
She doesn’t wake. Damn it damn it damn it … My fingers are shaking as I reach—I truly, deeply do not want to touch her body, Jesus, just fucking do it—and feel for a pulse. It takes a moment, a much-too-long moment, and I’m convinced she’s gone and I will be touching a rotting thing, a corpse thing, and then at last I feel the softest, flickering beat, like the dart of the moths’ wings I saw in the headlights. I imagine the same thing flickering within her, that abrupt defiant hazardous force of life, fainter than it’s ever been and yet here, urging. It centers me and I climb in to reach for her seat belt. I can’t get it free, I wrench at the thing and—
She wakes.
A muffled whimper. Then a mighty wail, a cataclysmic thing.
“Quiet,” I say instinctively, some strange otherworldly creature, and she falls quiet. “You’re alive.”
A soft, slow moan leaves her and she starts to cry, to panic.
“You’re alive,” I say again, “and you’re upside down in your car, and I’m going to get you out.”
The pervasive fog of fear evaporates within me. I hold fast to the facts that will keep us together, the three of us, and these are the facts that I know: she is alive and I’m going to get her out.
“Help,” she whispers. “I have to get out. I have to get out.”
“I’m getting you out,” I tell her and I have never been more certain of anything. I crawl out and run to the other side of the car, climb in feetfirst so that I can smash my foot against the seat belt buckle. The shoes are useless, heels, for the goddamn first time in my life. I crawl out and fling them off, fling them with all the rage I can afford and then there’s calm again, certainty, as I crawl back in and smash my bare foot against the plastic and it hurts, it hurts so much, I can feel the blood in a warm flow over my foot and ankle, but I kick it again and again until I feel the plastic give way, letting the woman free. She falls on her head and I twist around until I can slip a hand beneath her skull. What good it will do I don’t know.