“Take all the time you need—”
“I want to see him,” Kris said, cutting him off.
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t want to think about it. I just want to do it.”
Howard nodded. “Right. Of course.”
The rubber soles of Howard’s bright white Nike sneakers squeaked on the equally pristine tile floor as he crossed to the gurney. He grasped the top of the plastic sheet with both hands. Kris could see the hairs on his knuckles blowing like cattails in an invisible breeze from the overhead AC vent. Nearby, an exhaust van whirred as it sucked the air from the room and into what must have been the brightening purple sky of approaching dawn.
But Kris had no way of knowing anything about the outside world, about anything outside of that cold, sterile room.
Howard pulled back the sheet. He took a wide step to the side and clasped his hands in front of him.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he said.
Kris’s mind tried to stop her. Wait—
But she was already moving, her legs propelling her forward before her brain could override them. Her hip bumped the edge of the gurney. She was there.
At first her mind could not make sense of the shape before her. There were no familiar landmarks to convince her that what she was seeing was a face. Where the cheekbones normally would have protruded, there was a deep valley that ran horizontally over the tip of what should have been his nose. Something had smashed it all in.
The steering wheel.
“The airbag never deployed,” Howard said, as if reading her mind. “Could probably sue the automobile company, you know, if you …” He let his words drift off, perhaps realizing that it was not the time to speak of litigation.
Below the mashed, indented thing that had once been his nose, Jonah’s lips were closed, and yet Kris could see the top row of his teeth. Her brain stuttered, bare wires crossing, the contradictory images causing a split-second glitch in the system.
And then she realized what she was seeing: the impact had folded Jonah’s top teeth up so that they pointed straight out from his face, and the edges of his incisors had been forced through the skin above his upper lip. He looked as though he were eating his own mouth.
Dark, thick blood traced a line between the side of his face and the surface of the metal gurney. Kris followed this like the red line of a river on a state map—up past a chewed piece of flesh that could be pieced together, with some imagination, to resemble an ear—to the source of the blood: a wet, matted clump of long, brown hair just above his temple.
There were diamonds in his hair, nestled like stones in seaweed. They glistened in the fluorescent light.
No, not diamonds, she knew. Glass.
Shattered pebbles of tempered glass, embedded in his scalp.
The entire right side of his head was completely flat, like a cartoon character hit with a frying pan. The once-sturdy skull was nothing but a patch of bloody sludge. She could press her fingers into that red mud if she wanted to, digging her fingertips all the way into the spongy gray center of his brain.
Jonah had been starting to show his age—his toned body beginning to sag in places, his face puffy from drinking, silver peppering his brown stubble whenever he put off shaving for a week—but she had always been able to look at him and see the man she had fallen in love with all those years ago.
Had loved, Kris thought.
Still loved, another voice insisted. This was hopeful Kris. Naïve Kris.
Hated, a third Kris chimed in. The voice echoed up from the blackest depths of her mind.
She looked down at the swollen, battered face of her dead husband, one eye bashed to a deep purple, sealed shut like a heavyweight boxer in the twelfth round, the other open, staring upward at some profound knowledge revealed only to the dying. Was it love that kept her from instantly glancing away in disgust? Or had her heart flipped a switch to survival mode, the same sensation one feels when slowing down to gawk at a terrible accident on the highway, that sense of morbid relief that washes over as one realizes, Not my time. Not yet. Not yet.
With clenched teeth, Kris leaned closer to Jonah’s tortured corpse. Her right hand began to tremble, and she quickly clamped her left hand around her wrist to steady it, but the sensation was loose, working its way up her arm and across her shoulders. Her entire body shook, each breath a series of sharp, staccato thumps, like a car driving over a bad stretch of road. She forced her lips within inches of that torn, dangling flap of shredded flesh that had been Jonah’s ear.
“You asshole,” she whispered as fresh tears slipped down her cheeks. “You dumb, selfish son of a bitch. I’ll never forgive you for this. Never.”
The sound of an explosion, like a shotgun blast, thrust Kris brutally back into the present.
The Jeep was veering sharply to the left, into the other lane.
Sadie was instantly awake, crying out in desperate confusion, not with words—she hadn’t spoken more than a handful since her daddy died—but with an animalistic howl. The fear in that sound sent a sheet of ice grazing across Kris’s skin.
Instinctively, Kris clamped both hands down on the steering wheel, the toe of her right boot mashing the brake pedal.
The back of the Jeep began to skid.
Sadie’s high-pitched screams mixed with another shriek that, for a second, Kris could not place.
Tires. The shriek of rubber tires trying to grip the asphalt.
She jerked the wheel to the right. The Jeep reentered her lane, but Kris realized immediately that she had overcorrected. The car careened across the lane at a dangerously sharp angle. Beyond the dirt shoulder was a barbed-wire fence marking the border of someone’s farmland.
She was instantly aware of two things—the pale orb of the moon reflected in the glass of the windshield, and the sensation that the Jeep was leaning to the left, that half of the vehicle was struggling to keep up, an animal with a lame leg.
“Hold on!” she heard herself yell back to her daughter. Kris turned the wheel to the left, just enough to keep the car from leaving the shoulder and entering the shallow ravine that cut through the weeds beside the fence. At the same time, she let off of the brake, waiting until the Jeep was under control before returning her foot to the pedal.
Brake. Release. Brake. Release. Brake.
They were slowing.
Now there was a new sound, the unmistakable thwump-thwump-thwump of a flat tire trudging over the dry ground.
Kris pressed her boot down hard onto the pedal and the Jeep skidded to a stop. Dust billowed around them. She watched as it wafted into the headlight beams, twin souls escaping into the night.
She glanced over her shoulder at her daughter. Sadie’s eyes were wide in frozen panic. But she was quiet. She did not cry.
She’s trying to be strong. For you.
“It’s just a flat tire. Everything’s okay,” Kris assured her “There’s a spare in the back. I’ll change the tire. It’s fine, Sadie. We’re fine. I promise.”
Kris reached for the door handle. She felt something tug on the back of her shirt.
Sadie was leaning forward in her seat, an arm stretched out to stop her mother.
“It’s okay. It won’t take long. I’ll be right outside.”
Sadie’s fingers loosened, just enough for Kris to pull the fabric of the shirt from her grasp.
Kris opened the door and stepped out.