Chapter 5-Garrett

~*Chapter 5-Garrett*~



I drove the red Mustang down the road in search of a car wash. It was amazing, how far America had come in the last couple of centuries. To think that the road I was driving on was once land – with soil and grass and rocks.  The thought was incredible.

I could have been driving over a long lost battlefield from the American Revolution. A wagon caravan could have crossed over this stretch of land on their way to settle in the west. A traveling carnival might have set up on this stretch of land in the very beginnings of the twentieth century. And now, it was paved with asphalt. It was as if none of this land’s rich history had happened at all.

Of course, I held more pieces of history close to my heart than most – and that could very well be the understatement of the century.

There was just something special about walking through a field and knowing that the boots of Union soldiers had tromped through the grass, right where you stood. There was a certain magical quality about standing at the harbor in Manhattan and knowing that the RMS Titanic should have come into port there. Feelings like that couldn’t be bought or sold or built upon. So they faded away as history moved out of the past and into the future, completely bypassing the present.

Maybe I was too attached to history. I guess that could be true. Maybe I needed to move on with the rest of society. But, by the same token, I couldn’t afford to forget.

An ear-splitting siren brought me out if my own thoughts as I pulled over to let an ambulance and two cop cars speed past me. An accident. Not two minutes later, I got off the road again for a fire truck. Oh no. I thought. They need the Jaws of Life.

The further I got down the road, the slower the going was. As I rounded a blind corner in the road, I saw a long line of blazing break lights. At the front of the traffic jam stood a cop with an orange vest, trying to direct the traffic around the mangled heap off to the side of the road.

The people in the car in front of me were straining and twisting around trying to get a good look at the accident. I didn’t need to; I could see more than enough.

There was a Toyota Camry and a Ford Expedition. The Camry was about half the size of a normal Camry, though. Frankly, I wouldn’t have even known it was a Camry, except for the fact that I could catch a tiny glimpse of the letters “C,” “M,” “R,” and “Y” on the back of the car, near the Toyota emblem. It looked like it had been through a trash compactor. A plume of smoke was rising up from the wreckage. The entire front half of the car was basically gone, or shoved into the back half. It didn’t even look remotely like a car.

There was not a doubt in my mind that the driver had been killed.

Sure enough, as the firemen got the Jaws of Life working and managed to get to the inside of the car, they extracted a corpse. She was so covered in blood that I couldn’t even figure out the color of her shirt. The girl was small for her age – which I guessed to be about a year or two younger than me – and she had blonde hair that would have been pretty, had it not been matted with her blood.

The longer I looked at her, the more I could feel my mind whizzing. I recognized her. She was almost as beat up as her car, but I still couldn’t shake that thought that I’d seen her before. They laid her down on a gurney, face up, and, the second I saw her ravaged face, I knew where I’d seen her.

She was in line behind me at the coffee shop just that morning. When I had stepped out of line, I had apologized, and she had smiled and blushed.

I had no idea why, since I had been confronted with death for years, but seeing her being strapped down and wheeled into an ambulance was kind of disturbing to watch. I knew that she didn’t have a chance of leaving the hospital again, and, for some reason, that bothered me. I didn’t even know the first thing about her, but after having seen her just a short while ago, it just felt wrong to see her dead.

Once they had closed the ambulance doors, I scanned the Expedition. It had a substantial dent in its front left bumper, but it was otherwise fine. The family who had been inside was standing outside of it, talking to a cop. I cracked my window a bit so I could hear. The father was telling how the Camry had been swerving a bit, and once, it swerved too much and came over into the opposing lane of traffic, where the Expedition had been travelling. She had been going so fast that she hit the front of the truck and flipped, end over end, a couple times before slamming to a stop with the help of a telephone pole.

Not really wanting to hear more, I rolled up my window and clenched my eyes shut.

Life was cruel. Of course, the girl had been at fault – she had been speeding, and she probably had been distracted – but it didn’t change the fact that she died. The way life worked was cruel. Everyone starts off driving as a headstrong teenager who couldn’t care less for authority. They get behind the wheel of a car and do things that their adult counterparts wouldn’t dream of. It isn’t until they get older that they mellow out and start acting like responsible citizens. The whole process should be reversed. That way, those who are older and have had a chance to live their life would also have a higher chance of being killed on the road. It was sort of like a trade; too many young men and women died before their time.

That girl probably had a mother and a father. She might have had a boyfriend. Siblings. Pets. Friends. She was leaving a lot behind. I truly hoped that it was worth it. Wherever she was now, I hoped she could look back and see the shrapnel she created when she ran into that Expedition.

The family in the SUV wouldn’t be the same either. They’d always remember this. They’d always bear the guilt of her life on their shoulders. Even though it wasn’t their fault. She put that survivor’s guilt there, and nothing could take it away.

Boy, did I know survivor’s guilt. It would never leave them. It would haunt them until the day they died. No matter the circumstances, a life was a life. Anyone involved in the death of another human being would have to carry the burden as well. That was just the way it worked.

And to think that I was one of the last human faces that this girl saw.

Great. Now I’ve got survivor’s guilt too. Not as severe a case as the driver of the Expedition would have, but that old, familiar feeling was back again, plus some.

Apparently, the cop in the orange vest had gotten the traffic moving, because now, we were creeping along, moving past the smoldering remains of the girl’s Camry, one by one. Some cars moved more slowly past it, trying to take in the mess on the side of the road and make sense of it all. Others drove by as quickly as possible, doing everything they could to get past the hideous image and move on with their lives. As I made my way past, I nodded a silent farewell to the girl from the coffee shop.

~*~

I knew I couldn’t let it bother me. I’d seen so many others die that it shouldn’t bother me. So I shrugged off the image of the girl and her Camry as I drove on. It had taken me a second to remember that I had been on a search for a car wash, but once I had regained my objective, it became a bit easier to push the car accident into the back of my mind, along with all the rest of the deaths I’d seen.

In the back vault of my mind, this girl’s death was just one of hundreds – if not thousands. Virtually inconsequential. But still, every single one of the corpses in my memory had a face, a name, and a story. Including her. And it hadn’t been easy to watch any of them die. Death had never been a pleasant experience for me.

Finally, I found a gas station with a car wash that was reasonably priced and open. Mission accomplished. Life was good.