A week before my thirty-first birthday, I drove my daughter, Emilia, to her dad’s. She had pink-eye and a sinus infection, her fourth round of sickness that spring. After being home with her for two days, missing work, I told her dad he needed to take her for the rest of the week. I couldn’t afford to miss out on the income, especially after hearing the anxiousness in my usually patient boss’s voice. I’d been up with Emilia for the last couple of nights. We slept together in a twin bed in our small, studio apartment. She thrashed more in her fever than I could successfully sleep through. I drove down Highway 20, just outside Mount Vernon, Washington, with Emilia strapped in her car seat behind me. She had her window rolled down a bit. She wanted her doll’s hair—an Ariel doll from “The Little Mermaid,” whose tail changed from purple to blue when you put it in the warm water—to blow in the wind.
Emilia started crying, and I looked in the rear-view mirror. “My Ariel,” she said. It had gone out the window. In my sleep-deprived state, I drifted into the left turning lane at the next stoplight, and did a u-turn. I drove back to where I figured the doll might lay, pulled over on the left side of the four-lane, divided highway’s shoulder, and parked, putting on my emergency flashers. A grassy valley separated the divided traffic, and I opened the door of our beloved 1987 maroon “Suba-Ruby.” A prized possession for me, with just over 100,000 miles on it, in mint condition, bought only four months ago. Emilia lovingly called the car “Ruby” in conversation; people asked if she had a little sister.
I stepped out into the unseasonable warmth of that September in a tee-shirt and a pony-tail. The wind from the cars speeding by at 60 miles per hour almost felt hot when I scoured the grass. I spotted numerous soda bottles full of piss, candy wrappers, and empty beer cans. Then, I saw a wisp of red hair. Ariel’s head. Shit, I thought. Now I had to deal with my kid’s heartbreak over a decapitated doll. I spied Ariel’s mermaid bottom a few feet away, and I could already see its flattened shape. A plastic tail fanned into two sections.
As I reached down to pick it up, I heard a sudden and immediate sound of metal crunching and glass exploding all at once. A young man driving a tiny, Honda Civic hatchback looked down, drifted over, and hit the right corner or Ruby’s bumper, only two feet away from where Emilia sat, patiently waiting for her mom to retrieve her toy.
I’m only able to recollect this in slow motion. The way I turned to look at my car, how I dropped Ariel’s head, screamed, and ran. I opened the left door across from Emilia to find her crying, reaching out for me. The floor underneath her had folded to the same level as her feet. I unbuckled her and held her in that grassy ditch while cars slowed and even stopped to check if we were okay.
The young man who hit us came over. He’d spun to a stop a hundred feet away. His nose bled, and he had a few gashes in his spikey, blonde hair. “Are you okay?” he asked at first, then said, “Holy shit, was she in the car?”
“Of course she was in the car, you fucking idiot!” I screamed. “How could you hit my fucking car?!”
He backed away. The paramedics later carried him off on a stretcher. They also ushered us to the ambulance to check Emilia, and found nothing. Not even a scrape. Her only injury resulted from a piece of glass that fell from my cleaning supplies for work that I carried into our apartment later that evening.
My mom started calling then. I watched my phone light up, showing her international number, every five minutes or so. It’d been a year since we’d talked, but her frantic calling comforted me, enough that I eventually gave in, and answered. Even my voice sounded far away, and we echoed over the line. The distance made it hard for me to complete a sentence. After a few minutes, I grew annoyed with the bad connection. I could hear her sniffling, but said goodbye.
She kept up with her frequent calls for the next week or so, but I didn’t answer. I wanted to ask her if she felt this when I had my first car accident. If the fear of losing me kept her up that first night when she sat next to my hospital bed, or if she couldn’t take her eyes off me. I somehow needed to know why she never brushed the hair off my forehead, leaning in close when I woke up, to give me reassurance of her presence and that she loved me so, so much.
But not enough to actually ask. I knew she’d lie, tell me she did, and that my memory must be foggy. I do remember the nurses in the hospital room I lived in for three days, who gently reached up to touch my forehead, asking me if I felt okay. My mom sat in her chair, legs and arms crossed, and asked when they thought I could finally go home. But she was there. Maybe that’s all she ever felt she needed to be.
“Ruby died because I lost Ariel out the window,” Emilia said from her bath. “She died, Mom.” The new Ariel I’d bought sank to the bottom of the tub, and rubbed against the porcelain. “Mom,” she said, “you cried so hard. You were scared. But I was okay. We’re okay.” I poured water over her head. The faucet dripped into her bubbles.
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