An Accidental Memoir. How I Killed Someone and Other Stories

177 Pages·2013·0.85 MB·English

by  Wendy Reed

An Accidental Memoir
How I Killed Someone and Other Essays and Stories
Wendy Reed
NewSouth Books
Montgomery
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright 2013 by Wendy Reed. All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

ISBN: 978-1-58838-285-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306198-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012031520

Visit www.newsouthbooks.com
In Memory of Deidre
Contents

Prologue

Part I: Aftermath
Essays
Gnawing Through the Mask
Wearing Macramé
Driving Danny’s Ferrari
Beat Ten
Yard Work
Fig Preserves
A Hardwood with a View
Mother’s Day
Breaking Light
Stories
Harold Washburn
Sweet Sweet Tea
Aubade
Part II: Memoir of a Wrongful Death
How I Killed Someone

Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue

Reed and I were headed south to the dentist’s office on the interstate. It was his
first appointment ever and he was excited about being a “big boy.” We weren’t
late. We had time to spare. I put my windshield wipers on intermittent then
checked and merged into the right lane.
That’s when the back of our Montero veered left and I turned into the
direction of the swerve. For a second we were floating. Then everything went
sideways. There was a whirring sound somewhere. And then we were moving
faster.
It’s odd to realize your car is out of control. Even though the median was
across four lanes, on the other side of the freeway, I was suddenly there, in it.
Mud was flying everywhere; my car was moving, but I couldn’t be sure if it was
in circles or what.
Then things slowed.
I remember thinking I can’t believe I’ve gone across the freeway in morning
traffic and not been hit. I remember thinking that I would have to tell my
husband about the mud—he would not be happy. I’d get it washed before he saw
it.
I reached back to touch Reed in his car seat when I heard a sound like
something exploding. Motion began again. We were spinning. I tried to see
where but I couldn’t find anything to focus on. Then we were still again.
Maybe I tried to think. I do not remember unbuckling or getting out of my
car. No one saw me get out of the car, so it is possible that I climbed over the
seat to get to my son, but it seems I would remember doing such an unusual
thing.
I saw the red lever to unbuckle his car seat. My eyes scanned him from head
to toe and over and over I said, “You’re all right. It’s all right. We’re all right.”
Reed wasn’t crying but something in my manner or my words must have scared
him because before he was out of the car seat, he started. Someone, a man or a
woman, asked if we were okay. I think I said yes. It was several yards from the
median to the shoulder but I don’t remember walking there.
Cars were lined up as far as I could see. I knew those people would be late
for work all because of me. I’m sorry, I thought. I was so very sorry. That’s when
I saw my Montero. The frame was broken in half, the passenger side caved
completely in. No glass was left in the windows and a tire lay several feet away.
I must have hit something. Another car. Somebody else’s car. And then I saw the
other car. The somebody’s car.
“Are they okay?” I asked, and I know I said it out loud because a nice lady
with blonde hair looked at me.
“They’re just having a hard time getting her out,” a voice behind me
explained. Someone was stroking my hair.
“Ma’am, which hospital do you want to be taken to?” A paramedic waited for
my answer.
By reflex, I guess, I’d managed to run down the checklist I used to teach
CPR. I mentally ran it again. Reed was crying; I heard him. If he was crying,
then he was breathing. If he was breathing, then he was fine. “We’re fine, just
fine, thanks. See. Look. We’re fine.”
The air hung thick with humidity. But I could see through it. Lights. Red.
Flashing. The lights of emergency vehicles, fire trucks, an ambulance. I could
see them loading a bundle of white sheets onto a stretcher. A her, they had said.
The bundle was a her.
I wonder what her brain recorded, if she saw the Montero enter the median, if
she saw it shoot into her lane facing the wrong direction, if, when she was thirty-
five, thirty, twenty-five, twenty, fifteen feet away and still coming at us, she saw
Reed’s eyes—closed or maybe open wide—if she thought anything at all as her
Camry smashed head on into us below the passenger side mirror behind the right
front tire, if she registered the binding of the seat belt as it held her, if she saw
the spray of shattered windshield—or if by that time her brain was no longer
recording sensations.
To live through a wreck is to wish you had a stop button—and not just for the
cascading memories. Even a pause button would have given me some relief.
I was not working then and had not worked full-time since getting married at
seventeen. Teachers at my high school thought I must be pregnant. I wasn’t.
However by the next Mother’s Day—and in spite of having been diagnosed with
uterine polyps when I was 11—according to three EPT sticks I was. I was also
pulling an “A” in Psych 101, so it looked as though I might make it in pre-med
after all. Spring is the season famous for fertility and apparently I was fertile,
too.
I was nineteen and a half and had a 4.0 when Brittany was born. I was not a
statistic, just a mother who happened to be a teenager.
For her first birthday I told her she was getting a sister.
Life came easy.
I didn’t consider pregnancy the ultimate act of creation that culminated in a
tiny work of art, but I worked at it as obsessively as any artist does. I measured
every morsel that went into my mouth; I became a walking vitamin and talking
encyclopedia; I documented every pound, stretch mark, and perinatal aerobics
class. I even I finished out the season with my softball team—“Just don’t slide,”
my OB/GYN said. I documented the first time my daughter and I stole a base
together—second base in the first inning and we scored. At that time, I thought
all artists alien, impractical, neurotic, hoity-toity. Yet there I was, a Mommy-
artist-cum-athlete.
In 1992, during Monday night football, my son was born. The next day my
husband gave me a diamond ring.
We’d been divorced several years by the time I stood with my children before
Michelangelo’s Pietà staring at Mary’s youthful face. The intricate details of
love are carved hard and sorrowful as she holds the dead body of her son. I
marveled that life and death and love and sacrifice could appear out of a single
block of marble. My son wasn’t marveling. He was antsy. “There’s too much art
here,” he said. I snapped a photograph with my disposable camera then bought
us all gelato.
The wreck had happened in May 1996, when I was three months shy of
thirty. I felt old because I was the oldest student entering graduate school, at least
of the ones getting a degree in English.
“Mommy has homework,” I told Brittany and Brianne, then 10 and 8.
“Other mothers don’t,” they said.
I had not meant to go back to school any more than I’d meant to become a
stay-at-home mom with a BS in education. I’d spent so much time reading
children’s books that I thought I’d try my hand at writing one. I wound up in a
fiction-writing class instead. It had wrapped up right before the wreck. My plan
was to enjoy the break between terms before starting the Bibliography and
Research Methods class in June. In May spring isn’t over but it felt like summer
had already begun.
This is not a story about seasons, though.
Seasons have a beginning and an end, a date—certainty.
Life’s not so sure.
Science says beginning isn’t instinctual for us; we have to learn and then
remember “left” before we can go “right”—reflection and direction. Memory
also functions selectively. When the neural wiring seems faulty, and a past event
comes in cloudy to us, we can focus on obscure details of an object’s shape or
coloring.
It’s possible this story begins when my vehicle stopped spinning.
Her Camry was blue.
Or when I pressed the car seat lever.
The lever was square.
Or in between, at some point, I don’t remember. Where are the other shapes
and colors I need for telling?
Here, according to science, are two non-colors:
She was black. I am white.
Endings are no easier. Signs help: merge, exit, stop, flatline.
Our living, though, is done in the middle as we move along. Looking back is
how we judge distance between there and here, in spite of the consequences. In
the Old Testament, God forbade Lot and his wife to look back. She did anyway.
Was it the turning that changed her or was she transformed by what she saw? Or
both?
I require corrective lenses. Without them, images fall short of my retina’s
sweet spot. How the brain differentiates between our eyes and our mind’s eye
comes down to interpretation. Experiments show that ambition, anxiety,
righteous indignation, sexual arousal, and jealous rage can be triggered by
images of what isn’t there. So maybe imagination has the greatest power in our
consciousness. Imagination drives emotion.
I tell stories using pictures at a rate of 29.97 frames per second. As a
producer/director for public TV programs, I also ride my crew’s ass, powder the
talent’s nose, write voice over, camp out in archives, beg, borrow, wheedle,
cajole, and believe passionately in what I do. To supplement my income, I teach
scriptwriting.
Not once, though, have I narrated.
In digital storytelling, cuts and dissolves show the passage of time,
transitioning from one scene to another, regardless of chronology. If I sat in an
edit suite and dissolved my way from the wreck to now, transitioning as if by
magic, I could choose images I want you to see, leave out ones I don’t. If things
got troublesome, I could fade to black.
Before I learned how to edit, I skipped over certain parts when I told the
story of the wreck.
Even when I told it to myself.
Killing someone violates one of the strongest prohibitions of civilized
society. Even in the name of patriotism, the aftermath of killing can be
unpredictable. A veteran’s risky behavior is only one of the haunting effects.
At the time of the wreck, I was a model of selfless compassion. From my