John Sheirer

John Sheirer

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Approaching forty, Dave Alastair decided it was time to change. He was ready to find a real relationship after years of short but intense flings that always started randomly and ended badly. He was ready to start taking care of his body instead of drinking away his evenings and limiting his exercise routine to weekend softball games. He was ready to try to understand the world around him after following whatever politician wielded the best insults. He was ready to stop blaming his own lack of advancement at work on the people who earned the promotions he thought he deserved.

The night before, Dave decided he was ready to make the effort he had assumed other people were making. He just hadn’t been able to commit himself—until now.

Unfortunately, Dave found himself running late for this morning’ s projectmanagement training session that he decided was the first step toward those life changes he was certain he was ready to make. That’s why he took the curving exit ramp leaving Interstate 40 close to twice the posted speed limit. He was annoyed with himself for slightly oversleeping and delaying his new program of self-improvement, and his irritation weighted his heavy foot on the gas pedal. So it was almost a miracle that he was able to stomp on the brake and stop just a dozen yards short of the minivan lying upside-down halfway along the ramp, its front wheel still spinning.

His seatbelt dug into his chest through his suit jacket, shirt, and tie as the car skidded sideways, tires screaming on the pavement. Random papers, fastfood breakfast wrappers, coins, and other trivial objects flew forward from all parts of the car, including something heavy and hard that he couldn’t identify as it struck behind his right ear, pinging his brain like a random text message. His cell phone impacted the windshield and landed face-down on the passenger-side floor. Dave could tell without looking that the phone’s face had shattered. Singed rubber burned his nostrils.

Then he saw her. The woman crawled out from the overturned driver’ s side of the van, her dark hair in disarray and half her shirttail pulled from her jeans. She stood on wobbly legs, staggered forward for thirty feet, and knelt on the pavement.

A solid six, Dave thought. And then he mentally slapped himself. Rating women by their appearance was another character trait he knew he should change.

Dave took his seatbelt off and opened his door almost before he realized he was moving. He ran toward the woman and skidded on his smooth dress shoes like she was home plate and he was trying to beat a strong throw from the outfield.

“Are you okay?” he shouted as he slid beside her, nearly horizontal.

“Jesus!” the woman shouted back, startled by Dave’s sudden appearance.

Dave saw fear in her dark eyes.

“Back seat,” the woman said between coughs as she waved an arm toward the van. “In the back seat!”

Dave rose and ran again, reaching the van with five long strides. He bent to look in the back seat, but the glare made the window opaque. He dropped to his knees and leaned up against the window with his hands alongside his face, making a dark tunnel. The first thing he saw was the shattered window on the other side. Then he saw the upside-down armrests of the back seat. Then he saw a neatly closed umbrella lying on the inverted roof.

And then he saw a child’s booster seat, empty and unmoored, overturned near the broken window, the straps dangling free.

He swiveled toward the woman and shouted, “Where’s your baby?”

“What?” she called back as she tried to stand.

Dave rose and sprinted toward her. “Your baby!” he screamed. “Where’ s your ba— ”

Before he could finish the word, the toe of his dress shoe caught on a deep crack in the pavement. He found himself suddenly airborne, lurching forward, arms outreached like wings, feeling an instant sense of weightlessness, as if he could glide like that forever. That illusion slipped away as time kept its inevitable pace and gravity tightened its unbreakable grip.

His right knee landed first, and he could feel his fancy slacks ripping, hundreds of dollars’ worth of cloth disintegrating as the jagged pavement clawed the fabric. But he could barely feel the skin pulling from his kneecap, more like a caress than an act of violence. Then his left knee slammed into the pavement and, this time, he sensed his skin tearing along with the expensive textile. No gentle caress now, this was an asphalt rasp down to the bone.

His right hand and left elbow hit simultaneously, the thick hide of his palm fusing with the tarred black surface. The delicate skin covering his elbow disappeared as the bone impacted in a fireball of pain. Then his chest, stomach, and hipbones landed in succession, rocking and bouncing in slow motion like a water balloon that somehow wouldn’t burst. His face hit last, pulling only thin layers of flesh from his nose, chin, and forehead. But his right cheek, always his best side for selfies, tore away to the molars.

When his dive finally ended, Dave rolled onto his back, the morning sky going in and out of focus high above him. Did the scattered dark clouds foreshadow rain? Or was seeping blood clouding his vision?

The woman lurched into his view and towered above him. He could make out something new in her expression. Fear, yes, but also something adjacent to fear that he couldn’t quite identify. She would only look at him for a few seconds, searching instead for points just to his left and then right then near her feet—places to focus away from the unwelcome alterations to his face.

“Baby?” Dave croaked out the word.

She bent down but still couldn’t look for long. “What?”

“Your baby,” Dave replied. “In the car. Where’s your baby?”

“I don’t have a baby,” she said.

“But the seat?” Dave asked. “The child seat?”

“That’s for my sister,” she said, straightening. “Well, for my nephew, my sister’ s baby. An early Christmas present.”

She moved away then, and Dave could turn his head just enough to see her walking, steadily now, to the van. He felt a dangling bit of his own face flesh move in the slight breeze.

The woman bent down next to the car, reached in through the broken back seat window, twisted her arm upward—and pulled out a cell phone. She walked back toward Dave but not quite near him, swiping the phone’s surface and bringing it to her intact face.

“Yes, hello,” she said, twisting slightly to brush dirt from her right hip with the left hand that didn’t hold the phone. “There’s been a car accident.”

Dave almost said that of course he knew about the accident, he was right there, but then he understood that she wasn’t talking to him.

“No,” she said into her phone. “I’m okay. But there’s a guy here, and he needs …” She glanced toward his prone body. “Well, he needs an ambulance, for sure.” Dave thought he saw her brow furrow before he noticed that the sky was definitely darkening now as her voice floated toward him from far away.

“No,” she said again. “No, he wasn’t in the car. He just showed up. I don’t know him. He must have thought … Hell. I don’t know exactly what he was doing. Just send the goddamned ambulance!”

She looked at Dave now, direct and unblinking. Dave appreciated the eye contact. It was a small kindness, and he wanted to return the feeling but wasn’t sure how.

“Now,” the woman said into the phone, her voice still drifting but the urgency unmistakable.

Then she said the last words Dave heard that day. “Hurry. Please.”