Mary Miller: The Last Days of California

I bet she had a lot of money and hardly ever gave any of it away. I bet she ate steak every night and slept in hotel rooms with thick, white carpet.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked, taking a slug off my Yoo-hoo.

“The Waffle House didn’t sit well with his stomach,” she said.

“I guess we can add that to the list of places we can’t eat anymore.”

Elise got in the car and asked where Dad was.

“The bathroom,” my mother said, checking her watch even though there was a clock in the middle of the dash.

“You’re running a minute behind on every conversation,” I said. “It’s super annoying.”

She leaned over and opened her hand: a pink lighter with the words “True Love” in red rhinestones. “Texans love to bedazzle some shit,” she said. “I couldn’t decide between this and one with Elvis’s head on it—young Elvis. Have you ever seen pictures of young Elvis?”

“Of course.”

“He was amazing,” she said. “I see we’re picking up Joyce Meyer. How wonderful.”

“Joyce is preaching on obeying God and being blessed,” I said.

“Isn’t she always?”

“Unless she’s trying to explain why bad things happen to good people.”

“That’s a tougher sell. What town are we in?”

“Beaumont,” our mother said.

“Beaumont! I think that’s where Footloose was set,” Elise said. We loved Kevin Bacon, too. Kevin Bacon was his most beautiful in Footloose , primarily for the angry dance scene in the abandoned warehouse, even though you could tell it wasn’t always actually Kevin Bacon. When the camera panned out, something was off—the torso too wide or the legs too long, something hard to put your finger on.

Our mother ejected the disc and placed it carefully back in its box. Elise and I watched our father stop to look around with his pleasant expression, his hands on his hips. He had biggish hips, almost womanly, that he was always calling attention to.

He got into the car making noises like he wanted someone to ask how his stomach was so he could tell us it wasn’t good. He tried to stick the rearview mirror back into place again, and this went on until Elise burst out laughing and then I started laughing. I was afraid he’d get mad, but he just sighed and opened his Coke. He called it Cocola, which made me think of him as a little kid. Once he was just a little kid hunting and fishing to put food on the table after his father moved to Florida with a red-haired woman.

He took another swig and another, throwing his head back jerkily as he made his way to the bottom of the can. Then he handed it to our mother and put the car into DRIVE.

As we were about to pull out of the station, a yellow convertible plowed directly into a white car, slamming it head-on. The man in the white car flew through the windshield and landed in the road as the cars spun off in opposite directions. It was very loud and then it was quiet.

“Oh my God,” Elise said.

My mother made the sign of the cross and my father backed up and parked in the spot we’d just pulled out of. We all got out. Both of the cars’ radios were playing, tuned to the same station. The people in the convertible were still in there, but the man in the white car must not have been wearing his seatbelt. He was faceup in the street and there was blood everywhere. I knew he was dead.

I looked over at a couple of teenage girls next to a gas pump, their hands covering their mouths. And then one of them removed her hands and screamed. After that, everybody started moving. Elise dialed 911. My father jogged over to the convertible and another man ran to join him. My mother sent me inside to tell the freakishly tall guy, but he already knew, so I went back out and stood next to my mother and Elise, the Las Vegas girl, and her dog. We had just seen a man die. A man who had been alive only moments before, thinking about nothing or nearly nothing—wondering whether it was too early to have a drink, or if he might go for a swim this evening—things that were so inconsequential they were an insult to his life. He hadn’t had a moment to prepare, would take all of his secrets with him.

I made up a hundred different scenarios. He was newly married to the woman of his dreams. He was a drug dealer, a felon, a preacher, a man with more children than he could afford to feed. He was depressed and thought about dying all the time. No matter who he’d been, though, he would be described in heroic terms, like everyone who died as a result of someone else’s negligence. Perhaps he’d been going to the store for nothing more important than ice cream, an unnecessary trip he’d taken to get out of the house. I was sorry I’d never know him. If I knew even a little something, I might piece together a story for his life.

My father dragged a girl out of the passenger seat of the convertible, cradled her in his arms. She was nine or ten years old, tall and thin. My mother took my hand and began to pray, but I pulled away and left her there with Elise, ignoring their calls to come back.

The girl was Asian—Japanese—with long shiny hair in perfect order. She looked like she was asleep. When I was little we’d had a dog that had been hit by a car; my mother placed him in his bed, curled up, like he was napping. He’d looked perfect, not a spot of blood on him, and I couldn’t believe he was dead. I’d sat with him for hours, waiting for him to open his eyes.

“Is she dead?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“She’s breathing.”

“Why doesn’t she open her eyes?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Do you think she’s in a coma?”

“I don’t know,” he said again.

I wanted him to know something. “It looks like she’s asleep,” I said. Wake up, I thought. Wake up.

The other man had pulled a woman out of the driver’s side of the convertible. She was young and white and I wondered if she was the babysitter. The woman was alive, moaning softly, and then she sat up and screamed the most horrible scream I’d ever heard. And then she was shaking violently and screaming and the whole thing seemed like a bad television reenactment. No one was with the dead man. I walked over to him and crouched down, his face covered in blood and gashes. Elise and the Las Vegas girl joined me, watched as I touched his neck, which I wouldn’t have had the nerve to do without them there.

“Don’t do that,” Elise said. “What’re you doing?”

“Checking for a pulse,”

“Do you feel anything?” the Las Vegas girl asked.

I moved my fingers around, searching for the artery.

An ambulance arrived and a medic hustled us out of the way, and then there were police cars and fire trucks and we were moved farther and farther out of the way until we were no longer a part of it. We stood with the others, watching as they loaded them onto gurneys, as they covered the man in the white car with a sheet. My mother and Elise were crying. The Las Vegas girl touched my sister’s arm and they embraced. This seemed very strange and I tried to catch Elise’s eye, but she wouldn’t look at me.

I listened as those around us tried to work out what had happened, explaining it to the new people who’d arrived on the scene. They were already getting it wrong. We had seen it up close—we’d had the best view and I felt like they should be asking us. The convertible hadn’t been turning into the gas station. They’d both been driving straight past each other when the convertible swerved into the path of the man in the white car, who was now dead. Who, I had decided, had been on an unnecessary errand to buy an unnecessary item. Maybe he hadn’t even wanted the item, but had offered to get it for his girlfriend, a woman he hadn’t loved enough to marry.