Page 9 of Dark Ugly Places

She closes the file again and sits back.

“I don’t really remember much after the accident,” I admit. “Only bits and pieces.”

Ben’s lifeless body. Emmy screaming, her face coated in bright red blood. Sirens speeding toward us. The scent of my own perspiration. The ringing in my ears. Everything but the driver’s face.

“It’s very normal to not remember aspects of traumatic experiences. Consider it a coping mechanism.”

“I want to remember,” I tell her. “In fact, I think more memories are coming back to me now. Can that happen?”

“It’s possible. But emotions play a powerful role.” She pauses and repeats her question. “So, are you still angry with the man who hit you?”

“At first, I was, but then I realized being angry wasn’t the answer. It was an accident. Accidents happen.”

I try to keep my voice even. I know this is the right answer, the respectable answer she needs, even though not being angry seems impossible to me. My throat tightens, and I instinctively swallow.

I watch her face, the arch of her eyebrows, perfectly formed and unmoving. Benicia. Benita. Betty. What on earth is her first name? I can’t remember. Topamax does that to you. You get a thing in your head, and the next minute, it’s just gone. The old me would have remembered her first name. The old me wouldn’t have had blaring migraines that never go away. The old me would not be caught dead in a place like this to deal with panic attacks and post-traumatic stress disorder. The old me would have screamed the truth. The old me would have done a lot of things.

I’m stuck, still watching her eyebrow.

“So you’re not angry anymore?”

“No, not anymore. Like I said. I have forgiven him. It was an accident.” My words falter, and my voice comes out broken.

Dr. Constance smiles, wide and flat, dissatisfied. “All right.”

When Constance asked me this question during the first visit, I squirmed. My body burned. It took everything in me to say no. But forgiveness is good and right and honorable. It shows that you, the victim, are worthy. It shows that, in the eyes of the law, you must be redeemed and replenished and made whole—numerically, of course. Because let’s face it: the law can’t put my nerves back where they should be or fix the bulging discs in my back and neck. The law can’t regrow the hair on my daughter’s scalp where it was torn off and re-grafted from the back of her head. And it sure as hell can’t raise my husband from the dead.

So when Dr. Constance asks me if I’m angry at the man who hit us, who killed my husband on that clear, sunny, gorgeous afternoon and then afterwards got out, saw the mess he had made, and then got back in the car to reverse away from us like he’d hit a couple of stray dogs—well, there’s what I say, and then there’s the truth.

Am I angry?

Yes, but it’s much more than anger now. It’s a bitter little seed of revenge growing within me. I can feel it taking root, deeper and deeper, becoming part of me.

4

Nicola

There’s a spot about a block away from the school and the carpool lines where I wait for Emmy. With the windows down, I lean my head back and see if I can will the thumping sensation in my temple to slow down. I close my eyes for what feels like a second and listen to the distant traffic coming from Wilshire—horns honking, laughter, rap music from someone’s car. I grip the wheel, my white knuckles reminding me of how I didn’t drive after the accident for three whole months. I wouldn’t even get in a car. Our Range Rover sat there, deteriorating and collecting dust. On street sweeping days, Emmy would make sure it was parked properly, taking my keys gingerly from the glass dish in the kitchen and heading out silently to move it from the Monday spot to the Tuesday spot, and then back again.

Part of it was my leg. The other part was that I couldn’t be in a vehicle, couldn’t think about hearing the sound of the engine, the pull of the tires along the asphalt. The speed. The power.

But after three months with the bills piling up and trying to walk everywhere with Emmy, I decided enough was enough. I put on old clothes and went outside to wash the Range Rover with Emmy. When it was scrubbed clean, we took pictures and put it up for sale online. It sold within days. The money came in and went right back out again to pay for Emmy’s third skin graft that no lien doctor would cover. With just $1,200 left, I bought a 1999 Volkswagen Beetle with missing fabric on the roof and a glove compartment that was permanently shut on account of there being no handle. A local college kid who had just been hired at Silicon Beach sold it to me.

“You’re, like, going backwards,” Emmy said that day. I agreed with her, though I hadn’t expected her to notice. I was backsliding, more aptly, into a version of myself maybe I’d never been before. Alone. Without Ben. Without anyone, really—except my kid. And that day weighing on me created the sense that my life now was a heavy recurring nightmare from which I could never awake.

A knock on my passenger side door makes me bolt upright. It’s Emmy. My hands fumble for the lock, and I sit up, heavy with the second Imitrex I took coming out of Dr. Constance’s office.

I remove some snacks I took from the Club Level from her seat, and Emmy slides in, cramming her legs with her backpack. Her face is sullen.

“How was your first day?”

She stares at the floor, her breaths even but heavy. “Pretty lame overall.” A hand reaches up to her head, and she winces. “My head hurts.”

I reach for my purse in the back and pull out a couple of ibuprofens from the little red pouch where I keep all my emergency pills and offer them to her.

She frowns. “No, the strong ones.”

“Are you sure?” I ask her.