In an Instant(11)

“What’s that?” I point at a glint of color in front of us.

My dad slows so we’re barely moving, and we crawl to what we can now see is a small red car. My dad stops the camper and climbs out. He’s halfway to the stranded vehicle when the door opens and a kid not much older than me steps out. A few words are exchanged, and then both walk toward us.

“This is Kyle,” my dad says. “We’re going to give him a lift.”

Fine by me. We can pick up a Kyle anytime. Six feet tall and broad shouldered, with honey hair and green eyes so bright the color is clear from ten feet away.

He scans the inside of the trailer. Oz is buckled in beside the door, holding Bingo. My mom, Aunt Karen, and Uncle Bob are on the Bentley seat in the back. Chloe and Vance, buds blasting in their ears, sit at the dinette against the window, while Natalie is on one side of the table and Mo on the other. He smiles when Mo’s eyes catch his and takes the seat beside her, proving he’s smart as well.

We start to roll again, making our way carefully around Kyle’s car.

Kyle is lucky we came along. I can’t imagine many cars will take this shortcut tonight, and it would have been a long, cold hike into town.

Behind me, Mo’s already reeling him in, and though I can’t make out the conversation, I know Kyle is done for. A string of heartbroken guys has been left in Mo’s beguiling wake. She’s a love-them-and-leave-them-devastated-and-dizzy kind of girl.

I glance back to confirm it, and sure enough, Kyle is turned sideways in his seat, completely captivated as Mo weaves her web, mesmerizing him with her beauty and her sweet questions that seem so genuinely curious, listening to his answers as if he’s the most fascinating guy in the world.

Across from them, Natalie stares, tongue-tied, and I actually feel the smallest bond of sympathy with her, glad I’m not the girl stuck across from those two, feeling completely invisible while Mo does her thing.

My dad steps on the brake, and my head whips around to see the blink of a buck’s startled eye in front of us. The camper lurches, then skids, the front tires gripping as the back ones slide. It all happens very slowly. We are barely moving. The back end thuds against something solid, and the front tires lose their grip. It feels like only a few inches, but it must be several feet because the front bumper scrapes against the guardrail, the metal creaking as it bends, and we stop.

I breathe, relieved someone was smart enough to think to build a guardrail on this dangerous narrow strip. And the small exhale does it. Like stitches ripping, the pylons that hold the ribbon of steel snap from the mountainside—pop, pop, pop.

And we fall.

There’s no time to scream. Like a missile, we plummet, my seat belt suspending me over the windshield as mountain and snow and trees fly past. The tire on my dad’s side glances off something hard, and we ricochet forward, then down again, no longer straight, my shoulder lodged in the corner between the dash and the door.

In the next second, the camper is on its side, and I watch as it continues to slide, skidding over rock and snow. I look up, unable to believe how far we’ve fallen, the road above a distant ridge I can no longer see.

I’m outside but not cold, confused, but only for a second.





6

I am dead.

It’s obvious as realizing you are bleeding. You look down and see blood. In my case, I look down and see nothing but the snow and forest around me, too instant and too real to be a dream. I feel my body—my limbs, my heart, my breath—but no longer anything of the world, not the cold, wetness, gravity, or air.

It’s shocking yet entirely natural. Like birth, I think. I do not remember being born, the pain of entering the world, yet I knew to breathe, to suckle, to cry. Death is a lot like that—I have no recollection of the exact experience, the trauma of dying, but my understanding of this new state is innate. A bit difficult to accept and slightly unbelievable, but intuitively I recognize that I am dead and that my body is no longer a part of me.

The wind howls, and it’s strange to hear it but not be affected by it. I follow the camper. It’s not difficult. Like telling your hand to grip, my intention is to follow, so I do. My soul exists, but I no longer have any physical form to restrict it. I move freely wherever my thoughts take me. No white light or black hole beckons, and as far as I can tell, I am alone. And though I’m no longer alive, I still feel like I am part of the world, my emotions as desperate as if I were living.

The camper slams against a boulder that spins it into a tree, and finally it stops.

My panic shifts to Mo, and suddenly I am inside looking at her. She is on her side, her eyes wide and her hands clenching the seat. Natalie is across from her in a similar pose, except she is screaming.

Oz hangs by his seat belt from what is now the ceiling and howls at my dad to stop. He holds Bingo, who wriggles to get loose but amazingly still does not bite at Oz to release him.

Chloe and Vance and Kyle, the boy we picked up, are piled against the driver’s seat along with all the board games that are kept in the cabinets. Monopoly money and cards and Scrabble score sheets swirl in the air. My mom, Aunt Karen, and Uncle Bob lie jumbled together halfway back.

My dad moans, causing me to move to the cab.

I scream out for my mom. I scream and scream. My dad needs help. My voice is silent.

The front end of the camper is crushed against him, his body sideways and wedged between the driver’s side window and the steering wheel. His leg is broken, the bottom half of his femur sticking through his jeans, blood leaking through the denim. His face is slashed from shards of glass and frozen with crystals of ice. Blood is everywhere.