The Sound of Broken Ribs(7)

She was laughing and was not entirely sure why. Tears streamed down her face, and later, she would partially blame what happened next on her newly blurred vision.

Dan had ruined her life without a care in the world for her feelings. He’d destroyed everything they’d worked so hard for. And for what? For what? That was the question—wasn’t it? What made a man steal from his partner in life? What made a man want to pull up stakes at the drop of a hat and run away from everything, including the woman he vowed to love and respect and cherish and support? What made men such fucking assholes?

She’d been a good wife. She’d cooked for him and sucked his dick and fucked him the way he liked to be fucked. She’d not been able to give him a child yet, but she thought that, eventually, a little boy or girl would have come along and they’d be the perfect family. They’d go to the movies and parks and PTA meetings and everything else perfect families went to. They’d have barbecues where her brother would get too drunk and jump in the pool and need to be rescued and Bee and Dan would have to explain to Mini Bee or Little Dan the finer points of pool safety and that his or her uncle was a drunken idiot. Dan would have been a terrific father had he not turned out to be a fucking thieving asshat.

In the end, Belinda thought she did what she did next because she needed to share the destruction of her life with someone and she didn’t want to take it out on the only person she had left in her life—her brother.

Her foot drifted off the accelerator and the car immediately dropped ten ticks on the speedometer. The needle drifted down to fifty, then forty-five, then forty, because she didn’t want to kill whoever was in the road. She only wanted to hurt them really, really bad.

Like she’d been hurt.

Like Dan had hurt her.

The woman running on the side of the road stopped and dropped to one knee. That was unexpected. Belinda thought she would simply clip the bitch’s leg and send her spinning off the road. The slut would spend a few weeks in a cast and then go back to her whoring ways. But now she was a much more compact, tighter target. Belinda knew she wasn’t going to be able to stop in time, so instead of slamming her foot into the pedal and cutting the wheel and risk fishtailing, she eased her foot down on top of the brake.

She hit the woman in the spandex tank, blue-and-white yoga pants, and highlighter-yellow sneakers doing roughly forty-two miles per hour. That might not seem like a lot of speed, but it was enough to change both women’s lives forever.

The second before the car hit her, the woman on the side of the road looked up. The grill slammed into the woman’s left side. Her face bounced off the hood. Then she was spinning off into the high grass like one of those flying fairy toys Belinda had seen an ad for on television—the girl pulled a ripcord and the fairy came alive, twirling, all light and wings and chaos; there was a video that had gone viral of one of those fairies landing in a fireplace. Belinda thought the comparison apt.

She almost took off right then, but something made her ease down the brake even more. She needed to leave the scene. If someone came along and found her with the body—because the woman couldn’t be alive; not after that hit—she’d have some explaining to do.

But she wanted to see the body.

No. There was no want involved. She needed to see the body.

She swung the car farther into the tall grass and came to a stop. She put the car in park but did not kill the engine. The door popped open, and she swung her legs out, sat on the edge of her seat with her feet in the grass for a moment, wondering what the fuck she was doing.

This was madness.

Hitting the woman had been crazy, but needing to see her shattered body was a whole other level of batshit.

Belinda grabbed the frame of the driver’s side door and hauled herself from the vehicle.

Birds tweeted. Crickets chirped. Other than those two sounds, the world was silent.

Belinda’s pulse pounded in her head. Her heart raced in her chest. Her mind spun through possible excuses she would give to whoever showed up while she was being an idiot.

She figured this was the same compulsion that made serial murderers linger and lurk in crowds outside of their most recent kills. Some kind of morbid fascination that was impossible to resist filled her with static electricity. She was horrified and aroused and freezing and burning up, all at the same time.

This was better than sex.

Her shoes became damp with dew as she slid through the knee-high grass. She registered something bright in the road—one of the woman’s neon yellow training shoes. Getting knocked out of your shoes was something out of comedy movies. That shit didn’t really happen. Belinda shook her head to clear the image. But the shoe was still there.

She moved slowly toward the corpse. At this angle, Belinda could only see the woman from the waist down. Her top half was obscured by the trunk of one of the trees between which she had landed. One of the legs was snapped up at an extreme angle, making the woman look like a check mark. The foot on the obviously broken leg was missing a shoe. At the crotch, blood seeped through the thin material of the blue-and-white yoga pants, turning them purple. Belinda wondered if the woman was on her period. Perhaps the accident had forced it to begin.

Don’t be fucking stupid. She’s bleeding internally and her vagina is just the nearest opening for the blood to escape from.

This idea turned her stomach, and had she eaten that morning, she might have been sick in the grass.