ALL THE RAGE (writer: T.M. Frazier)(81)

I survey the car. I have one small thing going for me – the fire is raging much harder on the passenger side of the car. I can see Leo’s arm being licked by the flames, but so far his body and face are out of their path.

I go around to Leo’s side of the car and get on my belly, gasping at the icy water on the road as it seeps through my clothes. The car is upside down, and I have to crawl through the window and across Leo to undo his belt. It means I have to put my hand in the flames. I start coughing almost as soon as my head’s in the car window. I can’t bear to look too closely at Leo, not yet. If he dies…. I can’t even think like that.

I’m operating on adrenaline, high on smoke fumes and about to pass out when a hand locks around my ankle and pulls. “Cassie!” Damon yells. “Get back!”

I kick my mother’s husband square in the face, as hard as I can, and resume my rescue operation.

LeoLeoLeo. Please don’t die. Don’t f*cking die on me, not here, not like this. I need you. I don’t work without you. Leo!

I have no idea how, but somehow, I manage to pull a two-hundred-pound linebacker out of a burning car and away from the wreckage before the fuel tank explodes and showers the road in pieces of burning metal. I pull Leo into my lap, surveying the damage, slapping his unburnt cheek. “Hey,” I say, quietly at first, then a louder, more insistent yell. “Hey!”

He doesn’t wake up. The ambulance arrives. Then another. Damon is back, his face ashen, a streak of blood painting his left nostril down to his lip, probably from me kicking him.

“I don’t need an ambulance,” I say to him, as the paramedics prise my fingers away from Leo and get him on a stretcher.

He says somethingI don’t quite catch, something like “Other”, pointing down the embankment where a second team of paramedics is taking a stretcher, and thats when I understand. My vision narrows to two pinprick tunnels, and all I can see is my stepfather’s bright blue eyes and the fire as I decipher his words. He wasn’t saying “Other”.

He was saying mother.

My mother was in the other car. The one that nobody saw slide off the embankment and into the muddy ditch that flanks the road.

I watch in horror as they rush her past me. She looks dead. Her lips are blue and the paramedics are yelling at each other. One of her legs is hanging off the stretcher at a strange right-angle and there’s blood coming out of her mouth and nose.

People are talking to me. I guess they’re asking which ambulance I want to travel in. As if in slow-motion, I look between the two vehicles with their flashing lights and bright red sides. The two people I love most in the world.

I open my mouth to speak. Close it again. I can’t hear anymore. Everything is a staccato hiss, everything is the sound of the rain as it hits the asphalt I’m standing on. The world tilts suddenly as my legs disappear beneath me, I hear a loud thwack as my head hits the ground, and then nothing.

*

Later, in the sterile white of the hospital hallway, I start to hear things again. Two rooms, side by side, where teams of doctors work on the two people I love most in the world.

I start to hear things I do not want to hear.

My mother is in a coma.

She is almost certainly going to die.

My boyfriend is awake.

He has burns on his arm and a concussion.

My boyfriend is handcuffed to the stretcher he’s sitting up on.

Leo. The guy I was going to marry.

This is all his fault.

He spots me in the hallway. “I’m sorry,” he says, his eyes glassy and red.

I look at my own arm, bandaged from the burns, and wish I’d left him in his car while the flames took over.

“It should have been you,” I say, my hand burning with pain from where the flames licked at me. “It should have been f*cking you.”

*

That day had been so normal, so boring in contrast to the horror of that night.

It’s my fault, I would say to myself, over and over. As I held my mom’s hand in the ICU, her face already starting to hollow with death. She was still hanging on, and they’d said any brain swelling needed to go down before an accurate prognosis could be given, but she was already gone. I know it now, picking that memory out of my own brain, folding it over, tearing off the waxy film of denial and hope that was marring my view at the time. I don’t have that now, and I can tell you that my mother, God rest her soul, exited her body at the moment Leo’s car ploughed into hers.

I fought with Leo before he drove off in his car. I don’t even remember what it was about now. It was something trivial, for sure. So trivial I can’t even remember.

So he drank a six-pack of Bud, climbed into his truck, and smashed that truck into my mother’s tiny little Honda Civic, the one my stepfather bought her to get to work at the hospital because it was more fuel-efficient than the old fuel-guzzler Volvo she’d been driving around in for years.

If she’d crashed in the Volvo, she probably would have walked away without a scratch.

The cost of convenience, I suppose.

So now the Volvo sits in the garage and rusts, and my mother lies in her hospital bed and does the very same thing. And somewhere, where I have no idea, I’m sure Leo is rusting away as well.





CHAPTER THREE




Thanksgiving Eve, 2015

NOW