The Space In Between

The Space In Between by Brittainy C. Cherry


Chapter One


THREE DAYS, FIVE hours, and twenty-two minutes.
Mom kept crying. Her puffy eyes hadn’t stopped swelling for a few hours now and she could hardly breathe. I told her it was all right, but she kept hugging me, rubbing my hands in hers. She said that she would never understand why these kinds of things would happen to people, but God was always in control. I felt like that was just something people said. When they couldn’t figure out the words, it was always, "In God’s hands."
Daddy sat in the corner of the room with his thick-framed glasses brushing against his pepper gray-haired sideburns. He was a calm man by nature. Grams said when he was born there was only a whisper to show he was alive. But when she held him in her arms for the first time, he smiled to her. And he hadn’t stopped smiling since. Until today. Today, he sat there in the corner. Looking my way. Not pressuring me to get better. Not pushing me to express anything.
I turned away from Mom as I lay in the hospital bed and looked outside to the sky. I couldn’t grasp what was happening. It was a complex world. How could the sun shine so brightly and look so welcoming in the wake of such an event? The birds sang and danced past the window and the kids laughed down on Jefferson Street as they went to the county’s fair. The dogs barked and Ms. Jacobson gossiped. Outside the world of Albany, Wisconsin, was completely normal. Happy. But inside this cold, darkened room, I sat in a hospital bed. My left leg in a sling and my body bruised on the outside, but the internal damage of my soul was the worst.
Mom tried her best to silence her muffled tears by covering her mouth, as if she didn’t want me to hear her—to avoid my suffering. But I didn’t mind. It was better to hear her than the laughter. She worried for my safety. My calm demeanor scared her the most. But it appeared she was breaking down enough for all of us.
My eyes moved towards the closed seafoam-colored curtain, which blocked the entrance to my hospital room. I looked down and saw two pairs of shoes—an old brown scuffed up pair and high heels (you know, the fancy kind with the red bottoms, that scream, ‘We’re expensive!’). I knew it was Eric and Michelle, and I watched Dad pull back the curtain to let them in.
They both were silent. Michelle stood tall in a beautifully tight white floral dress featuring a red sweater over it. And there, her boyfriend, my brother, Eric was, wearing his UW-Madison sweatshirt, a pair of slacks, and his scuffed up brown shoes.
I followed after my brother to UW-Madison, where I met some of my best friends. Unlike Eric, I hadn’t become a teacher, but I followed with a cool degree in dance. I’m a fantastic dancer.
As my eyes landed on my leg, my heart skipped a beat. Iwas a fantastic dancer.
Say something. I wished they would talk. The staring at me with sad eyes was growing to be too much. So I opened my mouth to speak and was graced with a mouthful of air and emptied words. I tried again, and sounds came out. But the actual words were what slapped me and made my eyes follow after my mom. A never-ending flow of tears poured from me as I smiled to my calm, loving father. “Did someone cancel the rehearsal dinner?”
In three days, five hours, and twenty-two minutes, I would have been walking down the aisle in my white dress inside the beautiful St. Peter’s Church. I would have been beaming with a type of joy that can’t be expressed in words, but only in a feeling. It would have been a warm feeling of knowing that, once I reached the end of the aisle, Derrick would be there.
I would have been marrying my middle school sweetheart and starting a new chapter. We would move out to New York— him to pursue his singing career and I would be pursuing dance. I would go for my Master’s degree if I were lucky, or I would waitress tables (something I have done at Mr. Fred’s Diner off Brady Street since I was sixteen). Derrick would probably be discovered before me because he was talented beyond his years, and I would gladly become his trophy wife and the backup dancer in his music videos. Classy!
But I made a mistake.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Mom said over and over again. But I knew better.
At the end of the school year, I was always overjoyed when Derrick picked me up. I was saying goodbye to my best friend, Ladasha, who was pretty much the best dancer I’d ever seen. Madison had been the third college she had tried out in the past three years. I don’t know why but the first day I met her we clicked. The Caucasian small town girl in me was so amused by the African-American city girl in her. She would make me laugh at the stupidest things in the world, but some days she’d glance at herself in a mirror and burst out crying. I never knew why. I never asked…I just hugged her.
It was tough saying goodbye because she was on her way to New York City. “To make my dreams come true,” she smirked. Stating how there was something in her heart calling out to her. So before she could finish her degree, she had to follow the voice. I had no clue what the heck she was talking about, but I hugged her tight and promised to stay in touch.
It was always a treat when I’d see him pulling up to my building in his green pick-up truck. Derrick wouldn’t complain once as he helped me load my past year’s dorm items into the truck. When it was all loaded up each year, I would make the drive back home. As a ‘thank you’ for him helping me. It was around four-thirty in the afternoon when we got to the freeway and blasted the newest CD he had recorded.
I hadn’t even seen the car’s tire explode in front of me before it was too late to hit my brakes. I didn’t even remember crying out in pain as my body slammed against the steering wheel. I didn’t know the truck had flipped and was slammed from behind with three other cars piling up. I didn’t have time to fully grasp what had happened.