home
literature
art gallery
interests
my blog
web design services
about crimsondryad
contact me 		The Death of Easter

By Angela Gann

  Hard, swift pounding on the front door.  My heart stopped, then lurched into a tripping beat.  I sat frozen in my bed, listening for the hammer of fate to crush me beneath its uncaring weight.  For days now opening the front door had been an ordeal, and from the sound this knock was the one I had been dreading.  The only people who knock with that swift, staccato precision are the men in blue, those sworn to protect and serve…police officers.  Only I no longer had the right to their protection, for I committed a sin that could not be washed away by a simple Hail Mary.  Still I listened, quivering like a rabbit faced with the fox, for the thumping of boots on the stairs.  Then the front door closed.  I released the breath I forgot I even possessed with a great whooshing noise.  My husband came upstairs, the pallor of his face indicating how the unexpected knock affected him. He told me that, as usual, someone parked outside our apartment in the fire lane.  The security officer came to our door to see if the car was ours.  It wasn’t.  No one had come to take me to jail, at least not yet.
           The gentle air was warm and the sun’s mellow light caressed the proud daffodils I planted in my small garden.  Bunnies chased each other or nibbled the new grass without fear in the middle of the lawn.  Early April usually encourages living things, including people, to celebrate the coming of spring, but I did not celebrate as I sat in the air-conditioned shadows of my townhouse.  In fact, I barely dared to breathe for fear someone would see and come to punish me.  Up until that point I had never even had a speeding ticket.  I never broke any laws, committed vandalism or shoplifted. I never even thought of trying any of a hundred illegal activities people get away with every day.  My parents raised me to believe that those who stayed out of trouble’s way would be protected by fate, by goodness, by the law…and by God.
           I was wrong.  Death doesn’t care when he comes knocking whether you brush your teeth twice a day and floss.  He doesn’t care if you save stray animals or give blood every two months.  He just comes, and he marked me with an indelible mark of anger and shame and remorse.
           Business crawled at McDonald’s the evening before Easter.  After all, who wants fast food when visiting relatives gather to color Easter eggs?  No one wants to think about the cholesterol in their hamburger and French fries when surrounded by symbols of spring and the resurrection of Christ.  In America, denial is an institution, so everyone stayed away from the evil of fast-food grease.  Unfortunately, April 2, 1994 started Daylight Savings Time.  I was marked that night, but not with the rainbow hues of Easter egg dye.  I was steeped in a bitterness like vinegar, but unlike the eggs, the bitterness sank past my shell and polluted my soul.  In order to prevent damage to the computers, a key had to be inserted into the time clock to change the time.  Another manager was responsible for getting the key, but he didn’t do it.  As closing time approached Luis, who was the other manager on duty, and I decided that I had to go get the key from another store.
           I climbed into my car and turned on the radio, never thinking how soon my life would change forever.  I turned onto Kimberly Parkway, barely noticing the orange arc-sodium lights across the street at the Motor Vehicles Bureau.  The night was cool and the moon was muted behind a thick veil of mist.  The darkness was surreal and gossamer, wrapping everything in dove gray velvet.  I sped up to just under the speed limit when I saw a dim flash of light just ahead at my right bumper.  I swerved to the left as I recognized that glimmer as the reflection of my headlights on an old man’s cane and glasses.  Glaring at him I passed barely a foot away from him. I remember feeling disgust at the look he shot my way when he finally bothered to notice my car.  The look he gave me said I was a fool for driving my car in his way.  I marveled at his stupidity as he jaywalked…or rather jay-shuffled.  What he was doing could not properly be called walking.  The dark clothes he wore were unbroken by any other color, a deadly exercise in carelessness.  I didn’t consider that someone might have been following behind him, dressed in black as he was.
           From that point on the seconds slowed and yet zoomed past.  My wondering thought, “What is she doing there?” seemed languid, but reaction could never be fast enough.  The glare of my headlights illuminated the woman’s expression of surprise, an expression that surely matched mine.
           I felt more than heard the impact of my car colliding with her body, a bone-jarring thump that somehow still felt distant and removed.  The glass of my windshield starred crazily as she flew into it, and I threw up my hands in a futile effort to ward off a series of fleeting thoughts.  The first was of the deer from my native Pennsylvania, and what happened when people hit them.  I expected to stop and find her laying over my steering wheel with her bloody, torn face and glazed eyes staring at me.  Afterward, when I had time to contemplate those quicksilver thoughts, a torrent of shame flooded through me at my relief when she continued up over the car.  The next thing I knew, my car came to a sudden halt as I slammed on the brakes.  After the car came to a stop, I sat for several stunned seconds, unsure of what to do.  Thoughts of an eerily similar movie I had seen a month or so before flashed through my mind.  I think even then I knew the woman was more than seriously injured.  Then I got out of the car and began to walk back towards where she lay facedown on the pavement, about two feet behind the wheels of the second car, which hit her again when she bounced off my car into the incoming lane.  The old man reached the other side of the street before he realized his wife was no longer behind him.  In his drunken haze, he hadn’t heard me hit her.  Maybe that was a blessing, the only blessing to come of this horrible mess.  A keening, soul-wrenching wail rose from his throat as he shuffled towards her with his arms stretched out in a parody of every bad Frankenstein movie ever made.  I stayed back as people gathered around, afraid my eyes would confirm what my brain did not yet acknowledge.  A woman walked over to me with sympathy and maybe pity in her eyes.  She told me the victim would be fine, but no one rushed to tend her injuries.  Despite my brain’s denial of the facts, my body instinctively knew the truth.  Details continued to register, details that would play themselves over and over in my mind.  The twist of her knee where I hit her, the tear on the heel of her pantyhose.  Was that caused by the impact, or had she snagged her nylons while getting ready to go out for the evening?  The witnesses just stood there uneasily shifting from foot to foot.  Occasionally someone would glance my way, a look I could feel like a leaden weight settling on my shoulders.  Her husband finally reached her and lay down beside her on the cold asphalt.  When the medics finally pulled him away from her, I could see her blood dripping from the side of his head into the puddle spreading around her.  I watched as a medic pulled the woman up and looked at her face.  Then he let her drop almost carelessly.  The imagined sound of her hitting the ground still haunts me, a sound in my mind like a meaty thump.   As we played our parts in this grisly charade the mist became a drizzling rain.
           A while later another medic shook out a billowing white sheet and covered the woman with it.  Crimson spots seeped through the cotton like the reaching red tendrils of death that covered Egypt during Passover.  The Hebrews shed the blood of sheep to smear along their doors so the evil would pass over their firstborn.  I am the firstborn in my family, and there was no blood along my door.  The only blood was the damning human blood I shed, and by then it was far too late.  The protection of blood was denied me, instead tainting me as it was shed.  That wasn’t a sheep lying broken in the street.
           At one point I managed to walk back to my car to see how much damage I had done.  I wish I hadn’t.  Her crumpled pack of cigarettes lay on my equally crumpled windshield.  One lonely black shoe lay beside my front tire.  Her cheap little black purse lay a few feet beyond the shoe, the delicate golden chain of the strap broken neatly in two.  My stomach clenched as I put a hand to my mouth and stumbled away.  I did not try to look again.
           The police officers made me sit in a squad car, although they did leave the door open.  The grate between the seats was a vision of the punishment I was sure to face.  After all, “Thou shalt not kill” was one of the Ten Commandments.  I asked the police officers to call my husband.  They assured me they would right away, but an hour later they had not called.  They wanted to question me before I talked to him.  I worried about my car, which was racing like a stampeding herd of horses.  When I asked if I could go turn it off, the officers looked at me strangely and said one of them would turn it off for me.  I don’t know if they thought my worry about the car’s engine was strange with the woman lying dead, or if they wondered whether I wanted to hide incriminating evidence, like drugs or something.  I have never had anything like that in my car.  They took turns repeatedly telling me I was not at fault, that accidents happen.  Each time they said it, the story got thinner and thinner, like the threads of a rag that has been washed too often.  The rain increased from a drizzle to splattering little raindrops as the temperature dropped into a miserly chill.  Wet spots joined the red on the sheet rippling gently in the breeze, but no one moved the woman laying facedown on the cold, damp asphalt.
           I finally got home around 3 A.M.  I waited for a little while, then called my mother.  Some small part of me expected that she could make this mess better, though my confidence in her magical mommy abilities had long since crumpled into dust.  My stepfather answered the phone after five or six rings.  I heard him turn to my mother and say, “Wake up Deb, she killed somebody.”  His voice was uninflected, not condemning or even shocked, just resigned.  This was how a vampire feels when the stake plunges into its chest.  Inside I writhed and howled as the night-quiet sounds of static echoed over the phone lines.  My mom picked up the phone.  Her voice had that same smiling tone it always has when my sister and I call her.  She asked me questions, wanting details I didn’t feel I could give.  I had already repeated my story over and over.  I felt like a little kid’s juice box that crumples with their determination to get every last slurping drop.  Frustration joined my internal howling, and betrayal as well.  She didn’t fix it, she couldn’t fix it, and her platitudes were about to make me begin tearing things apart and throwing them in a rage.  But I sat.  My mother always taught me to respect the property of myself and others.  I had already committed the cardinal sin by breaking that woman’s life.  Now an ingrained guilt kept me from breaking anything else.  Her offer to come keep me company for a few days had me falling over myself convincing her it wasn’t necessary.  I still don’t truly believe she understood the horror of what happened.  She wanted to analyze it and pick at it like a festering wound.  The disgust I felt made me physically sick. Since then the distance between us has become a gulf.  I love her, she is my mother.  But never again will I look to her for healing, never again will I bare my soul to her.  Finally I couldn’t stand talking to her anymore, so I made an excuse to hang up.
           I considered calling my father, but I decided not to because my stepmother hates me with a passion that has not decreased in over a decade.  The morning would be soon enough.  About half an hour later the phone rang.  My father’s quiet, reassuring voice flooded over me.  Mom had called him. He offered to get me a lawyer if I needed one.  He also wanted to know why she called him instead of me.  I told him I didn’t want to wake him, but a small voice inside me knew it was a lie.  The reality was that I was afraid of his wife’s reaction, and I was right. The next morning my younger sister called my dad to wish him a happy Easter.  My stepmother answered the phone with an irritated bitchy tone.  When my sister asked what was wrong, she answered, “We got a call last night.”  I knew she hated me, but I couldn’t believe her reaction.  Had it been her and not me, I would still have told her how sorry I was to hear of it, and asked her if I could help in any way.  She offered nothing.
           Four days of unmitigated hell followed before the police decided not to charge me.  Despite the fact that it was an accident, despite the fact that I wasn’t speeding, the deciding factor in my continued freedom was the woman’s blood alcohol level.  It vaulted the legal limit with ease.  My name, age, and address were printed in the newspaper article about the accident, on the bottom of the third page.  I was told by the police how lucky I was that another accident had distracted the TV news reporters.  I didn’t feel very lucky.  Going outside alone terrified me after that.  What if her family, distraught at what happened, came to enact their own punishment?  That Easter the dawn flooded the sky, and still I lay awake wondering what right I had to live and eat and enjoy while she laid on a frigid metal shelf in a morgue.   Each crimson drop of blood fell endlessly from her husband’s head as my tears could not fall from mine.  I was wrung dry that night.  The tears would come to rend me two days later when the ice around my soul finally began to melt.
           When the accident happened, I was still on the clock at McDonald’s.  The lights of the emergency vehicles were clearly visible from the restaurant, and Luis came over after he finished closing to see how I was.  The police wouldn’t let him pass.  He was consumed with guilt for letting me go, but it wasn’t his fault.  The manager who was supposed to get the key for the time clock showed up about five minutes after I left the store.  By then the old woman was dead.  He never apologized, or indicated in any way that he cared about what happened.  I try never to hate anyone because eventually it eats you up inside.  I hate him.  I hate him for his irresponsibility and I hate him for not feeling any guilt when he is the reason I was out that night.  I hate him for not getting fired for his negligence.  And I hate him for having a normal life when mine has been twisted.  Fortunately I don’t think of him often now.  Once he happened to stop by where I worked about two years later.  I turned on my heel when I saw him and headed for the back of the store, where I told my manager I would not wait on that customer.  The instant fury of my response startled me as well as the manager, but the manager didn’t question me about it.  I was glad.
            I was finally almost calm enough to go to sleep around 9 A.M. Easter morning when the phone rang again.  My husband picked it up and glanced a question at me, “Are you awake to take a call?”  I shook my head.  Then I heard him as he began to argue with the person on the phone.  It was the Officer for McDonald’s security department, and she didn’t care if I was sleeping, she needed to talk to me now.  Finally she threatened my husband that I could be fired if I didn’t talk to her.  I took the phone, outraged and angry at her insensitivity. I could have been going to jail and a woman was dead.  Talking to her was just not a priority right then.  I couldn’t believe her incredible callousness.  Obviously she was only concerned with how to keep McDonald’s from getting its sparkling image dirtied.  Later she tried to get me in trouble with my store manager by telling him I was rude and uncooperative.  Fortunately the store manager was a little more understanding once I explained her behavior.  I never again believed that a company actually cared about its employees, though.  Oh sure, the people you work with day to day may care, but when it hits the fan the time-honored game of CYA becomes a favorite activity.  I should have sued.  I could probably have proven negligence on the part of the company, but I just wanted to move on.
           My faith in goodness has rotted.  One of the police officers handed me a brochure from his church, and asked me to come the following day for the Easter service.  He told me I could find comfort in God, but his words rang hollowly through my soul.  No longer would God ever be some benevolent being watching over me with a gentle hand and the radiance of unconditional love in his eyes.  God to me now is impersonal and implacable and totally untouchable.  Sometimes I listen to others talk about God with an absolute conviction of his love, of his goodness, of his perfect plans for us all.  I envy them even while my contempt and disgust rear their ugly heads.  What it must be like to trust like that, to have faith like that?  But I will never know, because never again will I blindly trust in goodness.  I railed against the betrayal of my innocence, angry at this salted, barren path God pushed me onto.  The story of “Footprints in the Sand” is a farce.  God does not walk beside anyone, He watches uncaring from afar…if He watches at all. Death came darting from the shadows without invitation to snatch my life from me as surely as he snatched the soul of the woman lying on the pavement. Death infected me with a disease called fear, and for years it nearly crippled me.  How could I trust others with my life when they couldn’t be trusted with their own?  I cowered at loud noises.  All kinds of things frightened me that never had before.  It wasn’t raining or snowing when the accident happened, but I feared them both, as well as traffic and darkness.  Long drives made my muscles ache with tension.  I didn’t trust anyone else behind the wheel, but I didn’t trust myself either.  I flinched at everything, waiting for the punishment I surely deserved.  God allowed this to happen, and I no longer trusted him either.
           The accident nearly ruined my fledgling marriage.  At night I wanted my husband to sit with me in bed, constantly touching me while I dozed.  He is by nature a restless night owl.  Eventually he couldn’t stand the inactivity and shut my cat, Havoc, in the room with me, leaving the light on at my request.  Every few minutes I would wake up and pet her while she purred, then drift back into a doze filled with chaotic, frenzied images.  She never left my side all night long, comforting me with her warm, fuzzy body and unconditional love.  Once a few days later my husband turned off the light when he went downstairs, thinking I would stay asleep for a while.  I woke up alone in a panic, too terrified to scream.  I finally worked up my nerve and stumbled over to turn on the light.  It was a long time before I managed to go back to sleep.  Only when he was there to hold me could I stand the darkness.  On a rainy, gray day soon after the accident, pedestrians were carelessly crossing the rain-slicked street.  My husband rolled down the window and shouted at them with desperation and sick rage tinting his voice.  His inability to help me frustrated and confused him, and my clinging needy fear wore him down as it dragged on night after night.  We used to take long, senseless rides together at night.  No more.  My tension made him crazy every time we got into a car together.  I began avoiding going places with him because we would fight when I tensed every time he braked hard, or if he sped up too fast, or if another car cut in front of us.  He didn’t feel like I trusted him, and I didn’t.  I didn’t trust anyone.
            The looks I received from other people made me feel like a freak in a carnival.  Looks where they accused me of insensitivity for living at all, much less laughing.  What else was I supposed to do?  If I died, I still couldn’t take her place.  And if I continued to live, I had to pay bills, and eat dinner, and in essence go on.  Most people wondered why I wasn’t in a mental institution, insane with grief.  They took my studied casualness for callousness, when in fact it was the only way I could cope.  Then there were the looks where they wondered why I wasn’t in prison paying for my sin, all while they mouthed phrases of how it wasn’t my fault.  Their morbid fascination and pity turned my stomach to a roiling mass of acid. These people wanted every grisly detail, all the while exclaiming on how horrible it must have been for me, never really comprehending the reality.  Finally there were the people who showered me with trite phrases like, “It was her time,” or “She lived a full life,” or “It was God’s plan.”  What an absurdity!  What difference does it make if she lived 8 months or 80 years?  A life is still a life.  And I could have easily done without being God’s instrument for this particular plan.
           Even the single act of kindness I was able to give the woman’s husband came back to haunt me over and over.  My car insurance company gave us the option of suing the man for the damages done to my car because he and his wife were cited for jaywalking and public drunkenness.  I thought the husband had been through enough with losing his wife, I couldn’t be so cruel as to make his misery worse by dragging him into court.  Unfortunately the insurance agent neglected to tell us our rates would jump dramatically if we didn’t sue.  And of course no other insurance company wanted to give us coverage with a fatality involved, even though I was never cited for anything.  I was not to blame, but we were punished.  For five years that accident followed me around like some rabid puppy.  Finally they can’t use it against me anymore. 
           Finally.
           Every Easter I wonder how the woman’s family celebrates.  I wonder if they have put that night behind them and rejoice in spring and Christ’s resurrection as I cannot.  The irony of Easter’s symbolism and the events of that night leave me with a taste like ashes in my mouth, though the sensation slowly fades as the years pass.  I have finally left the irrational fears behind me.  I drive in the dark without breaking into cold sweats.  Snow and rain are just irritants now.  I still reach to brace myself when I ride in the car with my husband, but it is largely just a habit, not an indication of fear.  Our marriage survived, though the waxy white scars still lattice our hearts with the stark glow of nightshade in the moonlight.  Finally I can deal with the grief I blocked away.  But it has been a struggle, a struggle not measured in months or weeks, but days and minutes.  And still when I tell people the room becomes silent as they stare for a moment with poorly disguised pity in their eyes.  I never did find out her name.  I was afraid it would give me nightmares, and I had seen enough.  Maybe one day I will look up the article and read it, but not just yet.  There are parts of this story I don’t tell, parts I can’t tell.  Some things are better left unsaid, better to leave them in their uneasy graves for whatever peace they can find.  I sometimes feel compelled to tend those moldy, mossy graves though, clearing away the dead leaves and brushing dirt from the headstones.  I need to remind myself of the fragility of goodness and of life. 
            Thankfully only sometimes.

 

  
home  |   literature  |   art gallery | interests  |   web design services  |   about crimsondryad  |   contact me
All work © Copyright 2002-2007 Angela Gann unless otherwise noted.