Blessed Event

ONE Alliance, Texas--July 1983 I wanted a family. I wanted Joanne to be part of us, of our family. Cal, my husband, he wanted the same thing, at first. Somehow, all our reasons got lost. I was the last one to know that something had gone wrong with our plans. Once I found out, everything went to hell pretty fast. By the time it all came clear to me, Joanne's 1980 Buick Le Sabre was down the hall in my bedroom, tipped headlong over my dresser. A steep embankment runs up beside our house to the highway. Joanne lost control of her car at the moment when her headlights would have flashed by our window. She was my closest friend. I don't remember a time before I knew her. She was as close as family. When she agreed to my plan, she became family. I still believe that. The seconds after that accident were the most awful moments of my life, when Cal and I woke to the sounds of Jo's car crashing into our bedroom, crunching our wall like a Saltine cracker. Wood and paint sprayed everywhere, along with glass from the windows and picture frames. I had cuts in a dozen places on my body that I never felt. My first thought was about the baby. Somehow I thought Joanne would be strong enough to get up and walk away. She'd stood up to her daddy for twenty-seven years; a car wreck shouldn't have been the end of it. But the baby, I didn't know if the baby could take something like that. Then I saw Joanne. I saw her bloody and broken through the car window and I just knew they were both lost. I stayed in the room as long as I could, until the smell of gasoline and the sight of my friend turned my stomach inside out. I stayed while Cal went to get help and I tried to reach in and touch her, but warm blood was everywhere and I had to pull back. Every part of me was shaking. After the police, the fire truck, and the ambulances all got to my house, I sat in my kitchen. I was trying to get away from the shouting, the thick air and, most of all, from the sight of Joanne. They said she was alive, but just barely. She probably wouldn't make it out of the car. It was more than I could handle. Sitting in my kitchen, I could block out everything else; only for a few seconds at a time, but just enough to hang on to my mind. I'd stare at my cigarette--the first I'd smoked in two years--like it was the most important object in the world, some treasure, and push all the other images away. It would come back to me in no time; but a moment here and there kept me going, like catching your breath when you're too winded to move on. Cal stayed in there all morning, talking to the police. He came in the kitchen once with the deputy to answer some questions with me. "When was the last time you saw her?" the deputy asked Cal. I could hear the medical people in our room, trying to get Joanne out of the car. "She been here recently?" "Yesterday afternoon," I answered for him. "She came over here." I thought of her then, standing in my house, troubled by something--both of us unaware of the terrible things that would come so soon. "Yeah," Cal told the deputy. "She was here when I got in from work." She'd been at the house for an hour before he got home, working hard to say something to me, looking for words that wouldn't fit into the thoughts she had in her head. "Joanne," I said. "Just tell me, whatever it is." I put my hand on her arm and she jumped. We'd been familiar as twins for twenty years of my life. She'd never flinched once before. Then Cal came in the front door. She took one look at him and I didn't need any words to know what she couldn't say. It was my fault. I'd put them together. She left without another word to me or to him. "Was there anything that made you think she was upset or angry?" the deputy asked. He was looking at me. "Yeah,"Page, Jean Reynolds is the author of 'Blessed Event', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345462152 and ISBN 0345462157.