It Was Always You - Sarah K. Stephens Page 0,1
the dusk I can’t see the car fully, but something inside tells me that Justin is going to jerk the wheel towards this other car, and so I reach out to grab the steering wheel with both of my hands. My chest is held back by my seat belt, which seems to be so enamored with its job that it’s locked itself into a shorter length, and I can only get my hands around the right side of the wheel. Still, it’s enough to counter Justin’s swerve to the left that comes a second later, and I manage to shift our car back into our lane.
Sweat pricks at my temples and under my arms. My mind is full of the sound of crunching metal and the feel of shattered glass sprinkling my cheeks. Memories I haven’t retrieved for years. Memories I didn’t even know I had.
Déjà vu floods my senses, followed by the spiky thrusts of dread.
“What are you doing?” I ask Justin, desperation turning my voice into Valley Girl upspeak. Like I’m asking him why he came home with farm-raised beets instead of wild-caught. I’m still trying to free myself from the seat belt, which is clinging to my body and won’t release me, no matter how much I rail against it. I want to shift forward to look him in the eye, to have him look at my face and stop this, whatever it is he’s trying to do.
I love you, I want to say, but the words get swallowed by the thrashing of the wheels as they skid along the road.
And then his phone rings, and a name pops up on the screen.
“Mom” is calling, it says.
Justin and I look at the phone together in an odd duet. My mouth opens and closes, a bilge pump of fear. When he turns to me, our eyes lock, mine wild and erratic and his two steadfast pools of blue. I think I see something shift in his face, a flicker of a feeling I can’t identify. He looks back at the road, unbuckles his seat belt, and pushes his foot hard down on the accelerator. We are coming up to a hairpin turn, and the inertia of our bodies and the car encasing them wills us off the road, so I fling my hand out to the steering wheel one more time. Justin’s skin is hard as a stone. The pads of my fingers prickle.
I hear the squeal of tires, the crunch as we move from the road to the berm, and the sickening crack of the car’s front end making contact with the trunk of an ancient tree. Justin’s hand goes limp underneath mine.
There again is that familiar shower of shattering glass, followed by a cry of pain. The voice I hear could be Justin’s, or mine, or both of ours mixed together in a polyphony of terror.
Until the cry is replaced with another voice—her voice.
My mother’s.
“Morgan.” The sound of my name hums like a buzz saw. “Morgan.”
Her voice creeps out from behind lead-lined doors.
My mind is playing tricks on me. Again.
And just like all the other times, hearing her say my name is not a wish my mind is making.
It’s a nightmare.
2
BEFORE
The podiums at the front of classrooms are really all the same. By this point in the semester, just a few weeks away from final exams, they are chock-full of jettisoned belongings, left and never claimed by their owners. In my classroom there’s an earring with two musical notes dangling from the post, an umbrella, a pathogen-experience of a coffee cup with the remnants of coffee from several weeks ago, three Five Star notebooks, and a miscellaneous gathering of pens and pencils. I push all of this aside to make room for my lecture notes, my water bottle, and my phone.
After I set it on the faux-wood desk, I check my phone is on silent. Only a month or so in, Justin and I are already settling into familiar patterns. For instance, Justin likes to text me in the middle of the day. For no reason really, just to tell me he’s thinking about me, and as much as I find it kind of mid-century adorable, I also don’t need my students hearing those little pings and getting distracted. It’s hard enough keeping their attention without my social life on full display.
When I look up I notice a young woman sitting in the front row, smiling at me.
I don’t know her in particular—my classes are large