After the crash, she stumbled out into the dark. She had the thought, even then, that she shouldn’t be moving. Something about neck injuries after a crash. Something she had learned in school or seen in a movie or both or neither.
But the car felt like it was crushing her. Suffocating her. Like it was filling up with water, even though they were nowhere near any real water, just the thin stream from the melting snow running down the small ravine under the overpass.
The headlights were still on, somehow, even though the front of the car had been folded up. Like laundry, she thought, but not the neatly-folded laundry in a store or at a laundromat. The stuff that you wad up and stick into your drawer after you’ve washed it for the umpteenth time and you’re sick of it and you just want it to be done so you can cook dinner or watch TV.
The headlights were on and the brake lights were on and even the cab light was on, for some reason, but it was red like the brake lights, stained by something she didn’t think about, couldn’t think about because the ground was shifting under her feet and it took all her concentration to stay standing. Somehow, the folding of the front of the car had angled one of the headlights up, and it pointed up and up, illuminating the shadows underneath the tall overpass.
That’s why she saw it. She was following the trajectory of that one headlight, up and up, and trying to keep the ground steady beneath her feet. One hand on the mangled front of the car, one shoe off, she didn’t know where, her foot on the cold ground, standing in what was left of the gray slush at the edge of the dead bushes beneath the overpass, beside the ravine.
That’s why she saw the thing under the overpass. Saw it move. Saw the way the arches were its shoulders, the place where they met its face, the shadows its mouth. Saw it take a deep breath in, and then the ground spun out from under her feet after all, and darkness and cold swallowed her up.
Her next clear memory was in the hospital two days later. In-between were things like the ghosts of memories. Photographs improperly exposed, capturing blurred and out-of-context objects, almost impossible for the waking mind to decipher.
Mitzi was the only one from work who came to see her, but she brought a card signed by all the other secretaries and paralegals on her floor, and even a few of the clerks and attorneys. Flowers came, as well. From her mom in Florida, from the office, even some from Phil’s sister, which seemed inappropriate, somehow. “I should send her something,” she told Mitzi, but Mitzi gently put a hand on her shoulder, “You should rest.”
Phil was dead. They didn’t have to tell her, though they eventually did. She had seen the inside of the car, even if it came back to her only as a red-lit blur. More than that, though, she had seen the intake of breath from the thing under the overpass, even if she tried to deny it, and she knew what it had been breathing in.
For another week, she was in the hospital, marking off milestones like the first day she was able to hobble—with help—to the small bathroom to pee on her own. They told her a litany of unfamiliar names; all the bones she had broken. Her collarbone, some ribs, bones in her left foot and leg, others she didn’t even know she had.
What they never said was how lucky she actually was. They never compared her injuries, however severe, to the red paste that had been left of Phil. Not only was she alive, she would heal. She would walk—not out of the hospital, they put her in a wheelchair for that and her sister, who had flown into town to stay with her for a week, picked her up—but back into the office one day, certainly, and the distance to that day would be measured in weeks, not years.
When she did go back to work, it was with a foam neck brace that her sister had picked up from Walgreens. She called it her “cone of shame,” like the ones they put on dogs when you bring them home from the vet. One of the jokes she used to try to make light of the situation, so her sister and her coworkers wouldn’t notice the shadow she kept watching, up there in the dark.
The week in the hospital was followed by two months of regular physical therapy, which she went to three days a week, on her way home from the office. That was where she met Ted, a CPA who also owned a landscaping company, though he no longer worked at it. “I worked there summers, through college,” he said, his skin pleasantly tan, still, though now it came from regular vacations, rather than hard work. “When the owner decided to sell, I figured I had enough to buy. Help some other guys work through college, y’know?”
Ted had a house, as opposed to her apartment, which was where they ended up retiring after their fifth or sixth date. He was a timid lover, obliging her to take the lead. It was something she might have found unsatisfying at any other time, but now it seemed like just what she needed. She even managed an orgasm that night, sitting astride him, and as she did, as she craned her head back as far as her healing collarbone would allow and sucked in her breath through her teeth, she saw another indrawn breath behind the lids of her eyes, a shadow high above.
She and Ted had been seeing each other for five months. He finished up his physical therapy before she did—he was recovering from a tendon torn when his son from a previous marriage convinced him to try out rock climbing—but often still met her after hers for dinner at the Italian restaurant in the same strip mall, where they had gone for their first date.
When her physical therapy had ended, too, they started venturing further afield. On the day that she went to the office without the neck brace for the first time, Mitzi and some of the other secretaries took her out to the Cheesecake Factory. Shortly thereafter, Ted started taking her to nicer restaurants on the Plaza, though she, if she had to be honest, missed the quiet of the unassuming little Italian place.
It was on the way back to his house from one of these rendezvous—a new place, recently opened, all the way up north, near the airport—that they passed under the overpass. It was the first time she had been by since the accident. A pile of red, red plastic flowers lay in the bushes next to a tipped-over cross bearing Phil’s initials. They had mud on them, but that did little to diminish the splash of crimson that the headlights picked up as they moved into the curve beneath the overpass.
Without knowing what she was doing (was that true) she reached out and grabbed the steering wheel. Later, she would tell herself that she just wanted Ted to stop the car. She wanted to get out and look, to mark the occasion, to pay her respects. Maybe even to assure herself that there was nothing there, in the dark up above. None of that is what she did, though.
She gripped the wheel and yanked it, hard and sudden, jumping the car off the road, through the scratchy bushes, and into the concrete support leg of the overpass. The last time, she hadn’t remembered the wreck at all. This time she seemed to capture every second of it. The difference in sound as the tires left the highway. The scraping of the bushes along the side. The noise Ted made, not quite a word but more like a half-dozen words all trying to leave his mouth at once. The impact as the nose of the car struck the concrete.
This time, Ted was the first one out of the car, which surprised her. Her seatbelt was stuck, and she fumbled at it with numb hands for several painfully long seconds as Ted stumbled toward the front of the car, his door hanging open, the notification beep going off again and again in her ears.
When her seatbelt finally let go, she seemed to spill out of the door, and was startled to find that she stepped directly onto the red plastic flowers, their petals scratching at her ankles through the pantyhose. Ted was looking at his hands, which were stained with blood. Down at the ground. But as soon as she had stepped out of the flowers she was looking up. Up and up into the dark above, where she knew that it was waiting.
There was no headlight angled upward this time, so the space directly beneath the overpass was lost to shadow. Yet she knew it was there. “We’re here!” she yelled up to it, pointing over at Ted. “We’re here! Take us!”
At the sound of her voice, Ted looked over, and the confusion on his face, the childlike sense of abandonment, almost made her stop what she was doing, as she caught it out of the corner of her eye. But then she saw movement. The shadows seemed to part as the face dipped down. It was all ridges and planes. She had seen a movie once, back in school. A silent movie from Germany, with a lady robot. The face reminded her of that. All hard angles and flat surfaces. It opened its mouth, and Ted began to scream.
“Something just ran out into the road.” That’s what she told them. A dark shape, big but indistinct. A dog, maybe, or a raccoon. Ted had swerved to avoid it, she’d reached for the wheel, but it had all happened so fast.
This time they did tell her that it was a miracle she had survived unscathed. Though Ted’s death was eventually attributed to heart failure, he was banged up badly from the wreck, bleeding profusely from his forehead, and they thought the shock of it was what had killed him. She knew they were wrong. Wrong about that, and wrong about her miracle. She had been hurt in the wreck. She remembered feeling the bruises and cuts as metal and plastic and glass all bit at her. More to the point, she remembered feeling them fade, as Ted’s screams died away.
They kept her in the hospital overnight, just to be safe, and when she finally fell asleep in the unfamiliar bed she saw that face, leaning down, mouth open, and it was like she rose up off the bed, out of the room, out of her body.
Her dreams were of machines that were like dinosaurs. Monsters that chewed up the earth to make new earth, to build roads and bridges, ditches and canals. Flattening mountains here, building mountains there. So much power, so much motion—how could it do anything but create something more than just inert stone and steel?
A skeleton built across an entire continent. Made not to prop it up, but to hold it down. To break it, to tame it. Such hubris. Such extravagance. Of course it had a face, a mouth, an appetite.
She waited another two months before she started going to the bar. It was far from her apartment, in a part of town where the lights of the city gave way to industrial lots and railroad tracks. She went there three nights—nonconsecutive—before someone picked her up.
His name was Ryan and he did “remediation,” he told her. Which meant that he was part of a team that went in after basements got flooded or buildings burnt and cleaned up the mess. His hands were rough and his face held traces of stubble that she could feel beneath her fingertips, even though he looked clean-shaven. He drove an SUV, rather than the pickup she had imagined, but that didn’t matter.
When they left the bar, she gave him directions to where she said her house was. Directions that took them under the overpass. This time, however, when she tried to grab the wheel, it wasn’t clean. He slammed on the brakes, the SUV swerved into a skid, and toppled onto its side as the passenger-side wheels went off the road.
As the side next to her crunched down, she heard the airbag go off—a pop that seemed to crack open her eardrums, like when the cabin pressure changes during takeoff and landing. She didn’t feel, not right then, the chunk of dashboard that went into her side, but she felt it when she first tried to move. A biting pain, cold and hot all at once, that made every motion an agony. But she had to move, because Ryan was already climbing out of the driver’s side door, on what was now the top of the SUV.
“What the hell,” he was saying, over and over again, like it was a litany rather than a question. She heard him drop from the side of the car to the ground, not waiting at the top to extend a hand down to help her. And she knew she couldn’t climb out on her own. Not with this thing in her side, the blood already pooling under her blouse, in the belt of her slacks.
Instead, she kicked at the windshield. It had spiderwebbed when the SUV went over. Safety glass turning to linked pebbles, and it took her four kicks to get the whole thing to fall out, onto the dirty ground. The air was already getting cold again at night, and she could see Ryan’s breath, where he paced in a circle like a wounded dog.
“What the hell,” he said again, rounding on her as she came crawling out of the wreck of the windshield. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You coulda killed us both.”
She pushed herself to her feet, then, and she guessed he saw the jagged piece of plastic that was still stuck in her side, or the blood that slicked both her palms. “Oh god,” he said, his hand going to his mouth. He stumbled, turned away. He wasn’t dead. Wasn’t even hurt, not compared to her. She wouldn’t live long, though. Not bleeding like this. She bent to the ground and picked up a rock.
She walked three miles before she called a cab, flinching every time a car passed, its headlights possibly picking up the bloodstains that still marred her torn blouse and slacks. Fortunately, she’d brought a jacket with her—a prophylactic against the cold evening air, not against this scenario—that covered the worst of it, and her clothes were dark anyway, making the blood largely invisible in the night.
Under the jacket and the blood, she felt great. Her wound not just healed, but gone as though it had never been. Her muscles felt stronger than they ever had before, her breathing easy, the cold air filling her lungs in a way that seemed like she had been trying to breathe through a pillow all the rest of her life.
The cab picked her up outside a different bar, where she explained that she’d been stood up by a date, though the driver didn’t ask, and took her to her apartment. She put the clothes in a separate trash bag, intending to dispose of them later, and showered before going to bed, watching the water turn pink as it washed the blood off her sides and hips.
That night, lying in the dark, she saw the thing beneath the overpass. It was hovering above her, leaning down from the dark of her ceiling, its face only inches from hers. It was like it was going to give her a kiss, but it had no lips. Just the dark planes of its mouth, and she could smell exhaust and asphalt.
In the distance, the sound of concrete moving.
For three weeks, she cautiously checked the headlines of the newspaper at the coffee shop on the ground floor of her office. She didn’t want to buy papers every day, because that was a behavior that was out of the ordinary for her, but she got to work early each morning, browsing through them while eating a Danish in the shop window. Looking for anything about Ryan. Looking for anything about murder.
At night, when she got back to her apartment, she watched the local news on channel 6. Looking for anything familiar. She saw nothing. Day after day after day she saw nothing, and her dreams grew more intense, as she felt the thing in the overpass reaching out to her. Drawing ever closer and closer.
She made it twenty-seven days before she called Mitzi.
“I’ve been struggling,” she said, sitting on Mitzi’s couch. “Ever since Ted . . . you know. I feel like it was my fault, somehow. Like I’m cursed.”
Mitzi patted her hand, said something comforting.
“I just feel like I have to go back out there. Like I need some kind of closure. But I’m scared to go there by myself. I haven’t been by sinc . . . since it happened. Can you take me?”
Of course, Mitzi agreed. She was a good friend, after all. The one who had come to see her in the hospital. On the drive out, the sun was sinking. She imagined that they would arrive and somehow find Ryan’s SUV still there. Still tipped up on its side and waiting, his body a dark flower beside it. Or maybe they would find police tape, like in a cop show, outlining where he had fallen after the rock struck him once, twice, three times, four.
Instead, they found nothing. Nothing to indicate that anything had ever been here, except that the bushes had been cleared back from the side of the road. There wasn’t even the little roadside shrine that Phil’s sister had made, not anymore. Two more tragedies had effectively deconsecrated the site. Now it was just a curve in the road, again, the blacktop ending, the dirt, the brush, the shallow ravine, and the legs of the overpass.
Nonetheless, she knew right where to have Mitzi park. She could imagine the wrecks there, the roadside shrine, all of it. She knew the angle, in relation to the shadows, up so far above. She got out while Mitzi sat in the driver’s seat, the engine still running, her hazards on. She walked up to the front of the car, into the beam of the headlights. She didn’t look up. She no longer needed to. She could feel it there. Above her. Inside her. Waiting.
She bowed her head, her shoulders shaking. She hoped she looked like she was crying. She needed to. But she felt like she was praying, instead. Felt like her heart was opening up, like her ribs were unfurling in order to let out the light that would consume her, otherwise. She bent, dropped to her knees, grateful for the resemblance between grief and exultation.
She heard the crunch of Mitzi’s shoes in the dirt. She had gotten out of the car to comfort her friend, as she had known she would. Mitzi was a good friend, after all. There was a tire iron in her purse. The long, straight kind, that jogged at the end. She rose up as Mitzi approached, drawing it out. Her friends eyes had time to widen, and in the dark of them, she could see the thing under the overpass waiting behind her.
She put Mitzi’s body into the driver’s seat and pushed the still-running station wagon off the road, headfirst into the narrow ravine. Maybe it would look like just an accident, maybe not. She didn’t care anymore. All she cared about was the god of concrete and metal above her. She could feel it all around her now. She saw its face, looking down from the dark. She reached her arms up, the red blood that spattered her hands and wrists looking black in the gloaming, and she heard that sound—the grinding roar of concrete tearing loose, as its rebar fingers reached back . . .
