Voices

Heather was late for work. A lengthy after-school nap on the family room couch had ruined her chances to be a punctual Target employee. Without provocation, she gently awoke to Oprah’s voice on the TV. “He is hanging you out the window, and burning you with cigarettes, and tying you up. You know, God doesn’t have anything to do with that, not one thing.”

Yikes. She casually looked at the clock: 4:45. Double yikes! She jumped to her feet. Her manager, in his tight red polo and man perfume, was sure to shake his big head and say, “Heather, Heather, Heather…” then cut her hours.

She knocked over a dining room chair as she dizzily hunted for her red vest. She threw her hands up to the popcorn ceiling. Where is it? She didn’t even feel good. She could call in sick. But then she spotted the vest’s crimson corner under the felled chair. Awesome.

She swiped her father’s car keys off the kitchen counter and slammed the door.

Her father was out of town, so she got to borrow his burgundy Ford pick-up truck for errands and work. A month ago, her entire driver’s ed consisted of driving this truck for two hours. Despite learning to drive in it, she didn’t love it. She’d already sideswiped a parked car because she hadn’t quite mastered backing out with a flatbed. She didn’t hurt her father’s truck in the accident, though, so she was still permitted to drive it.

No, her favorite car to drive was her friend Lindy’s new, zippy Honda. One time, Lindy let her take the wheel so she could flirt with Heather’s older brother Bill. Heather aggressively zoomed through highway traffic as Lindy giggled and Bill belly laughed about nothing funny. The magic shattered when a car honked. “Whoa! You cut that dude off!” Bill shouted, then snorted, “You drive like me. Nice.”

Heather didn’t want to drive like her mother who had been known to cry on hill starts and bail out last minute on left turns to avoid oncoming traffic. If her mother had her druthers, all her children would be “defensive” drivers even though she drove like a defenseless mouse. On the other hand, Heather’s father was a yeller, especially when he was teaching her how to drive; in retaliation, she decided to be more chill than he was. So her brother ended up being one of her dubious role models, as did his machismo friend Sadler who liked to use “fuzz-busters” to avoid speeding detection by cops’ radar guns. Neither wore seatbelts.

Sadler was an “offensive” driver. On several occasions, Heather witnessed the way he merged onto the highway. Despite having one to two cars in front of him, he’d find a way to cut in line and merge into the slow lane first, causing drivers to honk and slam on the brakes to let him pass. But this poor form was lost on Heather. Naïvely, she thought it was perfectly acceptable—clever, even.

Heather hopped up into the truck and popped in a U2 cassette. Tunes were essential according to her brother. She belted out, “I can’t live … with or without you!” as she (successfully) backed into the street. Soothed, she momentarily forgot how much her feet were going to hurt during her shift. And like her brother, she did not wear her seatbelt.

Per her mother’s request, Heather drove under the speed limit in the neighborhood to avoid hitting “kids, dogs, and balls.” It was her mother’s favorite PSA, and Heather had to admit, they were indisputable words to live by—one shouldn’t hit things with one’s car. At the stop sign, she strummed the steering wheel in time with “Bullet the Blue Sky.”

Now safely off suburban roads, she looked at the clock and gasped: 4:51. If she picked up the pace, she’d be three minutes late tops. Maybe she’d sneak to the stockroom to avoid her boss’s scrutiny.

When the green arrow blinked, she turned onto the merge lane. A white Chevy truck pulling a small trailer was in front of her and moving a little too slow for a girl in a rush. Why not? she thought. Heather cut in line.

As she entered the slow lane, she soon realized that she needed to rapidly accelerate to match the flow of traffic. Panicked, she floored it to squeeze in between two cars. But she was going too fast. She was about to hit the car in front of her. Yet if she slammed on the brakes, she’d get rear-ended.

She glanced over her left shoulder, accelerated again, and crossed into the fast lane—a race-car maneuver that required her to turn the wheel hard to the left.

The truck, being high off the ground—which is very unlike a race car—did not like the high speed combined with the wheel jerking. In response, the truck, carrying this unbelted, sixteen-year-old girl, was now teetering on two wheels, about to roll into the ditch between the west and eastbound highways.

Heather’s heart drummed. Her tongue tasted like metal. She jerked the wheel to the right to avoid the ditch. The tires screamed as they stained the road. The truck teetered onto the right-side wheels, now headed for a black sedan. Shit! She jerked the wheel to the left. The truck violently rocked onto its left-side wheels once more, toward the ditch.

She had lost control. She was going to fly out the window, be trampled to bits, and glide into the next world. What a waste.

But then Heather heard a voice: “You have to hit that truck.”

The voice was calm, sure, and unfamiliar. It wanted her to hit the white Chevy with the small trailer—the one she cut in front of only minutes before.

Without fear, or thought, or knowledge of physics, Heather turned the wheel and barreled into the corner of the truck’s flatbed.

The Chevy roared like a raging juggernaut as it twisted 180 degrees. But the sound she heard was the jingle of her father’s keys dangling from the ignition.

The impact thrust both vehicles into the shoulder, where they simultaneously came to a stop. The trucks eerily faced each other.

Heather stared ahead, stunned and motionless.

The driver exited his truck and slammed its hollow door. He was an old cowboy in blue plaid and a pale Stetson. He tapped his trusty Chevy and shook his head. Gravel dust clouded his boots as he approached Heather in her father’s truck.

Snapping out of her strange daze, she slid to the passenger side and jumped down to greet him.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

“I … I wasn’t thinking,” which was true. She listened instead.

The burgundy Ford looked like a rhomboid, which prompted the paramedics to put Heather on a wooden gurney. They taped her head to the board when they found out she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

At the hospital, they couldn’t find anything wrong with her, save a low-grade fever, which Heather admitted sensing before the accident. She called in sick.