The Late Matthew Brown. Paul Ketzle

“If only there was something for me to feel guilty about.”

      The mist was thickening in the twilight, but Hero demonstrated no hurry to leave. Instead she led us through the unkempt grass, pointing out a variety of other convict markers, pausing over each to make sure I read the name out loud. This was, I imagined, her way of trying to guilt or goad me into some acknowledgment of my culpability. And I confess an eerie feeling began to fall over me, but in some ways this tour only made the whole experience feel less real. Adler was going to move from a name on a page to a plaque in the earth—I felt just as detached as always, but at least there seemed in this place to be an end to my task, which couldn’t come soon enough for me.

      “What do you imagine this is supposed to do for me?” I asked.

      “It makes them more real, doesn’t it?”

      “I’m not a killer,” I said.

      “No,” she said. “You just pull the lever.”

      “No, I pick the guy who pulls the lever. Like I said, it’s completely different.”

      By the time we left, night had fully descended. As I drove, Hero was mostly silent, and I didn’t feel any need to interrupt this calm before our inevitable storm. I gunned the engine until the whole of the cab rattled and threatened to shatter.

      As the road curved right, I flipped on my brights to better make out the space ahead. Oncoming headlights filled the windshield, impenetrable and brilliant, overtaking everything. Rushing behind them, the powerful engine, the determined driver, the road growing more tiny and unsupportable by the second. Then, the lights passed in the rush of a small car I could just make out in my peripheral vision—bass turned up high, windows down, jamming its way through the night. Right in the path ahead of us, I saw the shine of eyeballs. Instinctively, I jerked the wheel, slightly but suddenly, to the side. Maybe it’s wrong to say I didn’t see it coming, because I used to see it coming all the time, every close brush by a semi on the freeway, every slick moment when the tires lost their grip—I just had no reason to believe that this one was going to be the one time it really happened.

      As in a dream, the road swayed and two faint red dots ran streaking across my rearview. Somehow unreal, we were swerving. The truck fishtailed, a lumbering, heavy thing. Soon, we were full-on spinning, and there was nothing I could do but watch everything swirl and fall away. Then we were off the ground, airborne, soaring, and for this moment of incline, nothing seemed unattainable. Hero and I and this heavy, speeding machine, were breaking all the rules. A high squeal sounded—a voice or engine, it could be any one of us—and then we were falling.

      I have no memory of hitting the ground.

      g

      “Hero?”

      I couldn’t see a thing. I had no idea how long we’d been sitting here. The engine was silent, and the cab was still. Beyond my door, I could hear the fierce chirp of wildlife that was no longer concerned about us. We might have been sitting here for hours.

      “Hero?” I said, this time louder.

      Still nothing.

      “Um… Marinara?”

      “Keep trying,” she said, quietly. She might have been sleeping.

      “You okay?”

      “I think so. Just a little achy all over. You?”

      “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Fine, I suppose.”

      In the blackness of the cab, I couldn’t see myself. Beside me, I could just barely make out my daughter—a mere silhouette with an occasional dull outline of a feature—a cheek, a frown, the curve of ear.

      “Why am I sitting in a puddle?” she asked.

      “Good question,” I said. “Me, too.”

      The well of the cab had filled with water that gathered around our thighs. I’d been aware of it for a few minutes now, subconsciously, but her question reminded me that this was odd. I wondered if I had a concussion, then wondered if someone with a concussion could wonder that. A cloudy sheen coated the windows, but even after Hero wiped a spot in the fog clear, there was nothing but more blackness to see.

      “We’d better get out of here.” I said finally.

      Hero choked a pale laugh. “Ya think?”

      “Seriously?” I said. “This is the time to joke?”

      Escape was not so easy to accomplish. My shoulder ached when I tried to move it, feeling both stiff and constrained. My legs were completely submerged in a dark muck. I kicked against the flooring, trying to gain leverage. All around was the inescapable stench of bog, and crickets chirping in powerful, sharp chorus. That last moment played again in my head— the bright lights, the swerve and jump, the crash.

      We were off road, “out there,” somewhere, probably twenty miles from civilization, in the untamed and night-consumed wild. When I tried to sit up, I found myself bound where I sat.

      “I think I’m trapped,” I said.

      “Freakin’ jeez.”

      “Can you unlatch my seatbelt?” I asked. “It hurts to reach.”

      Though she was leaning in close over me, it felt strange that I still couldn’t really see her. I wondered if perhaps I’d hurt my eyes. Immediately after Hero unlatched the belt, I felt the pressure lift. I could move with relative ease.

      “My door won’t open,” Hero said.

      “Try the window,” I suggested

      I turned the key, which faintly lit the dash, illuminating us like neon-green ghosts. Hers wouldn’t roll, but mine did, weakly and slowly, about two thirds of the way down before jamming to a stop. Using my legs and pulling with my one good arm, I managed to crouch on the seat. The truck pitched as I leaned out the window, and Hero shrieked.

      I tumbled out into the thigh-deep bog, water and muck swallowing my head in a swoosh. I thrashed about, digging myself back to the surface, afraid that the truck itself was about to fall on me. But the rig had just shifted mildly, listing at a slight angle before settling back down. As Hero pushed out of the window, I tried to ease her down into the water, but pain shot through my neck and shoulder and I dropped her.

      When she came back to the surface, she was laughing.

      “Good catch. What’s wrong with your shoulder?”

      “Nothing,” I lied.

      I reached over to hold up my arm to alleviate the pain. Something was seriously wrong with it, but I put that aside for the moment. For the first time, we could look around and survey our situation in the quarter light of the moon. The truck appeared to be lying relatively flat, as if parked, but still slightly tilted and buried deep in the muck halfway up the door, its tail flush against a tree where it had crashed to a halt. The bed was a crumpled accordion.