Читать книгу Life #6 - Diana Wagman - Страница 13

LIFE # 1

When I was five-years-old, I sailed through the windshield of my father’s car. Not his fault; we were hit from behind. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, but I don’t think there was one to wear. I launched from the red vinyl seat of his classic white Camaro and my pig-tailed head hit the glass and shattered it. I ended up sprawled half in, half out, my chest and stomach on the hood of the car, my legs and feet in pink socks dangling over the dashboard. My patent leather Mary Janes had flown off my feet into the back seat. I lay perfectly still watching the broken glass sparkle in the streetlight. My father’s nose was bleeding as he crawled over the hood to my upper half.

“Are you all right? Oh no. Oh no.”

“What happened to your nose?” I asked. To this day I remember flying and crashing and landing on the warm metal. My head hurt and the streetlight was too bright in my eyes, but I said, “I’m fine, Daddy.”

My father smiled and I was glad I’d made him happy. When the sirens and emergency vehicles arrived, he was energetic and trembling, joking with the cops and the guy in the other car. He was giddy until he had to call his ex-wife, my mother, and tell her he had almost killed me. His voice got low and scratchy the way it did whenever he had to talk to her. When he brought me home, she said he could never see me again, and that’s when I cried. His upper lip was swollen and bloody from hitting the steering wheel. No airbags in those days. No seatbelt laws. He walked back down the steps to his car with no windshield. There was a rip in the shoulder of his jacket, the white lining flapping farewell.

“Daddy!” I screamed.

He raised a hand. “Call you tomorrow, Button.”

Later, as my mother undressed me for my bath, she found splinters of glass in my thick hair and ground into the shoulder of my yellow sweater. It hurt too much to brush my hair so I went to bed without and in the morning my pillow had scratched my cheek from all the glass. Daddy called to see how I was and my mother cried and then she heard another woman in the background and got angry and hung up before I could talk to him. My headaches did not go away and when, three weeks later, I finally saw the doctor, he said I had a fractured skull and I should have died.