Crash

Chapter One

My name is Thomas Witt, and I died twice last November.

The first time was along a winding stretch of road in the small town of Warrenville, New York as we were driving home from my daughter’s play. A drunk driver plowed into our car, sending us down a deep ravine.

I was revived by a police officer — first to arrive on the scene.

I died for the second time at Mercy Point Hospital, six days after I came out of my coma and was told we had lost our seven-year old daughter, Kayla, in the accident.

That was nearly a year ago.

They say that time heals all wounds. Sometimes, though, time only carves them deeper.

I focus through my lens on the crumpled red car wrapped around the utility pole. The darkness of night has been interrupted by the flashing red lights and the bright-white headlights of emergency vehicles surrounding most of the accident scene. I follow the trail of debris, exploded from the car on impact. I stop on a girl’s backpack, pink with Dora the Explorer, faded and peeling from the back. My stomach sinks as I imagine the girl who owned it. 

Of course, I think of Kayla.

I snap several shots, zoom in closer, and see a doll sticking out of the backpack’s half-closed zipper — a girl with blonde hair and a plastic smile at odds with the scene’s horror.

I wonder if its owner took the doll to school for show and tell. Or maybe she was a shy child who secretly stashed it in her backpack to have something familiar from home to carry her through the day — an anchor to her family no matter how far away they seemed as she sat at her desk.

There’s something about seeing the victim’s objects that cuts deeper than the rest of the scene. I can imagine the girl wearing the backpack, going to school with a smile this morning, with no way of knowing that today would be the last day of her short life. What things did she worry about? Perhaps she wondered what was for dinner? Maybe she was worried which friends would play with her at recess? Or whether her mother would read her a story tonight before bed?

All for naught. 

Her plans for the night, and life, were cancelled by Fate, a cruel fucker, indeed.

The girl was one of two bodies taken away as I got here, already covered in black blankets. Judging from the purse still lying on the road, the other body was her mother, whose own dreams and plans are now also rendered meaningless.

I turn my camera on the massive utility truck that seems to have caused the accident. Other than some front-end damage, the truck looks fine. Its driver, not so much.

I focus on him, hunched over, sitting on the sidewalk, head in his hands, as two police officers stand over him, filling out paperwork and talking to people on their radios. They’re now saying something to him. He looks up, and I immediately see his haunted eyes.

He will carry this accident with him, forever.

I snap photos of him, thinking there’s no way the camera can capture the lost look of his soul that I’m seeing.

I don’t know if he’s at fault, or if maybe the car’s driver had cut him off, or what. The police can sort that out. Regardless, he’s wearing the look of a man who feels responsible for a mother and child dying tonight.

He will never forget this.

I both pity and envy him.

I have no memory of the accident, or the six months prior, that took Kayla’s life and put me in a coma for six days. It’s not enough to take a man’s daughter, but Fate also decided to steal the memories from my last six months with her.

Which is why I started this — whatever you can call this: Going out nearly every day, finding accidents to photograph. I can’t explain how it began, other than some urge to try and remember, to piece together my own tragedy and take back at least some of what was stolen. 

Meghan is worried about me. She lost her daughter, too, but damn, she carries it so much better than I do. The shrink, Dr. Lavender, says that perhaps these excursions are my attempts to find closure. Meghan thinks I can’t let go.

I’m not sure either of them is wrong.

When I get home, at 1:40 a.m., Meghan is asleep.

I feel bad that I wasn’t there to kiss her goodnight, but she’s used to this. Instead of going to bed, I head to my office, turn on my computer, and extract the memory card from my camera.

I load the card into the PC, begin to transfer the photos, and head to the kitchen to grab a drink while the computer is sorting pics into the new folder with today’s date.

I pour tea from the pitcher Meg made earlier, take a sip, and look around the kitchen. A note is on the counter, next to a plate of chocolate chip cookies wrapped in blue cellophane. 

The note says:

"Tried to stay up. Was hoping we could try again tonight. Maybe tomorrow?

—M"

Shit.

I forgot.

Meg has been trying to get pregnant for months, tonight was supposed to be the sweet spot in her cycle. We had no problem getting pregnant the first time. Kayla was, in fact, a happy accident. Now, it feels as if Fate is toying with us. Despite many, many attempts, it isn’t happening. I’m not sure if the problem is mine or hers, physical or mental, but it’s giving her too much stress. She’s thirty-four, but convinced that her time is running out to have another child, even though we’ve known plenty of women much older who have had children.

We’d always wanted two kids, a boy and a girl. We had a girl for seven great years. We stopped trying to have another. Meg was pursuing her writing career, just as mine was taking off — again. We didn’t worry about it so much. We were a happy family, why mess with what was already working by adding a baby to the mix?

I sigh as I imagine the look she’ll give me when I see her tomorrow, just before our certain fight. She’ll say, We were supposed to try! Then she’ll accuse me — again — of not wanting another child. Of maybe not loving her. Or — again — of being obsessed with these accidents.

I hate the arguments. And though I’d never admit it to Meghan, they sometimes push me away from her. Make me not want to have another child.

I head back to my office, sit at the desk, and pull up the night’s photos. I scroll through them while drinking sweet tea. I usually go through the shots, searching for five or six images that connect to me in some way, which I’ll then filter into the collection while the rest will get sent to a raw photos folder.

I make a gallery, rather than scrolling — rows of photos, four by four — to give me a bird’s eye view of atrocities, so I can see the threads I might otherwise miss — the story that I know is there, if I can find it. 

The sudden smell of Meg’s cookies reminds me how hungry I am and of the plate of cookies I’d left in the kitchen. I stand to go get some cookies, but then I see something in the photos.

It slams me back to my seat. 

A man I hadn’t noticed before, lurking in the background of several pictures.

I pull up the first photo with him and fill the screen. The man is standing off to the side of the road, beyond the police and paramedics, close enough to the scene that he must be part of the crew working it. But he’s not in any kind of uniform. He’s wearing all black — from his hat to his suit to his shirt.

In the first photo, he’s just standing there, staring at the accident.

I swipe the track pad and go to the next photo.

He’s still standing there.

I zoom in to see if I recognize him from any of the other hundred or so accident scenes I’d been to. The photos are dark, so he’s a bit grainy. I can’t make out much other than he’s a white guy, maybe in his forties, though I could be off. He doesn’t look like anyone I’ve ever seen. Maybe a reporter? 

I swipe to the next photo, then three more.

He’s just standing there in each of them, staring at the crash. Normally, a man standing on the roadside might not stand out, especially if I shot many photos in the span of a few seconds. But, as I advance through the set, photos taken over the course of several minutes, he’s the only person who hasn’t shifted position.

I reach the last photo.

My heart nearly stops.

He’s no longer looking at the accident. 

The man is staring at me.

A cold chill runs down my spine. I back away from the computer, as if he’s somehow able to look through time and the photo to see me right now.

I stare at the screen.

I tell myself it’s not as weird as it feels. 

Maybe he just happened to look up right then to see me snapping photos. I’m sure that to him, and anyone else not used to seeing me at these crash scenes, I probably look like some kind of creepy gore hound, snapping photos of the horrific, capturing tragedy for some kind of macabre posterity. 

I swipe through to the last photo, and he’s gone.

I go back to the previous picture and then forward again, thinking that some time must’ve elapsed between the two photos, and I simply didn’t capture him walking away. But no, that’s not it. Everyone else is more or less in place between the two shots. The times in the metadata read only two seconds apart.

Impossible.

I quickly swipe through the rest of the photos, trying to find where he went. But he’s not there. He’s nowhere.

I return to the photo where he was looking right at me, and zoom in on his face, in all its grainy glory. I save a copy to my desktop, then print it out.

I’ve made a few friends in the police and fire departments over the past few years, relying on them for some of my research; perhaps one of them can help me identify the man.

I go back and select six photos from tonight, including one of the bodies in black being rolled away, two of the man who was driving the utility truck, one of the doll sticking out of the backpack, one of the car and the field of debris, and finally one of the odd man in black staring at me, and mark them all with tonight’s date.

I am about to head off to bed, when, on a whim, I decide to pull up some of the other accident galleries to see if this man in black appears in any others.

My heart pounds as I see him again — in pictures taken last week. As I scroll through more photos going back several months, my heart races harder. I see him again and again, a grim spectator, even in photos taken two counties away.

How can I have missed him so many times?

Who is he?

I stare at the monitor for what seems an eternity, until 4:14 a.m., when I finally decide I might be able to fall asleep, with the help of pills, of course.

Usually, I worry I’ll be visited in my sleep by Kayla’s ghost. Tonight, I fear the man in black.

Chapter Two

I wake up to one of my favorite smells, blueberry muffins. It’s almost enough to erase the throbbing pain in my head.

Almost.

Sleeping in the corner, on his giant red dog bed, is Gus, our golden retriever. He looks up at me as I get up, eyebrow arched and tail immediately wagging.

Daddy’s up, I say, and he comes over to me and licks my hand, tail wagging harder. He knows when I get up I’ll take him for another walk. Gus loves walks like I love muffins. Of course, Gus also loves muffins like I love muffins.

I reach for the bottle of pain