After five minutes or so, though, I take a break, try to breathe away the fresh pain in my leg, and make myself think. The phone is apparently not an option. What are my options?
If my car had satellite GPS, and the access to emergency services that goes with it, my unreachable phone would be only a minor inconvenience. But most of my driving is in downtown Toronto, except the occasional three-hour trek north to my parents' place, so I'd decided to upgrade the car's CD player instead. Which isn't much help at the moment.
What would help, a lot, would be freeing my leg, so I take off my mittens and feel around beneath the airbag. When my careful inspection finds nothing I can push away, I take a deep breath and pull back against whatever's holding me. Again, nothing but that disgusting pain and no movement.
Trying to ignore the pain, I pull and pull from every angle I can find until I'm panting and afraid I'll be sick, then admit defeat. I am trapped.
Should I try starting the car? I can't imagine driving with my leg pinned beneath I-don't-know-what, but I also can't bring myself to leave a possible escape method untried so I reach past the big golden "R" keychain I found in my Christmas stocking this morning and take hold of the car's key.
The key turns in the ignition but there's no response. The tree must have crushed the engine, or at least messed it up. I hit the horn, then hit it again and again even though the only sound is my increasingly panicked breathing.
I am out of options.
Excitement floods me, washing away the terror. My laptop. My little laptop that goes everywhere with me, and has a wireless internet connection. I could email someone to come help me.
I reach behind my seat where I always keep my bag. It's not there. I twist around frantically, the pain slapping me again as I jerk my leg, and look into the back seat.
The bag is upside-down on the passenger side floor. I think it's within my grasp.
Don't be out of reach, I plead in my head. Don't be don't be don't be.
I reach back slowly, afraid to lose this hope too, and realize I'm muttering, "Don't be don't be" out loud. I pinch my lips shut to stop the words, then take a deep breath, blow it out, and reach.
I don't quite believe I've grabbed the bag until it's on the seat beside me. My hands are shaking so badly I can barely retrieve and open the laptop, and the few moments the tiny darling takes to boot up seem like forever.
Good news: it's not broken.
Bad news: it can't see any networks.
I refresh and re-refresh the empty network list, trying to keep my mind equally blank. Then I shut down the laptop, close it gently, and slide it back into my bag. I even do up the zipper.
Then I start to shriek.
"Mom Dad Andrew Sandra Bill Ruby someone anyone please God help me I'm scared I'm scared I'm scared I'm sorry I'm scared I'm not ready help me."
I'm pounding on the car door and flailing and jerking in my seat like I'm being electrocuted and the thought that my foot might somehow slip free makes me flail more even though the pain makes me shriek more, and I shriek and flail and pound and shriek until I catch sight of myself in the rear-view mirror.
My own insanity stops me cold, terrifying me almost more than the situation. I don't panic. I never panic. I plan and I organize and I execute and I evaluate and I stay calm, damn it.
I hold my frantic gaze in the mirror and don't let myself flinch away. I look into my eyes and tell myself it'll be okay, and I say it again and again in my head and out loud until I start to believe it. I will be fine. I'll get out of here. I even manage a smile at the image of my dad teasing me for being a "lousy woman driver" as Mom and I shake our heads in outraged unison.
I might have to wait a while, but I'm okay. Stuck, but not in immediate danger. It's not that cold, and my coat's warm. Someone will see my tire tracks going off the road. Help will come. Of course it will. Besides, as the song says, "Only the good die young."
A little voice somewhere inside picks up the word and whispers, "I'm going to die? Alone?" Since Bill's death, my greatest fear has been dying alone. No one beside me, no way to say goodbye.
"Easy," I say out loud, as if calming Ruby during a vet visit. "Take it easy."
Deep breaths and a little more self-soothing pull me back together and I reach for the laptop again. Might as well work to keep my mind occupied while I wait for help.
My fingers brush against an unfamiliar hard object in my bag beside the water bottle Mom gave me. Unfamiliar, and then achingly familiar, and my eyes are already filling with tears as I pull out one of Mom's kitchen containers, stuffed with several of her big chocolate chip cookies and a note.
"I know you said you couldn't eat these but I couldn't send you home without a little treat. I think you look beautiful, honey. Merry Christmas! Love, Mom"
While my parents ate turkey and mashed potatoes and my mother's delectable stuffing, I choked down a nasty little vacuum-packed diet-plan-approved flavor-deficient turkey dinner. Condemned prisoners get better food for their last meal. Not that I've had my last meal.
My mom thinks I look beautiful. So did Bill. Andrew's made it clear he feels the same way. Even Sandra keeps telling me I look better than I think I do. But in my eyes I'm never good enough. And look where it's landed me.
Misery overwhelms me, and I let a few tears slide down my cheeks. Others join them, and I'm revving up for a good cry but then pull myself together and wipe the tears away with my mitten. I'm being ridiculous. Sure, this isn't how I wanted to spend Christmas night, but I left my parents' place in a blizzard and now I'm paying the price.
The irony of my mother secretly giving me the cookies I fled the house to avoid is not lost on me, and I certainly won't eat them. I have exactly four months until the dress fittings for Sandra's wedding, and I will not ruin my best friend's pictures by being the fat bridesmaid. Been there, done that, wouldn't have fit into the t-shirt.
My mother means well, of course. She really thought I'd be happy she made and bought all my favorite treats and desserts for our Christmas together, and I managed to pretend delight so I wouldn't hurt her. But she and Dad, with their hyperactive-hummingbird metabolisms, could never understand how food can scream so loud in my ears I can barely hear anything else.
Not lucky enough to inherit their lean physiques, I instead got the 'conserve fat at all costs' body of some long-ago relative who faced constant famine. I don't face famine, though. All I face is the prospect of being two hundred and seven point six pounds for the rest of my life. Which is unacceptable.
So I left their house after dinner, despite Mom's fears of night-time winter driving, and headed to my tempting-food-less apartment. But two particularly scary skids on the icy road changed my mind and I turned around to go back. And then I lost control.
Resolve fills me. No eating those cookies. I'll get rescued and then I'll continue with the diet program. Even though it hasn't worked yet. It will. It has to.
I need a new counselor there, of course, but I'll go in next week and say I can't work with Joel any more. I won't admit what happened, but they'll probably know. I'm sure I wasn't the first one. Then I'll tighten up my eating even more, maybe work out twice a day instead of only once, and I will lose forty pounds by Sandra's wedding and everything will be great.
It's a good plan. I just need someone to come find me. Someone will. I'll be saved. How could I not be?
*****
I try playing solitaire on my laptop to distract myself but after barely half a game I quit. I shouldn't be fooling around. My leg's sore, yes, but when I don't move it's only a dull ache so I'm certainly able to be productive. No more games. Work.
One Enchanted Knight is currently the most popular online role-playing game, but we can't relax. If players don't get new places to explore on a regular basis, they wander off to try out the competition and don't always wander back, so my sunken medieval city, our first new area in six months, needs to be amazing.
After my promotion in March, people assume
d I wouldn't write code any more, since most team leaders don't, but I couldn't bring myself to stop. I'm good at it, and besides, I love it.
The cold precision comforts me. If a program does something unexpected, I know there's a reason and I know I'll find that reason if I dig deep enough. So many things in life don't make sense to me, especially over this last year, but technology never fails me.
Unless it's a cell phone that's slithered out of my reach.
I push away my annoyance at that thought and try to focus on fine-tuning the intricate details of the game components and how they interact with the players. I can't, though. My attention keeps being snapped back to my predicament, making me recognize it again and again as if for the first time.
I'm stuck, the situation is out of my control, there's nothing I can do.
After fighting myself for ten minutes or so, I close the designs so I won't make a mistake. I've made more than enough at work lately. Only one, actually, but that's still too many. And it was huge. Huge and embarrassing and—
I rub my temples and try to push away the memory. My mistake, witnessed by the whole office on my birthday, did lead to some of the best moments of my life but it's still so horrible to think about. So I won't. But what will I think about?
The obvious choice is another escape attempt. When help arrives, it'll be embarrassing if there's a simple way to free myself I didn't consider. But I already gave my leg some serious pulling, and a lot of pain, and I'm not eager to repeat the experience since my foot didn't shift.
To see if it helps, I try to wiggle my toes. The pain flares to life again, shooting up my leg almost to my knee. It sets my heart racing, and not just because it hurts. It's strange, deep and sharp and—
Something's embedded in my foot.
Adrenaline sends a wave of prickly heat through me before I can tell myself it's not possible. It's just not. If my foot were impaled, it would hurt a lot more. So there's nothing in it. There can't be. End of discussion.
But it hurts enough that I don't want to move it again.
Since I can't get out, I make myself open my file of "stuff to read when I have time", full of complicated technical articles I've been saving for weeks or even months. Knowing they're lurking unread in the laptop makes me feel guilty every night, ashamed of my poor discipline. If I read them all now, I can be proud of myself.
I force myself to stay with it for a while then notice I've read the same paragraph four times and still haven't taken in a word.
Frustration tightens around my chest. I so hate wasting time. I could be here for an hour, maybe even longer, and I should be productive. But I can't make my mind stay focused on work.
My laptop holds my personal plans too, so I open them up and skim through to see what I can do here in the car.
Nothing. Pathetic.
I find the "Friends and Social" section of my life plan and type, pressing the keys a little harder than I need to, "Goal: Always have something entertaining available". When I do my annual review on January first I'll figure out what would entertain me and add tasks to put those things on the laptop.
Should I do the review now? It's a week early, but stuck here with nothing but my foot to distract me, perhaps I can better see where I want the next year of my life to go.
I lean back against the headrest and close my eyes. The only thing I want right now is to be set free. And I can't control that. I hate not having control.
Eyes still shut against the truth of where I am, I let my thoughts drift to Andrew. I so want him to be a huge part of the coming year, and I think he will be. No, I know he will be.
Just the thought of him makes me feel warm and comforted, but I need more so I conjure him up in my mind, seeing his blond hair always in slight need of a comb, the way his blue eyes warm when he looks at me, his lean well-muscled body that can knock a man out but gives the best and sweetest hugs I've ever known. I need one of those hugs right now.
Tears rise again, and I scrub them away, not wanting to let myself sink into unnecessary misery again. I will get his hugs again, and more of his kisses too, so there's no reason to be sad.
My eye burns, and I realize I've probably rubbed mascara into it so I pull a tissue from my bag and adjust the rear-view mirror so my eyes are visible. Once the mascara's gone, I keep looking into my eyes in the mirror. They're a familiar sight: each night I stare into my bathroom mirror and ask myself, holding my own gaze so I can't squirm away from the question, "Did you do everything you could do today?"
Something always makes me say no: a workout cut short, a chocolate from a box passed around the office, an extra break at work. Once I identify what I didn't do, the second half of the routine is planning to correct it the next day. Lengthen my exercise session, cut back my food a little more, come back early from lunch, whatever it takes to make up for what I did wrong. I'm careful to follow through on those corrections, but there's still always something new to fix the next night.
I'll need both the extra exercise and the reduced food tomorrow to make up for today's eating, but if I do my planning now at least I'll be able to say I did one good thing today.
And I need to plan. My poor car is obviously in bad shape and I'll need to get it fixed. It might not even be fixable, and then I'd need a new one, and I'd need a loan...
I type in notes and ideas for a few minutes then give up on that too. As I shut the laptop, utter fury snaps through me at my inability to focus. Sure, my leg hurts, but I thought I was tougher than this.
Andrew reappears in my mind, shaking his head and saying, "Sorry, Rhiannon, you're not a robot" as he has so many times before, and I have to smile. Such a sweetheart. He so doesn't share my planning obsession, or my determination to always be better, but he's a great worker and so much fun.
Maybe I should be thinking about Bill instead. He asked me to marry him just over a year ago, and the anniversary of his murder isn't even two weeks away.
I probably should. But I need happy memories right now, and while I had tons of them with Bill it's so hard to pull them out of my mind. They're trapped behind the tragic part.
Even with Andrew, the bad thing that happened looms large and casts ugly shadows over the beautiful moments. To avoid dwelling on the darkness, I pull up a memory of the night before everything went first wrong and then gloriously right. Wrapping my coat tighter around me, for comfort rather than warmth, I let my mind go to Andrew since my body can't.
*****
Out for dinner, the night before my birthday last week. I didn't tell him it was coming up so he wouldn't feel like he had to get me something. We were in that amazing but awkward phase where we knew we were becoming more than coworkers and friends but hadn't done anything about it yet, a phase made even more awkward by my past, and presents would be complicated.
Seated in a quiet corner of the restaurant, we had a lovely time discussing work and gaming strategies and whether my cat liked him more than she liked me. All our usual topics.
When we were nearly finished, two parents and three kids invaded our peaceful space. The kids weren't so bad, although their seriously piercing voices were too loud for comfort, but their mother was a nightmare.
Her clothes were clearly expensive and those highlights in her hair hadn't come naturally, but her perpetual snarl made it clear everything displeased her. Her words made it far too clear her family displeased her more than anything else.
In the fifteen minutes we spent in her company, we heard over and over how tired and stressed she was, how her kids did nothing to help her, and how her husband was useless and to blame for all her troubles.
Said husband, who looked like he might have been attractive before his life beat him into a dull submission, never spoke, not even when his wife grabbed the arm of a passing pregnant woman and said, "God, honey, I hope it's better for you than it is for me."
The mom-to-be's husband freed her from the mom-who-should-never-have-been's clutches and had the restaurant hostess find them
a table in a safer area, and Andrew and I exchanged shocked glances and left an extra-large tip so we wouldn't have to wait for change.
"Besides, they probably won't tip at all," he said once we were on the sidewalk.
"And I bet she'll be totally annoying too. Did you hear her complaining that the lemon slice in her water was too small?"
Andrew buttoned his dark blue wool coat and wrapped a threadbare black scarf around his neck against the sharp wind and the snow whipping around us. "I stopped listening when she told the littlest girl to 'please shut up for one minute for once in your life'."
I looked at the gloves he was pulling on, even more decrepit than his scarf, and made a mental note to get him new stuff for Christmas. With it a week away I'd been agonizing over his gift. This would be perfect: not too overdone and expensive, just something to give him the same warm cozy feelings his presence in my life gave me.
We set off in the direction of his car, a few blocks away, as I said, "Yeah, that was brutal. And why have three if you hate it so much?"
Andrew shook his head. "That's what I kept thinking too. Okay, you didn't know how it would be so one makes sense. Was she fine with two but three were too much for her?"
"Maybe. And I bet those poor kids all figure it's their fault."
"Probably."
We walked in silence for half a block, then he said, "Do you want kids?"
My life plan and its kid-related goal flashed before my eyes. "I'm honestly not sure. I'm my parents' only chance for grandkids, though, which makes it tough. I'm going to decide one way or the other by the time I'm thirty-five."
He nodded. "My sister wasn't sure either. She didn't end up having them, and now she's forty-one and thrilled with her life."
I smiled at him, touched that he hadn't asked my age. We hadn't told each other yet; it wasn't a big secret but it hadn't come up. I liked how he wasn't prying into what I might not want to reveal. It didn't bother me, though, so I said, "I'm thirty-two now." Or I would be in a few hours, anyhow. "So I still have time to make up my mind. What about you?"
Toronto Collection Volume 1 (Toronto Series #1-5) Page 54
