The scene of the accident was bloodless, and beautiful.
That was the first word that came to Shelly’s mind when she pulled over:
Beautiful.
The full moon had been caught in the damp bare branches of an ash tree. It shone down on the girl, whose blond hair was fanned around her face. She lay on her side. Her legs were pressed together, bent at the knees. She looked as if she’d leapt, perhaps from that tree or out of the sky, and landed with improbable grace. She was wearing a black dress, and it was pooled around her like a shadow. The boy had already climbed out of the smashed vehicle and crossed a ditch full of dark water to kneel by her side.
He seemed about to take her in his arms. He was speaking to her, pushing her hair out of her eyes, gazing into her face. To Shelly, he did not appear panicked. He seemed stunned, and rapturous with love. He was kneeling. He was just beginning to slide his arms beneath her body, to cradle or lift her, when Shelly came to her senses long enough to honk the horn of her car. Twice. Three times. He was too far away to hear her no matter how loudly she might shout, but he heard her honk her horn, and looked up. Startled. Confused. As if he’d thought that he and the girl were the last two creatures on earth.
He was far from Shelly, on the other side of the rain-filled gash, but seemed to wait for her to tell him what to do, and Shelly was somehow able to tell him, as if they could speak to one another without bothering to speak. As if they could read one another’s thoughts. (Later, she would consider this. Perhaps she hadn’t spoken to him at all, she’d reason, or maybe she’d been shouting and hadn’t realized it.) However it had happened, Shelly managed to tell the boy, calmly, so he would understand, “If she’s injured, you don’t want to move her. We need to wait for the ambulance.”
This was the one thing Shelly knew about accidents, about injuries. She’d been married for a few years to a doctor, and that detail had stuck.
“The ambulance?” the boy asked. (In Shelly’s memory his voice was clear and close. But how could it have been?)
“I called them,” Shelly said. “From my cell phone. When I saw what happened.”
He nodded. He understood.
“What happened?” he asked. “Who was that? In the car without headlights? Why—?”
“I don’t know,” Shelly said. “You ran off the road.”
“Help,” he said then—a statement, not a cry—and the bare monosyllable of it was heart-wrenching. A cloud passed over the moon, and Shelly could no longer see him.
“Hey?” she called, but he didn’t answer.
She turned off the engine. She opened her car door. She took off her shoes and waded carefully into the ditch.
“I’m on my way,” she called. “Just stay where you are. Don’t move the girl. Don’t move.”
The water was surprisingly warm. The mud on the soles of her feet was soft. She slid only once, climbing up the opposite bank—and that must have been when she cut her hand on some piece of chrome torn from the wrecked car, overturned ten feet ahead of them in the road, or on a shard of broken glass from the windshield. But Shelly didn’t feel it at the time. Only after the twin ambulances had flashed and wailed away from the scene would she notice the blood on her hands and realize that it was her own.
When she finally climbed out of the ditch and reached the boy and girl, the cloud had passed, and Shelly could see clearly again:
The boy was lying down beside the girl now, his arm wrapped around her waist, his head at rest in her blond hair, and the moonlight had made them into statues.
Marble. Perfect. Rain-washed.
Shelly stood over them for a few moments, looking down, feeling as if she’d stumbled onto something secret, some symbol in a dream, some mystery of the subconscious revealed, some sacred rite never intended for human eyes, but which she had been singularly and mysteriously invited to see.