The Best Medicine [nate]

The day that she died the doctors told me, “no one expected her to live this long,” like it was some sort of consolation prize, like it was supposed to make me feel better. I felt the word long shouldn’t have been anywhere near that sentence. Twenty-four years isn’t long. Two years of marriage isn’t long either, but that’s all we got. That’s all I got. After her death I quit my job and moved back to my parents house. I couldn’t take the empty apartment. I used my savings and bought a nice big truck that I hardly ever use. I also bought a fifty-three inch plasma screen and a collection of DVD’s that, at the time, could rival a small video rental place, but now feel old and used. When people would ask me how I was doing I would say, “My wife died,” and they would leave me alone.

Every year, on her birthday, I drive out to visit her gravesite. I never miss it. I pay my respects and remember how my life used to be, before she left me. The drive is about three hours along a stretch of practically empty two-lane highway to the graveyard where her family had a plot. On the drive, I tend to keep the radio off and I look at the clouds. It reminds me of when Rebecca, my wife, and me were dating. We would spend hours laying in the park, arguing over what we thought the clouds looked like.

On the most recent trip, the sky was particularly full of clouds, but the sun was high, and on the long stretches of highway, the heat was unavoidable. The A/C was on but my hands were sweating from the sun baring down through the window. Along the side of the highway ran a small ditch that at the top, along the edge of the highway, was lined with small white rocks, and down in the ditch patches of small white flowers sprinkled the grass. I was so focused on a particularly interesting cloud high up in the sky that I did not notice the car stalled on the side with about a fourth of itself still on the highway. When I hit it, the car slammed forward and my truck, with me bouncing inside, spun 180 degrees around and rolled backwards into the ditch. My air bags did not deploy and my head bounced against the top of the steering wheel and I fell back against the seat and I saw through the window some clouds until they started spinning and I blacked out.

When I came to the sun was in my eyes. The truck was still running and I could feel the A/C blowing on my face. My head was throbbing and I felt for blood but was relieved when my hand was dry. The lump was rather large, and looking in my mirror was painful in itself. I turned off my truck and stepped outside, crushing a patch of flowers beneath my feet, and I felt a sharp pain run up my right leg. Looking up I noticed the clouds were cleared and I wondered how long I had been out. When I looked down the ditch towards the car the first thing I saw was the blood on the white rocks. I climbed, slowly, out of the ditch and with the sun to my back I started to sweat.

I was practically dripping by time I got to the man pinned down halfway underneath the front of the car. I figured he must have been standing in front of the car when I hit him. He looked about my age with short blond hair and tanned skin that was turning red. Blood had pooled behind his head and another puddle was forming beneath his back. The sun had dried some of the blood against the rocks creating the smell that reminded me of the hospital and I thought of Rebecca. I looked down the highway and couldn’t see a car for miles. In the distance I could see massive white clouds rolling in. I kneeled down and felt his neck; pressing my fingers hard against his moist skin. I thought I felt a pulse and leaned down, closer, and realized that he was actually breathing, softly, too. Shocked, I decided I had to do something right then to stop his bleeding and keep him alive, for both our sakes. I slowly lifted his head and nearly puked when the blood poured out of his hair. The smell was overwhelming. I stumbled, painfully, back to my truck and grabbed my pocketknife from the glove compartment.

When I was back at the man’s side, I cut off a long strip from the shirt he was wearing and carefully wrapped it around his head, pulling it tightly. I had his blood and sweat, from both of us, on my hands when I slowly pulled him from beneath the car and turned him over, revealing the wound on his lower back. Inside his car I found another shirt and I wrapped that tightly around his waist. I really didn’t know if it would help, but it was really all I knew to do. Back inside his car I found his cell phone in the center console and I figured the ambulance would come from town so I could continue my way to the graveyard without them seeing me. I knew I would need a doctor for my leg and my head eventually, but for the time being I would be fine.

I used his phone and told the dispatch that I thought I’d driven by an accident, and I put his cell phone back in the console. I checked one last time to make sure he was still breathing, wished him luck, and hobbled back to my truck. It started fine and I was able to reverse up and out of the ditch. With each press on the gas pedal my leg ached. The A/C kicked in and it felt great across the lump on my head. Looking back at the car through my rearview mirror I realized I was lucky my truck even started.

I drove into the mass of clouds and the cover brought a nice relief from the sun. My head was beginning to throb but I was only an hour from the graveyard and at that point there was no way I could turn around. I kept replaying the accident, what I could remember, over and over in my head. I wondered if they could figure out if it was me, and if the man would even survive. I wondered if I wasted time even trying to help him, and wished I had an extra pair of clothes because I had his blood on me. I couldn’t believe that this had happened to me, after everything I had been through.

About thirty minutes away from the graveyard I had an overwhelming need for something to drink, and I decided I should probably clean myself up a bit as well. I pulled off the highway into a small gas station and tried to sneak in to the bathroom past the attendant.

“You all right mister?” he said, catching me halfway across the store.

“Yeah, uh, I hit a, uh, deer, about thirty miles out.”

“Wow, you’re lucky to be alive, was the deer as lucky?” he said with a laugh.

“I’m not really sure.”

“Poor thing, if not, hope it didn’t suffer very long.”

I was covering the blood on my hands behind a display of candy bars when he finally left me alone. In the bathroom under the fluorescent white light my face looked worse than I imagined. The lump on my head had swollen into a dark purple mass and the sweat in my hair had dried making it knotted and stuck to my forehead. I slowly washed my forehead, every touch causing me to wince in pain. I purchased a bottle of water and as quickly as I could got to my truck and left.

When I reached the graveyard the pain in my head and leg was so hard to bear that I forgot about the hill I would have to climb to get to Rebecca’s grave. The graveyard was empty and the sun smothered me as I walked, nearly dragging my leg, up the hill. I drug myself through headstone after headstone, reading the names quietly out loud. Robert Bardon… Douglas Winfield…Julie Folklin…Reading the names became a sort of mantra to keep myself going. Howard Smith… Jessica Lawson… Bradley Saxwell…My head was throbbing and my thoughts were cloudy. Jacob Burton… Ronald Stanford…Alexis Walton… Finally, I came to Rebecca Harding, and I collapsed beside the headstone.

Lying there, beside her grave, I wanted to know what his name was, and if he died would he be buried here too? I thought about how the gas station attendant called me the lucky one, and how he laughed as if he knew. Like he knew it was all some joke that everyone was a part of, even the man lying bloody on the side of the street, that I would someday be let in on. To some people, everything is a joke. I could hardly keep my eyes open as I stared into the sky, and I saw a single cloud, and I wondered what Rebecca would think it looked like, and I started to laugh.