Sylvia remembered how it had been after the accident, Hugh in the hospital, he and her sister with their cuts and bruises, casts and headaches and compromised movements, the imprint of the seatbelt across Marg’s chest, cherry black—she had shown Sylvia when she visited. Marg developed her aversion to all of it then and there, amongst the windows with the blinds pulled low, the plastic chairs, the thin coffee, the old magazines in which everyone smiled as if life were jolly.
The driver’s side got the impact. It had been a perfectly sunny day. Hugh and Marg had planned a hike and because Marg was pregnant, it was nothing ambitious, just a little ways outside of town, and those children, the children playing the game, their can had careened into the street, and the car ahead of Hugh braked suddenly, so suddenly that Hugh tapped its rear, and they would have both been fine if there had not been, right behind them, one of those big trucks that couldn’t turn corners without a wide berth, that could not stop on a dime, and if the car ahead had not been an SUV, a size that somehow enabled the front of Hugh and Marg’s car to tuck underneath. Their car accordioned. Over the years Marg let the details go, as if she were trying to misplace them, ensure they could not be found again, but she had also given them to Sylvia and Sylvia couldn’t forget. She thought of them often, too often, making them her own, the way one wears secondhand clothes. Sylvia was sure Marg no longer remembered anything except the effects—a dislike of hospitals, the pain in her elbow when it rained, and of course the rearranged house, the ramp, the bedroom moved to the first floor, the bathrooms adjusted to accommodate Hugh’s wheelchair. The crash itself was lost. But Sylvia retained the details: they had given her her life.
In the background Sylvia was aware of the conversation at the other table wrapping up. The man who had entered left the older man and the woman to talk and continued toward the back of the store.
“Sylvia?”
“Sorry. I got distracted by....” She waved her arm toward the other table. She should have never chosen this café. Even with its intimate spaces, it was too busy. Marg smiled wanly for a second. Her skin had gone translucent.
“How bad?”
“Pretty bad.” She paused. “The worst, actually.”
Marg sucked her breath in again. “Meaning?”