By Charlie Coke

“Mr. Danvers, how are you doing today?” a man dressed in white and blue asked as he entered, dabbing his cigarette in the tin ashtray next to me. His face was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“They tell me your recovery is going well.” 

“Yeah, I . . . I think so,” I replied, my voice wavering.

“That’s good. And your memory?”

He seemed to sense my uneasiness, adjusting in his seat and smothering his cigarette.

“That’s alright, it’s what I’m here to help with. Mr. Danvers, I would like to speak to you about the evening of your accident. What can you tell me about the evening of August 24th? Can you recall the details of that night?”

“I think so, um, it’s a little fuzzy.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be here to help you through it.”

I paused for a moment, gathering my thoughts before speaking.

“There was a party, it was, um, it was for graduation. My parents threw it. I’d had, I’d had a rough year—we all had.”

“Who’s we?” the man asked.

“My friends and I. They were there, I remember. Annie, Jack–God, those two were in love. They’d been seeing each other for a year. Well, I guess nobody had really seen each other for a year, but you . . .you get it. And . . . and there was someone else. I can’t, I can’t remember . . .”

“Jane,” he said, checking my file. My mind suddenly filled with images of a girl’s blue eyes.

“Right, Jane. God, how could I forget?” I reminisced.

“It’s alright. Continue.”

“Right, right, Jane. God, she was stunning. I was there for ten minutes before I saw her. She was wearing this red dress, and these thick soled tennis shoes. She liked the height heels gave her but hated how uncomfortable they were. She saw me and gave me this smile. It was the kind of smile that made you know everything was okay. That no matter how bad life seemed, somehow it was going to get better . . . I think I was in love with her.”

“What happened next?”

“We, uh, we talked. She was going off to med school. She wanted to be a doctor. She wanted to help people, figure out what their problems were and solve them.”

The man seemed to falter for a second, producing a second cigarette and lighting it. He took a long drag and encouraged me to continue.

“Someone offered me a drink.  I—I turned it down. I was leaving first thing in the morning, and I was driving myself home that night.”

The man looked down at his file, then back up at me.

“You did drink that night.”

I froze, thinking for a second before the memory came back to me.

“Right, sorry. I figured I could have a few. Then I remember Jane came up and asked me to take her home.”

“Yes,” the man said, flipping one of his papers over to check.

“But I-I-I said no,” I stammered, the moment fuzzy in my head like there was static over it.

The man took another drag of his cigarette before looking me dead in the eyes. “Mr. Danvers, this test only works if you tell the truth.”

My breath caught, my hands shook. I pressed my eyes closed as a wave of pain went through my skull.

“Do you need some medication? I can ask them to bring it up,” he offered.

“No, I’m fine,” I half yelled, slamming my hand in frustration. “I said I’d take her. I remember now I brought her out to my car. I think Annie and Jack were with us. We started down the road, and Jane asked me to slow down, so I put my foot on the brake a little.”

“You didn’t,” the doctor said, no longer needing his notes.

“I-uh, sorry I didn’t slow down. I . . . I.” I could feel the pain filling my head again, agony pulsing behind my eye sockets. “We rounded a corner and there was nothing.”

“There was a car,” the man corrected.

“I swerved to avoid it.”

“You were too drunk.”

I felt a lightning bolt of anguish run down my forehead like it was being cracked open. My throat felt sore and dry. I reached for the plastic cup of water he had laid out for me on the aluminum tabletop, but he placed a hand on it to stop me. 

“Finish,” he said.

My ears filled with pounding and grinding noises, the ringing I’d drowned out subconsciously becoming deafening. I could feel my throat tearing open, dry flesh being torn apart with every strain. My mind was filled with clouds, lights, shadows. The harder I pressed it to remember that evening–that horrible, horrible evening–the thicker the smokescreen in my head grew.

“I . . . I don’t remember the rest,” I choked out in suffering.

There was quiet. He lifted his hand from the cup, and I drained it into my mouth. The liquid was cold and sweet, feeling nearly like it repaired me as it passed through my throat. My breathing steadied, and the pain in my head subsided.

“Then allow me to finish,” he muttered. “You crashed into an oncoming vehicle at sixty miles an hour. The front of your car smashed through their chassis, forcing the entire block into the driver and passengers’ seats. The driver was killed instantly, but his pregnant wife survived. By the time she was found, it was too late, and the baby was lost. Jack’s head slammed into the back of your seat, the impact of which caused serious brain damage, leaving him in a catatonic state. The airbags failed to deploy, and Annie was launched from your passenger seat through the front window, cracking her twenty first and twenty second vertebrae, causing paralysis of her lower body.”

I froze, nausea climbing through my stomach like a giant centipede, each of its hundred legs poking into my intestines as it climbed to my throat.

“Jane?” I croaked out.

“Jane sat in the back of the car with Annie’s seat crushing her ribs into her lungs for four hours as she cried out for help.” The man’s voice was choked with anger.

A cold hand gripped my heart as the clouds in my head faded. I was there, sitting in the car. My leg felt like someone had broken a thousand glass shards inside of it. I was confused, my mind scattered, but I had the wherewithal to drag myself out of the car.

“I-I-,“ I stammered.

“You ran,” he clarified, his eyes filled with loathing.

He extinguished his cigarette and rose from his seat. He made his way around the table and placed a painfully tight grip on my shoulder. 

“You left my daughter to die in the back of that car, and not a single day has passed over the last year when I haven’t taken a deep morbid pleasure in waking you up to this hell each and every time. Happy anniversary, Michael. I’ll see you in the morning.”

The door clicked closed behind him, and for a moment, the room was silent. 

Almost immediately, I could feel my memory fading, mist and smoke obscuring my thoughts as the events of that night faded into a miasma of repression.

As my chair was brought back to my room, I could scarcely remember my name, the only thing clear to me being my own reflection mirrored back to me by the dark hospital window.