It's a bright sunny day. Dad's humming on some tune as he's adjusting the rear-view mirror – it sounds awful, but you don't mind. Rach and Becca are arguing over some stupid doll, and you're stuck in the car seat between them. You tell them to stop, but they don't listen to you. They never do.
She turns around to look at the three of you. Her long black hair glitters in the sun light, and she's laughing. Dad and her are holding hands, and she gives him a kiss. You make a sound – yuk, grownups!
She's talking, but you can't hear her voice. Everything is muddled, all of a sudden. Why? Why can't you hear her? You try to call on her, touch her, but your arms are too short – you can't reach. They keep laughing, but you're not a part of it.
It almost seems like you're moving in slow motion. Dad's looking at Mom and Mom's looking at Rach and Becca. You're the only one with the eyes on the road. The other car comes towards you so slowly you'd think it was some special effect in a movie. You see it before anyone else does. You try to tell them, but no one hears you, no one listens. You're mute, and you're paralyzed, and there's nothing you can do.
The broken glass almost feels like when your legs fall asleep – a weird stingy feeling that just won't go away. Everything is silent now, even though you feel like screaming. You already know what's going to happen, but there's nothing you can do about it. The right side of the car gets hit first, and it's amazing how the metal gets smashed together like it were made of paper.
Her eyes find yours the moment before she is gone. Before she is twisted and turned into something unrecognizable, before the blood is everywhere. But her eyes are not the warm brown color you remember from the photos – they're a muddy grey. Eyes of the dead. And you scream.
I frantically pushed my eyes open, and forced myself to breath. I couldn't move. Wrong. I didn't dare to move. Frozen, my arms pressed against my body, my jaws tightly pressed together. Slowly, I realized that I wasn't there. I wasn't in the destroyed truck, I was in my bed, under the cover, where nothing was going to hurt me. I had never even been in the car in the first place.
I breathed slowly, tried to relax. I noticed I was drenched in sweat, and as the panic wore off, I began to quiver. I pulled the cover closer around me, but I wouldn't close my eyes - I didn't want to fall asleep again. Not back to that. That nightmare … I used to dream it almost every night when I was younger, but now I hadn't had it in ages.
Although, I'd never stopped thinking about her. She was always in the back of my mind, no matter what I did. And I knew it was the same with Dad and Rachel and Rebecca, even though we never talked about it.
Not talking about it, that's probably what'd given me these nightmares in the first place. I couldn't remember much from back then, but I remembered that no one would tell me what had happened. There had been an accident, and Mommy had gone to heaven. Well, when will she come back, I'd wondered, and then they had laughed and cried at the same time.
You're not stupid when you're four years old. It's not like you don't have a mind of your own, not like you can't think or feel. And even though Dad wouldn't cry in front of us, we could still hear him at night when he thought we were sleeping. And every time I mentioned Mom, I could see how he stiffened up, how his face went blank, so I stopped. Like she'd never been here.
Rachel and Rebecca weren't home as much as before. Always on play dates or in school and as soon as they were old enough they would go into town as soon as they had some time over. And Dad was getting careless. He still took great care of us, and he still hung out with Charlie and Harry, even more now than before. That's probably why they became so close, since Charlie's family had gone too. But Dad stopped taking care of himself. He'd always been forgetting to take his insulin shots, but Mom had been there, reminding him.
And then I found the articles. Dad had been saving them all, tucking them away behind the books in the bookshelf. I couldn't read, of course, but there were pictures. And I recognized our car, even though it looked nothing like before. The other car had smashed it together like an accordion. And there was pools of red on the ground. Blood.
That's when the nightmares started. They weren't always the same. Sometimes I was in the car, sometimes I was just watching from above. Sometimes it was Dad who drove over on the wrong side of the road, sometimes there was an animal they had to avoid. But it always ended the same way. She would always look at me with those dead eyes, like she was some sort of monster. A stranger in her body.
It was over ten years ago now. I had lived longer without her than with her. Dad, Rachel and Rebecca could occasionally share some memory, talk about Christmas gifts she'd given them or some of her crazy ideas that always seemed to backfire. I couldn't do that. I had no memories left. The few I still remembered were battered and washy, like an old video tape you'd watched too many times. I wasn't even sure if they were real memories or if I'd just made them up. All I had were the images from the nightmare. Instead of a mother, a living dead.
Against my will, my eyes felt heavier and heavier, and finally, they closed. The world moved in slow motion.