Wrecked (16 page)

It’s the middle of summer. We sit down on the lawn in front of the hospital and wait for our mother. I’m worried that she may look badly disfigured. What do people look like after a mass accident? No idea. I’ll just assume the worst. Two of the three fathers went to look at the cleared accident site yesterday. They have a lot of new information about how it could have happened. From what they say, together with the information from the two survivors—my mother and Rhea—and the police, I will eventually assemble the following mosaic image of the accident:

They left right after I tried on the wedding dress—which I wasn’t supposed to do. I’m not superstitious. But after something like this, it takes a lot of work not to become superstitious! Since I tried on the dress, I feel responsible for everything that
happened afterward. And they drove only because my dress was so big. So actually I’m directly responsible. You don’t have to be superstitious to see that. My oldest brother let his girlfriend sit in front because he’s a gentleman. They’re having fun in the car. Singing songs, the kids constantly asking questions about the wedding. My mother explains to them that they will all be wearing the matching shirts we picked out together. It’s very hot that morning and they take their shoes off during the drive—boat moccasins with little tassels, they look as if they could have been handcrafted by Indians. I saw them on their feet before I left my mother’s house. She drove the speed limit in Belgium: 120 kilometers per hour. She hadn’t had a drop to drink. And she never talked on the phone while driving with the children in the car. That’s important for the retrospective question of responsibility. On the day of days—that is, yesterday—my mother is driving through Belgium with the boys and my oldest brother’s girlfriend, on their way to the Eurotunnel. There’s a lot of traffic on the autobahn, but it’s moving. On the opposite side of the road, she can see a traffic jam building. The driver of a tanker truck full of gasoline doesn’t notice the traffic slowing in front of him in time. It could be that he fell asleep at the wheel for a second or that he just wasn’t paying attention. Maybe he dropped a cigarette in his lap and burned his balls. But he, too, was sober. He’s heading full speed into the stopped cars. Without braking. The drivers at the back of the traffic jam see him approaching in their rearview mirrors. But they get lucky. The truck driver jerks his steering wheel to the left just before he hits the line of stopped traffic. The tanker clips a full bus, and the two vehicles—the tanker and the bus—shoot across the median strip and form a wall across the other side of the autobahn in front of the oncoming
traffic. Which is right where my family is driving, in the slow lane. “Lucky Man,” by the Verve, is playing on the stereo of my mother’s car. Cars plow into the bus and tanker, flipping them on their sides. The passengers in my mother’s car see the wall they are suddenly headed for and start to scream. Impact. My mother doesn’t even have a chance to hit the brakes. Three inches. Between the gas pedal and the brake pedal.

Silence. For a long time. Rhea, my brother’s girlfriend, is the first to regain consciousness. The airbags are lying on the dashboard. She doesn’t look to her left. She just sits there. She can’t hear anything. Silence. Just a whooshing noise in her head. Everything is in slow motion. She opens her door and wants to get out. She collapses. She can’t stand up because her legs are smashed. She lies on the ground next to the car and crawls a few meters away from it on her stomach, like the sick gorillas in the mist in that movie we had to watch when we were way too young, in the hope that we would become animal researchers or environmentalists. She reaches the grass of the shoulder and lies there. She turns her head from right to left and watches what is happening around her. She sees lots of cars driving around the mess rather than stopping to help. I don’t want to belong to a species capable of that. There are lots of dead and lots of injured. The families in the tour bus have kicked a hole in a window and are crawling out one by one.

At some point after Rhea is out, my mother wakes up. She also sits there at first. That’s what happens in an extreme state of shock. You don’t do anything. You’re limited to the most minimal things. Your brain doesn’t function right. Your heart beats, but nothing more.

She sits and sits. She wonders about the silence in the car. She doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t look at her children. She’s not a mother anymore, not capable of taking care of her children. She can’t even save herself. She’s like a badly injured animal. She doesn’t look over to the right, either, where Rhea was. Though that would be an easier motion than turning her head around to look at her children. She just sits there and tries to comprehend what just happened. For several minutes.

Someone rips open the door. It’s the driver of another car snared in the accident. Not the cause of the accident—he died instantly. This other driver puts his strong arms under my mother’s arms.

It’s the only way he can carry her. She’s too heavy for him. The contents of the tanker are spilling out; hundreds of liters of gasoline now form a gleaming puddle beneath all the wrecked cars. Some flames have broken out from short circuits in the Belgian street lamps knocked over in the median strip. The other driver drags my mother like a sack through the flames on the ground. Everything is burning now. Everywhere dense smoke and the stench and screams of death.

He lays her on the side of the road with all the other injured and dead.

She says to him slowly, “My children, my children are still in the car.”

He turns to go back to get them.

But just then everything spews into the air in front of him. A huge explosion.

She knows she has lost her children.

She saw them go up in flames. With her own eyes.

There is another explosion and another. The gas tanks of all the cars are blowing up, one after the next.

The people who were able to escape from the tour bus give my mother first aid. They douse her feet, which are burned to the bone, with cola, Fanta, and apple juice, to cool them. The doctor later said that it helped a lot. It would have been much worse for her otherwise.

In my mind, the worst thing of all is that none of us knows whether my brothers were still alive when they went up in flames or whether they had already been killed by the impact. It sounds macabre, but that’s the way it is. I’ve hoped for eight years now that the impact was intense enough to break all three of their necks and that they weren’t still aware as they were being engulfed in flames. The question haunts me daily. During the day, and at night, in my dreams. I’ll never know. There will never be an answer. Because my mother didn’t turn around. Frau Drescher says it could be that she did but that she lied to us all to avoid having to describe what she saw. Or what she saw was so bad that her brain erased it so she wouldn’t become even crazier. Brains know what their owners can take and what they can’t.

We sit in the sun and wait for my mother. My horror-movie mother. I’m terrified to see her. I’m afraid my pretty mother is no longer pretty. She’s usually so well kempt. But not now, I’m sure. Don’t give yourself hope, Elizabeth. She’s almost certainly going to look awful, and you can’t let her realize it. You can do it.

A nurse emerges from the hospital building and beckons us to come in. Mother has arrived. She has her own room because of the severity of the accident. I knew it. Because she’s lost three children, she doesn’t have to share a room with some random
idiot. Great. Thank you, dear hospital! The nurse tells us that my mother has been here for a little while and has been examined. The doctor will want to talk to me soon. With me? Why? Oh, God, what does he want from me? We’ll see.

Elizabeth, you have to be brave. Things are going to come at you that you don’t understand. My knowledge of this kind of stuff is limited to things in movies Mother showed me. Maybe that’s why she showed them to us? So I could get through all of this and help her in this situation? It’s possible. Can’t put anything past her. She always seems to have a master plan—an evil one, but a plan nonetheless. The nurse whispers to us in front of the door marked 322 that we shouldn’t be surprised if she acts a little strange. Huh? Stranger than usual? They have her on strong psychotropic drugs, so she doesn’t understand that she has lost her sons yet. She hasn’t realized yet. The drugs ensure that the blinds are drawn in her head and that comprehension of what’s happened seeps slowly into her consciousness only a few days later.

She doesn’t know yet?

Aha. Good to know. Man, this is all crazy. There are drugs that make it as if my brothers are still alive? Why can’t I get some, instead of only my mother? I don’t want to go into the room. I don’t want to deal with a burned mother. It’s all too much for me.

Nobody says, “Come in.” She’s lying there, very small in the big bed, sleeping. Good. I can get used to the view first without her seeing from the shocked look on my face how shitty she looks. Her entire face is laced with bloody cuts. Aha, must be from the windshield. All the cuts go in one direction. As if Freddy from
Nightmare on Elm Street
had said a quick hello.
She has a swollen black eye and a stitched-up wound on her head. From the steering wheel or dashboard, no doubt. But the worst thing—something I hadn’t anticipated at all—is that her beautiful, long blonde hair has been fried into short, thick, charred dreadlocks. The heat. It hadn’t occurred to me. Hair evidently melts the way you would expect a plastic wig to. It will all have to be shaved off. There’s no way it’s ever going to look right.

She opens her eyes and smiles at us. The look on her face is pained. Her eyes are open wider than usual. Like a hunted animal. Yes. I can tell that her subconscious already knows what happened.

She says, “What can I say? I don’t know what to say. What are you all looking at? Cut it out. Did you get married, my child?”

She smiles like a crazy person.

Everyone in the room visibly tenses as she asks the question. My leftover sister and I—that’s what we are, leftovers—go over to her bed and lay our heads on her chest, gingerly, so as not to cause her pain.

“Yes, Mama, we got married.”

Why not? She’s on drugs, so I can tell her what she wants to hear. It doesn’t matter. I can always say she misunderstood because of the medicine.

“I’m happy for you.” She looks at my boyfriend. “For both of you. I’m happy for both of you. Now you’ll have to quickly have three children.”

Aaah. Help. I thought she didn’t know yet, or didn’t know anymore, because of the drugs. It would appear they don’t work perfectly.

I stroke her hand. It’s also covered with cuts, like her face, also from the windshield. Her whole body appears to be battered.

I look her in the face again. Her eyes are closed. Her breathing is agitated.

We all start to creep out of this room of horror. As we sneak out on tiptoes, in exaggerated slow motion, we can’t resist giggling. We quickly turn around to see whether it’s woken her up. Nope. On we go. Out of there.

In the hallway we meet the attending physician. He looks at me the entire time he speaks. I’m the older of us two remaining siblings. And my mother is no longer together with any of the men present. That means I am the next of kin and the contact person for all the shit coming down the pike.

“Frau Kiehl, we’ve given your mother her own room since it will be a difficult awakening process when we slowly reduce the psychotropic medication and she realizes, step-by-step, that she has lost three children. She was driving the car. Even though she isn’t legally responsible for the accident, she will blame herself. It’s possible that it will be so bad that she will try to kill herself. Please stay with her day and night for the next few weeks and make sure she doesn’t attempt to take her own life.”

Got it. I have a new job. My heroic duty: keep Mother from killing herself. Will do, no problem. I can handle it.

“We’re going to place another bed in the room for you to use. That’s the psychological situation. Now the bodily situation. Her feet are extremely badly burned. She has to be brushed every second day to avoid the formation of scar neoplasms. They would affect her range of motion later on. She’ll have to deal
with incredible pain. When we brush the open wounds with the rough bristles we’ll put her under general anesthesia. But afterward it’s going to be bad for her. Once the anesthesia wears off, we won’t be able to suppress a hundred percent of the pain. It’s going to be very unpleasant for your mother, and it would be good if you were with her at these times. She won’t be able to get up for a long time—for one thing because of her feet, of course, but also because of her broken vertebra. The vertebrae will have to grow back together, and until they do we’ll have to keep your mother still. We believe that one of the children in the backseat must have been launched through the front seat and caused the fracture of her spine with his skull.”

Now here is a piece of evidence. This means that at least one of the children, you would think, was already dead before he was burned in the flames.

Or at least unconscious.

“That’s what we have at our end. If you have questions, please feel free.”

We all look at one another and shake our heads.

Thanks. See you later.

I want to be alone. I tell the relatives—which since yesterday includes my boyfriend, too—that I’m going to walk the two kilometers home. Alone. To go and pack some things so I can stay overnight at the hospital. They should stay here and keep an eye on Mother. I take off. Out into the fresh air. I march along the sidewalk as if I’m on the run. This feeling will never leave me. I do everything quickly so I have as little capacity as possible for painful thoughts. I’m moving into a hospital. I’m afraid of spending the night there with my mother. I don’t want to be there when she becomes lucid again.

I picture her opening her eyes and screaming, grabbing onto me, crying, begging for it not to be true, for them to come back, for us to turn back time so she can set off a few minutes earlier and pass the site of the accident before it happens, for my dress to be a little smaller and more modest so I can fit it in my suitcase and we can all fly together. In a safe plane. She grips me tightly and pulls me down with her into madness.