After her mother’s death she took upon herself the task of shutting up the old house. Which she insisted upon doing alone. The farmhouse and five-acre property were hers but she wanted to prepare the furniture for storage since she intended to sell the house, and hoped to put things as much in order as possible before returning to Berlin. To my own life. My life. Her relatives were advising her not to sell so quickly, maybe one day she’d want to return, perhaps to spend part of a summer, but she was emphatically against this, no it wasn’t a good idea, returning to Maine had no part in her plans for the future. I will travel where I wish. Become anyone I wish. In truth she’d been deeply moved by the experience of returning. Deeply shaken by her mother’s death. And by the realization that she’d missed her father’s death, and her grandmother’s death, as if a strange spell had been cast over her, she’d been asleep for most of her life. What had she been thinking of? The familiar refrain taunted her, If I love no one. So long as I love no one. Never before had she detected its flat jeering tone, like struck tin.
She was desperate to be gone. Her emotions were too raw here. She couldn’t trust herself. Her mother had been hospitalized in mid-November, had died in early December as the days rapidly shortened and the hours of darkness lengthened like shadows pushing out of the snow-encrusted earth. And it was cold, bitter cold. She’d forgotten how cold. Almost, she felt panic at being snowed-in — stranded in the country. As if there weren’t snowplows! As if this weren’t a civilized place. As if she hadn’t lived through many winters here, along with everyone else. Yet she was eager to be back in Berlin by Christmas if not earlier. The house and property would be managed by an agent. She’d agreed to sell for any reasonable price. She refused to listen to her relatives. No! I have no plans to return. In truth she was shocked at how distraught she’d been by her mother’s death, and memories of the past that flooded upon her, she who’d told herself and others since college that she hadn’t been close to anyone in her family, she’d been intellectually “estranged” from them. Yet seeing her relatives again, particularly her cousins, had been quite moving. Driving Cuttler’s Mill Road into Skowhegan, those nine miles of countryside she would not have known she’d memorized, was hypnotic. As if somewhere along the way I might encounter Daddy driving our old Plymouth, with Mommy beside him, Grandma and me in the backseat. That child-face peering from a rear window.
How strange, whether wonderful or ominous she didn’t know, that the countryside west of Skowhegan hadn’t changed much in the past fifteen years. Names on farmers’ mailboxes were familiar—Cosgrove, Thorndike, Ward, Proctor. (She’d imagined herself in love, in her covert, distant way, with one of the Proctor boys, her senior by two or three years.) An older generation had passed away, her own generation had inherited and come into maturity.
But she was desperate to be gone. She wasn’t a superstitious person like a surprising number of her fellow photojournalists, but she believed she must leave Maine by December 21, the winter solstice. She made flight arrangements to leave on the twentieth. She’d nearly completed packing cartons, shutting up the old house. She’d been sleeping in her old room, no other room felt quite comfortable to her, and by the morning of the twentieth she was in a state of nerves for there was a traveler’s advisory against driving in central and northern Maine for the next twelve hours, the first severe blizzard of the winter was expected. Her flight didn’t leave Skowhegan until four P.M. but she decided to lock up the house, throw her things into her car (her mother’s car, which she would be leaving with her aunt in town) and drive out before noon. Already it had begun to snow — light, feathery snowflakes. There were patches, still, of pale blue sky. The winter sun had shone coldly and thinly that morning. Yet as she drove, she glanced anxiously upward to see clouds massed and ominous as malignancies; she felt her car rock in sporadic gusts of wind; snow by the roadside was lifted in coils and skeins, flung snakelike into the path of her car, and onto her windshield; there were few other cars on the road, their headlights looming up ghostly in the deepening dusk. Not yet midday, and already it was dusk. If I can make it to the edge of Skowhegan at least. To that Sunoco station. Then I will be safe. Snow burst out of the air in a delirium of faded white, if white can be faded. Even in her headlights this white looked discolored, like old ivory. She understood that her flight to Bangor in a twin-prop plane would be cancelled, but at least she’d be in town and could stay the night at a motel near the airport and fly out tomorrow. Or the next day. From Bangor she would be flying to Kennedy, and from Kennedy direct to Berlin, she’d made such careful plans, always she made such careful plans, she was a woman who’d planned her life with care, and she had made for herself a success in the vast world beyond her childhood. That world is there, awaiting me. I’m coming! Though the narrow road was icy in patches, and the wind had grown stronger, snow rushing thicker and more blinding into the feeble path of her headlights, she pressed her foot down harder on the gas pedal; gripped the steering wheel until her fingers seemed frozen to it. As if by such force she might hold the speeding, suddenly skidding car on the road.
She heard a cry—“No! No!” A child’s hurt, incredulous voice.
For it was so unfair.
Waking in a haze of muted white, a delirium of swirling white, pain wracking her upper chest, a terrible roaring in her ears — for some dazed minutes she didn’t know where she was.
Then she remembered. Her mother’s car. On the way to Skowhegan.
Without the safety belt I would have been killed! My neck broken. Skull broken. Flung against the windshield. Through the windshield. As in the old days before such safety features — people must have been injured, killed, in such accidents all the time. Shaken, crushed and broken like silly dolls. This was the tale she would tell others, the tone of the tale. If you’re disinclined to self-pity and feel uncomfortable speaking of a car accident in which you’d nearly died (but wasn’t that an exaggeration? she hadn’t nearly died), you can speak elliptically, with a dry, detached humor. For she’d broken her collarbone with her desperate driving, and her head ached so she was nearly blind, nose and mouth dripping blood that wasn’t red (for it was dark inside the car, overturned in a snowdrift in a ditch) but oddly black, greasy to the touch. Her thoughts came in a blur that roared like the wind. Oh! oh! oh. My God. What have I done? Groping panicked in the glove compartment where the flashlight was kept, her father’s old, rusted flashlight — yes, she found it, and yes, there came a beam of light when she forced the switch.