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Torn
up after the car crash, she put her hand on her abdomen, as if
she had indigestion. Yep, she said. You're going to give birth
soon. The tick of the hospital equipment filled the room. She'd
been thrown through the window and landed on a guardrail and
scraped along for ten feet before coming to rest tummy-first
against a concrete piling.
"Not me," I said, but my hand went
to my navel anyway. "You're the one's p.g," I said. I wanted to
get back to Ray and the kids, but Shandon was my best friend, and
I didn't know how to tell her. She needed me now. She had a
lacerated spleen and a slash like a knife-cut along her side
where the skin unraveled to a foot-long spot of road-rash. Wear
your seatbelt, kids.
"Not any more I'm not," she said.
"But it's OK." She coughed once and a little spritz of blood
appeared on her hospital johnny, and I thought of all the ways
God had to end things, he chose death. He could give us life
forever in some other form, some Buddhist thing, where we could
go on at least. But he had to make it final.
The doctors
said she wasn't continent, and might never be again. She'd want
to be dead. I would want to be dead. But she might live. She had
to hold onto that. It's what they said.
"Believe me,
Carissa," Shandon said. "You're going to have a kid and name it
for me and raise it the way a kid ought to be raised. No TV. No
snacks but Cheerios and fruit and veggies. Make that baby eat
right."
Just then Ray buzzed my cell and I stepped out to take
the call, and when I came back Shandon was gone, just blipped out
between breaths.
We named our next baby Marta after Ray's mom
though. He hated the name Shandon. When he left me nineteen
months after Shandon's funeral, I started the process to change
Marta's name to Shandon, but it was already too late, and the
papers still sit here somewhere, I'm sure.
I take Marta to
the graveside and she plays in the flowers. It's where Ray meets
us for the court-appointed visitation, because the park's
next door. Marta plays in the plastic flowers and Ray stares
bullet holes. Shandon lies propped under a stone, gone where I
can't see.
I think maybe I'll change my name away from Ray's.
Even one minute longer of having that man's name I can't take.
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