* * *
I see you. Little girl in the back seat of a car, in a world of your own, safe. The babble of parents up front. Perhaps you felt the air change as the moment came, an unexpected intake of breath from the driver, a tensing, a sudden movement of the wheel, a jerk. Your gaze flashing forward too late. Did she turn to you, your mother? Did she catch your eye before it hit, her last instinct to protect you?
I cannot presume to know what happened in those last moments. The life you came from, the ones who loved you, taken from you.
The car impacted, flipped, skidded and came to a stop in a gully beyond the road. In the silence that followed that deafening noise you slowly came to; your own cries inaudible beneath the buzz in your ears. Around you glass, and twisted metal, the taste of blood and the thick fug of gasoline. Your left arm broken, torn muscles in your neck and both shoulders. Broken ribs. You hung suspended by nothing but your seatbelt.
You all hung; a silent family suspended as if stopped in time. Your mother’s auburn hair swaying just out of reach, the car’s windshield decimated, plant life inching deep into the car. Whether you said her name or not, I do not know, whether you leant forward to try and wake her I do not know; but she would not have stirred. She was an object jostled, nothing more. Your father beside her, equally silent.
I don’t know how long you waited and hoped and tried to rouse those silent bodies. But after a time, an animal instinct moved you. Even at eleven years old you knew to cut your losses, to chew through a trap. Or perhaps you thought you could save them, get help, that someone else would come.
You disengaged your seatbelt and tumbled into the roof well, scrambling out on bleeding hands and knees. In my mind, Harriet, you did not look back as you passed them. You did not want to remember them that way.
The dead feel different, don’t they? Once the light has gone, the people we loved become strangers, don’t they? We cannot reach them and something different is left in their place.
You clambered out of that broken windshield, snagged by branches and barbs of twisted metal. You did not pull a phone from their pockets; you did not think to do so in your rush.
I have no doubt that over the years, you have stewed over why you did not think to do that in the moment. But, rest assured, there was nothing you could have done for them; I have seen the medical reports; they left you before you even knew.
Back on the road, shaking and bruised, you saw what hit you. He was there. His car tipped, immobile, its windshield shattered milky by the impact. You saw him, pinned by his own steering wheel, shivering, crying, his body trapped in the twisted metal.
Did you speak to him? Did he scream for help, shriek his regret? I imagine, even at your age, you could tell he was drunk, that this was why you had lost everything. Judging by what you did next, I think there can be no doubt about that.
Crashed cars rarely explode in real life, but small fires are common. A spark at the front of his vehicle. A fuel leak at the back. The two so rarely connect.
There was a witness. A local woman, a farmer. She heard the sound of the crash and rushed across her fields towards a pillar of smoke. As she ran, she saw a girl standing by the wreckage. She saw flames lick along the ground, from one end of the car to the other. A rush of burning heat along the tarmac like a magnesium strip, there and then gone. She watched as the car’s cabin exploded into flames, as you stood motionless beside it. The screams from inside it jolted her into a run. She ran to you but by the time she reached you the screaming had stopped.
A short sharp shock and your work was done.
Later, when questioned, she could not be sure what she had seen. Whether you had tried to put the flames out as they went past you or if you had been doing something else. When the police arrived, you did not speak.
* * *
We both know what happened that morning. And Harriet, my dear, let me tell you as an outside observer, what you did that day could never have been different.