Hugh Oakley was impaled on the exposed steering column. His head was turned in the other direction so I couldn’t see his face, thank God. Charlotte Oakley had not been wearing a seat belt and had gone full force into the windshield. The safety glass had stopped her, but her head had hit with such impact that there was an enormous crystal spiderweb on the glass. What was left of her beautiful face looked like a piece of dropped fruit. A section of the black steering wheel lay in her lap, evilly twisted, looking like some odd tool. The child, their boy, was in the backseat, dead too. He lay on his back, both arms above his head, one eye open, one closed. He wore a T-shirt with a picture of Wile E. Coyote holding a stick of dynamite in one paw. The boy’s head was bent at a fatal angle. But most important, he was older than when I had seen him only an hour before in the hall at Fieberglas. He had aged.

Staring into that car full of bodies, I knew what this was.

What would have happened if Hugh had lived, eventually left me, and gone back to Charlotte? This.

They would have had the boy and been happy for some years. Maybe eleven or twelve, maybe thirteen. Then one day they would go for a ride in the country in their elegant new silver car. And it would end like this: a face like a burst plum, Wile E. Coyote, the wrong beauty of a cracked glass spiderweb.

When McCabe walked back to his car to get a cell phone and call in the accident, my “coma” still surrounded me, protecting me. In any other situation, seeing Hugh Oakley like that would have driven me mad. Now I just stayed by him and listened to the eerie, beautiful song coming from the radio. I didn’t even feel bad, because I knew this was not true; this was not how it happened. He had died with his hand on my head, quietly, just the two of us, at the end of a summer evening rainstorm. That way was better, wasn’t it? Quietly, in love, with the second half of his life to look forward to, living with someone who loved him more than she ever thought possible? I would have given him everything. I would have pulled down planets to make our life work. I looked at him. I had to ask a question he could never answer because he was dead. Dead everywhere. Dead here, dead in my life.

“Which life would have been better for you? Which one would have kept you whole?”

Unconcerned, the birds above us hopped on and off the wires, chatty and busy with the rest of the day.

I returned to Crane’s View with a member of the town’s volunteer fire department. McCabe remained at the scene of the accident. After the fire truck and ambulances had arrived and the personnel had done everything they could, he’d arranged for me to go home with a friend of his.

We rode in silence until the man asked if I knew the victims. I hesitated before saying no. He tugged on his earlobe and said it was a terrible thing, terrible. Not only because of the accident, but because the Salvatos were fine people. He had known Al for years and even voted for him when he ran for mayor a few years before.

Baffled, I asked whom he was talking about. He threw a thumb over his shoulder. “The Salvatos: Al, Christine, little Bob. Hell of a nice family. All dead in one crash like that. Heartbreaker.

“Being on the fire department, we gotta be at most of the pile-ups. ‘Specially the bad ones. But these are the hardest. You come onto an accident scene, which is bad enough, but then you look in the car for the first time and you know the people? Jesus, there they are, dead. I’m tellin’ you, sometimes it makes me think about maybe quitting.”

I turned 180 degrees in my seat and gaped out the rear window; then I turned back. “But did you look inside the car? Did you actually see your friends in there?” It was a demand, not a question, because I had seen it too, them – Hugh, Charlotte, the whole horror.

“Sure I saw it! Lady, waddya think I’m talkin’ about here? I pulled Al off a steering column that was about two feet deep up his chest! Damned right I saw. I was six inches away from his face.”

I watched him silently until it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything else. I swiveled in the seat again to look out the back window. We were almost to Crane’s View.

When we drove through the center of town I remembered how excited Hugh and I had been the day we moved in. We wanted to do everything at once—unpack the truck, go into town and check out the stores, take a long walk to get a feel for what Crane’s View was really like. Because it was a nice day, we chose the walk and ended up by the river watching boats pass. Hugh said, “Nothing could be better than this.” He took my hand and squeezed it. Then he walked away. I asked where he was going but he didn’t answer. I watched as he wandered around, his eyes on the ground. Eventually he leaned over and picked up a small brown stick about the size and width of a cigar. Holding it up, he waved it back and forth for me to see.

“I’ve been waiting for just the right moment to look for this. Now’s the moment. Here with you, the water, the day… The perfect time to find my first Miranda stick.”

He came over and handed it to me. I rubbed my thumb over its surface and then impulsively kissed the stick. “I hope there will be a lot more.”

He took it back and slid it into his jeans pocket. “This is one of the big ones for me. I’ve got to take care of it.”

I got out of the car wondering where Hugh’s stick was. I waited until the car had gone around the corner before I turned to look at our house. I felt nothing—no dread or anxiety, not even the slightest shred of curiosity. Judging by the events of the last two days, there was no other option but to go back inside and face whatever was waiting for me.

Staring at the place I had so recently and happily thought would be our house, our home, for the rest of our lives, I remembered something Hugh had done that disturbed me.

One night in my New York apartment, he called to me from the bedroom. When I got there, he stopped me with an arm across the door.

“Do exactly what I tell you, okay? Look quickly and tell me what you see on the table next to the bed. Don’t think about it. Just look and say.”

Puzzled, I complied. Something dark and odd-shaped was exactly where my bedside lamp usually sat. I squinted once to see better but it didn’t help. I had no idea what it was. My wondering went on until he dropped his arm, walked to the bed, leaned over, and switched the lamp on. It was my lamp, only he had laid it on its side in such a way that it was impossible to recognize from a distance.

“Isn’t that strange? Just the smallest twist of the dial away from normal—one click—and everything we know for certain vanishes. Same damned thing happened to me this morning. There’s a vase in the office we’ve had for years, a nice Lalique piece. But someone knocked it over or whatever. When I saw it like that today, on its side, it was unrecognizable. I couldn’t tell what the thing was. I stood in the hall glued to the spot, wondering, What-the-hell-is-that? Then Courtney walked up, righted it, and there it was again—the vase.”

I wasn’t very wowed and he must have seen that in my expression. He put both hands on my face and squeezed my cheeks. “Don’t you see? Nothing is ever finished. It’s all evolving; everything has a hundred new angles we’ve never seen. We get jaded, but then something jarring like this happens and we’re bewildered by it, sometimes even pissed off, or delighted. That’s what I keep trying to be—delighted by what I don’t know.”

It was a sweet and very Hugh insight, but it didn’t do much for me. I kissed him, straightened the lamp, and went back to cooking our dinner.

That night I was awakened from a deep sleep by a touch—across my face, between my legs, up and down my side. My tingling body and foggy mind were rising in happy concert and I was moaning. When it happened, either the sound or the cause froze me and I threw my arm out to the side as hard as I could. It smacked Hugh on the forehead a great resounding wap! Crying out in surprise, he fell back holding his head. A moment later we were laughing and touching and then ended up doing what he had intended in the first place.