Free At the Bottom of Everything by Ben Dolnick

moment, if we’d saved our disbelief for afterward … But maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference, because the moment was just a moment, and we caught up with the car well before the intersection. But by that time it was rolling a little faster, since this was where the hill got steeper, and the fucking passenger door was locked and I couldn’t have, or wouldn’t have, thought of diving in through the passenger window now, when there was a good chance that I’d just get stuck with my legs hanging out into the air and then wherewould we be? But why couldn’t Thomas get his door open and get back into the driver’s seat? Afterward he said the door handle stuck but I didn’t and don’t believe him: it was animal panic, it was fumbling, it was the kind of physical idiocy that was never far from the surface in him.
    Connecticut Avenue, even at midnight on a Wednesday, is never completely empty. And on that particular stretch, where it intersected with Thomas’s street, there wasn’t a stoplight for a couple of hundred yards, so the cars tended to speed, as long as there weren’t any cops around. So there’s every reason to think the SUV was speeding as it approached Macomb. And, so long as I’m speculating, it seems likely that the woman crossing Connecticut, who’d been at a friend’s house on Lowell and who was already halfway across the street, might not have looked for cars, since in the middle of the night walkers tended to be more reckless. These things, I think, aren’t just possible but maybe even likely. Anyway, even if he hadn’t been speeding, the man driving the SUV wouldn’t have had time to decide what to do about the Volvo; it was black and the headlights were off; its nose would have appeared in his view and his hands would have turned the wheel before he’d even have had time to make a sound.
    I’d never before—not when my mom had fainted in an elevator at Hecht’s, not when I’d almost biked directly off a hiking trail into a ravine—felt horror anything like what I felt in that instant of hearing the scream of brakes and, half a heartbeat later, the scream of a woman.
    There’s a moment just after breaking something (the glass slips from your fingertips, your elbow catches the vase) in which it feels like if you stand there, absolutely still, baring your teeth, you should be able to suck time backward like an indrawn breath. Your hand hangs there in the air, your eyes fall shut, you’re like someone playing a children’s game with a whistle and a voice that shouts,
“Freeze!”
    I was still in that moment when Thomas, who’d been standing beside me, started down toward our car, which hadrolled to a stop half a lane into Connecticut and was sitting there untouched (only now did I register that among the things I heard
hadn’t
been the crunch of metal or glass). I must have walked some ways down the block too, although I don’t remember deciding to move, because I remember seeing the back of the man who’d been driving the SUV; he was bald-headed and wearing a white shirt, kneeling in the road, facing away from us. I remember seeing that our car sat in a puddle of dark between streetlights. And I remember thinking:
The cops aren’t here yet; no one’s come out of their houses yet; this won’t last
.
    It was Thomas who slipped into the Volvo, quick as a mouse disappearing into a crack in the wall, and it was him who reversed, more smoothly than either of us had ever driven before: an indrawn breath. But it was me who ran after him, who guided the car into the driveway, who, trembling afterward in Thomas’s bedroom, trying not to hear the faraway sirens, agreed: not a word, not a word, not a word.

Anna and I were lying together on the bath mat in their guest bathroom one afternoon that May. This bathroom had an enormous claw-foot tub, which we’d been in and were now outside of, listening as it slurpily drained, and I said, thinking I sounded so casual that it couldn’t