Free Splendor by Elana K. Arnold Page A

between my safety and answering the pull he felt to help someone.
    Martin was watching me work through all of this. “It’s a lot to ask of anyone,” he said softly. “To weigh the worth of one life against another.”
    I nodded. Suddenly it seemed that maybe Will had been glad to get into Yale for more reasons than just because it was an Ivy League school. Maybe he was glad to leave me behind—on the island, where it was safe.
    The fire felt hot now, stifling. I rose to leave. Martin stood, too. “Thanks for dinner, Martin,” I said.
    “Thank
you,
Scarlett, for the company. Drive safely, will you?”
    I nodded. We embraced. Martin’s sweater was scratchy against my cheek and smelled like smoke.

Outside, the world blurred—cars and cars and more cars, red and black and white and red again. In front of him were the backs of two heads—in the driver’s seat, a woman’s, dark brown waves falling to her shoulders, and directly in front of him a man’s, hair curly and uncombed, woven with the occasional gray.
    A CD played, one of his parents’ favorites, James Taylor. This song was a sort of lullaby—“Sweet Baby James,” about a cowboy and his horse and his cows, all alone together out on the range. The tune was quiet and dreamlike. As their car pulled off the freeway, James Taylor crooned, “With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go,” and their car slowed as they made their way through town, the trees in blossom, the sky bright and blue and open. Heading home. All was right with the world.
    There was a moment of silence as the song’s last notes faded. He saw that his mother’s right hand had reached for his father’s left. Their fingers interlaced in a way that both embarrassed and pleased him as he watched from the backseat.
    And then there was the next moment. In that instant all the air in the car was gone. Something electric replaced it, something charged and sinister and on the cusp of pain.
    His father didn’t notice the change. His sloped shoulders didn’t raise, his thumb, gently rubbing the hand it held, did not stop.
    But his mother felt the shift, too. Will saw her flinch, and the force it took her to settle, and then she squeezed his father’s hand and pulled hers away.
    “You missed your turn,” his father said, but his mother didn’t seem to hear. She grasped the wheel tightly with both hands and her foot pressed down hard on the gas pedal, and the engine roared, and Will felt his heart beating faster and faster, as if it was that pedal, as if his mother was stepping on his heart, harder and harder until it would surely burst.
    She turned the car sharply, tires squealing as they skipped across the asphalt. They raced down the street, his father shouting at his mother, but Will’s heart was pounding too loudly for him to make out the words, and then there was a woman—pregnant or fat, he couldn’t tell which—and another vehicle, a pickup truck, traveling too fast as well, into the intersection up ahead, and just before the impact, before his mother placed their car between the woman and the truck, he saw in the rearview mirror green, desperate eyes—his mother’s or a reflection of his own, he couldn’t tell which, not then or in the years to follow.
    His father rode in the back of the ambulance alongside his mother. It screamed off without him, leaving Will standing in the rainbow of shattered glass and oil. It was almost pretty.
    Finally a policeman offered him a ride in the cruiser; numbly he accepted and lowered himself into the backseat, behind the metal cage that protected the officers from their passengers. The policeman flipped on the siren. Its scream seemed to give voice to the feeling in Will’s chest. As they pulled away from the crash—his mother’s car and the pickup truck left behind, entangled like lovers—it seemed to Will that he was sitting exactly where he belonged.
    And he wondered what the eyes in the mirror had wanted to tell him.

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