Free Commuters by Emily Gray Tedrowe

the bottom of the screen, in those last moments before her awareness. When she had wondered, for a flash, if he was pulling a prank. Before she saw his head, how it was tilted to the side and how it was bulging, along the temple and behind his ear. His eyes, open only to their whites.
    Doctors who specialized in head injuries, Rachel was to learn, occasionally spoke about the “first injury”—to them, this meant whatever initial impact, that first blow, the one that set off a chain of dire problems inside the skull. They also spoke about a “second injury,” but while Rachel had originally thought this referred to another impact in the accident—another fall, collision, blow—what the doctors meant was the trauma that occurred inside the patient’s head, a buildup and overflow of blood, a rapid swelling that broke apart those neatly coiled tubes of brain. She got it, sort of, but the terminology continued to bother her because in Bob’s case, they still—years later—didn’t know how the two were related. Bob had been in a coma for eight days, and his amnesia, later, blacked out everything after that morning’s breakfast. He could remember Melissa dropping an open box of cereal, for example, the corn puffs skidding across linoleum, but he didn’t remember the broom, the ladder, or the James Taylor song. Everything about his first injury remained a frustrating mystery. There were a couple of leading theories.
    The gutter had been cleaned out. So had he fallen off the ladder, as was first assumed? There was no sign of it—no blood, no dent or disturbance in the grassy dirt along the back corner of the house. Plus, the ladder was neatly replaced in the garage, hanging on its metal hook as usual. Was it possible that he fell, recovered, and then went inside—disoriented, unaware of the damage done—to collapse on the couch? Possible, the neuromedical people conceded. They said that it was more often the second injury that incapacitated people, not the original impact, whose damage many victims underestimated, and hence delayed treatment. But Rachel couldn’t believe that Bob would fall off a ladder and then take the time to fold it up and carry it all the way back into the garage, before coming inside. Winnie had to agree.
    The doctors ruled out a stroke or a heart attack. They traced the initial impact to a blunt blow along the left side of his face. That first night they spent at the hospital, after Bob’s first surgery had begun, Winnie took the girls back to her apartment. She phoned Rachel and Bob’s neighbor, Bruce Everwine, to ask him to check that the house was closed and locked. When Bruce arrived, he noticed that their car was backed partially out of the open garage, left at an odd angle, keys in the ignition. No one knew what to make of this. Had Bob driven anywhere, in those minutes Rachel couldn’t account for? Had he been in some kind of car accident? No sign of it on the car itself, Bruce reported. One nurse in the trauma unit wondered aloud if the car had rolled backward, had hit Bob in the head, in the garage. Rachel tried to picture this. Had he, for some reason, turned on the motor and then bent down behind the car? Had she, somehow, left it in drive after returning from dropping off Melissa? None of it seemed likely.
    “You might just have to live with never knowing,” Dr. Richards, who led Bob’s team, had said to both of them several months later, once Bob had survived both the major surgeries.
    And because they were instantly plunged into the world of rehab and recovery, those endless months of scans and programs and treatments, for a long while there was no time to consider any alternative. Then, as time went on, Bob didn’t seem to want to know. Even after he was moved back home, he showed such little interest in parsing out either of their movements on that day that Rachel finally stopped asking or hoping for something to trigger a flood of actual recollection. She burned for