Songs For Your Mother

at my arm and telling me that we have to get out. He’s unbuckling his seatbelt and, on autopilot, I’m doing the same. My buckle pings and jumps loose. Will is turning to his door, and that’s all there’s time for.
There’s a desperate screech of brakes. I crane my neck, and I can see the driver’s face twist in horror, as he frantically pulls at the wheel trying to swerve. It’s not enough. It’s travelling way too fast for us, and there isn’t anything to be done. The truck is going to hit us, and it fills my vision like I have front row seats at the cinema, and I’m way too close to the screen.

Chapter 5
Three months later
When I open my eyes, my mother is sitting at my bedside, and I’m confused for a long moment. I’m a child again, sick with something that I don’t quite remember. She was sitting there then, and she’s sitting here now, except she is weeping, and leaning forward to hug me and hold me close. I want to tell her not to cry and that it will be alright, but I cannot speak.
It’s only then that I take in my hospital surroundings, and there is a tube in my nose, and my body feels weighted to the bed. I have no idea of how I got here, and no memory of anything at all before, and then it hits me. The truck didn’t stop, but after that, I have no recollection. Where is Will? I try to ask this question only I cannot get any words out.
I pull at my mother’s hand, wanting to know, but she is already standing and at the door to my room looking for help.
Nurses appear, and my feeding tube is removed from my nose. It makes me want to throw up. I sip some water and want to throw up again. My mother holds my hand and tells me it will get easier. I try again to talk, and my throat struggles to make a sound. I am unable to achieve much more than a croak.
Still holding my hand, my mother starts to tell me what’s happened. She tells my story, the one I know nothing about.
After the crash, Will and I were taken by ambulance to a hospital, and I didn’t wake up. Not that day or the day after or the one after that. Weeks started to drift by and then months. I’ve been in a vegetative state for three long months. I’ve been back in the UK for more than a month, after two months in a hospital in San Jose. The medical insurers agreed with my mother that it would be cheaper to fly me home by air ambulance to the UK than keep me there. I’m not on the critical list, and somehow I don’t feel half as much pain as I thought I would; but then I don’t feel much of anything.
I can move my arms and legs, and they’re all present and working. They hurt. I’m sapped, and I have no strength.
‘Will never made it,’ my mother says. ‘I’m so sorry. He died before the ambulance arrived. They don’t know how you survived. We’re so lucky you’re still here.’
As she says this, she starts to cry again, and it is too much – I am crying as well. I am crying, not for myself, but for Will. I can’t believe he’s gone.
As far as the doctors could tell, my mother tells me, my brain and body appeared to be in working order. I can imagine her asking the questions, being a doctor, and not stopping asking questions, and making sure everything possible was done for me.
I try to talk, as I need to ask about Will. There must be something more to say.
‘You need to take it slowly. It’s been a long time since you said a word; it will come back,’ my mother says.
I nod, not entirely reassured. I can think clearly. I can hear the words in my head, but I cannot get them out. There’s a well of panic rising inside me. What if my voice never comes back? I cannot imagine not being able to communicate, staying silent and mute. I force myself to croak. A mangled ‘ank’ comes out. It helps quell my fear.
I have a deep scar on my chest, and my ribs hurt a little but have mostly done their healing. When she tells me this, I can feel it, or at least I think I do: a slash across my body. As I work my fingers across my chest, it’s like a lightning strike. I remember the truck hitting our car and a detonation, and the impact crushing Will’s body, and then I remember the blood. Only it’s a jumble of images.
I broke my left arm and leg, which have both healed, and two ribs. I was, my mother tells me, quite broken.
I start to wonder what happened out on the road, the sequence of events after I lost consciousness. I imagine the ambulance arriving after taking some time to find us. That was all so long ago. It’s hard to process how much time has passed. It’s a horrifying length of time. The thought that I am trying to avoid and can’t is that, for all the time I’ve been in hospital in San Jose and London, Will has been dead. There would have been a funeral. There would have been friends and hymns. His body has long been burned or buried beneath the cold, wet earth. No one will have known what happened. Our truck driver was our only witness. He would have told how he came around the corner and he didn’t have a chance. None of us did.
It should have killed us both, only I didn’t die, and Will did. For me, he’s still out on that road. It feels like that’s where I left him, and it’s only then that it hits me. It crashes