We passed by a car wreck on the drive to your mom’s house. You slowed down to swerve around the cones put up around what was left of the car. I looked out the passenger side window at the blue and red flashing lights, the police cars, and the torn remains of metal, rubber, and glass. Small pieces of its carcass were strewn across the asphalt, the wheels of our car rolling over them.
“Don’t look.” You said. I turned to you. You were looking straight ahead, with both hands tight on the wheel.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Someone might have died.”
You could never look at a disaster straight on. The fascination that other people had with terrible events was lost on you. Why would anyone want to look at something horrible? For a long time, I just thought you were a much better person than me. You were a more careful driver. You read the paper instead of watching the news.
The first and last time we watched a horror movie together, you continuously woke up in the middle of the night for two weeks. I’d hear the rustling of the sheets and your weight shifting off the mattress as you left the bedroom to pace around the living room. One night, I woke up with you, and I let you smoke in bed. I watched your shaking hands raise the cigarette to your lips, and the spark of the lighter warmly illuminate the planes of your face before going dark again.
“It’s not that I’m scared of getting murdered.” you explained, smoke escaping between your syllables. I tried not to cough as it burned through the still air. “That little girl didn’t even know her parents were killed.” You were talking about the movie again. “I can’t help but wonder about all the horrible things that must happen all the time, and we just never know.”
We eventually went back to sleep. It was a particularly gruesome film. We wouldn’t have gone if we knew.
By the time I got the diagnosis, the thing had already been killing me for a year and a half. During that period of oblivious bliss, we’d gone to the grocery store, driven past more car accidents, had sex, had fights. We made a mess of the kitchen, and we cleaned it again several times over. You smoked more cigarettes. I raked the yard. We never knew.
The night I got the diagnosis, you smoked four cigarettes in bed. You’d light it, smoke the cigarette in two draws of breath, discard the butt in the ashtray on your nightstand, and then reach for another. I watched you in silence, following the movement of your hands in the dark, its repetitive and hypnotic dance. Your eyes stayed put on the far end of the room. In the end, you only managed to grab my hand, the half smoked fourth cigarette still hanging from your lips. I remember that desperate and frantic look in your eyes. Through the plume of smoke, you murmured to yourself,
“Don’t look.
Don’t
look.”