“I got it,” she said, practically singing. Then I heard the scream, the warning scream, the targeted scream, the one directed at the nexus point, trying to destroy the geometric inevitability of the girl and the Buick meeting there. And then there were the other screams, the yells, the shrieks, the mass casualty devices, the napalm scorched sound waves, the “British are coming” alarms that sent men and women running, as if motion is the same as action. Our spaniel started barking. I was running like the rest. An old man got out of the Buick. He had white hair and a gold watch. “She ran right in front, I didn’t see,” he said to everyone at once. “I didn’t see. I didn’t see. I didn’t see. She ran…” I remember hearing that as I looked at the girl on the ground. She was out cold. It was an old man, I remember thinking, they drive so slow, and by a park. I pulled a woman with dreads off the man as she battered his chest with her metal-spiraled wrists. Then the wailing started. The howling. The kind of noise that has no object, no subject, it exists only to drown itself, the sound people make when they want to empty themselves into the world and diffuse themselves into nothing. She was the mother. She had to be. There was a Doctor. We were told not to move her. The ambulance came quickly. I held my wife in my arms. She cried and cried. The family and the shortstop were gone. Had he seen? “What the fuck is happening?” she sobbed. “What the fuck? What the fuck?” You know how Eskimos have 300 words for snow? I wonder who the people are who have the most words for screaming, the people who are most adapted to the intricacies of human shock and sorrow. Who are they? How many words for howl, shriek, wail do they have? Although maybe the people most used to suffering don’t scream at all. We made dinner at home after that. Silent pasta from a half-empty box. And after that we made love. She was pregnant within the year. That girl died, I remember that clearly, it was in the papers, on the news. I’m not sure we would’ve stuck it out if it weren’t for that. I don’t think she would’ve forgiven me. That girl may have saved us. She might be the reason that my daughter is here now, alive, still terrified of streets. She looks both ways when crossing a hallway. Her mother made her that way.
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