Truck

             When I woke, I had to call for the nurse. That was one thing I wouldn’t expect—usually in the movies the nurse is standing over the soldier right when they wake up. So I laid there in some striped smock, yelling, “Nurse!” because that’s what the war veterans moan when they wake up after their legs have been blown off, right? I counted limbs, fingers, and toes as I heard footsteps approaching my bed. Four, ten, and ten. Good.

            “Well, that didn’t take long!” said the woman in kitten-patterned scrubs after she pulled the curtains back. She grabbed the chart off the end of my bed and wrote something on it.

            “What didn’t?” I asked.

            “You were only out for just under two hours. Tell me, what was the last thing you remember?”

            I looked around the hospital room: it was calm. There were other beds up and down the long room, but they were all empty. And the only people around were orderlies or other nurses cleaning up or passing through.

            “I was trying to cross the street, on my way home from campus, to go to the post office, and I think I tripped and hit my head,” I said. The nurse laughed.

            “You got it half right. How do you feel?” the nurse asked.

            “I have a headache but other than that I think I’m okay. What do you mean half?”

            “Honey, you were hit by a truck. Hit and run.”

I had to laugh at that. “You mean, like, the truck stopped a little bit short and knocked me over, or what?”

            “No, the EMTs say people on the street saw it run smack into you. Must have been going forty, fifty miles, they said.” Then I decided to expand my health check from fingers and limbs to frantically running my hands over my sides and stomach. The nurse laughed again.

            “Where did it hit me?”

            “Lower abdomen is what we heard from the bystanders. But we ran x-rays and nothing’s broken. No bruises, nothing aside from the lacerations on your face.” I reached up and felt the gauze still taped to my cheek. I remembered the asphalt coming up to greet me. But I thought that I would have remembered a box of metal on wheels flying into me.

            “You’re shitting me,” I said.

            “Look, honey, I’ve seen stranger things working around here. You can believe me or not, but count this as a blessing. You got to have someone up there looking after you.” She finished writing and marched off down the hall, cats of all different colors prancing on the back of her shirt. I looked over and saw my clothes neatly arranged on a chair next to my bed, my shoes and just jeans and a t-shirt, but I started to panic when the blue Duke University sweatshirt I had been wearing wasn’t there. I tore the pile of clothes apart and found it neatly folded under my bra and underwear, and sighed with relief.

            I got dressed and had to sign a couple of papers before they would let me go. Nurses here and there who must have had heard about my accident looked me up and down suspiciously. I left the hospital and realized I’d never been there before, and had no idea how to get home. I went back inside and asked an orderly how to get to my street, and I knew none of the street names that came out in jumbles and nodded as if I did know and then went outside again.

            After wandering down the street I decided to follow people who looked like they knew where they were going, men in suits mostly. This led me to the bus station, and I found my way onto a bus home from there. The bus was cold and I stuffed my hands into the overlong sleeves of the blue sweatshirt for warmth. It had been my mother’s father’s, and I wore it whenever the weather allowed. To me it felt warmer than a down coat.

            I came into my apartment and everything looked the same as I had left it that morning. I don’t know why I expected anything to have changed. But when you’re in an accident like that and you have to come home from having woken up somewhere else, you feel surprised to see your room and your things again. And it’s almost as if you can tell they’re surprised to see you, too.

            I wasn’t sure what to do next. What’s the first thing to take care of after surviving a car crash? I had gotten sleepy on the bus ride, so I lay down on my bed. I tried to remember the truck hitting me, and as I dusted off the memory of falling in the street, like an archaeologist brushing dirt off an old bone, I started to make out the truck slamming into my side. I couldn’t remember any pain, but I saw the face of the man driving, shaggy, blonde bangs, lower lip trembling as if he were about to burst into tears, mortified.

            Then everything was hard to picture, it was as if my vision was obscured by some sort of mesh in front of my face, like a bee keeper’s mask. I stumbled around in the street as cars swerved around me and voices called, “This way!” and “Over here!” but I couldn’t find my way out of the intersection. I reached out with both hands to feel someone or something, but the voices ebbed away, and I was being consumed by the whirring white noise of cars roaring on all sides.

            I woke up to my phone ringing. I answered, and it was my mother.

            “Baby, are you okay?” said the fuzzy approximation of her voice through the speaker.

            “Yes, Mamma, I’m fine.”

            “The hospital called when they brought you in. I about had a heart attack! What happened? Are you going to press charges?”

            “No, Mamma, the man barely tapped me. I just fell and hit my head, that’s all,” I lied. “He came to hospital and apologized over and over again. I just told him to go home.”

            “Well, Alice from work says even if you feel fine now the pain might could come later. You could have whiplash and not even know it!”

            “I’m fine. I’ll let you know if anything does happen, I promise.” The phone was silent.

            “Okay. I’m just glad you’re okay.” She paused. “Did you get the package yet?”

            “No, I didn’t get the package,” I said, getting off the bed and walking into the kitchen. “I got hit by a truck. What’s in it anyway?”

            “Just some old things I thought might help you find some direction,” she said.

            “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, sitting at the kitchen table.

            “Baby, you’re so lost these days, always switching up your major. And I can’t help but feel it’s my fault.”

            “What?” I asked, ready for a consolation trip.

            “It’s just that ever since we moved across the state you’ve cut off from your heritage, my family and not to mention your daddy’s,” my mother said. “Why, you never even got to meet your own granddaddy.”

            “That’s not your fault, Mamma.”

            “I know, baby. I just think you need to find out where you’re from to find where you’re going.”

            “Let me decide what I need,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

            “Okay. Are you going to get the package now? Should you be driving?”

            “The doctor said it was okay.”

            “All-right, then. I love you. I’m glad you’re okay.”

            “I know, Mamma. I love you too.”

            I got up from the table and got my keys. I left the apartment, got into my car, and headed to the post office, one hospital trip later than I’d meant to. I never had to go to the post office before, but this time they’d tried to deliver my package to my apartment while I wasn’t there one too many times and finally told me just to pick it up at the shipping facility.

            It was dark when I got on the road and I had to follow directions I’d scribbled down from the internet onto a sticky note. They took me down the back roads behind campus, past the train tracks and into where it was mostly warehouses. The roads had few streetlights and many transfer trucks were parked all around the black parking lots. My headlights shone onto and reflected off of the sides of the trucks as I drove, and as I squinted at the street signs I found myself on a road with the post office at the end of it, lit up alone in the night.

            I parked and inside the post office it was all yellow light and brown boxes. There was a kind of conveyor belt like in an airport where the baggage comes out, but it was stopped, and an old lady stood arguing with a middle-aged woman in a blue uniform. The old lady needed her husband’s medicine, but either it hadn’t arrived yet or she didn’t have her husband’s I.D. to be able to take the package anyway. I think it was a little of both.

            They came to an agreement to wait for the last truck to come back before the office closed, and then they would see what they would see, and it was my turn to ask for a package. The old lady hobbled over to a seat along the wall. I approached the woman in uniform who had frizzy red hair and bags under her eyes and asked for my package. She went in the back and I sat down next the old lady.

            “Good gracious, sweetie, what happened to your face?” the lady asked. “Oh, look at me, mouthing off, no manners at all. Please, don’t answer that. I’ve had a long day, is all.”

            “No, it’s alright,” I said. “I was hit by truck today.” The lady pulled backwards and removed her eyeglasses, as if to inspect me more thoroughly.

            “A truck?! Now, I never seen nobody walk up into a post office like that after a car accident,” she said. She wore a kerchief over what little hair she had left.

            “You’re telling me. I remember going down and the next thing I know I’m in a hospital, nurse telling me I’m fine, all but the scratch on my cheek.”

            “Nothing but a little scratch, huh?” she said. She pulled at the sleeve of my sweatshirt, stained and with a cigarette burn on the cuff. “How long you had this old thing?”

            “This? It was my grandfather’s before he died,” I said.

            “Mhmm. I thought so, this old rag’s got power in it. He’s looking out for you, girl.”

I laughed. “Power? What does that mean?”

            “Love! Who else wore that shirt before you? Your mamma or daddy?” She settled back into her chair and closed her eyes. “I can feel it, ain’t nothing could hurt someone wearing something with that much love left on it.”

            I squeezed the fabric of the sweatshirt in between my fingers, as if maybe the power she spoke of made it thicker, like armor.

            “Shoot, we all got to have someone looking out for us. Like my husband, if I weren’t running all over town trying to get his damn pills—oh, excuse my language darling.” She blushed.

            The woman came back from around the corner holding a small package, about the size of a shoebox.

            “Sign here,” she said, and I did. I took the box and opened it right there. Inside was an old cigar box, inside that a pile of old letters and pictures, a small journal at the bottom. I picked one of the photos up. It’s strange to see someone you’ve never met who looks so much like you. Maybe because they resembled you so much they might have thought the same way, or had the same problems as you. But how would you ever know?

            “Is that him?” the old lady next to me asked.

            “Mhmm.”

            “See? He’s looking out for you.” She winked at me.

            I put the picture and the box away and got up.

            “I hope you get your husband’s medicine,” I said.

            “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “I always get my way in the end.” I smiled at her and told her goodnight.

            Outside the post office I looked through the photos again. I found one of my grandfather holding my mother as a baby. They were on the porch swing at the old house, and my mother was pulling the glasses off of his face. He was laughing and looking right at the camera, at me.

            I heard brakes and the slamming of a car door near me, and saw a faded blue truck with a large dent in the right side of the bumper. A blonde man was standing, staring at me with a look on his face as if he’d seen a ghost.

            “Oh god, it’s—how are you—I’m so sorry,” he said.

            “How the hell do you think I am after getting run over?” I said, crushing the shipping package in my fingers.

            “Well, you look, uh…”

            “Yeah, I’m fine, for God knows what reason. And now I have to pay a bill for an x-ray that showed my spine is stronger than your busted-ass truck anyway,” I said pointing the box at the pickup.

            “Look, please just don’t call the cops,” he said, eyes tearing up. “I can’t handle that right now. I didn’t see you, I swear. I fucked up again, I’m sorry.”

            He was crying now, and I thought about the story of when my grandfather ended up giving a job to the man that tried to steal the brand-new lawnmower out of his shed. I don’t remember all the details, and they change every time my mother tells the story anyway. But the man was on his knees slobbering as I thought, and I walked towards him, extended a hand, and awkwardly patted his shoulder.

            “Look, I’m not going to tell anybody. Just get out of here,” I said.

            “Really?” he asked, getting to his feet and wiping his nose.

            “Yeah, just get lost. After you get your package or whatever.”

            “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much!” he said, grabbing me in a hug. “You know, you must do a damn good job eating your vegetables. Getting up after a hit like that.”

            “No,” I said, after he let me go and I got out my car keys. “I’ve just got someone looking out for me.”