collarbone and big shiner-would be nothing short of vulgar. Besides, it’s not as if Marissa and I were friends. I’d only met her the night she died.
She and I had been at the same Weight Watchers meeting. I’d just joined, hoping to lose the ten pounds that had managed to creep up from the last time I lost ten pounds. She’d received her lifetime pin for being at her weight goal (the irony of that word lifetime not lost on me now). Offering a ride to a stranger is something I wouldn’t normally do, but I saw her teetering toward the bus stop on those sexy shoes. I thought about how amazing it was she’d dropped so much weight and said to myself, What the heck. Maybe her success will rub off on me.
So there we were, zipping along Centinela Boulevard and chatting about dieting. I said to her something along the lines of “I’m worried I’ll fail because I get so hungry when I go on a diet.”
Then she said, “I have a recipe for a soup that’s super filling.”
And I said, “I’m not much of a cook.”
And she said, “This is totally easy.”
And I said, “Really?”
And she said, “I have the recipe right here with me. I swear, it’s so simple-nothing but opening a bunch of cans.”
And I said, “Well, great, let’s see it!”
And she reached into the backseat of my car to grab her purse, which was the reason her seat belt was unbuckled at the moment of impact.
Marissa Jones’s Taco Soup
4 cans navy or northern beans
1 can Mexican-spiced tomatoes
1 can diced tomatoes
1 can corn
1 package taco seasoning
1 package fat-free ranch dressing mix
Mix ingredients in large saucepan. Heat and serve.
MAKES 8 SERVINGS.
As best I can recall (my head took quite a whack, so my memory is dodgy), a dresser toppled off a truck in front of us, and I’d jerked the steering wheel to avoid it. The rest is unclear. Witnesses reported that we skimmed the curb at an angle, which sent us rolling.
“Landed ass over teakettle,” I heard one paramedic say to another as they slid my stretcher into the ambulance.
Another thing I overheard: “No hurry on that one, she’s dead.”
Dead? My hands felt around on my body. I wasn’ t sure which one of us he referring to.
It wasn’t me.
Which meant.
Oh shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
After the accident, I tried to go back to life as usual, without success. Seemed I’d failed to account for one simple yet irrefutable fact, which is as follows: Knowing that you killed somebody is really depressing. Honestly, I can’t fathom how people like Scott Peterson can pick themselves up afterward and go fishing. I barely had the energy to report to the office and perform a job I’ve been doing so long that I suspect I could do it in a coma.
The weeks ticked by. The bruises faded, and yet, unable to shake the despair that clung to me like a fog, I was left to conclude that there are two types of horrible events: the type that shake you up and cause you to grab life by the throat and never again take it for granted, and the type that make you lie in bed and watch a lot of reality TV.
Mine fell into the latter category.
With no one close enough to witness my downward spiral, I was free to fall. No husband or kids. No roommate. My boyfriend Robert made his break in late August, a month after the accident. We’d been on the brink of splitting anyway, lingering at that stage where we both knew things were over and yet, like a car we weren’t quite ready to sell, we kept patching and paying for small repairs, waiting for something huge like the transmission to blow. As it turned out, the relationship was totaled. Robert could barely stand to look at the wreckage I’d become, and frankly, it was a relief when he left. I barely noticed him packing his toothbrush and the extra set of shoes he kept under my bed, what with the new fall TV season starting up.
If only Marissa hadn’t written that list or if hers had been more like my to-do lists: a bunch of nothing that nevertheless had occupied my time for the past three-plus decades. Pick up the dry cleaning. Run to the gym. Meet a friend for lunch. Some of the tasks got crossed off others were transferred from paper to paper until I’d either finally get around to doing them or decide they weren’t as important as I thought they were.
If I died, what could my obituary possibly even say? June Parker, on- and off-again girlfriend, midlevel employee, and lifelong underachiever, died waiting for something to happen. She is survived by a new pack of socks, the purchase of which was the greatest achievement crossed off her to-do list.
I’d read Marissa’s list only once before hiding it away in my dresser drawer. I wasn’t even sure why I’d kept it. Sure, I told myself it would be sad for the family-but still, why did it bother me so much?
It was only when bathed in the forgiving light of the TV that I could bear to admit the truth to myself: Horrible as it was that I’d killed someone, I was relieved I hadn’t died. For whatever reason, I’d been given a second chance.
Which is why I felt so guilty about squandering it. The gods who spared me were probably sitting around in the clouds, scratching their heads, and saying things like “You’d assume rescuing her from a pile of destroyed metal was enough! What do we need to get through to this woman? Plague? Locusts?!”
Problem was, I had no idea how to change. I wasn’t and had never been that person who could sit down and write a list of things I wanted to do and then actually do them. Marissa Jones needed to rub off on me all right. Not so much the part of her that could lose weight, but the part that seemed to at least have a clue about what she wanted once she did.
It seemed it would require a miracle to pry me from my malaise and set me on a new course. As it turned out, all it took was a guy at the intersection of Pico Boulevard and Eleventh Street selling ten-dollar bouquets of roses.
IT WAS JANUARY 20, exactly six months from the day Marissa died. My stomach had twisted when I noticed the date on my calendar and realized half a year had passed. It felt like both yesterday and a lifetime ago. My original plans to honor the occasion involved going home after work and& well, I had no plans. But then I stopped at a traffic light next to the man selling roses, and an idea instantly formulated in my head. I’d visit her grave. I’d apologize, and in doing so, maybe I’d be set free.
Flowers resting on my passenger seat, I stopped by a booth at the cemetery’s entrance for directions. A woman gave me a photocopied map, using a Sharpie to mark the route to Marissa’s grave site. I parked and then walked the rest of the way to where she was buried. Her tombstone, a tastefully simple marker, read, Marissa Jones, loving daughter, sister, and friend, and gave her birth and death dates.
“Sorry,” I whispered, and set down
