Dying for Chocolate

I stopped, glanced left, floored the accelerator, and wrenched the steering wheel to the right. The snow was coming down like oatmeal. Philip barreled down the left lane straight into the path of the oncoming trucks. At the last moment he careened out of the lane when the tractor-trailer blasted him with his horn. The big trucks lumbered past. Philip put on his auxiliary lights and appeared to slow down.

I gunned the T-bird forward and pulled up on the BMW’s right, on the dirt shoulder of Highway 24. I honked. Through his tinted window glass it was impossible to make out his face. He acted as if he neither saw nor heard me. Again he sped up, as if to get away.

The Thunderbird stalled in the snowy mud.

I leaned on the horn and lowered my window all the way. Cold feathers of snow pricked my face.

“Philip!” I screamed. “Come back!”

Speeding up again, the BMW bumped and rocked southbound down 24. In the right lane I could see a black Porsche passing a silver bus. I took a deep breath and turned the key in the ignition. If I could hit Philip from behind, maybe he would stop.

A Ford is not a BMW. The Thunderbird started with a jolt. I gunned it forward and hit a utility pole with the right front headlight. With all the snow, I hadn’t even seen it. A dull pain shot up my spine. When I looked back at the road, Philip was speeding down the left lane on a collision course with the bus. Leaving bells and whistles whining, I unstrapped my seat belt and jumped from the car.

“Stop!” I yelled through the curtains of snow. “Stop!”

But he did not. The Porsche and the bus honked. The Porsche driver careened onto the shoulder. A wall of snow sprayed upward. The Porsche’s brakes screamed. Still the BMW raced forward. The bus driver leaned on the horn. Philip heard the honk and braked, then hit the gravel on the left shoulder. The BMW went into a wild skid.

The bus slammed into the BMW on the driver’s side. Glass shattered. Tires shrieked. I could hear the bus passengers screaming. The Porsche driver scrambled out. There’s no way, I thought as I ran, there’s just no way.

My feet slid through the snow. Ahead the bus and Philip’s car stood motionless, smoking. My body whacked the BMW hood. The left front of the car was irreparably smashed. I looked through the broken glass, desperately hoping to see some movement.

The top half of Philip’s body was at a skewed angle; he had been thrown back by the impact. His face and chest were splattered with blood and glass. The sunglasses were gone and his eyes were wide, red, empty. The bottom half of his body had disappeared below the BMW’s crumpled metal.

“Call an ambulance!” I shrieked at the bus driver.

But I knew. I just couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t look back at him. I couldn’t think of anything, couldn’t see or hear anything, only knew one thing.

Philip was dead.

4.

Slow motion, fast motion. Time splintered.

Fast: People moved back and forth. Back and forth. They asked questions and called to me, as if I were at the bottom of a very deep well. A man pulled me back when I tried to tug open the BMW door. I ripped away from him and started to run. A gentle set of hands guided me away and draped a blanket over my hair and shoulders, protection from the snow. A man and a woman put out flares. Directed traffic. Motioned the police car over.

In slow motion: The snow fell. The BMW smoked. Behind the car’s dark glass the body did not move.

In the midst of life we are in death . . .

A policeman spoke my name. His voice was far away. I looked at him through eyes that seemed not mine. I cupped my hands and blew into them.

He said, “Just a few questions, if you can manage it.”

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts . . .

I nodded and followed him, slowly, slowly. The BMW was behind me now. I was leaving Philip to strangers, foreign men in suits who would make their decree. It was unbearable.

My name again. Yes. I got into the patrol car. I tried to focus on the policeman, but Philip’s face invaded my mind. Could you describe what happened? Yes. Even then something inside said: I can describe it. What I can’t do is explain it.

Outside the car, snow fell like soft feathers, sticking in some places, melting in others. When I tried to think of what I was going to do with Adele’s T-bird, I would see the back of Philip’s car, see the black smoke belching, see his forehead and cheeks sprayed with blood.

The ambulance came. Paramedics splashed through the mud. Someone brought me a paper cup of coffee, told the cop the EMS guys had hooked the victim up to a machine to send telemetry down to a Denver hospital. A doctor had confirmed that Philip Miller was dead. Somebody from the coroner’s office was on the way.

Now a new policeman, a state patrolman, asked my name, the location of my vehicle, and if I was the one who had witnessed the accident from the other direction. When I made my answers he handed me a notebook and said to write down all I had seen. I wrote and passed it to him. While he was reading, someone rapped on the window of the patrol car. The patrolman, whose name tag said only Lowry, stepped out of the car. When he got back in he was grumbling.

My head throbbed. “May I go now?” I asked. I was seized with a surge of panic, as I had been when one of Arch’s classmates was killed in a school-bus accident two years before. I needed to see Arch, to be with him, to make sure he was okay. I said, “I need to get home. To my son.”

Where exactly was he, Lowry wanted to know, where was home? I dived into the muddle of my brain. Where was Arch now? At the school. He needed to get to the Farquhars. Yes, Lowry said, the police would phone and have Arch call home.

Home. The word brought tears, finally, as if by mentioning one loss there could be grief for all others.

Elizabeth, Elizabeth Miller, my voice was saying, someone needs to find Elizabeth, someone needs to tell her. And through my blubbering Lowry again extracted information and promised follow-up.

I took a deep breath.

Lowry said, “A friend of yours was up in this area and answered the call about the accident. He’s from the Sheriff’s Department, an investigator by the name of Tom Schulz. . . . He wanted to know if you were all right.”

“He answered the call?”

“Didn’t know you were in it till he got here. You want to see him or not?”

“Yes,” I said as tears stung my eyes again. “Please, I’d like to see Schulz.”

“Soon. About this accident. . .” said Lowry.

I looked out the window, but could not see Tom Schulz through the crowd. The snow was coming down now in a slanted rush to the mountain meadow, like millions of tiny arrows shooting to earth.

“Exactly how fast was the victim going,” Lowry wanted to know.

“It’s on there,” I said, and motioned to the pad. “About forty.” The speed limit was thirty on that road, but you could do forty on most of the straight stretches if you were careful. Which was not, of course, what Philip Miller had been.

“You see,” I said, “it was more the way he was driving.”

“And the way he was driving was . . .”

“Zigzag. As if he didn’t have control of the car.”

Lowry narrowed his eyes at me. “So what did you think?”

I shook my head and mumbled something about not knowing. “Maybe car trouble,” I said.

“Why didn’t he pull over?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I can’t figure out.”

Then we had to go back to the beginning, how I had been catering the brunch where Philip had been a guest who had arrived late.