An Accidental Memoir: How I Killed Someone and Other Stories

By Wendy Reed

On a rainy Tuesday morning in 1996, Wendy Reed’s car hydroplaned, crossed an interstate median, and crashed into an oncoming car, whose driver was killed. Though Reed and her son were unharmed and Reed initially described herself as "fine," in the months that followed she would be engulfed in a storm of guilt and recrimination, as well as jarring legal proceedings over the accident.

In An Accidental Memoir, Reed, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, points the lens at herself and explores that accident and a succession of personal experiences through fact and fiction. Told from unusual perspectives and in highly figurative language, the stories draw on the Southern Gothic tradition of Flannery O’Connor and feature dark humor, flawed people, disastrous events, and moments of spiritual grace.

Taken together, this collection of deliberately fragmented essays and short stories become a meditation on subjects such as work, family responsibilities, death, and raising a child.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781603061988

Wendy Reed

WENDY REED has received writing fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and Seaside Institute and has published in various anthologies, magazines and newspapers. She also co-edited All Out of Faith and Circling Faith with Jennifer Horne. Reed produced and directed numerous documentaries and the series Bookmark with Don Noble at the University of Alabama Center for Public TV & Radio and for her work with Discovering Alabama she received two Emmys. She has three children and lives in Waverly, Alabama.

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An Accidental Memoir

How I Killed Someone and Other Essays and Stories

Wendy Reed

NewSouth Books

Montgomery

NewSouth Books

105 S. Court Street

Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright 2013 by Wendy Reed. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

ISBN: 978-1-58838-285-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-198-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012031520

Visit www.newsouthbooks.com

In Memory of Deidre

Contents

Prologue

Part I: Aftermath

Essays

Gnawing Through the Mask

Wearing Macramé

Driving Danny’s Ferrari

Beat Ten

Yard Work

Fig Preserves

A Hardwood with a View

Mother’s Day

Breaking Light

Stories

Harold Washburn

Sweet Sweet Tea

Aubade

Part II: Memoir of a Wrongful Death

How I Killed Someone

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Prologue

Reed and I were headed south to the dentist’s office on the interstate. It was his first appointment ever and he was excited about being a big boy. We weren’t late. We had time to spare. I put my windshield wipers on intermittent then checked and merged into the right lane.

That’s when the back of our Montero veered left and I turned into the direction of the swerve. For a second we were floating. Then everything went sideways. There was a whirring sound somewhere. And then we were moving faster.

It’s odd to realize your car is out of control. Even though the median was across four lanes, on the other side of the freeway, I was suddenly there, in it. Mud was flying everywhere; my car was moving, but I couldn’t be sure if it was in circles or what.

Then things slowed.

I remember thinking I can’t believe I’ve gone across the freeway in morning traffic and not been hit. I remember thinking that I would have to tell my husband about the mud—he would not be happy. I’d get it washed before he saw it.

I reached back to touch Reed in his car seat when I heard a sound like something exploding. Motion began again. We were spinning. I tried to see where but I couldn’t find anything to focus on. Then we were still again.

Maybe I tried to think. I do not remember unbuckling or getting out of my car. No one saw me get out of the car, so it is possible that I climbed over the seat to get to my son, but it seems I would remember doing such an unusual thing.

I saw the red lever to unbuckle his car seat. My eyes scanned him from head to toe and over and over I said, You’re all right. It’s all right. We’re all right. Reed wasn’t crying but something in my manner or my words must have scared him because before he was out of the car seat, he started. Someone, a man or a woman, asked if we were okay. I think I said yes. It was several yards from the median to the shoulder but I don’t remember walking there.

Cars were lined up as far as I could see. I knew those people would be late for work all because of me. I’m sorry, I thought. I was so very sorry. That’s when I saw my Montero. The frame was broken in half, the passenger side caved completely in. No glass was left in the windows and a tire lay several feet away. I must have hit something. Another car. Somebody else’s car. And then I saw the other car. The somebody’s car.

Are they okay? I asked, and I know I said it out loud because a nice lady with blonde hair looked at me.

They’re just having a hard time getting her out, a voice behind me explained. Someone was stroking my hair.

Ma’am, which hospital do you want to be taken to? A paramedic waited for my answer.

By reflex, I guess, I’d managed to run down the checklist I used to teach CPR. I mentally ran it again. Reed was crying; I heard him. If he was crying, then he was breathing. If he was breathing, then he was fine. We’re fine, just fine, thanks. See. Look. We’re fine.

The air hung thick with humidity. But I could see through it. Lights. Red. Flashing. The lights of emergency vehicles, fire trucks, an ambulance. I could see them loading a bundle of white sheets onto a stretcher. A her, they had said.

The bundle was a her.

I wonder what her brain recorded, if she saw the Montero enter the median, if she saw it shoot into her lane facing the wrong direction, if, when she was thirty-five, thirty, twenty-five, twenty, fifteen feet away and still coming at us, she saw Reed’s eyes—closed or maybe open wide—if she thought anything at all as her Camry smashed head on into us below the passenger side mirror behind the right front tire, if she registered the binding of the seat belt as it held her, if she saw the spray of shattered windshield—or if by that time her brain was no longer recording sensations.

To live through a wreck is to wish you had a stop button—and not just for the cascading memories. Even a pause button would have given me some relief.

I was not working then and had not worked full-time since getting married at seventeen. Teachers at my high school thought I must be pregnant. I wasn’t. However by the next Mother’s Day—and in spite of having been diagnosed with uterine polyps when I was 11—according to three EPT sticks I was. I was also pulling an A in Psych 101, so it looked as though I might make it in pre-med after all. Spring is the season famous for fertility and apparently I was fertile, too.

I was nineteen and a half and had a 4.0 when Brittany was born. I was not a statistic, just a mother who happened to be a teenager.

For her first birthday I told her she was getting a sister.

Life came easy.

I didn’t consider pregnancy the ultimate act of creation that culminated in a tiny work of art, but I worked at it as obsessively as any artist does. I measured every morsel that went into my mouth; I became a walking vitamin and talking encyclopedia; I documented every pound, stretch mark, and perinatal aerobics class. I even I finished out the season with my softball team—Just don’t slide, my OB/GYN said. I documented the first time my daughter and I stole a base together—second base in the first inning and we scored. At that time, I thought all artists alien, impractical, neurotic, hoity-toity. Yet there I was, a Mommy-artist-cum-athlete.

In 1992, during Monday night football, my son was born. The next day my husband gave me a diamond ring.

We’d been divorced several years by the time I stood with my children before Michelangelo’s Pietà staring at Mary’s youthful face. The intricate details of love are carved hard and sorrowful as she holds the dead body of her son. I marveled that life and death and love and sacrifice could appear out of a single block of marble. My son wasn’t marveling. He was antsy. There’s too much art here, he said. I snapped a photograph with my disposable camera then bought us all gelato.

The wreck had happened in May 1996, when I was three months shy of thirty. I felt old because I was the oldest student entering graduate school, at least of the ones getting a degree in English.

Mommy has homework, I told Brittany and Brianne, then 10 and 8.

Other mothers don’t, they said.

I had not meant to go back to school any more than I’d meant to become a stay-at-home mom with a BS in education. I’d spent so much time reading children’s books that I thought I’d try my hand at writing one. I wound up in a fiction-writing class instead. It had wrapped up right before the wreck. My plan was to enjoy the break between terms before starting the Bibliography and Research Methods class in June. In May spring isn’t over but it felt like summer had already begun.

This is not a story about seasons, though.

Seasons have a beginning and an end, a date—certainty.

Life’s not so sure.

Science says beginning isn’t instinctual for us; we have to learn and then remember left before we can go right—reflection and direction. Memory also functions selectively. When the neural wiring seems faulty, and a past event comes in cloudy to us, we can focus on obscure details of an object’s shape or coloring.

It’s possible this story begins when my vehicle stopped spinning.

Her Camry was blue.

Or when I pressed the car seat lever.

The lever was square.

Or in between, at some point, I don’t remember. Where are the other shapes and colors I need for telling?

Here, according to science, are two non-colors:

She was black. I am white.

Endings are no easier. Signs help: merge, exit, stop, flatline.

Our living, though, is done in the middle as we move along. Looking back is how we judge distance between there and here, in spite of the consequences. In the Old Testament, God forbade Lot and his wife to look back. She did anyway. Was it the turning that changed her or was she transformed by what she saw? Or both?

I require corrective lenses. Without them, images fall short of my retina’s sweet spot. How the brain differentiates between our eyes and our mind’s eye comes down to interpretation. Experiments show that ambition, anxiety, righteous indignation, sexual arousal, and jealous rage can be triggered by images of what isn’t there. So maybe imagination has the greatest power in our consciousness. Imagination drives emotion.

I tell stories using pictures at a rate of 29.97 frames per second. As a producer/director for public TV programs, I also ride my crew’s ass, powder the talent’s nose, write voice over, camp out in archives, beg, borrow, wheedle, cajole, and believe passionately in what I do. To supplement my income, I teach scriptwriting.

Not once, though, have I narrated.

In digital storytelling, cuts and dissolves show the passage of time, transitioning from one scene to another, regardless of chronology. If I sat in an edit suite and dissolved my way from the wreck to now, transitioning as if by magic, I could choose images I want you to see, leave out ones I don’t. If things got troublesome, I could fade to black.

Before I learned how to edit, I skipped over certain parts when I told the story of the wreck.

Even when I told it to myself.

Killing someone violates one of the strongest prohibitions of civilized society. Even in the name of patriotism, the aftermath of killing can be unpredictable. A veteran’s risky behavior is only one of the haunting effects.

At the time of the wreck, I was a model of selfless compassion. From my pedestal I taught first-grade Sunday School at the Baptist church behind the house and CPR for the Red Cross. I knew about shock and trauma and its aftermath but they didn’t apply to me, someone so together, so obviously fine. I’d heard of stress syndromes and mentally filed that kind of thing away under Hypochondria or Get A Life. In that way, I wasn’t always as truly compassionate as I looked.

But my son was fine. I was fine. We were fine. The following summer was fine. Bibliography and Research Methods was torturously grueling, but I was working hard and it would be fine. As I developed my research skills, I could’ve dug into hydroplaning, tort law, accidental homicide, or anything at all related to the wreck. Apparently I had more pressing concerns: I researched the upbringing of the literary Brontë siblings for my major paper and filled my research diary with notes on why redbirds return at dawn, day after day, to peck a house’s aluminum gutters.

As I stood on the shoulder of I-65 that Tuesday, I didn’t see one of the year’s 6.8 million accidents. I saw her car, smashed, her body trapped inside. Although statistics suggest that one in four people will be involved in a serious automobile accident in his or her lifetime, it wasn’t statistics that mattered. While the emergency people were tending to her, I grabbed my son. I didn’t see the metal legs of the stretcher, shaped like an x on wheels. I didn’t see the straps for securing her body. I didn’t know where she’d be taken. I don’t think I even saw her go.

Travel isn’t cheap: there’s oil, gas. Insurance isn’t either: age and accident reports quantify premiums. There are all kinds of tabulations made in an attempt to calculate the cost of driving.

Not one will mention the weight of a dead woman.

No matter how I arrange my memory of the accident, the scenes, the fragments, the pieces, I can’t change what happened.

During the before, all three of us were alive, two of us going to the dentist.

During the after, one of us wasn’t.

Life goes on, during the aftermath, in the same ways and in ways that will never be the same. When our green Montero crossed the straight and broken lines of I-65 on a rainy Tuesday morning in May, 1996, spinning through traffic randomly, certainty became a thing of the past for me. Belief and understanding skewed. My once-staunch perception slanted. Light, shape, and color are not as they were before. Yet now, unprotected by my edit suite, and uncertain of my recall, I’m going to narrate what I can of it all.

If it matters, I was like you, in the middle of life when I got into my car that morning.

Part I

Aftermath

Essays and Stories

People are buried every day. Death happens. Live and let live. Live and let die. One is the loneliest number. One comes before two. One follows nothing. He ain’t heavy. He’s my brother. We are family. I got all my sisters with me. I do have two sisters. She did, too. Before, we were strangers traveling in opposite directions. Now it’s impossible to say where either one of us is.

In what may or may not be a calculated effort, I wrote some stories. If memory is to addition what nonfiction is to subtraction then fiction is left to choose to multiply or divide.

I’d like to quote Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Mother Teresa or even Tina Fey saying, The mind, like memory, is complex; what it perceives is second only to what it conceives. Only that would be weird, a kind of inverse or reverse or maybe perverse plagiarism because, you see, the words are mine and who am I? I have no clout. I do think, however, they’re true. So is What is borne of experience and then recorded for playback is memory. But memory is never the whole story.

The mind’s way weaves meanings, marrying mystery with mistress. Why am I putting in essays and stories? The truth is I don’t know why. When I wrote this I was looking for meaning. I guess this is how I hunt. This is what came after. I wish that when you read them I could know what you think. I’d like to know what you make of the aftermath.

Essays

Crises beget crises.

— Jerry Ward,

The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery

Gnawing Through the Mask

I came across a steer skull in the flatlands of Western Idaho. Without hesitation I lifted it up and slipped it over my head like a pagan mask, cocking my head to one side.

Look, Peter! I said. I’m Pan’s bovine cousin.

I considered stepping closer to Peter to get a reflection of what I looked like in his glasses, but his expression stopped me. Horror, or maybe disgust, had set his patronizing smile.

I can only speculate about the steer’s demise. Wolves have been reintroduced to the Northwest—amidst ranchers’ protests—but it was only a coyote we saw disappearing over the hill minutes earlier, not a wolf. Of course it could have been illness. We were just north of the only known reservoir of spongiform encephalopathies occurring in wild ungulates in the world. Call these encephalopathies what you will—CJD, BSE, TSE, CWD, mad cow disease, mad deer disease—they all deteriorate the brain in a way I’ve begun to appreciate of late. Early warning signs include insomnia, memory loss, depression, anxiety, withdrawal, and fearfulness—a perfect description of the last three years of my life.

I’d blamed my mental state on the hysterectomy,

Reviews for An Accidental Memoir

[klbrooks-2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I bought this book after reading Wendy's short story in Shoe Burnin' and was not disappointed. She's funny, candid and totally fearless. This is a book worth reading.