TEN YEARS AGO

MUSE sat at the kitchen table, watching the minutes on the clock above the stove tick by. 

    Her teeth had been grinding together so hard she felt certain she'd need dental work after this. Which sucked, because her dentist had already told her she'd have braces her first year of high school. She was only twelve still, but she was dreading it. 

     The clock flashed 10:37 p.m. in glowing neon green.

     Muse had no patience left. It had been hours since her parents and her baby brother had gone out to get ice cream. Mom had promised she'd help Muse with her math homework. What was taking so long?

     10:37 p.m. ticked to 10:38. 

     One minute. She would never forget it―how fast a world could change, how fast it could fold in on itself and crush her, ruin her. From worrying about her algebra test tomorrow to hearing a knock on the door.

     "Hello," said the police officer, as soon as she opened it.

     If Muse hadn't been so stunned at seeing a real officer outside her apartment, full uniform, badge and all―just like the movies―she might have realized what it meant. She might have taken note of his expression. The resignation that creased his face, the heavy set to his mouth. The way his face fell when he saw her. As if he knew whatever he'd say would tilt the axis of her whole life.

     "Are you Muse Gardner?"

     "Yeah," said Muse. Still in shock. Still wondering why he'd stopped here. She'd never talked to a police officer before. She'd never even really seen one up close. 

     The only other time she'd even been near an officer had been when one knocked on the apartment door a few months ago. Muse's mother had answered. It had been about a stolen Amazon package. Some neighbours had complained.

     This was not about a stolen Amazon package.

     At 10:38 p.m, the officer said, "There was a car accident. Your family . . ."

     Muse was twelve, going on thirteen in a few days. She would never forget the power of one minute. Because it was then, within those sixty seconds when she had first answered the door, that everything changed. Everything. 

     The officer trailed off. Later, Muse would wonder if he had been in charge of delivering terrible news for so long that he'd stopped finishing sentences. Because maybe people just got it. Because maybe people only had to take one look at him, and hear those first few words―There was an accident―to piece it together.

     Muse just looked. And looked. She didn't get it. "My family? What about them?"

     Twelve, going on thirteen, and nothing bad―nothing real―had ever happened to her. She stressed about math tests and getting good grades and crushing on the girls who sat on the other side of the class.

     She was twelve, and she was stubborn, and bad things happened to other people. Not her.

     "Your family was in a car accident, Miss Gardner. Your parents died on impact. Your little brother is in critical condition in the hospital. They're operating on him as we speak."

     Muse crossed her arms. Huffed a little. And said, "That's not true. My parents wouldn't―"

     She'd stopped, then. How could she finish that?

     Muse had replayed this moment in her head a thousand times. Always, she thought to herself, Wouldn't what? Wouldn't die? Like her parents were invincible, immortal. Like they were special. 

      If there was anything Muse had learned in the decade since, it was that nobody was special.

     Better to be alone. Better not to risk caring for someone, loving someone, only for them to get hurt.

      "I'm so sorry, Muse," said the officer. "I'm so . . . I'm so, so sorry."

      And this, more than anything else, sliced through her like a knife. It wasn't a clean cut, either. It gutted her. Blood and bone and internal organs, dripping out onto the threshold of her apartment. She didn't know what sound she made―didn't know how she ended up keeled over in the officer's arms. She only felt the fabric of his uniform wrinkling against her face, the hot press of her tears into the polyester, and the shrill ringing in her ears.

      Maybe she screamed. She didn't know. The night got blurry after that. 

     "My brother," she kept repeating, in the backseat of the police car. The officer had said critical condition, not dead. "My brother. I need to see him."

      He didn't answer. Not even once they'd reached the hospital. She heard him whispering to a doctor, and she remembered the doctor saying, "It's not a good idea. It's not how she should remember him." 

     The officer had whispered back, "She needs to see him." 

     He must have won the argument. At some point during the night―God, what a long fucking night―a nurse shook Muse awake. She'd been sleeping on a chair in the waiting room, cheek pressed into the edge of the cold metal arm. She lifted her head, and with her fingertips, felt the stinging indent on her skin. For a moment, she remembered nothing. Where was Mom and Dad? What about the math test tomorrow?

     Then it all flooded back in, and she hiccuped a little with the force of it.

     "Come say goodbye to your brother," said the nurse.

     Goodbye? Muse wished she'd registered that word. Critical condition, to her, meant not dead. It meant hope. 

    She followed the nurse. Panic had set in. None of this felt real.

    The elevator ride, and the walk to her brother's room in a blue-lit hallway, was coiled with silence. Sheer silence, woven into the space between them, spiralling into a chokehold.

    Before pushing open the door, the nurse said, "Five minutes." And everything unraveled. 

    Muse stumbled into the room.

    Her baby brother might as well have been dead.

    Tubes slithered up his nose. Scrapes marred his face. His head had been shaved, a scar running behind his ear to his neck. And at his arm, a faint bump betrayed the spot where some nurse must have stuck an IV. 

    Muse took one step. Then another. There was a doctor in the room, but she didn't care.

    The monitor next to her brother had a slow, unstable pulse.

    She should have known. 

    "Hey." Her voice sounded―wrong. Wet. Raw from the sobbing. "Um."

    She didn't know what else to say. He didn't even look conscious. She decided to sit with him, too afraid to even touch his hand. She worried she'd mess something up. He was her baby brother, of course, but he'd never looked so small and fragile before. She worried that with one wrong move, she'd kill him.

     It didn't matter, anyway. He died a few hours later that night. 

HER aunt and uncle were next in line to care for Muse. They found her the morning after the accident, curled up in the hospital's lost-and-found box. She didn't have any sound left in her. She'd used it all up. 

    Instead, she'd spent the night―or however many hours since they'd told her everyone was gone, she was alone―shaking. Convulsing. Rocking back and forth, surrounded by dirty clothes, caged in by flimsy wooden walls. She'd done it in pure silence. She had never felt like that in her life.

     She hoped she'd never feel like that again.

     Her uncle crouched by her and held out his hand. His fingers were callused, rough. He was a construction worker in Queens. "Hey, Muse. How about we go home?"

     "I have a math test today," Muse whispered. Her mom was supposed to help her study. 

     And it all came back to her, for the thousandth time―how her mother had knocked on her door earlier that night, how she'd invited Muse to get ice cream with them, how she'd given Muse five minutes to change her mind, and Muse hadn't, and she should have, because if she had, she wouldn't be here now. She wouldn't be the one left behind.

     She knew she should be grateful she was alive. In that moment, though, it felt like a punishment. They'd all left her alone.

     She knew. Logically, she knew. It wasn't their fault. The other car had run a red light and hit the vehicle from the side. For her father, in the driver's seat, it was painless. Dead on impact.

     But the officer had lied. Muse would only discover it later. Her parents hadn't both died on impact. In the passenger seat, her mother had choked on her own blood. Fighting to remove her seatbelt. Suffocating slowly, alone, while passersby attempted to open the door. Dead by the time the ambulance got there. But, in the seven minutes before, suffering.

     Sometimes Muse woke up feeling like her mouth was full of blood. If she had gone for ice cream with them, it would have been her in that passenger seat. She knew it, sure as day, because she'd only recently been allowed to sit there. So, every time she got in the car with her family, she begged for it. And her mother would have relented, rolling her eyes but holding back a little smile. Okay, fine, she might have said. Just this one time. My little girl wants to sit in the front, just like an adult. Gosh, she's growing up so fast.

     Muse should have been in her mother's place.

     She should have been in the passenger seat.

     If she could trade those seven minutes with her mother, if she could take away whatever pain her mother had endured slowly choking to death, she would.

     They'd never even made it to the stupid Baskin Robbins. The accident had happened only five―ten―minutes after they'd left.

     Muse had still been at home. How could she have known?

     And in those hours after they'd pronounced her parents dead on arrival, when they'd done an emergency operation on her little brother, Muse had been annoyed. Sitting in the kitchen. Glaring at her math textbook. Wondering why it was taking so long.

     She was grateful, now, that she was alive. She was guilty for feeling that way. Always, always, always. It never stopped. An endless war in her head. The constant taste of blood, like copper, in her mouth. On her teeth. Reminding her. It would have been me. It should have been me.

     Over ten years later, and Muse still couldn't talk about it. Still left the room if she felt she'd talked too much, or let slip some personal detail, or revealed more than necessary.

     Whoever said time healed all was a fucking liar.

***

Little childhood reveal for Muse.

From the moon and back,
Sarai