Twenty-Two

With Mom and Dad downstairs in the restaurant and Trey and Rowan at school, I have the whole apartment to myself. I flip on the ancient computer and then rummage around for a sandwich, waiting impatiently for the weather forecast to load. Out the window, the sun shines, unless you look a little farther down the road, where in a storefront window, a crash and an explosion in a snowstorm is happening right . . . now.

The page loads and, surprise, in place of each little weather icon is a picture of an explosion. Nice touch, weird brain. At least the forecast description is still there. As of this moment, there’s only a 10 percent chance of snow showers tonight. A 20 percent chance tomorrow, and a 40 percent chance Friday, and then it looks like there might be a storm coming on the weekend. I study it, and it’s a bit of a relief that the next couple days look reasonably clear.

“Okay,” I mutter, feeling hopeful. “Okay. We most likely have some time to work with here.” But it would be really freaking nice if I could narrow down the date of this crash. That one thing would make this huge uncertainty more manageable, and it would make it easier to convince Sawyer . . .

“Oh, hell,” I say. “What am I thinking?” Convincing Sawyer will be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. None of this will be easy. Not one thing about this will be easy at all. And I’m almost certain I’ll fail.

Nine body bags in the snow.

Before I can send myself back to the overwhelming abyss of hopelessness, I grip the desk and grit my teeth and take a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “Hang on, Demarco. Just calm it down and hang on.”

First things first. I have two hours with the TV to myself, and by the time it’s over, I will know every detail of that scene backward and forward and inside out.

I flip on the TV and I don’t even have to search for it. It plays on a loop. I watch it like that for several minutes just to get back into the timing of the events. Obviously the scenes are not one continuous shot, but where exactly are the breaks? I grab my notebook and take notes about my observations:

Scene 1: The snowplow is coming down Cottonwood Street behind Angotti’s. My view is approximately from the parking lot near the Angotti’s building. While it’s dark, it’s only a little hard to see the truck, because the streetlights are on. It seems to me that the truck is going way too fast for a mostly residential neighborhood. It’s not going very straight. It crosses to the wrong side of the road and angles toward the back parking lot of Angotti’s. It hits the curb, goes over a pile of snow, and bounces roughly. That’s where the scene breaks.

As I watch, I realize a couple of things. First, how can the snowplow hop the curb like that if the plow is down? I rewind and watch again in the earliest second of the scene, and I can see in the dark that the plow is not actually down. Yet the street is pretty freshly cleared.

Scene 2: It appears that this scene immediately follows scene 1, but the viewpoint is different. I see the snowplow from the back this time, as if I’m standing in the rear of the parking lot, and the plow is still rocking after jumping the curb and snow pile. It has a clear path to the restaurant, which is now in sight, and I can see people in the window. The snowplow doesn’t slow down at all. It hits the building, and the people inside never even appear to see it coming until that last second. Some glass flies before I see fire and the rest of the place exploding. Then smoke and pieces of brick and glass falling all around. That’s the end of scene 2.

As I watch this scene over and over, I take note of the height of the snow piles in the parking lot—there’s been a decent amount of snow plowed along the parking lot edges, and it’s almost all white, not too dirty, which makes me think it’s quite fresh. I stare at the pile height and try to find something physical I can compare it to. I crawl up close to the TV and look hard. There’s a No Parking sign on that side of the road. The snow comes about a third of the way up, I guess, but it’s hard to tell. On the opposite side of the street I see the top of a fire hydrant sticking out. I draw a picture of it in my notebook, showing where the snow line is. I bite my lip in anticipation, feeling the tiniest bit of hope that I’ll be able to narrow down the day this happens by taking a daily drive up that street and seeing where the snow level is.

Scene 3: It’s a simple scene. My viewpoint this time is from the rubble, it seems. There are nine body bags in the snow. They are laid out on the far edge of the parking lot, along the avenue parallel to Cottonwood Street. There’s a band of yellow police tape attached to the maple trees that line the road on that side. There are people in stride and standing about, but their heads and shoulders are all cut from the scene, which centers on the bags. There is a wisp of smoke, and while I don’t see any emergency vehicles in this shot, the snow has a red glow to it in one spot, and blue in another, which makes me think lights are probably on. Vehicles are still there. Then the final frame—a close-up of the three bags on the right. The one on the end is open, and Sawyer’s dead face is visible.

It stops me cold, even though I’ve seen it at least a thousand times by now. There’s something about today, about the good night’s sleep and the shower and the personal pep talk and the notebook, writing down details, that finally makes this seem very real. “This is happening,” I say, staring at the screen, and for the first time I’m deeply convinced. It’s not a joke. It’s not a mind game. And what’s more, I’m starting to think I’m not insane—or I’m caring less about my own personal crap and how this crash will affect me. “This is really going to happen, Demarco. You’re going to have to do something.”