“Ma’am,” he says as he grabs my arms. I keep shouting. Ben needs to hear me. He needs to know that I am here. He needs to know that it’s time to come home. “Ma’am,” the officer calls again.
“What?” I yell into his face. I rip my arms out of his grasp and I spin myself around. I try to run through what is clearly a marked-off area. I know that whoever marked this off would want to let me through. They would understand that I just need to find my husband.
The officer catches up to me and grabs me again. “Ma’am!” he says, this time more severe. “You cannot be here right now.” Doesn’t he understand that this is exactly where I must be right now?
“I need to find my husband!” I say to him. “He could be hurt. That’s his bike. I have to find him.”
“Ma’am, they have taken your husband to Cedars-Sinai. Do you have a ride to get there?”
My eyes are staring at his face, but I do not understand what he is saying to me.
“Where is he?” I ask. I need him to tell me again. I don’t understand.
“Ma’am, your husband is on his way to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He is being rushed to the emergency room. Would you like me to take you?”
He’s not here? I think. He was in that ambulance?
“Is he okay?”
“Ma’am, I can’t—”
“Is he okay?”
The officer looks at me. He pulls his hat off his head and places it on his chest. I know what this means. I’ve seen it done on the doorsteps of war widows in period pieces. As if on cue, I start violently heaving.
“I need to see him!” I scream through my tears. “I need to see him! I need to be with him!” I drop to my knees in the middle of the road, cereal crunching underneath me. “Is he all right? I should be with him. Just tell me if he is still alive.”
The police officer looks at me with pity and guilt. I’ve never seen the two looks together before but it’s easy to recognize. “Ma’am. I’m sorry. Your husband has . . . ”
The police officer isn’t rushed; he isn’t running on adrenaline like me. He knows there is nothing to hurry for. He knows my husband’s dead body can wait.
I don’t let him finish his sentence. I know what he’s going to say and I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it. I scream at him, pounding my fists into his chest. He is a huge man, probably six foot four at least, and he looms over me. I feel like a child. But that doesn’t stop me. I just keep flailing and hitting him. I want to slap him. I want to kick him. I want to make him hurt like I do.
“He passed away on impact. I’m sorry.”
That’s when I fall to the ground. Everything starts spinning. I can hear my pulse, but I can’t focus on what the policeman is saying. I really didn’t think this was going to happen. I thought bad things only happened to people with hubris. They don’t happen to people like me, people that know how fragile life is, people that respect the authority of a higher power. But it has. It has happened to me.
My body calms. My eyes dry. My face freezes, and my gaze falls onto a scaffolding and stays there. My arms feel numb. I’m not sure if I’m standing or sitting.
“What happened to the driver?” I ask the officer, calm and composed.
“I’m sorry?”
“What happened to the person driving the moving truck?”
“He passed away, ma’am.”
“Good,” I say to him. I say it like a sociopath. The police officer just nods his head at me, perhaps indicating some unspoken contract that he will pretend he didn’t hear me say it, and I can pretend I don’t wish another person to have died. But I don’t want to take it back.
He grabs my hand and leads me into the front of his police car. He uses his siren to break through traffic and I see the streets of Los Angeles in fast-forward. They have never looked so ugly.
When we get to the hospital, the officer sits me down in the waiting room. I’m shaking so hard that the chair shakes with me.