The Shining Red Chariot

Cara remembered the accident from two weeks ago like it was yesterday. She’d been driving back from the DMV, somehow having passed her driver’s test while contemplating the chance that her mother had paid off the driving instructor. She’d turned a three-point turn into a six-point turn. She’d turned the wipers on and didn’t know how to turn them off. For the remainder of the test they had screeched across the dry windshield. The short Hispanic woman in the passenger seat, who reminded her of Dolores, — the lady who came to clean the house on weekends — looked at her clipboard and said two words: “You pass.”

Cara had been contemplating all of this afterward, driving back home on a long stretch of road that ran parallel to the Falk Meadows Golf Club, when she’d seen the remains of something horrible. The rightmost lane was cordoned off, filled with police cars and ambulances, and metal debris was scattered around. In the grass next to the road there were two cars. One was a small sedan. The other was a massive truck with six sets of wheels and a bed big enough to fit the sedan on it. The sedan was belly-up. Its front half was entirely crushed in. An array of people were talking to the police, who were writing down statements. Some of them were crying hysterically.

But Cara could only focus on the sedan. Front half crushed in, blood all over the windshield, all over the inside, and dripping onto the grass. And in a stretcher going up the ramp into the ambulance there was a body wrapped in bandages, twitching. Face covered in blood stained gauze.

Now she was thinking about it again, on the long afternoon walk home from Bowdington Preparatory Academy. She was the only person she knew who walked home.

Cara never wanted to have to drive everywhere. Cara’s problem was that her parents wanted her to start driving herself everywhere as soon as possible. They’d gotten her older sister, Kacie, a brand-new Mercedes for her twentieth birthday. Now gifted to Cara was Kacie’s four-year-old Lexus. It had been involved in two fender-benders, countless curb incidents, and a minor hit-and-run that had been settled out of court.

She saw her sister’s former ride as she walked up the winding, perfectly paved driveway to her six-bedroom four-and-a-half bathroom New Mediterranean monstrosity. A wide, shiny, velvet red mechanical chariot. It looked right in place with the collection of luxury cars parked out front, right next to the most recent addition, her father’s brand new all-black Porsche.

“Why don’t you just drive home now?” her dad asked. They were in the kitchen as he smacked on a cream cheese and salmon bagel. “You’re sixteen years old! When I was your age, and I got my car, I’d go out for days. Sometimes alone. Sometimes with my friends we’d head out for a weekend at the beach. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

“You’re father’s right, Cara” her mom said from the couch watching the news. “You can go anywhere now.”

On the news was a report of a shooting on a highway not too far away. A man who had been cut off in traffic proceeded to start shooting at the car that had cut him off, and in the process had killed the driver of the other car and wounded two others. They were showing helicopter footage that captured a half-dozen state troopers in rapid pursuit of a purple muscle car, and then the moment in which the driver hit the divider and lost control, car flipping like a gymnast in the air before smashing down in the leftmost lane.

“Like there?” Cara pointed to the television.

“Cara, that’s just the news. All they do is scare people. Stuff like that rarely happens.”

“Cars kill thousands of people every year.”

“There are millions of people in this country. You’re making a big deal out of a one, maybe two-percent chance.”

“Whatever. I’ll just be careful not to cut anyone off, right?”

“Cara, don’t walk away from me-” Cara was already stomping up the stairs. She slammed the door, took off her shoes, and lay under her luxurious covers.

Later that night, she pressed her ear to the door as she heard her parents walking by. They were talking about her.

“We do everything to make her happy… I just don’t understand…”

She heard her father sigh.

“I think it’s something serious. We have to take her to a professional. Remember how it was with the dog?”

“We should have never gotten her that dog. Oh god… I can still remember the look on her face when she saw it bleeding out in the road… she’s too fragile… too fragile for things like that…”

“She has to grow up. She can’t stay like this forever…”

At school all anyone could talk about was the impending Spring Beach Bash. “SBB ” for short, this was the premier spring-break social event of Bowdington’s richest and most desirable. Information would spread through word-of-mouth and online posts about who would be hosting, who would be bringing what, and who was allowed to come. From there they would all flock two hours away to Pleasant Shores, the vacation town built almost entirely for the beachfront vacation homes of the residents of Rockerson and other wealth-bubble small towns. For the whole week many of those houses would be turned into nonstop dens of debauchery, underage drinking and copious drug use fueling parties that, for the rest of the year, would be subject of fond remembrance for those who went and insatiable envy for those who weren’t invited.

Cara was in second period IB Chemistry when the subject was brought up to her.

“You going to beach bash?” Samantha asked, turned around in her chair.

“No. I’d rather do something else than snort baby powder and walk around with my drink covered at all times.”

“Well, there’s an extra seat in Devin’s car if you change your mind.”

“Don’t count on me filling it. Didn’t you break things off with him?”

“Well, yeah. But also, no. It’s complicated. He said he knows a good party he can get us into.”

“Count me out. I value my life enough to not get in a car he’s driving.”

Devin was one of the reasons Cara hated driving. He was an over-privileged teenage boy with a brand-new sports coupe, and probably single handedly driving up car insurance rates in the area. His first car, which had been his dad’s older Cadillac, had been “gay.” And because of this, Devin had driven so carelessly as to back it up directly into a streetlight, in full view of a police car. When the officer rushed to the scene, he found a car with the inside rendered imperceptible by a thick cloud of smoke. The smoke was so thick he had to open the door to see who was inside, and when he opened the door there were two teenage boys in the front, laughing uncontrollably at the damage to public property they had just caused, and in the back, a three-foot-tall bong with adult cartoon character stickers all over it and a half-pound of marijuana.

Things could have gone very badly for Devin. But Devin was the star midfield of the Bowdington Lacrosse team, with a dad who regularly went golfing with the chief of police. The son of the chief of police, Harry, happened to have been in the front passenger seat.

When Cara walked out the gates at dismissal she saw all the cars in the student lot leaving at once, a big parade of privilege headed for Bendfork Plaza, the town’s premier shopping center full of high-end clothing stores that sold designer ripped sweatpants and restaurants that sold ramen noodles for sixteen dollars. She was headed in the other direction, the long and winding road home.

When she got home, her dad and her mom were both in the kitchen, an unwelcome surprise. Their respective careers as real estate agent and finance lawyer usually meant dawn-to-dusk workdays that left them too tired to talk about anything when they came home. It was best whenever things would get really busy and she would virtually never see her parents.

“Look who it is,” her mom said, in the pleasant tone that really meant danger.

“How was your day at school, honey?” her dad asked.

“Alright.”

“Just alright? A teenage girl saying just ‘alright?’ I don’t buy it.” Her mom laughed. “I just don’t buy it. Is there some boy, some drama with your girlfriends?”

“Nothing.” Cara turned from the kitchen to ascend the staircase. “Just another day.”

“Wait right there, missy.”

Cara stopped and turned around to see her mother and father by each other’s side, her father tapping one hand on the countertop and her mother with her arms crossed.

“Your father and I have been very concerned about this recent behavior of yours. The rudeness, the staying in your room all day, the ungratefulness.” Her mother said ungratefulness in three parts.

“And that, that is really the worst part for me,” her father said. “That we work so hard for you, we send you to the best school, we get you all the things you need, all the things you want, and yet you treat us like garbage.”

Her father went to the window at the front living room and lifted the curtain to point outside.

“Look, look at that right there! A practically brand-new, thirty-five-thousand dollar car, just sitting there! All because Little Miss Difficult would rather walk an hour in the rain, snow, mud, whatever, than drive somewhere! And you know, I don’t have to do this, I don’t have to feed you or clothe you or do anything for you. If I wanted to, I could just let you starve. Is that what you want, Cara, to see what it’s like in the real world? That’s how it is in Africa, or Haiti, or any other of those shithole countries where people eat bugs off the ground!”

Whenever he started yelling, Cara wanted to go and hide. She had a hard time listening because she was sensitive to sudden loud noises, which her dad seemed to always forget whenever angry.

Her mother sighed.

“Oh, here we go again with the bleeding heart nonsense. Cara, honey, they say all of that just to scare you. What being an adult means is knowing that none of that matters, and at the end of the day, you’re going to go out into the world and do what’s best for you.”

“So I should only care about myself and nobody else. I should just be like you guys?”
“That’s enough!” her father screamed.

“From now on, things are going to be different. The next time you want a ride, the next time you need to go to some school event or you want to study with one of your friends, the answer’s going to be no. And if you still want to walk then, and you walk somewhere and while you’re walking it starts raining, and you get tuberculosis and you’re on a bed in the hospital on life support while they put tubes everywhere in your body, don’t be surprised. Don’t cry to me or your mother, because all we’ll say then is that you put yourself there.”

“Fine by me!” Cara stomped up the stairs.

She sobbed into her pillow, feeling contempt for her mother and father. Contempt for this world, this ridiculous, dangerous, selfish car-dependent world where everybody just needed to be behind the wheel of their own factory-made steel death chariot, all driving on these labyrinthine loops of six, eight, even ten lane roads where one wrong move meant a six-car pileup and multiple fatalities. She thought about how when she was little, she’d loved these big books of road maps of the United States, and loved to trace her imaginary road trip through them with her finger. She liked the lines. But then she’d stepped outside and saw that there were no maps, no lines, no paths that intersected beautifully from above. Just a concrete maze that she and millions of other people would navigate all at once, a maze that would get bigger and bigger, swallowing neighborhoods, maybe even entire cities in its shadow, and in the future the roads would blot out the sun, and whole cities would exist beneath them, whole lives would be lived on roads, womb to tomb, and the cars would be the coffins, windows blacked out and left on the sides of the road, the final resting place she’d always envisioned in her nightmares, in the driver’s seat of a car, a car having fallen off a bridge into the sea, descending into the depths, a car having turned over on the highway, gas tank on fire, thousands watching as it spread from the back to the front, and immolated her, melted her hands to the steering wheel, like that car she’d seen the day she passed her driver’s test, flipped over, emergency personnel scraping her off the seats of the metal husk.

Then she was in-between waking and sleeping, a liminal state disturbed by a nightmare. The sedan was there again. It was red, just like the car her parents wanted her to drive. The police cars were there with their blinding sirens. There was wailing and crying from every direction. And in the driver’s seat, she could see a young woman hanging upside down, part of her face hanging from her head, exposing red-and-white muscle, slowly sliding off as the gas tank caught fire and flames engulfed the car. She’d seen herself.

Then she was really awake. Sneaking down the stairs, snatching the keys off the hook. Scraping the side of her dad’s new ride as she pulled out of the driveway and into the night. Now she was driving down Long Wind Road, twenty-five miles over the speed limit in the luxury sedan that had been bequeathed to her.

Long Wind Road was treacherous. It was long and snakelike, winding its way through neighborhoods where the least well-off still made at least four-hundred-thousand a year. Many overconfident, under-experienced and mostly male drivers had totaled their birthday gifts and graduation presents going too fast into a turn, trying to impress a girl or a group of friends. When she was thirteen, she’d only been in the lower school, but she’d been in the auditorium as the Dean mourned the death of three Bowdington seniors in a tumbling car wreck on the same road, and the crippling of one, Bradley Thomas, who sat next to him in a wheelchair, covered with bandages and braces, a living reminder of what happened when you gave your children too many toys and too little guidance.

What was she doing? Driving like this, it went against everything she thought the world ought to be. All she could feel was a burning desire to escape, to drive far away, until she was somewhere she couldn’t recognize. She hated everything about how this town was made. From the long, curving roads and fountain roundabouts, to the new gated communities full of ugly suburban monstrosities brought by families who would inevitably raise the next generation of shitty bosses and failing marriages. Maybe more than ever, and maybe stupidly, like all teenagers, she just wanted to prove her parents wrong. Rub something shocking in their faces, like a stunning car wreck, where as they loaded her onto the stretcher they would contemplate that maybe the world really was as she said it, having lost all the smug self-assurance that came with age and wealth.

She contemplated the possibility of her death. If she turned too fast or didn’t slow down in time, the accident might be too severe. But the odds were in her favor. She was far more careful than the average driver. A big curve was coming up. She pushed the pedal to the floor. This was the big one, a mile-long and it got bigger the further it went. This was real now.

She was beginning to understand the appeal of driving recklessly. The effortless ease by which one could throw things to chance, change the state of one’s movement, risk their life in a world that closed off all possibility of new sensations. All the kids that sped around in their birthday presents without a care in the world were perhaps braver than her, and perhaps she only ever hated them because they felt no shame in using the privilege they’d been born into, the same privilege she’d been born into. Maybe she’d only ever hated driving because of how it could disrupt her small, pleasant world. Force her to expand it. Maybe all the moral apprehension was a veil for the true fear of venturing outside the bubble she so despised.

But she’d forgotten about the new intersection they’d put there, only a few months ago. The lights were coming up. She could see a car turning left across the road. She braced for impact.

It came back to her in flashes at first. Crashing, scraping, screeching. Shards of metal and glass everywhere, being upside-down, the flashing blue and red sirens, and a trip she didn’t remember, but a trip she must have taken to a place where she lay, where faces came in and out and said things, not to her but to other faces. When they left there was silence and darkness. It was like that for some time. Time was nothing to her. What she could feel of her consciousness floated in a void, unencumbered.

Then there was pain. Pain in every part of her body. She couldn’t move a single muscle without it screaming to stop. She was wrapped up in bandages, but she could bend her neck to look down. She was in a hospital, in a sterile white room hooked up to beeping machines with only a television to pass the time. The television played things she couldn’t understand. These dreamlike shows where some old person was trying to sell something or trying to say something and people would laugh for no reason. She slept often. Nurses brought her pills and told her to take them. She did.

It was late at night when she heard her parents talking. They were talking with someone, a doctor. The doctor was saying things like “expected path to recovery” and “long-term treatment options.” Her mother was saying things like “my poor baby” and “I don’t know why she would ever do this.” The more she listened, the more she could pick up. It was like tuning a radio station. It started as bits and pieces, but in time she could hear it as it was practically happening right by her. They were beside her bed, and she could see their hands moving, brief blurry motions, their faces contorting.

“I just-I just don’t know what to do. She’s a teenage girl. She’s supposed to have a life! She made one little mistake… and she has to pay for it like this?” her mom said.

“Listen, like I told you before, this isn’t the end of the world. Two, maybe less years of physical therapy is normal for cases like this, but-” the doctor began.

“Normal? What is normal about this? Look at her!”

“I think that what Doctor Smith is trying to say is that there is a path forward,” her dad said. “Our daughter will get better. It’ll take some time, but soon she’ll be walking again, she’ll be back to her regular self. We’ll get her a new car, and put this all behind us. We’ll let her choose whatever she likes.”