Page 28 of Spectacular Things
Fifty vs. Five
It’s a chilly November morning but the sunlight streaming through the windshield is strong enough to warm Liz’s hands on the steering wheel.
Outside, the bare trees wave to her from either side of the street.
After dropping Cricket off at her teammate’s house, Liz imagines Sarah Compton’s Toyota Highlander heading to Massachusetts stuffed with adolescent Stallions and feels overwhelmed with gratitude for her own empty car.
Liz opens her window, lets her left hand ride the breeze. The town is still sleeping and Liz has a whole hour to herself before she’s expected at the dental office. Cricket and Mia are both gone, busy living their own lives.
She is free. Free to dillydally. Free to daydream about the coffee shop in five blocks, the hot barista who flirts with her no matter the line.
Liz wonders if it’s time to start dating again.
She finally trusts herself to make good romantic choices and in just a few years, she’ll be an empty nester.
The thought alone is reason enough to spring for a latte and some eyelash batting, so Liz hangs a last-minute left.
The lack of traffic is just one of several perks to getting up so early on a Saturday for Cricket’s budding soccer career.
That’s how Mia describes it—Cricket’s “budding soccer career”—when she calls Liz on her walk across campus.
It’s the same reverence with which Cricket refers to Mia as “the Ivy Leaguer” rather than the college sophomore.
They take each other so seriously, her girls.
Amused by the thought of them, Liz calls Mia.
When she doesn’t pick up, Liz turns on the radio and switches from Cricket’s favorite station to her own.
She sings along to a pop song of her youth, only to grimace when the DJ refers to it as a “throwback.” She is thirty-seven years old but still feels seventeen, still feels like her life is just beginning, and it is because she believes this to be true.
Be positive, she reminds herself, and poof!
The clock on the center console turns from 7:10 a.m. to 7:11.
Liz follows her own standard protocol and makes a wish.
It is still 7:11 when she eases off the gas pedal several feet before coming to a complete stop at a red light. Liz watches a stray cat with a sagging stomach labor across the intersection, a pregnant female alone in the world.
When the light turns green, Liz doesn’t look left.
She doesn’t see the SUV running the red.
The SUV barreling toward her.
The SUV going at least fifty miles per hour compared to Liz’s five.
She doesn’t register the SUV, but as the impact T-bones her car, she does see herself, pigtailed and knobby-kneed at summer camp, dribbling a soccer ball as the counselors call her Pelé, and scoring the game-winning goal of her high school state championship match, and being right there in the Rose Bowl stadium when the ’99ers won and Brandi Chastain tore off her jersey, and then receiving Mia in her arms, the nurse saying her features were heavenly, and driving all night to see the Maine state sign that read The Way Life Should Be, and Dr. Green in the Hannaford parking lot telling her everything would be okay, and then five-year-old Mia in her favorite yellow dress holding a ridiculously long-legged Cricket for the first time.
Liz sees the three of them chasing down an ice-cream truck on the Eastern Promenade, and decorating Mia’s dorm room at Yale, and hugging at the World Cup in Paris, and so she is spared the unspeakable horror that occurs just before her heart stops beating.