Page 45 of The Second Chance Cinema
Call for help. Of course, she should call for help. Ellie fumbled for the phone in her pocket. The screen was black and very dead.
She hadn’t charged her phone. If she had just …
Next, Ben’s pocket. She checked his jeans, tapped the seat beside him—
His blood, on her trembling palms.
“Compartment,” he was saying.
“Compartment. Compartment?” Ellie repeated. Time tickingaway, energy draining, precious seconds lost. Finally, Ellie figured it out. She clicked the compartment between them open. His phone was in her hand. It was charged. She punched in 9-1-1.
What’s your emergency?a warped voice asked. It was coming through a tin can.
Ellie undid her seat belt to get a better look at Ben. Her bones hurt. “Uh, there’s been an accident. My brother was driving.”
Where are you? the tin can asked.
“I don’t, I don’t know where, I don’t know where we—”
Can you give me some landmarks—
The exit name came to mind. Ben liked to growl when he said it.Grrrr-over. “Grover exit,” she said. “On …” What was the highway called? Ellie couldn’t tell. Any sort of sign was out of sight.
We’re on the way, said the tin can, which became not a voice on the phone, but a drill bit inside her head. Ellie could feel the voice on her teeth as it asked a series of follow-up questions.Talk to your brother,her teeth vibrated.
“Ben, please.”
“Okay, Ellie,” Ben said.
Keep talking. We’re going to be there soon.
“Yes, you’re okay,” Ellie said. “You’re going to be fine.”
“It’s okay,” he repeated.
The heaviness ofit’ssank in. Ben wasn’t okay, he meant.It’s okay. As if to say, a life without him would be okay for Ellie. She would move on. She had their mom and dad. She would make friends that felt like family. She would meet someone and start a family and tell her kids about their wild, wonderful uncle. Those stories, the framed photos on the walls, the smell of him she might catch as she rounded a corner during the holidays, would be enough. A lifetime of feeble attempts to connect stretched out before her like a lonely, wavering road.
“Don’t forget me,” Ben said, his voice getting smaller.
“Ben, of course, I won’t forget you. I could never forget— I promise I could never forget you. But, hey. You’re not going anywhere.”
A horrible irony settled in as Ellie said the thing she couldn’t at the green light. It was even truer now, even more relevant, and so easy to put to words. “I can’t do this without you,” she begged.
Ben didn’t respond.
A little later, Ellie and Ben were drowned in a sea of lights and the hot red sound of sirens. A man pulled her from the car. There was a scratched-up blanket, a ride to the hospital, a dreamless sleep. Or maybe the whole night was a dream, a terrible, vivid dream.
Ellie was in the hospital where Ben was born. It was a hospital so illustrious that Sandra and William Marshall had driven an hour to have a child there. William had filmed Sandra, wound up in pain, as they walked to the delivery room. Sandra grunted for a few minutes, then her baby came out in “the world’s shortest labor.”
Later that afternoon, her dad brought Ben to the window, according to Marshall family lore. “Look there. At the world,” he whispered. It was a view of the parking garage. The idea of the world was enough, though. There were so many possibilities waiting for him, possibilities that had been better than what they’d had.
A new generation. A fresh start.
Now, Ellie was three floors up.
Inside the room with her was a swarm of doctors, specialists, and questions she couldn’t answer. The room smelled like Jell-O. She started to feel like she’d crawled inside the mold and was wobbling with humans around her, speaking a foreign language. Then, something clicked. Ben’s name. They were saying Ben’s name. Her dad was next to her. He asked the doctors to leave them alone for a while. Ellie shivered under the crisp, white sheets.
William leaned toward her but didn’t take her hand. He broke the news so simply; confusion must have marked her face because he could tell she didn’t understand. His voice was mundane. The moment itself was heartbreakingly mundane: the gasping of an IV bag draining fluids into her. Talk-show hosts who droned on in the background about travel destinations.Cancun.Belize. Where was the moving overture? Where were the tears? Why hadn’t her dad turned the television off?
