I will always be on the corner, watching my daughter die.

She had been playing with a friend who lived across the street, and I had called over to let her know that dinner was almost ready and that I’d come out and see her across the street in a couple of minutes. She was eight, maybe a little too old for such close scrutiny, especially for a quiet street in a small town, but I had always thought it was best to err on the side of caution.

That doesn’t explain why I waited on my side of the street for her to come to me.

It was the tail end of dusk, the colors in the sky slowly fading to black, and everything on our little street was still. What I had taken for tranquility was the holding of breath before a scream. Monica came out the Reynolds’ door, saw me and flashed her perfect, gap-toothed smile and started running. If only it didn’t tickle me so much, watching her smile like that, I’d have been able to remind her to look before running. It may not have made any difference, since you couldn’t hear the car until it came wailing around the corner, but a step here, a step there, maybe she’d be here with me instead of me here watching her.

She was halfway across the street when they slid around the corner with a sudden roar of engine and tires clawing at pavement. She stopped halfway across, the smile falling off her face. For the briefest of seconds it looked like its careening turn will take it right around behind her, the back end fishtailing around, tires squealing and hissing out white smoke.

I will always be there, watching as the tires of the car that looks like it’s going to miss her, find traction on the ground and snap the front end around so it’s pointed directly at her.

It’s impossible to go from a perfectly still position to a leap ten, maybe fifteen feet ahead of you, but in my cruelest, most masochistic moments, I try to imagine throwing myself at her, grabbing her hand and pulling her to safety.

Not just standing there, watching.

She is always standing there one second, and in the next she is airborne, twirling impossibly fast in mid air. I like to imagine that the scream I hear is the tires ripping across pavement. She is airborne, and then she hits the pavement with a wet smack, like watermelons colliding at the speed of sound.

The car is there, and then it’s gone. If it wasn’t for the tire marks and the smell of the burning rubber that they left behind, you’d think I’d imagined it. Like Houdini and the magic car. One second, you see your daughter, the next you see hamburger! Ta-da! For my next trick, I’ll let you live with that image.

One of her shoes came off. A tiny pink shoe that spins on the pavement, and with a couple of hops, lands right in front of me. With the fading burning rubber smell and howl of the engine fading into the sunset, I just stood there, watching her. I could feel the shake in my legs before I knew what was happening to me, and then I fell, dropping first to my knees and then forward onto my elbows. I can’t even remember the sound that came from me. It must have been loud, because both Eric Reynolds from across the street and Helen from our house came out to see what in gods name all the racket was about.

I remember running out of breath, the burning in my lungs as all the air had escaped with a fraction of my anguish, and I needed to get it all out. I didn’t know that was never going to happen, so I just laid there, gasping and wheezing for air as my guts churned with a new sensation. I didn’t realize what it was until later.

It was the world changing suddenly and forever, knowing you can’t do anything to stop it or put it back the way it was.

With everything going on inside me, I almost missed Helen discovering the same joy I was experiencing. Of course, it’d be hard to, as she was grabbing my shirt and shaking me, screaming. “What did you do? What did you do?”

If I had been more put together, I could’ve just told her “I didn’t do anything. I just stood there.”

When the police arrived, I had almost pulled myself together, and I tried to tell them everything I could, which amounted to a whole lot of nothing. No, I do not know what kind of car it was. I do not know what color it was. I did not get a license plate. “How?” Helen would scream at me. “How could you not know? How could you not know anything?”

Even the baby faced local cop who couldn’t turn around and look at my daughter without turning green made dubious faces at me, like not knowing was a magic trick he was dying to figure out. But there wasn’t anything, nothing I could say that would bring her back, nothing I could say that could be helpful to anyone, and it quickly became one of those sad local news stories that gets teased during primetime for you to get worked up about while you’re watching “Lost.”

“Collier County girl killed in hit and run, the details at 11.”

Four other people on our street described three different cars. A reward was put out for information but there were no takers. No remorseful super-speedway drivers claiming responsibility. There was just John Marshall, our Good Police Chief, on the TV alternately pleading for information and condemning the culprits for their actions. “They will face God’s judgment, one way or another.”

Oh, Good Chief, shall you bring them their judgment with broad stomach and sweaty brow?

In the year and a half since, I’ve come to discover many things about myself. The things I was capable of, the things I’m not. The most telling, I’ve found, is how little I care now. How much being able to close my eyes and still see that smile, seconds before it was destroyed, makes you realize how much bullshit every single thing around you really is.

I thought after a couple of months it’d lessen. Not stop, of course not, but lessen. Going to work, trying to sleep, getting drunk, but I’d be at the corner, still watching her die. Even when Helen was yelling at me, the only way she could talk to me afterwards, that’s where I’d be, even if I was yelling back.

I wasn’t that surprised when she wasn’t there when I came back. Or the next morning when I woke up. Or when I got home from work that night. I was sensing a trend. Sure enough, I came back home a couple of days later and all her stuff was gone. Even the stuff she just thought was hers. Not that I minded, because as the days rolled on, I found I couldn’t honestly give a shit about a single thing. Life had become one of those electric sidewalks in an airport, and I was just too lazy to get off.

I’d just stand there and watch Monica die.

Don’t sweat the small stuff, your little girl is underground. I can’t really blame Helen for leaving, because in my own head I was gone. I couldn’t just be pulled from my misery and be told everything happens for a reason, and that it was all going to work out later. I didn’t care about things working out. Everything was already worked out, and then someone went and ran it over. Why try again when you already had everything right to begin with and you can’t ever put it back together again?

So in that long year, after burying my daughter and Helen walking out, I would sit, and I would try to find some way to put it back together in a different way, in a way that couldn’t be broken. Sitting in the dark, closing my eyes and putting myself back on the corner again, it began to put itself together. I began to see what I needed to do, and I found that while I couldn’t make things the same again, I found a way to make things bearable. All I had to do was give up everything I had.

So I did, and six months after that, the wheels began to turn.

Which is what led me to lying on my back, bleeding to death.

Copyright Thacher E. Cleveland