BLIND DRIVEWAYS

I was nine years old and visiting my father in Scottsdale, Arizona, for the Fourth of July weekend. My half-brother, Brad, was also in town for the holiday. Brad had recently gotten his license, and my mom made my dad promise not to let us drive with him.

My dad agreed to this, then most likely blocked it out of his head completely and carried on with his life. I have this same propensity.

The morning of the Fourth, I watched him run around his Sharper Image-laden bachelor pad as he prepped for a small barbecue with friends. Topless and tanned to perfection, he lugged giant bags of ice up the stairs and onto his avocado-tree-lined balcony. Brad, meanwhile, was tasked with driving out to Sun City to pick up our sub-clinically depressed grandmother, who was joining us for the festivities.

My sister, Samantha, stayed back.

I went with Brad.

I sat in the front seat of my dad’s gigantic white Lincoln Town Car in a red-striped cotton tank dress that connected to three layers of tiered ruffles below. The gray leather seat burned the backs of my legs as I settled in and buckled my belt.

I remember looking out the window at the adobe-style houses and stucco-roofed strip malls as we sped down the road blasting the radio. I remember catching my reflection in the window and listening to a disc jockey talk about potato salad and drunk drivers.

A premonition crossed my mind.

This happens to me sometimes, just before something catastrophic. I don’t see dead people or anything cinematic. It’s more like an internal alarm. A feeling that some invisible stage manager has just moved a chair into place and now a new scene is about to begin.

I remember getting out at a Circle K and making myself a giant cherry-red ICEE.

I don’t remember re-buckling my seatbelt.

Brad continued down a long stretch of open road. Were we going too fast? I have no idea. Everything feels fast when you are nine.

My eyes connected with a boy straddling his cement-walled backyard fence. I don’t know why he was there or who he was waiting for. When my eyes drifted back to the road, I saw that a car had suddenly pulled out of a blind driveway several feet in front of us.

Brad slammed the brakes and I went flying through the windshield.

There was a moment of darkness, then I woke up covered in blood and glass and ICEE.

For years, I replayed the accident in my head.

What if I had stayed back with Samantha? What if I had buckled my seatbelt? What if there hadn’t been another car? What if I hadn’t been looking at the boy on the wall?

That was always the part that haunted me. Not the collision itself, but the second before. The last second of not knowing. The moment right before my forehead split open against the windshield, when everything was still fine.

I’ve spent my life revisiting moments, looking for ways to rewrite them.

There never is.

I lost my virginity on the Fourth of July. It wasn’t violent or catastrophic. It was ordinary, which meant I had nowhere to put my anger.

I hated myself and my poor innocent boyfriend for weeks after. Not because he did anything wrong. More because I felt defeat. And shame. And honestly, too much like my mother. I felt like I had betrayed myself and then blamed him for witnessing it.

July Fourth is supposed to be about independence, but that’s never how it’s felt to me. Maybe I hate holidays because I grew up around too much unsafe partying and no adult supervision, or simply because I don’t like being told when and how to perfom happiness. But the Fourth of July is particularly difficult because it’s hard to clap under an exploding sky when your life already feels like it’s falling apart.

I met Jason in July of 2007. It was actually Friday the 13th, just after he walked under a ladder and ran over a black cat in his Audi stick-shift hatchback that he believed was the coolest car in the world.

He was standing in the garage at Sushi Park when I pulled up, music blasting. Ego on full tilt.

“Are you Jason?” I asked.

“You know who I am,” he said.

Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe that’s just something he says in the retelling, because in my retelling I add that he was instantly in love with me.

We were married exactly one year later. Or rather, that’s when we had our ceremony in Napa. We were actually married in April, six months after he told me with a straight face that he wasn’t looking for anything serious.