In The Night

Sitting beside her on the sofa, he stretches and yawns. ‘Up to bed?’ he asks. Always a question though the answer has never differed. Not once in a marriage of thirty years.

And so they go, to the room in which she’s not slept for a year. Not since last September. A year in which she has grown bony and gaunt; a year in which she’s forgotten how it feels to be at peace.

While her husband’s body has stilled with sleep beside her, his breath deep and slow, she has stared at the ceiling, her heart racing against her chest, that afternoon playing before her in the faint moonlight.

Tonight is no different of course. Why should it be? Why should any night from now on be different? A moment of distraction had changed her life forever, broken the heart of a family she’d never known but now couldn’t shake from her mind.

She spoke about it at first, told her husband about the bad dreams, the fear and the sweats, but he’d said simply, ‘It was an accident, Sherry. You heard the judge. A terrible accident. You can’t go on blaming yourself.’

How wrong he was, because ever since that day guilt has swelled within her, suffocating the self she knew. Oh, she functions as she always did – she tidies the house, cooks the dinner, finishes the crossword in the paper - but inside she is shattered, haunted by memories only she can recollect: the dull thud of the body on the windscreen, the spiderweb crack in the glass, the blood spreading out on the concrete as realisation swept over her like a wave of pain. She had killed someone, she realised as sirens wailed in the distance. She, Sherry Murray, a woman who had lived her life without so much as a parking ticket, had killed someone.

They can say all they want: that the girl shouldn’t have been crossing the road, that it was a blind bend, that there was no way she could have stopped in time, even doing just 30. They could tell her the cold facts again and again, but it would make no difference. It wouldn’t bring the girl back.

So perhaps two lives had been claimed that day, she thinks now, tears fresh in her eyes. One of a girl whose life had been ahead of her, the other an old woman for whom death would be now be a relief, a purge of pain.