There was a knock on the door, which surprised me, because nobody had come knocking on my door lately. The only person that had even come to see me voluntarily was my mom, and she never bothered to knock. The knocking stopped. So I waited. I sat on my couch and didn’t intend to get up. Whoever it was had gone away. I assumed that they had either had the wrong address or dropped off a package.
I pulled a blanket around my shoulders and sunk down into the couch. I wasn’t sure what time it was, but I assumed it was late afternoon. I sat in the quiet darkness for a while, and, eventually, fell asleep.
The dreams only stopped when I was drunk. I’m not sure why, but the alcohol quieted my mind and let me sleep peacefully. But my mom had emptied all the alcohol from my house in an angry sweep, and now I only drank water and orange juice.
I could go out and buy more alcohol, which would seem like the obvious solution to my problem. But that would mean leaving the house. Leaving the house was worse than the dreams, because that was real life. No matter where I went, someone would whisper about me, or point, or spit on me like that one time I ran out to the pharmacy. So I stayed inside, I stayed sober, and I let the dreams terrorize me.
The dreams were never the same, but always similar. The very first dream I had come the first night I slept after the accident. I was sitting in the hospital waiting room, and every nurse, doctor, patient, and family member in the hospital came to scream at me. The waiting room emptied out, the people surrounded me, and then the yelling started. Each one of them screamed at once. They made one giant cacophony of angry screams. Some of the doctors didn’t even bother to remove their surgical masks. Their screams permeated the thin paper and reached me anyways.  I woke up from that dream with my hands clamped around my ears. I drank for the next three nights after that. I slept heavy and silently. Then I would try to be strong, try to be a better man, and not drink myself to sleep. But on that night, the dreams came again. The next dream didn’t seem like a dream, but rather the act of my mind replaying the accident over and over again. As if I could see it and stop it this time, as if I could replay it until I could pause it. In this dream, I was sitting in the driver’s seat knowing that I was about to collide with another car. It was dark and wet and then I saw a flash of silver and heard the sickening noise of metal crushing metal.
Since the accident, the dreams had been the only reliable thing in my life. The dreams, and my mother, but unlike the dreams, I wasn’t actively trying to get rid of her. Most twenty-six year olds would be horrified to have their moms show up weekly at their homes, but I was grateful. It was nice to see another face, to listen to someone talk and feel their eyes on you. Sometimes we would sit in a comfortable silence, and I would listen to the sound of her breathing. My mom always hugged me, always reminded me that I was a good guy, she even brought me a bible one time and asked that I remember God and try to speak with him more. I promised her that I would, but I knew deep down that I would never be able to reach God again. She also reminded me that I wasn’t a drinker before, and that I didn’t have to be a drinker now. I always agreed, always told her she was right. Every time she left, she looked hopeful. She always kissed my cheek and I knew she was thinking that maybe, this time, she had finally fixed me. But no matter what, I never watched her drive away.
The knocking started again, it woke me up. But I had never been so thankful for an interruption. This time, I dreamt that I was standing on a sidewalk. I was watching as my car slid across the pavement, then slammed into the car of the sixteen year old girl I had killed. I had been on the sidewalk, watching, and from where I stood, I was able to see her body go flying through the windshield in a strange kind of arc, and fall onto the hood of her silver car. I watched myself get out of my car, stumble towards the girl, and right before I could touch her, before I could try to find a pulse or stop bleeding or beg her to breathe, the knocking started.
So I pulled myself off the couch, I rubbed the dream out of my eyes and patted my hair down. I flipped a light on so I could see where I was going. The sun had set while I was asleep, and a bright moon had replaced her rays with a milky light. I opened the door to find a woman standing on my front step. Only then did it occur to me that I should have peered out a window first to see who was knocking. I almost slammed the door. I thought that maybe she would pull out a camera and snap a picture for the newspaper. In my mind, in that brief moment in between when I opened the door and when the woman started talking, I imagined a newspaper with the headline Local man becomes recluse after killing a child.  “The paper already covered the story,” I said. I wasn’t really thinking, but I was too surprised to see a person who wasn’t my mother at my door, that I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know if she was a reporter. “They had a picture and everything, everyone knows that the family didn’t press charges. I’m not sure why you’re here.”
The woman tilted her head and I knew she was looking me over. She had large brown eyes that lingered on my unshaven face. I felt them move down to my pajama pants and then back up to my messy hair.
“Everyone knows,” I continued, “everyone knows that I was reckless and stupid. I killed that girl, she died because of me. Everyone knows. The family didn’t even press charges. I’m guilty and free and everyone knows that I killed that girl.” I was quiet. The woman’s mouth had popped open a quarter of an inch. “No need to write another story about it,” I added.
“I’m not from the newspaper.” Her voice was like torn velvet, and she spoke very slowly, as if trying to coax me towards her. “I’m the family that you spoke of.” She began tugging at the belt of her tan coat. I felt my stomach drop, I was confused and a little hazy, but I understood what she was saying. She looked familiar then, I remembered seeing her at the hospital and in court and even in the papers.
“You were her mom,” I whispered. My voice failed me, and I couldn’t say more.
“I still am her mom,” she replied. I felt my knees wobble and I knew I was about to fall over. She must have known too, because she took a step towards me and grabbed my arms.
“May I come in?” She asked.
I couldn’t answer.
“Let me help you,” she said, and her eyes were on me again. I wanted to apologize. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was, how it had been slippery and how I wasn’t paying attention and how all the commercials about texting and driving were right. I wanted her to know how deeply sorry I was. I opened my mouth to tell her, but instead of speaking I started crying.
“Okay,” She said. “Come on, sit down.” She maneuvered herself through the doorway and steered me towards my couch. I fell into it in a heap, and she perched herself delicately on the edge of a cushion.
I had cried quite a few times since the accident. It happened so often that I didn’t even realize it. I took deep breathes and tried to calm myself down. I had to apologize. I had to communicate with this mother that I would never sleep another sober night without seeing her daughter. I had to tell her that I hadn’t looked at my phone since the accident, and that I would never drive again and never text another person for as long as I pathetically lived. But instead I just cried. Loud, impolite, gasping sounds escaped me. I didn’t know I could even make noises like that, but they pinched my soul and sliced threw me like shattered glass.
“I’ve cried a lot too,” The mother said. “The first two weeks I don’t think I stopped crying.” She reached a hand out hesitantly, and then set it on my shaking shoulder. “Sometimes I would still set a plate for her for dinner. Or I would be driving home and dial her number. I still buy her favorite ice cream at the store.”
It was then that I realized what the sounds were that came with crying. Crying was the shedding of tears, a natural occurrence in the body. The noises that came with crying, those were the sounds of a person deconstructing. The gasping and the wales were the sounds of broken promises and empty tomorrows leaking from a person. I felt that the mother sitting next to me had to be a little bit happy. She had to take some pride in watching the man that had killed her daughter slowly die inside. She was breathing next to me; She didn’t look happy. She looked like she was in pain. Her breathes sounded different than my mother’s. She sat very still, and I wondered if she would speak again. Together, we sat in the sound of all the glass breaking inside of me.
Finally, she broke the silence, “Those things,” she said, referring back to all the things she still did for her daughter. “Those things are worse than crying though. Because when I do that, when I buy the ice cream or go to call her, it’s like I forget. It’s like she’s still here. Then I have to remember. Each time, it hits me like a train. I sit there at a red light, staring at her number on my phone. Every digit reminds me that she is gone, every plate at the dinner table tells me she won’t be home again.”
I had never heard a more beautiful description of pain. The mother didn’t cry, I felt her fingers tighten around my shoulder, as if she was trying to hold every piece of herself together. But she did not cry, maybe she was remembering, but she wasn’t crying.
“Why are you here?” I found my voice.
“I am so sorry, I did not come to upset you.” She pulled her hand back from my shoulder and left her sad eyes on me.
“You don’t have to apologize to me, I should apol-“
“No, you already apologized to me.” She said, and she smiled as she interrupted me. “You apologized that night, and you apologized in court and I have felt you apologize every day since then. I wake up every morning and miss her and hear you. I replay the sound of you apologizing every morning.”
It didn’t matter to me how many times I apologized. There weren’t even words to say everything I wanted to tell this woman. “You didn’t press charges,” I whispered.
“You had already apologized. I didn’t see what else I could ask for. You were, you still are, a good person. You were a young man working a busy job at an office and drinking coffee and dating pretty girls and paying off college debt. You were driving home and you were texting and in that moment, you decided that your message was more important than my daughter’s life. But that wasn’t what you actually intended, you were, you still are, a good person. I know you never intended to kill my daughter. I know that, you know that, and my daughter, my sweet, beautiful daughter, she knows that. She knows that you made a mistake. You apologized, and I forgave you. That is why my family and I didn’t press charges.” Her voice was velvet again, and her hand was back on my shoulder.
“I think,” I started. “I think it would be easier if I were being punished.”
“Oh, but you are. Look at you. You have punished yourself enough. I called your mother one day. I hadn’t heard anything about you. No one in town seemed to know anything except that you were hauled up in your house. I found your mother’s number and I called her. She helped me to get here.”
“and you’re here to tell me that you forgive me?” I asked.
“I’m here to help you.” She said. “I’m here because my daughter died and I can’t bare to see another life disappear. You are alive right now but you are so lost in your regret and guilt. My daughter did not die so that someone else may waste their life.”
“No,” I said. “Your daughter died because of me.”
She turned towards me with a grace that resembled wind and sunrises. “And now, you will live because she died.”
I threw my head in my hands and cried again. I felt her get up from the couch. She leaned down and kissed my forehead in one fluid motion. “I won’t be coming back,” she told me. “I have told you everything that you need to know. I really hope that hearing how I am feeling and what I am thinking helps you.” She was standing above me now with a gaze fixed far away from me.
“Thank you,” I whispered. She nodded at me with a tight smile and then headed towards the door. I got up easier than I had sat down, and followed her out. She got in her car, and, from my spot in the doorway, I watched her drive away.
It was past ten o’ clock by then. When I got back to the couch, I wondered if I had thought that up. I wondered if I had made that woman out of my own head. I laid back and felt her velvet voice in my head. I thought of the dinner plate she must have set at her table for her daughter that night. I thought of all the tiny actions that take place every day to make up a life, I thought of everything I had taken from that girl, and everything I had lost.
That night, I dreamt again. In this dream, I watched as my car slammed into hers. This time, instead of ripping into metal, my car ripped into the universe. I watched from the sidewalks as the seams of the sky tore open. I saw the body of the girl go falling up into it, as if sucked there by a vacuum. From my spot on the ground, I began slowly floating upwards, towards the hole, towards the girl, away from the ground.
When I woke up, I got a shower and shaved my beard. I walked to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of orange juice. I was making small decisions, I was doing tiny tasks, but my life was taking shape again. I dug my phone out of a box in my closet so that I could call my boss. I was nervous that the dreams would come back that night, but even if they did, even if I never slept another sober night in my life, I would at least live during the day.