The Seam
Auto-edit: enabled.
Dr. Okafor had a way of delivering bad news that made it sound like weather. Confabulation, she called it, the word landing soft as she turned her monitor toward me and traced the scan with the capped end of her pen. The brain fills gaps the way water fills a bucket of sand, she said. It doesn’t leave empty space. Nor does it tell you what’s happening…or explain why.
I asked her what that meant, specifically, for the deer.
She responded point-blank that there was no deer. There were no swerve marks on the shoulder of the road, no debris consistent with an animal strike, nor anything else reported in the crash report to corroborate my own version. What I remembered doing, on the other hand, was yanking the wheel hard right to avoid something in the road and lose control on the wet asphalt. What the report showed instead was a car traveling in a straight line at seventy-one miles an hour. Until, of course, it wasn’t.
After leaving that evening’s session with Dr. Okafor, I drove home with both hands on the wheel like I was being tested.
For eleven months I had told the story the same way, both at my dinner table and to three different insurance adjusters. The deer even had a name in my head by now, Horace, though I’d never said it out loud. I gave the deer these kinds of specific details because that was easier than what Okafor was suggesting, which was that I’d built the deer myself, out of nothing. The funny thing is that I didn’t really find it too odd that there might be gaps in my memory. But apparently the possibility of my brain filling in these gaps with fabrications was unbearable to me.
That night I barely slept. I lay next to Renee and listened to her breathe while focusing all of my thoughts on those four seconds right before the guardrail. Those four seconds had always felt complete to me, sealed and certain and inaccessible, with no seam to be found for so long. But now that I could feel one, I was consumed with trying to peer through the cracks.
In the morning I pulled out the full accident report from the county, deciding that the summary from the insurance company left too many questions open. The language of the county’s report was so flat and procedural that I had to read it multiple times to fully process what I was looking for.
“Vehicle maintained lane position for 340 feet prior to point of impact. No pre-impact braking. No evasive steering input recorded by the vehicle’s data module.”
Vehicle’s data module? So the car had a black box. I hadn’t known that because I hadn’t thought to ask.
I called the tow yard where the wreck had sat for two weeks before the insurance company took it. A man named Randy remembered it, because it turns out not many people call back about a wreck that’s already been photographed. He said the front end told a story all its own if you knew how to read it, dead straight into the guardrail without correction, like the driver never saw it coming. I asked him what that meant, and he said it usually meant the driver wasn’t looking at the road.
I thought back to a particular night last year when I was putting Dylan to bed. He’s eight now, but was seven when it happened and doesn’t talk about the accident unless I bring it up. Even then he answers in the fewest words he can manage, which I used to think was a kid protecting himself but now I’m not sure. On the particular night, as I was tucking Dylan in, I asked him whether he remembered the deer, and I recall he stayed quiet long enough that I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he said he didn’t want to talk about the road. He didn’t say “the accident,” or “the deer,” he said “the road.” I asked him why he’d put it that way, and he pulled the blanket up to his chin and said he was tired. I think it was the first lie I’d ever caught him in.
I should have stopped there. Okafor had more or less told me to do exactly that. She’d used the phrase “adaptive function,” and said the mind doesn’t confabulate at random, but rather builds whatever story is necessary to let you keep functioning. She warned me that there’s a cost to tearing that down without knowing what’s underneath it. It’s not that she was wrong to warn me, of course. I understood, intellectually, that I might be standing at the edge of something built specifically to keep me off the edge.
But understanding all of that doesn’t always stop someone from wanting to see over that edge.
The last thing I had to check was my phone bill from that night, the itemized version. Accessing it required three phone calls to my carrier to access the password for a portal I’d forgotten existed. My self-justification was that I was ruling something out. I told myself that people might check their phone records after a crash to make sure they weren’t texting, though I felt almost certain that I hadn’t been. Confirming this would help me let it go, and feel more confident in placing myself back in Dr. Okafor’s hands.
The bill loaded slowly on my laptop, a gray bar creeping across an empty white page, and I sat in my kitchen with one hand flat on the counter like I was steadying it.
After the download completed, and I scrolled down a couple pages to the date in question, I could see there it was, clear and undeniable: at 6:47pm there was an outgoing call, lasting four minutes and twelve seconds, to a number that I couldn’t recognize.
I already knew from months of filling in forms that the crash was logged at 6:51pm.
Knowing this didn’t necessarily answer anything with complete certainty, of course, but something shifted in me irreversibly upon seeing that line in the phone log. I sat there for far longer than necessary, staring like a statue at those words: four minutes and twelve seconds. I didn’t move to write it down or call it or do anything with it except read it again and again, unwilling to let it pass through my memory even once.