Curiosity Killing The Cat

It was too late to undo it. I had peeked, despite my mother's stern warning not to, and my eyes had been filled with an image that would take me twenty years to be able to comprehend. It was twenty years of pushing it out of my mind, so that when I finally did try my best to understand, I wasn't fully sure if it was all my imagination or if I had actually seen that dead little girl.

It can't be true, but it seems as though every time we'd drive from our little suburb in Orange County to my grandmother's home in Los Angeles for some Jewish holiday or another, the freeway would be snarled with epic traffic. Perhaps it was just the impatience of a little girl who had listened to the cassette of Dudley Moore reading Peter & The Wolf from the backseat of her mother's Cadillac one too many times, but what was supposed to be a 45 minute drive would always, in my memory, last for hours.

Surely my mother handing a banana to the man in the car next to ours on the 405 freeway that had turned into a virtual parking lot after he screamed out his window "I'm so hungry!!!" wasn't just an imagined memory...my siblings can vouch for that one. But what about the dead little girl? Had I not asked my brother or sister about it because I didn't want it to be confirmed? Or perhaps I had been the only disobedient one that day - the only one who had ignored her mother when our boat of a car had finally reached the cause of the epic delay in reaching the warmth of my grandmother's house.

"Everyone get down!" was my mother's way of warning us not to look at the wreckage. It was her way of protecting her little ones from whatever carnage may have ensued due to a car crash, but she didn't know that it only piqued our curiosity and fueled our imagination...at least it did for me.

But that's the question; did my mother's shaky voice and stern warning fuel my imagination enough to concoct that scene? Did I really see that girl? Her head had smashed through the passenger side window of what had moments before been her safe spot in the backseat of her family's car - not unlike my own. Her wrists were limp beside her head, and it was only when I let myself think of that scene years and years later, did I imagine her hands thrown up in a vane attempt to brace herself from smashing through the glass, only to find her wrists as impaled on glass as her neck was moments later. Her eyes were cloudy. Her mouth hung open as if she was shocked to find herself in that situation, or like she was calling to me from the other side of the freeway.

I don't remember anything else from that day. Did we pass the accident and make the rest of the trip in record time; late, but still in time to join my large family for deli sandwiches and matzo ball soup? Did I think of her as I opened Hanukkah gifts? Was that the year I got my prized Fievel stuffed animal and clutched it to my chest with glee? Did anyone know I had playfully peeked out the window, only to see that little girl? How about my constant fear of death and, specifically, car accidents? Did that start before this incident, or only after had I convinced myself that car accidents were a part of life? Had I always waited up for my mother to get home from a date until the wee hours of the morning - crying under my covers because I was convinced she was dead - until I heard the sound of her car? I don't think so.

So what do I do with this information? Since I let myself think about it while trying to nap last weekend, the first time since it happened that I didn't immediately push it out of my mind when it came to the surface, I've been struggling with what to do with it. I don't trust my memory completely. For the past twenty years I've been answering "no, thank god" when asked if I'd ever seen a dead person. Why hadn't I ever thought of that little girl? I can picture it all perfectly, too perfectly, and I want to convince myself that it was just my imagination. But. But then I close my eyes and I can see it, I can see her, and I can feel the grief I felt for her family that day. I wish I hadn't peeked. I wish I had listened to my mother.