Trapped

FOURTEEN

It was on a remarkably pleasant day of bright blue skies and soft warm sun in May of her twenty-second year when the car in which Marianne Marshall rode in the backseat collided with a tractor trailer on the Eisenhower Expressway and flipped three times.

Her parents were in the front.

After the initial impact, her memory was hazy. She remembered noise, very loud noise, and huge shards of glass and loose objects seeming to fly against gravity as the car somersaulted, her parents jerking against the straps of their seatbelts.

It all happened before her mind could even register it, too fast to process the chain of events that followed. She had time only to feel a deep primitive terror as suddenly the right-side-up world she had come to appreciate was gone. Physics were defied. She was helpless.

Somewhere in all that she hit her head. She woke up in the hospital that night with a minor concussion and a few scrapes and was told that her parents were dead, killed almost instantly after, according to the police, the trucker switched lanes without looking.

It had been a week after her graduation from college.

She had already moved off campus to her own apartment and was working as a secretary for Kupper & Dietz at their home office. Even though she could support herself by that point, the landlord had insisted on her father co-signing the lease agreement. A woman living on her own, with no husband and no roommate, completely self-sufficient, was still a relatively new thing in the mid-seventies. Few believed it that she was making her own money.

And now suddenly she was wholly, utterly on her own. She remembered the feeling settling in her bones: loneliness like a sudden cold, unforgiving, merciless. The warmth her parents had wrapped her in since birth was gone.

Marianne had been an only child, and she had no living grandparents. Her parents had wanted a big family but complications from Marianne's birth resulted in her mother needing a hysterectomy. It was a guilt she carried through a good portion of her childhood, like she had stolen something from her parents by being born. They did not feel that way and told her so, and she did honestly believe that was true, but nonetheless she had always put pressure on herself as young as she could remember to be a model daughter. She owed them that much.

Her parents devoted time to church and missionary causes they otherwise wouldn't have been able to do with more kids, and recognized that God just had other plans for their lives. It was their calling. Her parents had a come-what-may Lord-willing grace to everything they did, rolling with the punches of life, seeing everything that came their way as an opportunity for growth. If there was any bitterness they harbored about anything, Marianne never saw it.

She tried to keep that same spirit after they passed, but she couldn't. She was very much bitter and it only kept building. There was no specific crisis of faith moment where she decided to hell with believing, no back-sliding or Curse-God-and-die episode—it was just a very gradual falling away, like a marriage gone sour. You acknowledge that the other person still exists, maybe you even make him coffee and breakfast, fold and iron his clothes. But when you look at him it's with resentment. There's no kissing to be had, no love to be made—not with any feeling anyway, and certainly without any passion.

For a while she even kept praying and going to church. Then it became slowly less and less until not at all. She could never embrace an atheistic or even agnostic stance—it was all too deep in her bones—but God became less the warm and comforting father of her youth who had big plans for her life, and instead a cold distant old man who liked to play cosmic roulette with her happiness.

Her surviving of the car crash had originally given her a new lease on life, a feeling of purpose that she had come so close to death and made it out alive. But it didn't last long.

When she got married, she thought things were looking up. She was actually very happy again for a brief time, and even went back to church with her new beau. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but her ex-husband had been what she would call Christian-lite. And Marianne had been so focused on what they were supposed to do, what was expected of them as a couple, that she never noticed he had one foot outside the door their whole marriage. And then one day suddenly it was both feet, a gorgeous girl waiting at the doorstep to whisk him so willingly away.

Just like that he was gone, and all their plans with him. It was a strange feeling, like a dream you wake up from but feel an incredible need to return to because there was so much unfinished business, so much left unsaid. Her husband gone, her parents gone—all ripped away just as her life seemed to be moving along at a steady, even pace, harming no one, minding its own business.

There's a particular poignancy to the good times in life when the end comes so swiftly and cruelly, be it violent death or adultery or whatever other sick game God in his sense of humor cooks up as a bet with the devil. There's an extra sting to think back on childhood memories aglow with familial love and togetherness, or the early days of a marriage abound with passion and promises. It's a nostalgia that hurts too much to dwell on. A song from that time, a restaurant, a television show, a cologne—any reminder is nearly unbearable.

There's something comfortable about romanticizing the past as if it truly was a better time. The world's gone mad now, but oh, how good we had it back in the day, how safe and warm we were.

It's an illusion. Marianne knew this. She had grown up in the tumult of nuclear proliferation, civil rights, Watergate, Vietnam and the great threat of communism. She was eleven years old when Kennedy was assassinated.

But there was something about that feeling of being someone's child, of family and home and hearth. You were cared for, you were okay. Even if the world was spinning out of control around you.

But one day suddenly you're thrust into it. You're on your own and you have to keep ahead of that spinning world, sprint when it speeds up and jump the hurdles that seem to come out of nowhere—or else you lose your footing.

A part of Marianne still likes to believe her childhood home is right there as it used to be, her parents alive and waiting for her to come back for the holidays or the summers. Another part of her even believes that one day her ex-husband will show up at her door, laughing like it had all been a bad joke.

It's bad enough when it's gradual. A store that closes, a friend that moves away, the end of a summer break. You can rationalize that though, even with the depressing knowledge that you'll never get it back. But when it's just taken from you with no warning, in a blink, it's like you've been cheated, like you weren't even given a chance. At least with gradual change there's the illusion of choice, the illusion of closure.

One must find a way to move on.

There were two moments in her life when Marianne remembers being truly shell-shocked. One was lying on the hospital bed learning of the death of her parents, and the other was listening to her husband admit in the same breath that he had been cheating on her and was also leaving.

Both times it was a pain that felt like it would never end, followed by a numbness it seemed would last even longer.

Two moments.

This was the third.