Blue Violets

I take a deep breath and buckle my seat belt. The straps sit heavy on my chest and stomach. I feel my heartbeat pulsing in my fingers and toes.
“I’m ready.”
James looks at me with brows slightly pulled together. “Are you sure you want me to drive? I know it makes you nervous and you already look a little tense.”
I nod. “If I drive, I know I’ll turn around before we get there. I don’t want to turn around, I want to do this, so I just . . . need a little help.”
“We can wait a little bit longer if you need.”
“No. No if we wait any more, I’ll put it off another year. I can’t keep doing this. Hit the gas, Gieves, it’s time to go.” I wave in the general direction of his feet and then towards the road.
As we drive the vibrations of the car help me breathe a little easier. I never grew out of the phase where going for a drive puts you to sleep. We turn left and my body recognizes the road before I do. My hand reaches for the door and I push back against the seat. James slows down.
“Please don’t. We’re almost there.” My voice is low and squeaky.
My knuckles turn white as the tree comes into view. My vision goes white soon after. I see the tree crack. Shattered glass. Blood. Blue Violets. James. Pain like a snake moving to escape a hawk burns down my shoulder. The edges of my vision fill with black.
I start to scream.
"Hallie..."
The scream catches in my throat.
“Hallie,” James says again. I burn from the inside out and push the blackness away. James is standing a few feet away holding out a hand towards me. He’s not reaching for me or shielding against me. I don’t know what he’s doing. His palm is towards me but it’s at an angle, gently pointing towards the ground. His knees bend slightly. His other hand comes up to join the first and I tense, shifting backward. “Hallie, I think we should sit down.” His voice is soft, trailing off at the end.
“Sit down?” I blink. I think I’m having a heart attack.
“Hallie, please, just for a moment.”
I hesitate. What happened to his face? Why are we outside? “Okay.” I slowly lower myself to the ground. The water from the morning dew soaks into my shorts and raises goosebumps on my skin. “Am I bleeding?” I go to touch my head but James interrupts me.
“Hey,” He’s kneeling in front of me on the ground. “See anything red around here?”
I blink again but I put my arm down. “The blood.” Bright red surrounded by blue.
“Okay, kind of a rough start.” He gives a short laugh. “How about orange?”
I look around. We’re sitting in a forest. Trees are always farther apart than they appear to be from the outside. I recognize the birch trees; their white bark is easy to spot. The other trees are a mix of pine and deciduous with names I don’t know. Some of the deciduous leaves are starting to change for the fall. I pick out a particularly orange patch and point to it. “Those leaves.”
“Good, and yellow?”
As I look around to find something yellow, I notice my heartrate slowing, my breathing leveling out. It feels like a defroster has been turned on in my head, the fog slowly edging away, the scope of my memory widening bit by bit. I trail my eyes over the landscape. The rays of sunshine poking through the leaves seem surreal, how can this place that haunts me be so beautiful? A mature dandelion pokes through the underbrush and reminds me that weeds can be beautiful.
“That dandelion.”
“Green?”
“The leaves.” I tilt my head to the side. “Or, I mean, the needly things.” I point at the nearest pine tree.
James smiles, just a slight uptick of the side of his mouth, and continues on. “Blue?”
My nose scrunches up. “Blue…” What a gross color. I take a deep breath. Not the point. Find something blue.
The sky would be the obvious choice, but I can’t see it from here. What would be blue in nature, anyway, besides a flower? Blueberries aren’t even blue, they’re purple. Of course, there wouldn’t be blueberries out here, they don’t grow wild here. There aren’t any blue flowers today, either. Today isn’t the day of the crash. I realize that means my first answer wasn’t true because there’s no blood anywhere, I was seeing it in my mind. Whoops. Too late now. Blue is the color of the moment. Blue, blue, blue.
Oh, duh. “Your jeans.” James is wearing a pair of fitted blue jeans and a black shirt that features an alien riding a narwhal. His jeans only fit because I showed him how to try things on in the store rather than assuming you still wear the same size that you did in high school. I smile as I remember that first trip to Old Navy.
“And violet.”
“Purple.”
James laughs, a bit of pink colors his cheeks and I realize the tension in his body has dissipated, his right leg has moved out from under his body and he’s slouching to the left. I trace his scars with my eyes. The one on his arm, trailing up from his forearm until it disappears under the sleeve of his shirt. The one on his leg, poking out from beneath his pants. The one on his stomach, that I can’t see, but I know is there. The one on his face, that makes him look so different. It’s why I don’t recognize him during my flashbacks. It cuts from the back of his left jaw, up in a jagged line across the bridge of his nose and stops just above his right eyebrow. It formed because a large piece of glass stuck into his face when he flew through the windshield. He had taken off his seatbelt to grab something from the back. I was looking back with him and didn’t notice the curve in the road. I did this to him, and I treat him like a stranger because of it. I remind him that he used to look different, beautiful. Whole. I drag him back to that day with me because I’m too weak to move on.
I look away, focusing on a spider hanging in its web off to my left.
“Alright, purple, then, since you hate violet so much.”
I smile a little, reflexively. James is so kind and funny and uplifting.
I grab the necklace I wear and hold it up, tapping the heart pendant. “Purple.”
He throws his arms up and grins. “We did it, the whole rainbow, found. Do we need to do the senses, too?” His voice softens as he asks.
I shake my head. “No, I’m okay now. Mostly.”
He should have died that day. Everyone said so. The doctors, the nurses, his family, our friends. He was hurt so badly, had so many injuries. He was unconscious from the moment I hit the tree. I thought he was dead lying in that flower patch. It was a miracle they said. A miracle. The real miracle would have been not getting into the accident in the first place. Or if I had died, and James had stayed whole. He didn’t tell me, didn’t blame me, not out loud. But I see the way he looks at himself in the mirror when he thinks he’s alone. His eyes hollow as he softly traces the scar on his face with his fingers, over and over. His shoulders falling as he holds his palm over it, to get a glimpse of the way he used to be. The way he will never be again.
I look the same way I always have. I could pretend it never happened if I wanted to. I could leave James behind and start a new, accident-free life. He has to resent me for that. He has to. He’s the one who almost died, who can’t escape, but somehow I’m the one who needs to be taken care of, I’m the one who wakes up screaming in the night and won’t let him sleep. It’s ridiculous.
“I’m sorry I freaked out.”
He slides forward and touches his shoe to mine. “No worries, I knew where we were going. I expected this.”
“Thank you for coming with me. I never would have been able to come here by myself.”
He scoots closer again and swivels so that he’s immediately to my right. He opens his arm and tilts his head to the side, raising his eyebrows. I nod. He wraps the arm around my torso and hugs me close.
“Any time you need. I’m here for you, through sickness and health and all that.”
I snort, “Oh are we married now?”
He waggles his eyebrows at me. “Not yet.”
A tingling warmth spreads out from the center of my chest and I turn so I can fully press my front against him, nuzzling my face securely into his neck and breath deep. He smells like the earth, like the forest after rain, like a meadow in the moonlight. Everything smells better at night. He’s warm like fire made of stars and kindness. His skin is smooth and soft, his flesh giving way easily to mine whichever way I embrace him.
“You did great. You aren’t catatonic, that’s amazing. The last time we even drove past this place you couldn’t speak for a whole day. This is amazing progress. Amazing. I’m so proud of you.” I lean back to look at him and there’s a sparkle in his eyes and a wide smile on his lips.
One of the teeth in front is chipped. When the dentist quoted him a price to fix it, James laughed in his face. I’m not paying 600 bucks to fix one tooth when the rest of my face is this fucked up, are you kidding me? He said. The dentist’s face had scrunched up like he’d been slapped. We have a different dentist now.
I look over at the tree I crushed my old car against, obvious by the fact that it leans heavily to one side and has a good chunk of its trunk missing. I kiss James on the cheek before extracting myself from his arms and walking over to it. The memories encroach on me again, stalking up from the back of my mind. I look up and take a deep breath in. Red. The exposed skin of the tree. I breath out and look back down.
I reach out and brush the broken section of the tree with my fingertips, silently apologizing. The wood has smoothed out and I can see the edges are starting to fold inward. The tree has healed so much since our last encounter. This time next year, the whole thing might just be a knot in its trunk, another in a long line of annoying injuries the tree has no way to prevent. I smile.
My eyes drift down along the trunk and to the ground, and there at the base, hidden from where I was sitting before, is a small blue flower. A blue violet.
I close my eyes as they begin to stream tears. I turn away quickly and try to take deep breaths. Orange. The leaves. Yellow. The dandelion. Green. Green.
“I need to leave now.” The words are choked, quiet.
I feel James place a hand on my back and another on my arm. I lean into him and let him slowly lead me out of the forest and into the car. I stare out the windshield at the sky, trying to steady my breathing. He gets in the driver’s seat and we pull out onto the road. I place my hand on his thigh to steady myself.
He clenches his thigh muscle and I know he’s smiling. “I’m proud of you.”