It's Them or Us

"Alice, stop messing around back there," I say, keeping my hands on the steering wheel and my eyes on the road.

"He's taking my gummies!" she cries, hitting Luke's hand away as he reaches for the bag of gummies on her lap.

"Luke," I warn, and he stops, returning back to his tablet.

"Daddy," Alice asks, "are we going to see Mommy?"

"No, my love," I say, my throat feeling like it's being constricted. "Mommy's not going to be there."

"But she's always there for Christmas dinner," Alice says, "because she makes cookies with Grandma."

"Alica, honey, she's not going to be there. We talked about this. She's in heaven now."

"But she's always there!" Alice repeats, and I press my lips together, trying not to cry.

"Shut up, Alice," Luke snaps, which makes me turn around in my seat to look at my six year-old son.

"Luke, don't tell your sister to shut up."

Luke crosses his arms and refuses to meet my gaze. "She's so dumb," he mutters.

Four year-old Alice, who adores her older brother, bursts into tears. "Luke!" I scold him.

But all he does is turn to Alice. "You're so dumb, Alice! Mommy's not coming back!"

The car explodes with screaming and crying, half of it which is over the gummies which Luke is trying to steal again. I massage my temples. Luke didn't use to be like this before his mother died. He was a happy little boy, who loved Legos and playing with his sister.

I look at the photograph of Isabella, which hangs from the rearview mirror. She's laughing, her smile wide, as she puts her hands over her pregnant belly. Maybe it's just me, but I can see the slightest bit of worry behind her eyes, like she knew something was wrong.

I'm trying, Isa. I think, gently touching the picture with one hand.

"I hate you!" Alice screams at Luke. "I wish you had died, and not Jack!"

The car goes deadly silent, and for a moment, I see red. I feel light-headed, and I'm dragged back to the hospital room. Blood everywhere. Isabella's cries. Little blue hands.

I can't bring myself to say anything, and neither can anyone else in the car. All I can hear are the sniffles of Alice and Luke, as they both stare out their car windows, refusing to look at each other.

I look around, and see that we're alone on the highway. I keep one hand on the steering wheel, and turn around.

"Hey," I say, "you two can absolutely not say those things to each other. Things in life happen," I pause, because my throat is becoming tight again, "and you two have to stick together. Someday, I'm going to be gone too, and you two are going to be all you've got."

Alice and Luke still won't look at each other, so I take my other hand off the steering wheel. I grab Luke's hand and Alice's hand, and I pull them until they're facing each other. "Now apologize," I say sternly.

But Luke's eyes aren't on me or his sister. They're staring straight ahead, out the front of the windshield. And he's screaming.

I whip back around, barely in time to see the semi-truck barrelling towards us, and the blue mini van to my right that's hard to make out because of the snow.

Time seems to slow down, and I look to my left. Oh God. That's a straight 20 metre fall. I look back to my right, where I can just barely make out a man, a woman, and three kids in the mini van.

I can already feel the glass shattering, the blood running cold, even though the semi-truck hasn't reached us. I still feel like I'm in slow-motion. I can still hear Luke's screams, though they're muffled in loud pounding in my ears.

I glance over at the family beside us again. Do I stay or do I go? Do I kill another family and possibly my own, or do I just do nothing?

If I go right, there's still a possibilty that everyone in my car might die, but there's better odds than just being a sitting duck as a 38,000 pound semi-truck barrels towards us.

Before I can think about it, I grip the steering wheel and veer a hard right, the front of my car crashing into the side of the mini van. I don't slow down, and keep the gas running until I've pushed the mini van to the far right lane, and there's room for me to avoid the semi-truck. I watch as it zooms past the left lane, trampling the spot where we would have been just seconds ago. I slam on the brakes and turn around to check on my kids.

Luke's head is bleeding a slight bit from making contact with his window from the sharp turn, and Alice is wailing, but overall, we're all alive. Then I realize the way Alice is staring at me, like I'm some sort of monster.

"Daddy!" she cries. "Your head!"

I wipe my forehead, just in case there's some dirt or glass. Then when I look at my fingers, I realize they're soaked in red. I barely have time to take another breath before the world starts spinning and I pass out.

The soft yellow fabric brings a smile to Isabella's face as she adds the little onesie to our growing pile in the shopping cart. I squeeze her hand, grinning at the way she's practically bouncing on her toes in excitement, even though she's nearly six months pregnant.

"Which one?" she asks, pointing between a pack of blue and a pack of green socks.

"Let's get both," I say, kissing her on the cheek.

She's been smiling ever since we went to bed last night, because that's when we decided on the name of our little boy. "Jack," she keeps saying to herself with a smile.

"This morning, Alice kept telling everyone around the neighbourhood when we went for a walk that you ate her little brother." I laugh.

Isabella smiles. "That girl never stops making me laugh."

She picks up a small, woven red hat, and holds it against her belly. "Do you like that one, Jackie?" she whispers.

Suddenly, the room becomes disoriented, and my vision becomes blurry. The red hat has turned into blood, and now there's blood everywhere, and Isabella's screaming, and the store is filling up with blood and the little gloves on the shelf have blue hands in them and she's bleeding and bleeding and

I startle awake, and realize that I'm laying down on the road. I'm shivering as the snow falls over me, and I see red all around me.

Where am I? I slowly sit up, and my head starts pounding. Okay, not doing that anymore. I lower myself down to my elbows, so the pounding fades but I can still see around me.

There's a woman helping children out of a trashed blue car a few feet away from me, and I see that a young boy and girl are already sitting on the ground at her feet. The girl sees me and yells, "Daddy!"

Daddy? She runs over to me, but I push her away with one hand. "I'm not your dad," I say, and I watch as her heart breaks.

"You're my daddy," she whispers, and I'm confused.

"What's your name?" I ask her.

"Alice," she cries.

I feel genuinely bad for her, but I've never seen this girl in my entire life.

"Luke!" she cries out for the boy, and he comes over. "Daddy doesn't remember us," she sobs into his arms.

The little boy stares at me. "Look, I'm sorry, kids, but I'm not your dad. Is that guy your dad?" I point to the man who's helping the woman, where two boys around ten years old are helping pull out a young girl from the wreckage.

Both of them burst into tears, and I'm crazily uncomfortable. After all three children are safe, the woman comes over to us. "What were you thinking?" she yelled at me. "Swerving like that straight into a car?"

"Ma'am, I'm sorry," I say, "but I don't know what you're talking about."

She takes a closer look at me. "You don't remember?"

"It's not Daddy's fault," the little boy pipes up. "There was a big truck coming straight at us so he had to."

I sit up. "Woah, can someone please explain to me what's going on?"

I spend the next hour shivering in the cold as the woman explains the whole accident, and the two kids cry about me not remembering them.

"Aren't these your kids?" she asks me.

"I-I'm sorry," I stammer, "I don't remember anything before I woke up. I don't even know my name."

"Adam," the boy says.

"Thanks," I say, only half-believing him. How can he know about my past if I can't even do so myself?

Finally, loud sirens fill the air, and the amublance pulls up behind us. Paramedics rush out, and I'm caught up in people asking me questions. They load me onto a stretcher and wheel me into the back of the ambulance.

I black out on the ride, and I wake up in a hospital room.

"Where am I?" I ask the doctor, who's fiddling with my IV's.

"You're in a hospital," he tells me.

I think about this for a moment, then something hits me. Blood. Screaming. Death. Suddenly, I break down crying.

"Is something wrong?" he asks me.

"I remember something," I sob.

He rushes over to me. "Good, good. What is it?"

The only thing that comes out of my mouth is the word: "Jack."

"Jack? Who's Jack?" the doctor asks me.

I look up at the ceiling of the room, trying so hard to remember. Then it comes to me. "He's my son," I whisper.