Repercussion

I remember the car crash that took my grandmother’s life like it was yesterday. And when I say I remember, I mean vividly, because I was in the passenger seat.

We hit an oncoming vehicle trying to overtake on a blind bend. My grandmother seemed to register the car and sighed at the inevitable.

Everything happened in slow motion, the sound of metal crushing, air whooshing past where it shouldn’t. The man who was trying to overtake hit the driver’s side of my car and ended up hitting a tree and burning to death after impact.

It felt like we were spinning for ages. I had looked over at my grandmother, hunched over, a look of pure terror mirroring my own. Then everything went black.

When I woke up, I was told the woman in the third car avoided the crash completely and pulled up onto the grassy bank, on the other side of the road from where the car was burning, to call the police.

My mother was a wreck for weeks after, ranting at me from the minute I opened my eyes in the hospital bed, “How could you let her drive, Anne? It was your car, your responsibility.”

The doctor, with his blue scrubs and shaved head, said it was a miracle I only had a fractured wrist and concussion, considering my grandmother had split her head open, lost her arm with the car door, and had a heart attack as she bled out.

I knew my mother’s rage was mostly because I was unconscious for the last few moments of her mother’s life, where she died alone and in pain. My father tried to reassure me that it wasn’t my fault, but I knew it was, I knew she would still be here if I had driven.

The morning of the crash, she had walked the mile or so it was from her house to ours, hoping we could go shopping together as she did almost every Saturday since I got my license. Because I idolized her, when she asked to drive us, I would always let her, every time.

I wasn’t allowed to visit her lying in rest in the chapel, “It will upset the Aunts and Uncles too much,” was the excuse my mother used, “She was the heart and soul of the family, you understand.”

But I didn’t, she was my grandmother, she was part of me too. They should have let me say goodbye.

A week after the funeral the dreams started.

She always turned up at the front door, asking if I wanted to go shopping with her, much like she did the morning of the crash.

Those first few weeks, I always woke up not long after I saw her standing there - the terror jolting me out of the dream.

I rarely dreamt before the crash, sleep then had been beautiful blackness. I prayed for a dreamless sleep to return, growing weary of the overactive repetition of my sleeping mind.

As time went on and winter came around, the dreams uncontrollably got longer. I would agree to drive her, and as I walked out the front door in my dream, she would start having a heart attack, falling to the ground in a pile of blood that rose from the grassy lawn.

When I told my father about this, fearful of letting my mother know, he put it down to the medication I was on. He took me back to the doctors, who prescribed me something else to try.

The dreams didn’t stop, but they didn’t get worse either.

I tried to return to normal, going to volleyball practice and on date nights with my boyfriend, Phil.

It worked for a little while.

Nearly two months after the crash, I opened my curtains one morning and looked down at the lawn as I had done every morning of my life to see someone standing at the end of the drive, about one hundred yards away. I didn’t pay much attention to them the first first day, or second. On the third day, the person moved a bit closer to the house, as if demanding to be seen.

My grandmother looked up at me with a blank expression. I shut the curtains, trying to ignore the apparition.

I was convinced death was coming to get me, so I stopped sleeping, afraid I wouldn’t wake up. 

The lack of sleep meant grandmother was around more, stalking me from a closer proximity, standing behind me in the mirror as I washed my face in the morning, sitting in the back of the car when my mother took me to school, walking past me in the hallways at school.

I was grateful she remained silent, and her right arm was still intact.

She had given me a cross for my tenth birthday, and I dug it out of my closet and started wearing it constantly, hoping it would ward off her spirit. Or at least trick my brain into warding her off.

But the cross did nothing.

I googled ways to relax. It told me to take a bath and eat healthier food. I was barely eating, so I took a bath.

Everything was okay until the bath water turned bright red like fresh blood, and I passed out from a mixture of fear and lack of food. My mother found me hours later, prune-like and shivering in the water.

“Can’t you see it?” I said through chattering teeth.

She looked over my body as if checking for injury, “See what? What did you do?”

I spoke slowly, my voice raspy, “The bath is filled with blood.”

My mother flinched as though I had slapped her, then pulled the plug out and let the bath drain. Then she wrapped me in three towels and bundled me downstairs to sit in front of the fire where I watched my grandmother’s face dance behind the flames.

One Saturday, at the height of my newfound insanity, as Phil was cooking us dinner in his family home, he called me by her name Hazel.

I got a headrush from the shock, and I closed my eyes for a few seconds while I waited for it to pass. When I opened my eyes again, my grandmother appeared in front of me, where I stood by the stove, smiling at me for the first time since she had appeared posthumously.

I started screaming.

Weeks of no sleep, being haunted by your dead grandmother will eventually make you lose your mind.

Phil couldn’t calm me down and ended up calling my parents to come and get me. No one else could see her standing there smiling, her mouth twisted more to the right than I remembered. Her eyes followed me wherever I went in the room, but she remained in place.

“Maybe we need to take her to see a specialist?” I heard my mother say to my father as I sobbed in the back seat of the car. 

“She already has a doctor.”

“There’s something not right about her, not anymore, she needs to see a psychiatrist or something.”

But the specialist, who prescribed me even more pills, told me repeatedly that at seventeen, I wasn’t seeing my dead grandmother, “You just have clinical exhaustion, you’ll be fine.”

That night I took the new pills I had been given to put me to sleep, only to be woken up by the feeling of hands around my neck, crushing my windpipe.

I opened my eyes, to see my grandmother standing over me as I lay in bed, unable to move.

“What a shame,” my grandmother hissed, her voice deep and not at all the sweet sing-song voice she had in life.

I needed her to stop haunting me. 

Tears streamed down my cheeks as I fought to get the words out, “I would do anything to trade places with you, anything.”

Her mouth pulled up slowly on the right side.

“Anything?”

I was gasping in the dark. No, not gasping, choking. Choking on something in my throat. A snake crawled into my mouth and was snaking its way to my stomach. I could feel my lips around its slimy body.

“She’s awake.” I heard my mother say.

Couldn’t she see I was being suffocated?

I peeled back my dry eyelids as the snake started to move, feeling a lot like this was the end, especially when I was met with blinding light.

Blinking until the room came into focus, to first see the doctor with his shaved head who was pulling a tube out of my mouth. Then I noticed my mother to the right of me, standing up next to the bed, father sat beside her.

Furthest away from me was my grandmother, standing in the doorway, her lips taut in a wry smile.

I was going to be sick.

“It’s okay Anne, it’s okay,” my mother began stroking my hair as soon as the doctor was finished, “You were in an accident, but you’re okay.”

This wasn’t happening. Or rather, this had already happened, hadn’t it?

I went to wipe my tears away with my right hand, but for some reason, I couldn’t move it.

Grandmother still stood in the doorway, now expressionless.

I tried to see what was trapping my right arm, but I couldn’t see anything for the sheet covering me. 

“You were in a car crash darling, you-” but my mother couldn’t continue, breaking into sobs.

I tried to say, “What,” but it came out all muffled and wrong. My tongue, somehow, too big for my mouth.

My father was shaking his head.

“You were in a car crash Anne,” Grandmother said, her voice that had evaded me for weeks was frail and dry, “the impact tore your right arm off,”

No, this wasn’t happening.

I was shaking my head frantically.

The doctor was concerned with my heart rate and hyperventilation, injecting me with something that made the world go fuzzy.

Grandmother moved closer to me in my haze, still not smiling. She seemed to be talking to my parents about something, but I couldn’t hear them, the drugs were too powerful.

Reality eventually slipped away, and I fell into a dreamless sleep for once.

When I woke up, I opened my eyes to my dimly lit bedroom at home, looking exactly as it had on the morning of the crash.

My heart was pounding in my chest.

I kept telling myself it was a dream, it was all just a dream, the crash, the hospital, everything.

But I was too scared to move for fear I discovered my right arm was missing.