Breathless (30 page)

I can still feel the tenderness around my midriff when I curl up in the alcove in the pearl fisher's house and shut my eyes. It was sunny on the highway, the first light of day, as I was driving here at dawn at eighty miles an hour—too fast, too slippery, too bright—and suddenly: the oblique shaft entered through the windshield and transfixed me on the driver's seat. I was veering across a no-man's-land, straight into the light. Within its dazzling force was silence, the world was in slow motion, playing backward, moving away. Not a sound, no metallic smell of blood, only something that was closing, my lungs emptied of air. There was no pain, it was beyond good and bad. If I survive this, I thought, if I survive, I will give our story a happier ending.