ALLATONCE the car, a black 1962 Mercedes, a heavy car, caught its tires in the gravel, and to avoid the median, I swerved too far to the right and veered off the highway and was catapulted over the edge, turning over and over and over, my mother's body covering mine as we tumbled over and over and over, the top becoming the bottom and the bottom falling out of everything. We landed at the bottom of a ravine. When I came to, I had no idea how long I had been unconscious — seconds, minutes or hours. Time had been fractured and would never tick or pulse or beat the same way again. I checked my mother. I looked into her eyes and felt her pulse and knew that she was dead. I saw her fingers crushed, what did broken bones matter when her breath was gone. I cried for what happened so quickly. I closed her eyes, that stared outward to a heavenly world I had escaped. "I killed her," I screamed over and over to the world. I screamed to the nothingness that surrounded me, to the void that engulfed me. "I killed her," echoed through this space of suspended life. I tried the door but couldn't get out. There was shattered glass everywhere. Everything was shattered. I tried to believe that I was asleep, that this was a nightmare, that I had learned my lesson, but no — I checked her again, seeing now her broken neck. I was there alone with her for nearly an hour, trapped with guilt and tears and fears as my only company. Finally, a gentle greyhaired black man called for help as I screamed, "I killed her" over and over. "No, little lady, never think that. It was an accident, a terrible accident...." The ambulance came, I screamed for the men to take my mother first. They put us both on stretchers and rolled us into the back of the ambulance, my mother and me, side by side, dead and alive; we drove to a hospital, drove side by side to the end that spring. Now I knew the unknowable place between life and death and nothing was ever the same again.