Gilda

October 17th, 1992.

My sister Katie and I had both gotten our driver's licesnses the previous Monday. After six months of practicing with our Dad, it was the first Saturday night we'd be having when we were out on our own. A driver's license meant a later curfew, midnight instead of 11:00 on weekends, so we went to a late movie. As we were returning home, Katie driving, we approached a red light. As luck would have it, the light changed from red to green at just the right moment, and Katie managed to cruise into the intersection after slowing to about 10 mph.

A drunk driver approaching the intersection from our left didn't see his light change from green to yellow to red, and he ran through the light going at least 40 mph, more than a second after his light turned red. The front grill of his large, heavy four-wheel-drive pickup truck struck our car broadside, the front end of the truck striking squarely on the driver's door of our tiny Honda Civic. The front end of the truck penetrated more than a foot into the cabin, obliterating the left side of Katie's body, but leaving the right side, the side nearest me in the passenger seat, strangely unmarked.

Our car stuck to the front of the truck, and it pushed us forward, sparks flying up from the left side rims scraping on the pavement. The driver hit his brakes after he struck us, and we finally came to a stop some 200 feet down the road.

I was bruised and scraped, had a sore neck from the whiplash, and I had a welt on the side of my head where I'd struck the side windw on recoil, but was otherwise unharmed. Katies left side was gone, the front of the truck splattered with her blood, now pooling in in her seat and ther driver's side footwell. Her neck had been broken, and it lolled crazily off to one side at an angle not possible in a living person. I looked at her, not comprehending that she was gone, unable to reconcile the seemingly unharmed right side of her body with the splattered remains of the left. Although I remember it as having taken only a minute, I'm told that it was more than half an hour later when the jackhammer sound of the jaws of life prying open my door shook me from my shock. For that half hour, I had gone somewhere else; to this day it's still gone from me, in a place from which I can't retrieve it, and wouldn't want to.

I had a minor concussion, some scrapes from the flying glass, and a sore neck, but otherwise walked away unharmed. I was treated in the emergency room and released.

That was the sixteenth. It was the next day that I count as the saddest in my life. When I woke up the next morning, the first thing I thought to do was tell Katie about the horrible thing that had happened the night before. It wasn't until I saw her empty bed still neatly made, covers tight and smooth, pulle down halfway then folded over the pillow the way our mother had taught us as little girls, that I realized she was dead. And I wanted to run to my best friend, to cry and be comforted, to be told that things would get better, but that had always been Katie.

I sat there by myself, and I thought about why I was alive, and she was gone. Identical twins will develop divergent personality traits as they mature, and Katie had become slightly more assertive than I had. I'd usually defer to her to go first when we took turns if she insisted, which wasn't often. That Saturday, we had both wanted to drive going out. I insisted that I be given a fair chance to go first, which was unusual for me. We compromised, and flipped a coin. I called tails, and won. I chose to be the one to drive going out, and Katie would get to drive coming home.

That was why I was alive, and Katie, my sister, my best friend, my twin, my other self , was gone. A choice I had made resulted in her being the one to be killed in that accident instead of me. I crawled into her bed, crying, pitying myself and asking Katie for forgiveness for having killed her. It was another timeless interval, still gone, away with that half hour in the car where it can't get to me and hurt me anymore. More than 20 hours gone this time. I'm told that I ate a little bit, but wouldn't leave Katies bed.

I know now, intellectually, that the choice that killed Katie that day wasn't mine. It was the 20-year-old college student who chose to get drunk playing a binge drinking game and then chose to get behind the wheel of his truck to drive. It was the friends he was with who chose to encourage him to binge drink while underage and chose not to attempt to keep him from driving. It was the bouncer and the bartender who chose to look the other way or were merely careless about checking id's. It was a dozen choices people made that they shouldn't have, and which if they had done the right thing, would have resulted in that intersection being empty as we drove through it.

But though I know these things, I know them, my feelings on that following day and the weeks and months that followed lagged far behind. Most days, I can accept that I bear no responsibility for her death, but there are still dark days when those days following the accident come back to me, and I'm once again that scared little girl who killed her sister. I think I still revisit that half hour I spent in the car with Katie's corpse in my dreams, but mercifully, that time goes back into hiding when I wake up again.

October 17th is the day after, but really any day from the following week would have qualified; it's hard to order rank something like that.