Still fascinated by what might have been
Stories a haunting reminder that anything can happen at any time
At the best of times, it’s a fairly tight squeeze along the lane leading to the garage in which I park my car most days — and the large truck parked in the narrow lane wasn’t helping any. I stopped to ask the fellow standing at the back of the truck whether he’d be long.
Barely turning away from a clutch of guys in the lane with whom he was chatting, he said, gruffly, that I had enough room to pass.
As I inched gingerly past the truck, the asphalt of the lane heaving and uneven after winter, he added, “Anyway, ton char a besoin d’être peinturé.”
Ouch. I suspect he said it more for the benefit of the guys than for me, but it’s never pleasant to hear things you don’t want to hear — even when you know them to be true. And usually, it’s something that cuts considerably closer to the bone than the state of your car. I’m the first to acknowledge that I’m disorganized and misplace things regularly, for instance, that too frequently I leave things to the last minute, that I am by temperament too impatient, that a hard edge creeps into my voice on occasion. I know all that.
But draw any of it to my attention, and my first instinct is not to say, “You’re right,” even though you are: it is to turn on you. In sports parlance, the best defence is said to be a good offence. But this is not sports — and I cannot fathom why I am so defensive. “What’s it to you?” I wanted to call out to the guy, although I kept quiet and focused on moving beyond his truck.
The car, it happens, was a particularly sore spot. In the nearly 17 years since it rolled off the assembly line, it has been carefully looked after — workings inspected regularly, rust kept in check by bodywork. Lately, though, it has been looking its age. (And who wants to be reminded of that?)
Rust has chewed voraciously on its most vulnerable places these past months and last weekend the driver’s side-view mirror was knocked from its moorings, so the car looks somewhat lopsided. A driver moving way too fast had come up behind us in the left lane on the Laurentian autoroute and flashed for us to change lanes; too impatient to wait, he passed on the left, veering off the road onto the shoulder to do it. As he roared by, he rammed the mirror housing. The impact made the most gawdawful noise, broke the mirror, bent the housing back against the body of the car and scratched a broad swath of paint. No, he didn’t stop. We were lucky: a broken mirror can be replaced. He could have hit us hard enough to knock our car into the next lane, where we might have rammed another vehicle and caused a multi-vehicle pileup. His car could have slipped into the ditch beyond the shoulder and flipped. A few miles per hour or a few centimetres one way or the other, and people could have been seriously injured. I have been replaying in my head the disastrous ways in which things could have unfolded.
The 1998 film Sliding Doors opens with Gwyneth Paltrow’s character being fired from her public relations job in London and plays out two different scenarios, in parallel: in one, she makes the subway train that carries her home. In the other, the doors slide shut in her face and she has to wait for the next train, which delays her return home. They are as different as two scenarios can be.
Two years later, Paltrow starred in another movie in which action taken in an instant had profound ramifications: Bounce. In a bid to do a good deed, Buddy (Ben Affleck) gives up his seat on a flight so Greg (Tony Goldwyn) can get home earlier to his family. The plane crashes and Greg dies. Buddy and Greg’s widow (Paltrow), whom he conspires to meet, are plagued by guilt because, independently, each feels responsible for Greg’s death.
In a passage in Ascent of Women (Random House Canada, 2013), Sally Armstrong describes the final moments in the life of young Smadar Elhanan, one of five Israelis killed when three Hamas suicide bombers blew themselves up on a downtown Jerusalem pedestrian mall Sept. 4, 1997. Five years later the girl’s mother, Nurit Peled Elhanan, was “still consumed by every detail” of that day, she writes.
Despite her mother’s objections, Smadar, 13, had gone downtown to sign up for jazz-dancing lessons. She’d seen a friend of one of her older brothers, a fellow on whom she had a bit of a crush, and approached him, “but he’d waved her off because he was talking to a friend. Elhanan told me he’s now consumed with guilt, wishing he’d talked with her, even for a moment, so she might have lingered where he was and not walked on into the path of the suicide bomber,” Armstrong writes.
Such stories — of doors that slide closed and of roads not taken, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and of being spared — hold a strange and morbid fascination for me: I return to them again and again and think of them as a haunting reminder that anything can happen at any time.