142 MPH

She beat me. 142 miles an hour.

That was my first thought. I have three stories and a video to put her last moments together: the police report with two witness statements. And my own – the preface, and the conclusion.

We’ve been together a year, both divorced from long, painful marriages two or so years before. We met and it was like the ignition sparks for a suped-up six. We had synchrony, we knew what we wanted, and we knew what we wouldn’t stand. She taught me passion that I had always repressed. We love, hard. We fight hard, too.

Shit. Fought.

I toyed with the idea of getting a racing license but knew it was an investment I’d be better off without. She said “No hobbies where death is a possible outcome.” I thought it was a private joke between us, told to co-workers and friends. But I’d keep talking about getting a license to her. My love believed I used her as an excuse not to do what I wanted, and told it as such to others, making her the one in my way. That hadn’t occurred to me, but it was not wrong. We fight about things like that, when I misinterpret how my actions are perceived. We fought like that just before I left on a work trip. The police and the coroner summoned me home two days later.

She was using my car because we haven’t gotten her another one yet, and her van has safety issues. There is a YouTube video of the accident, taken from the Clear Creek overpass above the highway. One of those videos where one asks “what was the camera doing there, at just the right time?” It’s a bridge. Most people drive on them, not stop to make videos of speeding cars. It shows footage of my white Mercedes E350 curving a beautiful line to ditch a Dodge and fly by a Ford in the bargain. Nothing dangerous, just good high speed driving. Was she flirting with the driver, using the car? Maybe. Why not?

But it was a Dodge, a Challenger. I remembered telling her Dodges talk shit in the parking lot. She didn’t think it as funny as I did, but humored me. She knows I despise them. I choose to believe she just wanted to win – madly in love with me. Angrily in love, expressing the combination of desire and frustration in me by taking a page out of my book. She tried on my shoes, and they fit well on the gas pedal. That’s how I see it. It’s a slightly better hurt that way.

Anyhow, the footage. Gorgeous line through the curve coming out of the Fort Hood gate exit. That’s the beginning of the video, as far as you can see from the bridge. It’s glorious, the way she left that Dodge in the dust. Faster not just by engine alone, but through physics, momentum, and pure driving. My love slid through the inner curve to the outer lane behind the Ford, like the pat of butter she cooks with when making shrimp on the uneven burner. She replaced the drip pans on the stove when she first moved in, but the size is impossible to find so the burners are a little canted. The butter, once it reaches the right temperature, slews right over to the outer edge of the pan, just like she crossed those three lanes. Smooth and delicious like the way she cooks.

Cooked. Goddammit.

The lady in the Ford Fiesta was an unknowing participant in the short race. My love blew by her at perhaps three times the speed, but left no trace to spook the other driver. She timed it perfectly, knew the spacing plus speed plus distance. It’s a formula, I’m sure, but that isn’t how it works behind the wheel. You either know it or not, I guess. She did. I always knew she did. The witness statement was appended to the police report:

“The first car, the white one, crossed all the lanes behind me and then passed on my right, real fast. I barely saw her face, but I think she was laughing. She was smiling real big and was just gone like I was standing still. Then the red one went by, and the white car…she went off the road, flipped. I saw the airbags come out and then it rolled and landed back on the tires but the whole thing looked bent, it kinda rolled to a stop in the median, in the grass. I stopped to see if she was ok, but the red car kept going for a little ways before the cop stopped them.”

My love was smiling. She felt it, that joy; she knew it! Did she know how close to me she was in that feeling? I like to think it widened her smile a bit, to know how I felt, to feel it herself and love it for herself, then love it again because she knew it was part of me, and brought us together in yet another way. I like to think she loved me more, or with even greater depth.

I like to think she forgave me at that moment.

The statement from the Challenger’s driver was also appended to the police report, as well as his speed (119 mph) and charges. I didn’t care about the charges, didn’t bother to think if they were fitting or anything else. He didn’t cause her to wreck, and was lucky not to have suffered the same. Tire pressures have to be adjusted for those kinds of speeds. I sort of had, a while back, but not for 142. I was aiming for 90+ with the full load of a college student’s room furniture and clothing for two semesters in the trunk. Very different pressures from my love alone in an unloaded Mercedes. The Challenger I highly doubt had ever changed their tire pressures for high speed.

“The lady passed me on the outside lane up by Stan Schleuter, I think she looked over but she passed pretty quick, I was doing like 85. So I gunned it and was gonna show her up, you know, but she had already gone for it, I couldn’t get even with her back bumper and I was already doing over a hundred. And then she switched lanes a couple times, you know through the curves leading up to the Hood gate, and I couldn’t catch her. I don’t know, sir, what I was doing when you saw me, but I know it was close to 120, and she was pulling away hard, left that Fiesta behind and then she just flipped off the road, I think the right front popped. I couldn’t slow fast enough to help and then you had your lights on behind me.”

As it turns out, two police cars were at the bridge the video was made from. Maybe they were watching the camera-person, who knows. They certainly got a better show. Their report detailed how both vehicles were caught on radar, how the Mercedes had blown the right front tire by connecting with a divot in the road at high speed. I know the spot, it’s almost like the paving truck had a bit of metal hanging off that gouged the roadway for a few hundred meters. A car with an innertube tire will get caught in the rut and has to ride within it until it disappears; the video shows my love hit it sideways with hot, too-inflated radial tires. You can see some of the tread explode away if you slow it down. You can also hate yourself for noticing, or slowing it down at that stupid moment.

The accident should not necessarily have been fatal, the report notes. The airbags deployed properly, and while the front end of the car essentially tripped on itself and buckled, the flip was almost entirely in the air, rather than a roll, and the car had landed on its wheels. The video is taken not but a few hundred feet from the accident, so all the details come through. It broke the suspension, but it shouldn’t have broken a person. But my love has a prior neck injury. It causes her pain daily, sometimes less, sometimes more. Sometimes I’m unaware of, or forget, that she deals with that pain. It’s so consistent I became numb to it, for it isn’t mine, after all. I don’t feel it myself and so sometimes its existence would fade from my consideration. But it’s always there for her.

And it killed her. No pain. Hooray. Past tenses now. I saw the video.

She beat me. 142 miles an hour. I’ve gotten to 136 on the Kansas Turnpike. So she beat me, and that record can never be broken. That car will never again be used, damaged or otherwise. If one dies setting a record, it stands. I’m not upset to be beaten, in no way. I say this accented with all the love I have for her, nuanced with knowledge of such joy and sweetness, pitted with hard lessons and brutal battles. She beat me! I’m pleased, and I cannot share it with her, and I’m pretty sure she’d be mad at me for dwelling on it. It’s easier to think about that than realize I slowed down the stupid video to watch what happened to the car and inadvertently saw her die. I couldn’t point out the moment. I can’t know. But I knew I was watching the accident she died in and slowed it down.

She would admonish me many times: “Get over yourself!” Now, what sticks out in my mind is still something about myself which she reflected, and that pleases me. But was it her? Did she taste my life, to get closer, to understand me, to find peace in the argument? Did she die doing it? Here I am again, not over myself. I know her gorgeous body, I can see her face of fiery perfection, hear her noises to herself. Yet what sticks in my mind is that she drove my car the way I would love to drive it, in a spectacular and visually beautiful accident. That was the last thing she did. And, selfishly, it is probably what I will remember most, attaching all of the other attributes I miss. It still tastes like me, though, and I can’t shake a deep shame that I remember her best through something that is ultimately about me. So I don’t want to have to remember for longer than I need to.

My love said she did not want to be in the way of me doing something I wanted, nor the excuse not to do so. Racing could result in death, but that was only a problem when she was alive, because we wanted to remain alive together. I’m getting the racing license. I said I wouldn’t chase her, but goddammit I lied. I don’t want to win, I need to catch up with her. I need to apologize.