My Son Walked Away From It. I Could Not.

The phone call, and the thing nobody tells you about relief

At twenty to one in the morning on a Sunday in June, my phone rang, and it was not my son's voice on my son's phone.

It was a woman. Very calm. She said, ma'am, I am with your son, he is talking, he is fine, I need you to hear that first before I say anything else.

I have thought many times about that woman and about the fact that she led with that. Whoever taught her to do that should be given something. Because everything after that sentence, the road, the ambulance, the name of the hospital, went into me sideways and I retained almost none of it. But I had the first sentence. He is talking. He is fine.

Tshepo was twenty-one. He had been driving home from a friend's place in Boksburg. A bakkie came through a red light on the R23 and hit him on the passenger side, and if there had been anybody in that passenger seat we would be having a completely different conversation, and I know that, and I have known it every single day since.

He had a broken collarbone, some glass in his forearm, and a bruise across his chest from the belt that went black and then green and then yellow over about six weeks and which I looked at every day like it was a calendar.

He was fine. He was completely fine. He was back at his lectures in nine days.

And I fell apart for a year and a half.

Nobody warns you about the after

Here is what nobody tells you. When your child nearly dies and does not, you do not get to be traumatised. Not properly. Not out loud.

Because the correct response, the only socially available response, is gratitude. Everybody says it. Praise God. He was protected. There was an angel in that car. My aunties said it, my colleagues said it, the woman at church who I love and who I wanted to slap said it.

And they were right. Of course they were right. I was grateful. I have never in my life been so grateful for anything.

But underneath the gratitude, and I have never said this to a single person in my family, there was something else, and it was this: for about ninety seconds, in the dark, in my bed, in Benoni, I did not know if my son was alive.

I got him back. Nobody gets those ninety seconds back. Those ninety seconds live in me now. They are a tenant. They do not pay rent.

And you cannot say that out loud, because the moment you open your mouth somebody says, but he is fine, and they say it kindly, and you close your mouth again, and it goes back inside and it sits down.

The car came home

The insurance wrote it off within about three weeks. It was not a complicated decision, apparently. The whole right side of that car was somewhere else.

But we had this whole mess, because of the third party and the claim and a dispute about the bakkie driver, and there was a point where somebody, and to this day I could not tell you who, said the words "we may need to keep it for now."

So the Polo came home on a flatbed and it got put in my driveway, against the wall, next to my late mother's aloe.

I remember standing there watching them offload it. My neighbour Rina came out and stood with me, and she is a woman of few words, and she looked at it and she said, ag no, Lerato.

Because you could see it. You could see exactly what had happened. The passenger door was folded in the way paper folds. The roof was buckled at the corner. The windscreen was still there, sort of, in that way where it goes white and stays.

And Tshepo, who was standing there in his sling, said, ja, that is my baby, hey, shame.

And he laughed. He actually laughed.

Fourteen months

The claim resolved in about eleven weeks. There was no reason to keep the car after that. None.

It stayed for fourteen months.

I need to explain how that happens, because from the outside it is completely mad, and my sister told me it was completely mad approximately once a fortnight for a year.

At first it was the paperwork. Genuinely. Then it was that I was tired. Then it was that I did not know who you even call about a thing like that, and every time I thought about finding out, I found something else to do, and I have never once in my life been the kind of woman who avoids a phone call.

And then, somewhere around month five, it stopped having a reason at all, and it just became a thing that was in my driveway.

Here is the truth, and it took me a very long time and one extremely uncomfortable conversation to get to it.

I needed to see it.

That car was the only physical proof in the world that those ninety seconds had been real. Everybody else got to move on because for everybody else it was a story with a happy ending. But I would come home from work at half past five, and I would turn in at my gate, and there it would be, folded, white windscreen, and my body would go: yes. That happened. You were right to be that afraid.

It was the only thing that agreed with me.

What it did to my son

I did not understand what I was doing to Tshepo until the March.

He came home for the weekend and he was in a mood I did not recognise, and eventually at the table on the Saturday he said, Ma, when are you getting rid of that thing.

I said something about the paperwork, which was by then a lie about ten months old.

And he put down his fork and he said, I park behind it every time I come here. Every time. And I look at it. And I remember that I could not get my arm to work.

I did not know that. I did not know he was looking at it. I had somehow constructed a version of my son where he was completely unbothered, because he laughed on the day and he was back at lectures in nine days and he made jokes about it.

He was twenty-one. He was making jokes about it because he was twenty-one and I was his mother and he had watched me not sleep, and he had decided, at twenty-one, that his job was to be fine.

I had a wrecked car in my driveway for my own reasons and my son had been walking past it and going quiet for a year to protect me.

That is the worst thing I have ever done as a mother and I did it entirely by accident, out of grief, over something that did not even happen.

Getting rid of it

So then I had to actually do it, which is where I discovered that I had spent fourteen months avoiding something that took two days.

I did not know anything. I want to be honest about my ignorance because I think a lot of people are sitting in exactly this ignorance right now, with something under a cover in the yard.

I had somehow assumed that a car in that condition was worth nothing, and that getting rid of it would cost me money. That is what I had built the whole avoidance on. Some vague idea of a tow truck and a bill and a form.

It is not nothing. That was genuinely the thing that surprised me. There are people whose whole business is to buy exactly that. It has value, in parts, in metal, in ways I had never once thought about because why would I. The engine and the box on that car were completely untouched. The whole left side was perfect. Only the part that hit the bakkie was gone.

I sat at my kitchen table on a Sunday night and typed something like how to sell damaged cars into my phone, feeling like an idiot, and discovered that this is a normal thing that normal people do all the time, and there is a whole industry of it, and I had spent fourteen months being frightened of a phone call.

I looked at a few. Some of them I did not like the smell of, if I am honest. The one I went with was a place called Damaged Cars Wanted, and the reason I went with them was extremely stupid and extremely important: the man on the phone did not ask me how it happened.

I had been braced for that question. I had been braced for it for fourteen months. I had a whole speech ready about the R23 and the red light and how my son is fine, thank you, he is completely fine.

He did not ask. He asked about the year and the model and where the damage was, and whether I had the papers, and could they come Tuesday.

I nearly cried on the phone at a man asking me about papers, because he was the first person in fourteen months who did not need me to perform gratitude at him.

Tuesday

They came at about ten. Two guys, a flatbed, very fast, very unbothered. Which is what you want. You do not want anybody to be moved. You want it to be Tuesday.

I stood in my doorway with a cup of coffee going cold and I watched them winch my son's car up onto that truck and I thought I would feel something enormous.

I did not.

That is the thing I most want to say. I did not feel anything at all as it went. It was just a broken car going away on a truck, which is what it had been the whole time, and the ninety seconds were never in it. The ninety seconds were in me. They had always been in me. I had just put them out there in the driveway so I would not have to hold them.

Rina came out. She looked at the empty space against the wall and she said, ag, that is better.

And I said yes.

And then I went inside and sat down and I cried for about forty minutes, properly, for the first time since it happened, at half past ten on a Tuesday morning in my own kitchen with the flatbed still audible going down the road.

What I would say

Tshepo is twenty-five now. He drives a Corolla. He is a horribly careful driver, which is the one thing I got out of all of this, and he laughs at me when I say that.

I told him, about a year ago, why the car stayed. The whole thing. The ninety seconds. The tenant that does not pay rent.

He listened to all of it and then he said, Ma, why did you never say.

And I said, because everybody kept telling me you were fine.

And he said, I was fine. You were not. Those are two different things and nobody in this family can tell them apart.

So if there is anything in this at all, it is that. If you have got one sitting in your yard under a cover, and you have had it there for longer than the paperwork ever needed, go and be honest with yourself about what it is doing there. Because it is probably not the paperwork. It was never the paperwork.

And then, once you know, go and sell your damaged car, because the wreck cannot hold the memory for you. It cannot. It is metal and it does not know your son's name.

I put an aloe where it was standing. It is my mother's aloe, actually, a piece off the big one. It has taken very well in that spot.