Page 3 of The Strawberry Field
Sawyer
I AM A coward.
The words lodge in my mind and begin to echo. A steady, punishing drumbeat. Coward. Coward.
The road ahead blurs. I blink hard, trying to bring it back into focus, my eyes gritty from too many nights without sleep.
Driving straight through from New York City to Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia, wasn’t a great decision. But what was the alternative? Staying in the apartment that still feels like Michael will knock on the door with a pizza for my dinner after a late shift? Or drive, hour after hour, barely stopping, just enough to fill the tank, use a rest stop, scrub my hands raw, and keep going?
That’s what I chose. Forward motion. Driving away on city streets quiet and unrecognizable. Restaurants boarded up, some obviously having given up for good. People standing on fire escapes just to get outside their apartments and into fresh air.
The world around me no longer feels familiar. It’s as if I’ve been dropped into a version of life blurred just enough to make everything hard to make out. The Virginia landscape outside the car window is green, alive, but it feels as foreign as Mars. I don’t trust that it won’t fade before my eyes. I don’t trust anything.
The events of the past three months have made that my reality.
I lower the driver’s side window and stick my head out into the rushing air, letting it slap my face awake. For a moment, I feel something close to alive. Then I roll the window up and crank the air-conditioning vents toward me, welcoming the sting of cold.
I am running away.
It’s not something I ever imagined doing. Not me.
Not after years of fighting for everything I built in the city, at the hospital where I once loved working. But a few months ago, I could not have imagined any of what’s happened. Watching someone I loved fade with a speed I couldn’t make sense of. Standing helplessly on the other side of the glass or whispering I’m sorry over and over into the beeping of machines failing to restore irreversible damage.
Medical school didn’t prepare me for that. For watching death pick and choose its victims with no logic, no pattern, no mercy. For the way our ER filled with bodies faster than we could clear the hallways and the trucks at the back of the hospital serving as makeshift morgues. For the reality that there were days when we were losing more than we were saving.
At first, it looked like a bad flu. Aggressive, yes, but treatable, we thought. We started seeing patients whose lungs began to fail. By early April, we were out of ventilators and doubling patients on a single machine.
Then we started to fail, too. Breaking down under the soul-shattering weight of failure and grief.
Sweat breaks out across my forehead. My heart is racing suddenly and furiously, insisting on panic for the thoughts I am subjecting it to. I draw in a deep breath and try to push the images from my mind. Breathe in. One, two, three, four. Exhale. One, two, three, four. Repeat.
I’ve traveled several miles on the two-lane road before my heart slows its thumping against my chest wall. Curves have appeared, the scenery on either side of me increasingly rural. Black cows with tiny calves at their sides dot the pastures, the grassgreen and lush. The leaves on the hardwood trees are equally green and nearly returned from their winter retreat, startlingly alive.
The road narrows into a two-lane stretch, curving through fields and pastures. I spot cows grazing, calves nudging close to their mothers.
And I feel like a ghost drifting through it, like late fall leaves skittering on a lonely road.
It’s been almost a year since I was at the lake house. After my parents died the previous summer, in a car accident that had nothing to do with the world upheaval to come, I told myself I’d visit—sort through things, decide what to do with the place. But with the onslaught of the pandemic, the grief settled on me like a second skin, too heavy to peel off. And I couldn’t bring myself to come. I kept telling myself I didn’t have time. Life had been turned upside down. The hospital needed me. There’d be another chance.
Then the breakdown came. That’s what my therapist says happened to me. Me, shoulder everything, conquer the world me. She’s right. I don’t know what else to call it. Losing all ability to function as you’ve functioned your whole life. With drive. Purpose. Belief that your efforts matter every day. And then discovering they do not.
And now here I am. No job. No plan. Just this house, and nothing but time on my hands.
The final summer vacation we came here as a family, I was fifteen. My parents and I left that last week as three instead of four.
I try to picture Tommy’s face, but the image won’t come. I’ve attempted everything, old photos, faded memories, but it’s like staring at something through a thick fog. My mind won’t let me see him clearly. Maybe that’s the punishment. I wasn’t just the one left behind—I was part of what made him go.
My phone buzzes in the console beside me. I glance at the screen: another call from the hospital. I let it ring.
They want explanations. Clarifications. An answer to the resignation I submitted without a conversation about my decision. But I have nothing left to say. Nothing they want to hear. Nothing they don’t already know.
The urge to turn around pulses sharp and sudden. Am I running from one tragedy to the far too vivid memories of another?
But where else would I go? I don’t belong in New York City anymore. And if I’m honest, I don’t belong here either.
I check the GPS. I’ve almost reached the turnoff. The road looks different, though I’m not sure if it’s the trees or the time or just me. Then I spot the mailbox. Once painted bright white. Now rusty, dented. A casualty of time and neglect.
I brake and turn the wheel, easing the car onto the pitted driveway. The first pothole is deep, filled with muddy rainwater that slaps the undercarriage and spatters the windshield. I slow to a crawl, navigating the uneven path.
