I STILL DON’T KNOW ANYTHING about her. I was standing across
the street, near the intersection, waiting for a bus. She carried an armload of boxes wrapped
with green paper
and decorated with red and silver ribbons. But I don’t think I noticed those packages.
I'm sure I didn’t. Not then. I hardly noticed her at all at
first. Maybe a hundred feet from the intersection, she started across the street. The driver must have been trying to beat the yellow. He should have been able to see her in time.
I understood what was about to happen a moment before she did. The instant she knew, I saw it in her eyes. Somehow the
distance between us contracted. I could see her face so clearly. It couldn’t have taken a second. First, she recognized her peril, and for an instant she thought she would spring away, but her legs betrayed her and in the next moment her eyes—they were gray eyes—in the next moment her eyes filled with resignation and she shifted her gaze slightly beyond the car and onto me. The tires were squealing in that slow half second, and her gaze reached me in time to say, please, and I answered, yes, and just before she passed from this loneliness into another, neither of us was alone.
The sound—I could hear it beneath the tire squeal—was innocent as a line drive kissing the glove. The Christmas presents
bounced off the windshield.
I could have gone to the driver while he knelt beside her with his head in his hands. But the poor bastard was too complicated. I could never give him what I had given her.
