CHAPTER ONE - collision
It was earlier in the day when Wade decided he had had enough of his board meeting, it was earlier, many would point to that as the trigger for why he had proceeded to drive his car headlong into a bus full of school children, but in fact it was after that. In fact at the board meeting, when those in positions of authority had deemed it necessary to sacrifice common sense in sake of a monetary gain he had developed a sort of headstrong notion that he was a hero. As one corporate stooge sounded forth their plans to cut corners, and slash budgets, Wade felt his destiny flourish in a way he never thought it would. It could have been a savior complex, though to be fair Wade would never consider himself in the same league as a Christ figure. He would be one of those who did their job because it was their job to do, and to politely swipe away any time anyone decided on a moniker that resembled the word hero. But, he felt something resembling heroics coursing its way through his veins and he decided to yell it out. Slammed both palms on the table, and let it be known that he had disagreed with all the money-grubbing, all the lateral and vertical sacrifices that had embedded the manufacturers psyches with delusions of godlike superiority over the common workers. Work that he had once done, sweating and dehydrated in furnace like conditions, inside shops, and warehouses. He had worked his way up from the bottom on the romantic notion that he could change things. And, then there he was speaking up, letting it be known what his heart had always known, that this belligerent villainy could not continue.
Nothing much came of that. The board kindly dismissed him. They dismissed him from the meeting, from his office, out of the building. They had dismissed him from his livelihood. And as he tucked his small cardboard box filled with nick-knacks and name plates, and his physical portfolio, he felt triumphant. Invincibility surged through his mind. His conscience had been kept clean and he had forged ahead on his own path. On his way out the main entrance, the doorman nodded his farewell, for the doorman had always appreciated Wade, and Wade in turn appreciated him, and felt a shred of melancholy that he had never learned the man's name. As he was walking but a few feet away, he paused, and turned around. He sat his box of goodies upon the ground, and offered a hand to shake. The doorman didn't not shake his hand.
"Excuse me?" He said, as though Wade had spoken something that he, the doorman had not heard.
Wade looked down at his ungreeted palm, and smiled on at the doorman and said, "I just realized I never introduced myself. I'm Wade Gardener."
The doorman still did not respond. His hands sat cold at the end of limp arms. "Okay." His face became quizzical, and apprehensive, in other words, his face was covered in stern suspicion.
"Anyways, I thought it'd be appropriate for me to tell you my name, I mean why not, we are all humans aren't we. People. We all deserve respect."
The doorman no longer thought fondly of Wade, for years, Wade had nodded casually. Wade had stayed in his role as business suit, clothed in fine attire, and bustling in through the door, with a complimentary smile, and nod and in this moment Wade who was quite obviously departing and would likely never be heard of again was now giving way to some culturally appropriate form of small talk, and a too-late introduction. This was absurd as far as the doorman was concerned, and it smelled of superiority.
"I just thought, I don't know, it was a nice gesture." Wade let his hand go down, sensing defeat. He knelt down to pick up his box.
"Nice gesture. Nice gesture, sir, might be to slip a fiver in my hand when you head on into your fancy windowed office. Nice gesture might be to acknowledge that I exist, before you yourself are nothing at this company no more, but a body that once was. You don't get to be a people person just because you no longer sit at the table."
"No, I quit. I mean, I was fired for speaking up."
"Well, what in the hell did you go and do that for. Seems to be a man just sits in a fancy suit, especially one who don't buy them to expensive, who seems to be coming on up from the bottom might be aware what hard work he done, and you just go and toss it all out like that. What a fool you are Mister Gardener. What a fool you are. You want to do good, but now you aint got no means to do the good you intended. May Lord have mercy on you. Sir, good day." The doorman nodded, and Wade scoffed at the rebuke.
Wade thought it opaquely ridiculous to assume his sacrifice should go unnoticed. Surely his wife would understand, his kids. They would see the principle. He had often spoke to them of the why's and how's of being better for the sake of your fellow man. To pull off the crown you wear and to give out the gold for the less fortunate.
He collected up his box, and turned away, but immediately turned back to the doorman who would not look his way. That courteous smile available only to the other people who walked by, and in and disappeared into elevator bays, and stairwells. Suddenly, Wade felt small. He turned away from the door.
When his car later collided with the school bus on a divided high on some back country road, he hadn't planned on it being a bus that ended his life. Wade felt rather embarrassed at what the doorman had said, and as he tried to figure it out in his head, if his choice had been right, his distraction kept him from noticing his exit until it appeared and disappeared in his peripheral vision. So, he kept driving, and then pretended that he had been too distracted to find his exit, and he kept driving, and he kept going. His fuel tank had been full, and he drove straight on, and found himself without an expressway, on some divided highway devoid of barriers, just a thin layer of grass that was easy to verge over.
The trigger then was a revelation that what he had done was foolish. Giving way it all, Wade realized meant that he would be concerned with finding another path, he would have wasted some struggle of his life, for one moment of glory. A failed triumphant moment of righteousness that amounted to little more than a passage of gas out of the bowels of time. A silent exclamation that proved he was a good man to no one but himself.
He vowed at a certain time, about the time his gas gauge dinged to signal it had mere miles to go before being emptied that he would end his life. As though lazily guided his hands turned the wheel slowly to the left, and the rumble and rough conditions of those mounds of grass caused him to shake, and his teeth to shatter, and the yellow bus came upon the hood of his car with a sudden crunch. Knocking half of its body into the air as one tired came to crush the head of Wade Gardener savior of the board room, master of corporate ladder climbing, fool, and husband and father of three.
The bus driver, Rita, a twenty-one year old mother of two rambunctious four year old twin girls was flown off from her seat so that her head struck against the window at her left side, and died instantly as blood rushed to drown her brain. The kids aboard, aged five to ten, survived with minor bumps, and simple recoverable concussions.
Abernathy and Cecilia sat at home. Unaware at the random chance that had claimed their mothers life. They wouldn't know why Wade Gardener had decided to crash into their mothers bus, and the conspiracy theorist would declare aloud through soapboxes that he was some wall street punk in love with money so much that when he lost it he gave up on life. While they had the latter half right, in truth, the first part was much simpler.
The girls would be given to the system, and that was where their journey would begin. As randomized with happenstance as the events that brought them there. And maybe if they grew up to believe in fate they might have thought it some grand design but they were much too clever to believe in set-in-stone ideals. As they grew from four to seventeen, they took it up on themselves to believe more in chance than fate, and had developed and alarmingly acute romanticism with luck.
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