Asking for a Friend by Kerry Clare

Author:Kerry Clare [Clare, Kerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2023-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

HOT CARS

2008

A few months after Bella’s first birthday, with Jess returned to work, she finally read the article everybody had been sharing about children dying in hot cars. One man’s motion-activated car alarm had been going off all afternoon, but he could see the vehicle from his office, so three times he deactivated the alarm with his key fob and simply went back to his job.

Jess was curled up on the sofa, scrolling on her phone and weeping. She told Adam, “You have to read this. It’s going to break your heart.”

There were no common denominators; the kind of person it happened to was everyone. A slight change in routine—a usual route closed to traffic, a stop to pick up dry cleaning, the other parent doing drop-off—and with that, something goes amiss, a gap in the memory as the baby sleeps in the back seat. There were scientific explanations, commentary from a psychologist. It was the sort of tragedy that, until it happened, nobody ever imagined.

Adam refused to read it; he said the article was tragedy porn. It was gross to become so caught up in a story that wasn’t yours, almost voyeuristic, when at the press of a button you could have the whole thing disappear.

Except it was a kind of insurance, Jess’s attention to the details and her refusal to look away—but she wouldn’t tell him that. How she had to be prepared to face such disaster if ever called upon to do so. And somehow, however karmically complicated, being prepared would also mean she probably never would be.

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