The Longest Turn

My father was riding in a jeepney, seated near the rear, when it began to make a left turn. The rear tire on the driver’s side struck the curb of a traffic island, and the force of it threw him out of the jeepney and onto the road.

I keep trying to imagine that moment, and every time I do, I wish I hadn’t.

He's eighty-eight years old. One second he was sitting inside a jeepney, probably thinking about nothing more than where he was going or what he would do when he got there. The next, he was on the pavement.

Then came the van behind them.

The van ran over my father.

And somehow, horribly, he became trapped underneath it.

The driver kept moving.

Later, the van driver himself told my sister that he had no idea there was a person beneath his vehicle. He only stopped after another motorist alerted him that someone was under the van.

Someone had to tell him.

There was a person underneath your vehicle.

My father.

That is the part I cannot get out of my head.

I try to understand it as a sequence of events because perhaps that makes it easier to carry. A jeepney makes a left turn. A rear tire strikes the curb. A passenger is thrown onto the road. A van comes from behind. The driver does not see him. The van runs over him. Another motorist sees what is happening and alerts the driver.

Those are the facts.

But facts have a way of sounding clean when what actually happened was anything but.

My father was thrown onto a road.

He was run over.

He was dragged underneath a moving van while the man behind the wheel did not even know he was there.

There are details you hear and your mind simply refuses to accept them in the order they are given. You understand every word, but when you put them together, they become something your brain seems determined to reject.

Thrown.

Run over.

Dragged.

My father.

I have repeated the story enough times now that I should be able to tell it without feeling as though something inside me is resisting every sentence.

I still can’t because somewhere between the jeepney hitting that curb and another motorist shouting that there was a person underneath the van, this stopped being merely an accident someone was describing to me.

It became an image.

And no matter how many times I try to push it away, I see my father there.