How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu

say that she didn’t expect it to happen. The blow, she knew, was inevitable from the moment her husband spoke, because in doing so, he had crossed a line that not even she was aware of having made.
    Like a courteous guest, the blow had announced itself ahead of time, and like any good hostess, she had prepared herself in advance, turning her head just slightly to the right to protect the delicate spots—eyes and nose—in the seconds between her husband locking the door and raising his hand. The only thing that had yet to be determined in those remaining seconds was how hard and where he would hit her. Over the course of the past six months there had been a few full-forced, closed-fisted punches, dozens or perhaps even hundreds of open-handed slaps, some minor, some not. There had been an irrational childlike kick to the shin that made it difficult to walk, and two days later a flashlight that upon hitting her just above her left brow had temporarily darkened the world in that one eye. (“Imagine,” she would say to me thirty years later in an obvious attempt to impress me with how well she knew English, “the irony of that.”) No two blows were ever the same, even if they were delivered to the same spot within seconds of each other. Each had its own force and logic. As a general rule, however, the first punch, kick, slap, or push was the hardest; the rest, when and if they came, being generally milder, softer—a concession to both their bodies’ ability to endure pain.
    The blow that knocked her unconscious today was a first. Neither a punch nor slap but a simple, deliberate shove to the head. A push, open-handed, with all five fingers spread open as if her head was a ball that could be palmed and then tossed at will. In the end, though, it was the passenger window that did it. It was the glass that took her narrow face and diffused the force with which it came through millions of tiny particles of sand; and in the end, it was the glass that decided that there was nowhere else for her head to go but back to the white vinyl seat from which it came. You could almost imagine the side of her head leaving an impression on the window, a haunting daguerreotype portrait that would have forever captured the right side of my mother’s face, with its high cheekbone and pointed chin, the side she liked to show off in pictures because she knew it was the prettiest side she had.
    The last thing she recalled was reaching for the door handle as the car began to reverse far too fast out of the driveway. It was an instinctive gesture, born no doubt out of the secret conviction that all she had to do in order to right the world to her expectations was get away. Did she actually expect to make it out of the car, however? I doubt it. She should have realized by then that an escape was impossible. The car was moving too quickly, and the passenger door was already locked, and then there was the matter of her husband’s arm stretched over her body like a guardrail—one that at any moment was prepared to fight to bring her back. Had she gotten away she would have gone crashing into the driveway, the concrete being far less generous than the glass that had absorbed her head. Escape anyway was never really more than just a fantasy. After all, how many times did I watch her pack and unpack her suitcases: dozens, at least, which I alone can recall. We were always supposedly on the move, to St. Louis, Kansas, Chicago, and Des Moines, ready to disappear but somehow rarely getting any farther than one of a half-dozen motels on the outskirts of town, or on occasion, when the situation demanded it, to a shelter for the battered and homeless. Life, for my mother and me, was lived in the spaces between attempted departures.
    During the twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds that she was unconscious my mother’s mind wandered off into a gray area that I like to think of as the future conditional: the “will” and “would” that are simultaneously