Rehearsing the future and telling her own story

Rehearsing the future and telling her own story is Kelly Kelleher’s effort to hold open a life beyond immediate danger. As she struggles inside a submerged car, she imagines surviving long enough to describe what happened; the imagined account becomes a practical form of hope, but also exposes how survival may depend on shaping an experience whose facts and meanings she cannot yet fully grasp.

An imagined future as a survival practice

Before she can know the outcome, Kelly turns toward a future in which the ordeal can be told. She insists inwardly that she must never doubt she will live to speak, and must never doubt she will tell her story. The insistence is not proof that rescue is assured: it is a way to preserve the possibility of rescue when black water, darkness, and bodily entrapment threaten to close it off. Words point toward a life she cannot see from inside the car.

The future she rehearses has an audience. Kelly imagines recounting the accident to friends, perhaps even to Carl Spader, who once knew The Senator but is now distant from him. She composes an account in which the Senator had been courteous and genuinely interested in what the group thought of his Senate proposals, including Medicaid and welfare reform. Rehearsing that social scene gives her a destination for her thoughts beyond the car, while making the imagined testimony feel like a version of ordinary conversation rather than a mere description of terror.

This practice also puts pressure on the distinction between experiencing an event and being able to narrate it. Kelly wants to transform the submerged-car nightmare—the entrapment, near-drowning, and rescue—into an account she can tell. Yet her prospective story already arranges events into a comprehensible sequence and gives the Senator an explanation: he went for help, and air remained in the car because the windows had been shut and the air conditioner was on. She calls the survival miraculous, but the story’s reassuring shape cannot itself settle what happened. Its construction shows both the power and the limits of narration: a story can make a future imaginable before it can make the past certain.

The body under threat, the mind making a story

The need to imagine future speech arises from an immediate physical crisis. At the moment of the crash, the Toyota skids off the road and enters water; the passenger door buckles, and Kelly is trapped amid the impact, darkness, and the Senator’s frightened voice. Her body is restrained by the damaged car and its belts, while the water rises through cracks and openings. The distance between this material emergency and the articulate account she later imagines is central to the concept: the future storyteller is trying to emerge from a present in which she cannot freely move or reliably orient herself.

Kelly’s attention repeatedly shifts between practical calculation and overwhelmed sensation. She knows the submerged car will gradually fill, even if it still holds pockets of air, and imagines the water eventually reaching her mouth and lungs. She tries to remain patient rather than panic, but coughs and chokes on black muck. Later, she cannot estimate whether fifteen or forty minutes have passed; she wakes in terror as the current shifts the car from its precarious position and turns it completely over. Her difficulty measuring time is not incidental. The future she rehearses depends on continuity—there will be a later in which she can tell—but the crisis makes duration itself uncertain.

The same erosion reaches language and spatial understanding. Kelly feels for the broken steering wheel, using it to locate herself and reason about the driver’s door, but she cannot see whether the door will open. When the vehicle capsizes, she finds a pocket of waning air beyond the passenger seat, in the space beneath the glove compartment where her knees had been. As water splashes around her mouth, she can no longer think what that space really is; she has lost the words and the logic that connected them. Air and light, too, become things she senses without being able to name. The imagined future in which she can recount the event therefore stands in stark contrast to the present loss of the very vocabulary that telling requires.

Desire, fear, and competing interpretations

The story Kelly hopes to tell is entangled with her understanding of The Senator and of her own agency. Earlier, on a dune hike, the wind, surf, and his grip on her bare shoulders accompany her thought that something is going to happen that cannot be stopped. On the beach, his repeated kisses produce desire that Kelly experiences as the man’s rather than her own, followed by anxiety and guilt: she feels she has made him want her and therefore may not refuse him. These recollections complicate any simple account of the encounter as freely chosen or straightforwardly understood. Her bodily response and her interpretation of it do not neatly coincide.

The uncertainty continues after the crash. Kelly remembers that the Senator has promised to come back, and tells herself he will reach her from one direction. At another point, she understands that he kicked her in panic while trying to escape, but believes he did not know what he was doing. The explanation gives her a way to hold on to faith in him even as she recognizes the danger of being left trapped. These are not equivalent to an external confirmation of his intentions; they are interpretations formed by a woman in darkness, injured and struggling to breathe.

Her imagined account makes that interpretive tension particularly visible. Kelly pictures herself explaining to a gathering of indistinct elders that the Senator did not abandon her: he went to get help and call an ambulance. She insists in that imagined defense that he did not kick her, flee, or forget her. The rehearsal thus does more than prepare a factual report. It stages a possible judgment by other people and anticipates what she will need to say against it. Even before she can speak publicly, she tries out a version of events that preserves the possibility of his innocence and of her own survival.

Rehearsal, memory, and endurance

The imagined testimony does not proceed in a settled, linear way. It shares space with fragments of memory and fear: her former lover G-----, who sometimes hurt her unconsciously; The Senator’s crushing handshake; the crash; a remembered childhood image of being seized securely beneath the arms; and the elders before whom she imagines explaining the accident. These returns make the future-oriented story less like a polished report than an unstable effort to connect bodily experience, remembered relationships, and the meaning of the Senator’s departure.

Still, rehearsal gives Kelly an action she can perform when larger actions are blocked. She cannot see the submerged space or know how long she has been trapped, but she can reason from the steering wheel and the car’s shifting position; she can hold her face in a dwindling air pocket; and, in thought, she can address future listeners. Her insistence on a future does not remove the physical danger or guarantee that anyone will hear her. It keeps narration itself imaginable at the point when perception and language are breaking down.

When she believes rescue may require amputation, Kelly bargains that the emergency team may take one or even both legs, and promises to sign the release later. She adds that she will not sue, invoking the family’s teasing description of Artie Kelleher as litigious and promising to explain the circumstances and take the blame. This imagined negotiation carries her forward into a hypothetical aftermath: she pictures herself alive to consent, explain, and assume responsibility. Its force lies not in certainty but in the persistence of a speaking self. For Kelly, rehearsing the future is both a lifeline and a way to begin telling a story whose ending she cannot yet know.