Crash and yearn

“I loved that car, too,” he said. “And I never got to say goodbye.”

So I pulled him out of school for the day and, driving a rental car, we headed to Insurance Auto Auctions’s lot on Hawkins Point Road outside of Baltimore.

We found our Volvo in a vast, sad lot of broken cars and trucks, some disturbingly twisted, with shattered windshields and hoods crushed with such violence as to be beyond recognition. My car, though it was no longer mine, looked barely scratched. I had a key. (I still do.) I wanted nothing more than to just get in, start her up and drive away.

* * *

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that from 5 million to 6 million autos get into accidents every year. Of those, salvage experts estimate that more than half are totaled, deemed not worth repairing, like my Volvo, and shipped to salvage auctions such as this one. From there, the cars 15 years and older are typically sold off to recyclers who crush them and sell the scrap, or to dismantlers who want the four-to-10-year-old cars to disembowel and sell as parts, explained Winston Wheeler, president of the American Salvage Pool Association, “the voice of automotive remarketing,” according to its recorded phone greeting.

Sometimes the mangled cars are bought by shippers, put in containers, as is, and sent to Bolivia, Mexico, Indonesia or 100 other countries where the labor to repair them is cheaper or the parts are needed, Wheeler said. In rare cases, the salvage cars are bought by a mom-and-pop car lot or a mechanic, rebuilt and resold, though the title will always say “salvage” and carry a story.

I asked what would happen to the Volvo.

“I find Volvo to be a lower-end vehicle in the auction market just because there aren’t that many to repair,” he said, unlike the wildly popular Toyota Camry, a hot auction item. “I’m based in Florida, and in our world, it would probably be scrap.”

The Volvo, its license plates removed, had a stock number scrawled in blue grease pencil across the windshield. Liam sat in the driver’s seat, pretending to be 16 and, as he’d always imagined, driving his car. We put the last of our things — the toys and bottles of spray cleaner that never could keep up with the bird droppings, my daughter’s hula hoop — in a couple of boxes. Then Liam went around to the front of the car, put his arms around the bumper and laid his head on the hood.

And that’s when it hit me.

My husband and I had bought the Volvo when I was six months pregnant with Liam. After I had been told for years that I would never be able to carry a child. This is the car that brought both my unexpected miracle babies home from the hospital. I remember being so proud to drive that car, with its built-in car seat, and its back-seat pockets that could so easily carry all those toys, extra bottles, juice boxes and plastic bags of Cheerios. I called it my “mom car,” because, finally, after so much heartache, I was going to be one.

I patted the dashboard of my damaged friend one last time and took my miracle child home.