This imaginary me.

I'm daydreaming, my feet propped up on the dash, my eyes directed out to pine trees and sky--so I'm barely aware of Dan's face, how it contorts with doubt and hope as he guns our pickup to pass a car. He has waited for a straight stretch on this curvy mountain road before attempting to get around a slow-moving, erratic-driving junker he's been cussing for a mile. Some part of me is aware of this, though mostly I have been elsewhere, with an alternate me in a nonexistent life.

Suddenly: "Oh no, no!"

I squint at Dan, confused. He hits the brakes, jolting us to a slower speed, and now I'm frantic, looking ahead to see what we'll crash into, how our lives are about to end.

My eyes search and search, though really it is only a split second, but finally I see what he does: In the white car we are passing, a man drives with one hand and punches the woman next to him with his other.

Then the car is not beside us anymore. Dan has re-entered the space behind it, right as both cars curve around a steep bend.

I cock my head in confusion, squint my eyes. My brain offers different sequences of words--various narratives--to explain what l saw to myself: A man is punching a woman, there is blood smeared across the woman's face, there is a man with dark hair, there is a red-faced man driving with one hand, there is a woman ducking, there is a woman with blond hair ducking down and away, there is a man punching a woman who has pressed herself against the door.

Finally, we react, Dan lays on the horn, then speeds up to tailgate the car. "Write down the license plate," he says, and I grope around for a pen. I knock my head on the glove compartment as my body sways forward and then back as Dan abruptly accelerates. I look up to discover that the white car has sped up; so has Dan in an effort to match the pace.

"Hey! Don't kill us," I say.

"B-Y-2-0-2 something. Write it down."

I scrawl this across the front cover of the book I'm reading. I see myself as I was this morning, tossing the book in the car, hoping to enter its imaginary world.

"Can you see the numbers? Is that right?"

"Slow down, Dan." Then, "Dan, there was a kid in the back seal."

"I know."

"There was a kid in the back seat."

"Four-door, Honda, `80s."

"Dan, did you see that kid's face? Did you see that kid?"

"Yes, yes. Write it down!"

Only now has my brain registered the image: A blond boy, somewhere between infant and toddler, staring wide-eyed at the two people in front of him. There are tears running down his face. His mouth is just starting to open in surprise, or maybe in a cry.

My daydream was about the same man who always inhabits my dreams, the one who's been in my head for years, the one who falls in love with me again and again for various reasons and in various circumstances. He doesn't have a name, even after all these years. But these dreams aren't about him, anyway, as I've come to realize, and they're not even so much about love. I know this because I am mostly interested in imagining the falling-in-love stage. Alter that, our relationship blurs out of focus and I start a new fantasy altogether. It took me awhile, but now I know: What these dreams are about is me, a different, better, fascinating me.

Also, I like to know that I can still feel my heart swish open with excitement, constrict with pain. Which is what had been happening at that moment: My heart had hurt with anticipation for a first imaginary kiss. The man leaned forward, and the courtship was over, kiss complete.

"Let's stop for lunch," I'd said.

"Let me get past this driver," Dan had said. "What a jerk."

We are going way too fast around the corners, even for us locals who drive up this mountain pass every week or so. Ahead is a small community, a few homes and businesses gathered together. "Sweetheart Lodge Ahead," one sign advertises. "Night-crawlers, beer, food, good company inside--Stop Here!"

"Stop here," I say.

Dan hesitates. We can see from the silhouettes that the man has stopped punching and is instead hunched over the wheel, glancing in the rearview mirror. The woman is slumped against the door. The child I cannot see.

"Let's not follow--what would we--let's call the police. Stop here!"

To our right, log cabins appear. I am struck with the sense of seeing something familiar: Such a cabin is where I have imagined meeting my falling-in-love lover, such a place is where we talk about joining to eke out our quiet, simple lives. Such a place transforms me.

Dan slows and pulls into the parking lot of the Sweetheart Lodge. The outdoor phone has an "Out of Order" sign taped to it, so Dan runs to the store, and I leap out of the car to follow.

Dan asks for the phone, saying "It's an emergency!" over and over to the sleepy-looking guy at the counter. Dan grabs the phone book the man hands him, flips to the front and finds "Sheriff," holds his finger to the number as he dials. As he waits for someone to answer, I glance around the store at the deer heads and fish nailed to the wall, and when I turn back around, Dan is already telling the phone what we've seen.

I listen, silently urging him to better convey the seriousness of it, the momentum of the man's fist, the woman's bloody face, the way her body ricocheted from the force of his blows.

Dan tells the police the make of the car and apologizes that he never caught the full license plate--there was mud splattered. He answers questions about our location and names, and then there is a pause. Dan is searching, I know, for a way to end this conversation right--a way to ask for help for this woman. I am searching, too, for something, anything.

"Tell them to hurry," I whisper.

"It looked pretty bad," Dan says. "You might want to hurry."

Then he hangs up the phone, turns to me, and holds his hands out in confusion.

"I love you," I tell him. I take one of his hands and hold it to my face.

We couldn't find the car, the sheriff tells me that afternoon. Dan and I are home from our hike now, the hike that wasn't so enjoyable or beautiful after all. The sheriffs voice, booming over the phone, assures me that they did send up a patrol car; they did look. They didn't see a thing matching our description, and there wasn't much else they could do, since the license plate was a not-for-sure.

Oh my God, I think. We should have followed. Why, why did I tell Dan to stop?

By now, of course, the image has taken hold in my mind--a frozen moment that I cannot shake away and that I cannot help but examine for details. I can see the man, the black stubble on his red cheek, the dark blue of a T-shirt. I can see the hair of a woman, the contrast of blond curls spilling across a bloody face. I can see a toddler boy in the back seat, the surprised O of his lips. His eyes have that look of wanting to understand something but being unable to, and also of basic fear, and of sorrow.

I write a letter to the Colorado State Patrol in big, loopy handwriting and bad grammar. I don't know why I want to disguise this, to make it different than our own report. I write, "I saw a man beating up on some body in his car and it looked real bad so I'm writing to tell you his license plate number. I think it was BY2002. Please, I hope you do something about it because there was a kid in there."

I leave a half-cooked dinner on the stove to run the letter down to the mailbox on the corner, as if running will speed its delivery, as if the postal carrier will pick it up any sooner if she sees how I have rushed. I hope that my mind will let go of the images now, that words that keep trying to explain will disappear as the envelope falls from my hand.

I want to close the boy's eyes, transport him somewhere else, take him away from the real. But his eyes are locked open, so instead I close mine.

In bed, I try to conjure up my imaginary man, the one who isn't concerned about the terrors of the world, because he is too intent upon me, or who is concerned with the terrors of the world, and holds me to him, and we push our foreheads against each other's shoulder for comfort. He is not there, though; for the first time I cannot find him, and my heart is too dead to search.

I stare into the dark and time passes and it is not until later that I come out of my thoughts enough to view them, to listen to the conversation I am having with the woman. We talk about her leaving this man, I assure her of her worth, we work out the details on how she can live alone. I mumble things about her child's safety and comment on his beautiful eyes. I offer advice on safe and welcoming places to go. I even invite her and her son to live with us.

She reaches out to hold me. I concentrate on how my heart feels, the way it swells with the joy and approval of this imaginary me.

LAURA PRITCHETT is the author of Hell's Bottom, Colorado (Milkweed), winner of the 2002 PEN USA Award for Fiction.