surprised that I was still alive, but I couldn’t seem to move and even if I’d been able to, I would have been too afraid to check out what damage I’d sustained. I couldn’t hear anything; it was as if I was alone in the world. My vision was misty, and my face felt numb, but at the same time it
The good news was: the air bag worked. The bad news was: it needed to. I looked around me at my car and almost moaned aloud. My beautiful little car looked like a twisted pile of scrap metal. I was alive, but my car wasn’t.
Oh, my God,
“Blair,” he said hoarsely, reaching for me, but he froze with his hands outstretched as if he was afraid to touch me. His face was paper white. “Are you all right? Is anything broken?”
“I don’t think so.” My voice was thin and shaky, and my nose was running. Embarrassed, I swiped at it, then saw the bright smear of red on my hand and the additional red dripping from my nose. “Oh. I’m bleeding. Again.”
“I know.” He gently lifted me off the hood and carried me to the grassy median, picking his way through a tangle of cars. Traffic in both directions had come to a complete halt. Steam rose from the crumpled hood of the car that had hit me, and other motorists were helping the woman inside. On the other side of the four-lane, two or three cars rested at weird angles in the road, but the damage there seemed to be mostly in the fender- bender range.
Wyatt set me down on the grass and pressed a handkerchief into my hand. “If you’re all right, I’ll go see about the other driver.” I nodded and waved a hand, indicating he should see what he could do. “Are you certain?” he asked, and I nodded again. He briefly touched my arm, then strode off, talking into his cell phone, and I lay back on the grass with the handkerchief pressed to my nose to stop the bleeding. I remembered being hit in the face really hard; that must have been the air bag deploying. My life was well worth a bloody nose.
A man in a suit came over and squatted down beside me, positioning himself so he blocked the sun out of my face. “Are you all right?” he asked kindly.
“I dink so,” I said nasally, holding my nose pinched together.
“You lie right there and don’t try to get up, just in case you’re hurt worse than you realize and don’t feel it yet. Is your nose broken?”
“I don’t dink so.” It hurt; my whole face hurt. But my nose didn’t hurt worse than anything else, and all in all, I thought it was just a bloody nose.
Good Samaritans came out of the woodwork, offering aid in a variety of means: bottles of water and baby wipes, even a few alcohol wipes from someone’s first aid kit, to help clean up the cuts and wipe away blood so you could tell how bad a cut actually was; emergency ice packs; Band-Aids and gauze; cell phones and sympathy. There were seven walking-wounded with minor injuries, including me, but the driver of the car that had T-boned me was injured severely enough that they hadn’t taken her out of the car. I could hear Wyatt talking, his voice calm and authoritative, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
Reaction seized me and I began trembling. I slowly sat up and looked around at the chaos, at the bloody people sitting on the median with me, and I wanted to cry. I had done this? It was an accident, I knew it was, but still… I was the cause. My car. Me. Guilt ate at me. I kept my car in good running condition, but had I overlooked some key maintenance? Not paid attention to a warning sign that my brakes were about to fail?
Sirens were shrieking in the distance and I realized only a few minutes had passed. Time was crawling so slowly it felt as if I’d been lying there on the grass for at least half an hour. I closed my eyes and prayed hard that the woman who had hit me would be okay. Because I felt weak and a little dizzy, I lay back down and stared up at the blue sky.
Suddenly I had a weird sense of deja vu, and I realized how similar this scene was to the one Sunday afternoon, only then I’d been lying on the warm parking lot instead of fragrant green grass. But sirens had been shrieking and cops swarming, just the way they were now. Maybe more time had passed than I thought; when had the cops got here?
A medic went down on one knee beside me. I didn’t know him. I wanted Keisha, who gave me cookies. “Let’s see what we have here,” he said, but he was reaching for my left arm. He must have thought the bandage was covering a new cut.
“I’m okay,” I said. “That’s stitches from minor surgery.”
“Where’s all this blood from?” He was taking my pulse, then flicking a tiny penlight from eye to eye.
“My nose. The air bag gave me a bloody nose.”
“Considering what could have happened, God bless air bags,” he said. “Were you wearing your seat belt?”
I nodded, so then he checked me for seat-belt injuries, and wrapped a cuff around my right arm to check my blood pressure. Guess what? It was elevated. Since I was structurally all right, he moved on to someone else.
While other medics were working with the woman in the car, stabilizing her, Wyatt came back and squatted beside me. “What happened?” he asked quietly. “I was right behind you, and I didn’t see anything unusual, but all of a sudden you started spinning.” He still looked pale and grim, but the sun was in my eyes again and I couldn’t be sure.
“I put on my brakes for the stop sign, and the pedal went all the way to floor. There was nothing. So I put on the emergency brake, and that’s when I started to spin.”
He glanced over at my car where it rested in the far lane, the two front wheels up on the curb. I followed his gaze, stared a moment at the wreckage, and shuddered. I’d been hit so hard the frame had wrapped in a U shape, and the passenger side was nonexistent. No wonder the windshield had popped out. If it hadn’t been for my seat belt, I probably would have popped out, too.
“Have you had trouble with your brakes lately?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. And I have it serviced regularly.”
“The patrolman who drove it to your place didn’t report any problems with it. You go on to the hospital and get checked out-”
“I’m okay. Honest. My vitals are steady, and other than getting popped in the face by the air bag, I don’t think anything else is wrong.”
He rubbed his thumb over my cheekbone, the touch light. “All right. Should I call your mother to come get you? I’d rather you not be alone for the next few hours, at least.”
“After the cars are moved. I don’t want her to see my car; it’ll give her nightmares. I know you need my insurance card and registration,” I said woefully, still staring at the tangle of sheet metal. “They’re in the glove compartment, if you can find the glove compartment. And my bag is in there, too.”
Briefly he touched my shoulder, then stood and walked across the two lanes to my car. He looked in the window, walked around the car to the other side and back, then did something odd: he got down on the pavement, on his back, and slid his head and shoulders under the car just behind the front wheels. I winced, thinking of all the glass that must be on the pavement and hoping he wouldn’t get cut. What was he looking for?
He slid out from beneath the car, but didn’t come back over to me. Instead he went to one of the uniformed officers and said something to him, and the officer went over to my car and he, too, slid underneath it, just the way Wyatt had. I saw Wyatt talking on his cell phone again.
A small convoy of wreckers began arriving, to tow the damaged vehicles away. An ambulance arrived, and the medics began the process of gently removing the woman from her car. One of them held an IV bag over her. Her face was drenched in blood, and they’d fitted a cervical collar on her. I whispered another prayer.
Sawhorse barricades were put on the street, and officers in both directions were directing
