“Good. See? Zen,” he replied. “Let him think he has the power and, presto, the guy retreats.”
Mr. SUV had indeed faded back to my rear but he was still following close behind. Close, until three seconds later he was trying to pass me again but on the opposite side now, on the shoulder side of the road. This put him on the inner path of a very blind turn. Let him fly by, I mused to myself. Good riddance.
Eight seconds.
The healthy thought didn’t dispel the rising tension I was feeling.
“Sierra, hold my paw,” said Aaron to our daughter. That was their little code for assurance—whenever there was a goblin in the house or a clap of thunder in the distance, the two koalas in the family held tight.
“Daddy, hold my paw,” she immediately echoed back. Five seconds.
Sensing the tension in the car, they were now entwined. Just in time. The SUV was so close to us—when it happened.
He clipped the far corner of my rear bumper, a solid enough strike but not nearly hard enough to seem like anything other than an accident. I lost control of our car. Four seconds.
We began to skid clockwise, toward the guardrail.
Two-point-five seconds.
And instead of flashing on the cocktail party in Manhattan when we’d joked about how to react in a high-speed car chase—three years ago, when Aaron got hired for his first big job as a lawyer, for a nice corporation called Drake Oil—I instead flashed on the general concept of my husband and Sierra in my back seat, innocently playing together in the kangaroo galaxy.
And I hesitated at the wheel.
There was no time anyway.
Seventy-three miles per hour.
We were going to go over the edge.
Zero.
Chapter 2
I hit the guardrail at over seventy miles an hour, exploding the metal post from its anchor in the rock and shattering the metal outward as if it were the fringes of a ribbon, at the end of a marathon.
My heart froze, not just for what was happening in the moment, but for what was looming ahead on my disturbingly clear horizon.
There was no ground in sight.
We were going over a cliff.
It was just air meeting dashboard. There was no ground in this picture.
“Miranda!” my husband screamed, the involuntary expulsion of your wife’s name when terror takes hold of your vocal cords.
The front of the minivan flew forward as my stomach sank about ten miles below my seat. All four tires went airborne as 99 percent of the ambient noise abruptly vanished, like someone clicked off the master volume on life, which, in turn, ushered in the horrific sound of my four-year-old daughter screaming at the top of her lungs. The most bloodcurdling, most agonized shriek imaginable.
“Mmmmaaaaammmaaaaaaa!”
My entire body went rigid as my inner organs twisted in a knot. I stomped my foot down on the brake pedal, crushing it into the floor, as if brakes mattered while our minivan did what minivans were not supposed to do.
We were airborne, and then we were not. We rejoined the planet without slowing down at all. The front of the van hit the dirt, a massive grade leading toward the abyss. We flipped over, for a second on all four wheels, and I felt the traction of the tires bite for just a second as I had a chance to correct the careening vehicle ever-so-slightly forward again.
It was a brief moment of hope, but there was no control. Our minivan kept flipping, vertically and horizontally.
As the world spun in front of me, I caught a glimpse in the rearview mirror of my treasures—screaming and crying just as I must have been. We bounced horrendously along the spine of the hillside with its rocky dirt hammering our tires and our chassis, until we finally smashed into the bottom of the canyon.
Upside down.
Where everything then became eerily still. Everyone’s cries had stopped.
Only the river murmured. It was getting in somehow, trickling across our ceiling. We were partially on the rapids, partially on the shallow end of the bank.
Only later would I appreciate that while bad luck had delivered me an SUV to contend with, good luck had delivered me the one spot by the river that would hold us. A dozen feet farther and we’d be submerged.
I turned to look behind me. I saw my husband, seemingly drifting in and out of consciousness.
“You good?” I asked him.
He didn’t look good. It took him a long moment to answer. “Mmmmm…”
“Sierra?” I said to my daughter, a one-word query.
She was wide-eyed but alert, apparently intact.
I instantly activated myself. Sleeves rolled up. Time to move. All of us. My husband, though sluggish, started fiddling with the straps on Sierra’s car seat. I took off my seat belt, trying to land as gracefully as possible onto the wet ceiling. It wasn’t very graceful. I looked back to Aaron to make sure he and Sierra could both wiggle free. His forehead had a nasty gash across it. Long, thick, deep. But he was present enough to help Sierra down.
“I’m gonna climb back up to the main road,” I announced to him.
“’Kay,” he replied.
I’d fully expected him to debate me, to tell me he should be the one to go, to tell me I should stay here with Sierra, but he didn’t protest. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
I didn’t dwell on it. I got moving. The shock neutralized any hesitation I might have had, maybe should have. I was numbly executing a series of actions I wasn’t even sure would work. We needed help, serious help. An ambulance. A medical helicopter. We hadn’t had reception for a long time, and I couldn’t see either of our phones, which must have bounced around the van.
Water was really starting to get in, now—I realized that most of the windows were shattered. Of course they were.
One thing went right, though: I had no idea what inconvenient place we decided to cram our emergency kit when we packed the
