I wasted a precious few seconds desperately pumping the brake pedal, praying it would suddenly, miraculously work. It didn't. Just before I went past the stop sign, as a last-ditch effort I stomped on the emergency brake pedal, and the car went into a hard spin, tires screaming and smoking, as I shot into the intersection. My seat belt snapped tight, jerking me back against my seat. I tried to get control of the spin, but an oncoming car, its own tires screaming as it tried to stop, clipped my right rear bumper and added to the momentum. It was like riding a very fast merry-go-round. In the split second I was facing traffic, I had a lightning flash of a red pickup coming right at me; then there was a hard jolt as my car hit the concrete bumper of the median and jumped it, backward, before slewing sideways across the grass and into the other two lanes of traffic. Terror-stricken, I glanced to the right and, through the passenger window, saw a woman's face frozen in horror, and time itself seemed to freeze, too, in the instant before the impact. An enormous shock wave hit me like a body blow, and the world went black.
The blackness lasted for only a few seconds. I opened my eyes and blinked, both aware and 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 hurt. "Ouch," I said aloud into the strange silence, and with that sound everything popped back into focus.
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, Wyatt. He'd been right behind me; he'd seen everything. He had to think I was dead. I fumbled with my right hand for the seat belt and unclipped it, but when I tried to open my door, it wouldn't budge and I couldn't throw my weight against it because my hurt arm was on that side. Then I noticed the windshield had been popped out, so I laboriously hauled myself out from behind the steering wheel-it was like playing Twister-and gingerly crawled through the space where the windshield had been, careful of the broken glass, and out onto the hood, just as Wyatt reached me.
"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?