'The Accident'

'I didn't even know what I'd hit until I looked in the rearview mirror and saw bodies and bookbags flying everywhere'.

I've heard these words from my mother more times than I can count, though she was rarely speaking directly to me when she said them.  Of course, my mother never hit anyone with her car that I know of, but this is her account of the words spoken by the man who hit my older sister and me with his jeep as we were crossing the street at a busy intersection on November 11, 1989.  My sister had just turned eleven years old a few weeks previously and I was excitedly preparing for my seventh birthday which was only a few days away.

The day had begun as a perfectly ordinary day with my mother getting my sister and I out of bed and ready for school before leaving for her job at the local clinic just a few blocks away from our home.  We had waited for our ride, a carpool with the mother of one of our friends from church who attended the same school that we did, arrived safely at school to have an utterly uneventful day and then met up with and were dropped off again by our ride home.  It wasn't until we'd made it to the side door and our ride had already driven away that the ordinariness of our day began to change.

On any other day, my sister would have unzipped her backpack and retrieved her house key.  She would have unlocked the door and we would have gone inside and locked it behind us precisely as we had been taught to do.  We would have dropped our backpacks in our rooms, possibly changed out of our good school clothes, and rummaged through the fridge for an after-school snack of some kind.  We would have taken up our respective positions in front of the giant TV in the basement to watch our usual menu of after school cartoons, starting with Gummy Bears followed by Duck Tails and we would have been part way through Tail Spin when our older brother arrived home from his high school swim team practice and set us to work on our after-school chores.  

We each had three chores to do every day including my brother; character building tasks that taught us responsibility and prepared us for adulthood.  The chores changed daily and we would find them written in my mother's elaborately fancy cursive on a piece of scrap paper on the kitchen table, but we always ignored them until an authoritarian, such as our brother, saw to it that we did them.  Being the youngest my chores were generally things best suited to a tiny human such as ironing laundry, wiping down the baseboards with a rag and a bucket of Pine Sol water, dusting furniture, and such.  Knowing myself the way that I do I'm sure I was probably relieved on this particular day that our usual routine was being uprooted.

You see, my sister opened her backpack and reached for the key but it wasn't there, most likely she'd forgotten to put it in her bag earlier that morning before school and was only just now realizing it.  In our neighborhood, we knew several families with kids our age and there must have been a half-dozen or so options available to us.  We could have simply waited in the yard for big brother to come home and let us into the house, it probably wouldn't have been much more than an hour wait, but I suppose to our young minds that hour seemed like an eternity because we were going to be missing our favorite shows, regardless of the fact that they were probably reruns that we'd already seen at least a few times over.  We could have gone across the street to my best friend's house; I've no doubt that he would have let us hang out with him for an hour and he liked all the same cartoons that we did.

I don't know why we didn't choose either of these options or why we thought walking to my mom's work would be the best solution to our predicament but set off we did, retracing nearly half the distance to our school in the process until we came to a busy and notoriously dangerous intersection at the corner of 4400 South & 1900 West.  To be fair, I don't know that this intersection was notorious for being dangerous before our encounter with it but I do know that we weren't the last victims of its treachery.  In fact, I seem to recall a rather serious auto-pedestrian accident happening at that same intersection just a few weeks after ours.

My sister stopped us before we'd properly approached the position on the corner where people stand while they're waiting to cross a street.  You know the one, the one that clearly tells the cars 'I'm here and I want to cross'; close enough to push the button on the traffic light pole but slightly closer to the curb as if preparing for an Olympic sprint once the signal changes.  She took a bright pink jump rope from her backpack, or maybe it came from mine, and she tied one end of it around my waist and the other end around hers.  The police later asked us why we'd done this and I don't think either of us had been able to give them a proper answer.  I suppose we were both a little bit frightened, though I doubt either of us would have admitted it.  We were approaching virtually nine lanes of 45mph traffic between the two roads and had never really ventured beyond our quiet little dead-end street without adult supervision before.  Somehow tethering ourselves together must have made us feel more confident, as if we were bigger and easier to notice by combining ourselves, in some way, into a single human as opposed to two little ones.

We'd certainly learned proper street crossing technique several times over.  Push the button and wait for the little red hand to become a little green stick figure, then look both ways, then cross quickly but don't run because tripping and falling while crossing the street is very, very bad.  We'd gone over this in school, we'd gone over it with our parents, and I'm sure it was featured in many of our favorite TV shows.  We had it down and we followed it to the letter.  Button pushed, little green man present, traffic stopped both left and right on 4400 and so, we began to cross.

But no one had ever told us that at an intersection this size we should also check the traffic turning left or right onto 4400 from the cross street.  No one had ever told us that at nearly or just after 4 p.m. in the late fall the low-hanging sun could be utterly blinding for drivers.  No one had ever told us that sometimes drivers run red lights for a variety of reasons.  Neither of us actually remembers the impact.  For years afterward I could have sworn that I'd heard the engine of the big noisy vehicle coming at us from behind, from a car turning right into the lane that we were crossing, but all accounts – including the police report – directly contradict that.  He was turning left from the opposite side of the intersection.  The sun was in his eyes and he didn't see the light change to red, nor did he see two little girls in their layered hot pink and green socks or their fluffy 80's hair connected by a bright pink jump rope skipping merrily across the road dreaming about possibly convincing their mother, who's place of employment was now solidly in our view just ahead, to buy them Slurpee’s from the 7-11 that now stood as the only building between them and their destination.

Thank god she didn't actually see it happen, it would have destroyed her.  We were close enough that she could have, had she been outside or near the right window of the clinic at the right moment, but she wasn't and I honestly believe that was a blessing for her sanity.  She said that the police arrived at her work and the moment they asked for her she knew something was horribly wrong.  I've no idea how they knew where to find her or what her name was or who we were because I certainly don't remember anything until after she arrived.

You've probably heard that when a person is in a really traumatic accident that things kind of go blurry for them before the actual impact, as if the mind decides on its own that even though no actual trauma has yet occurred, the knowledge that trauma is coming is too terrible to be remembered and thus simply blotted and blurred into obscurity.  I can wholly confirm this, at least in the experience I had.  One minute I was crossing the road and the next I was waking up flat on my back in the middle of it, as though I had just spontaneously fallen asleep for a little while.  The paramedics were literally cutting my pants off of me with scissors and it freaked me out but virtually the instant that I started to protest, there was my mother leaning over me and telling me that it was okay because they were only trying to help me.  

They strapped me down to a wooden plank, head and all, to load me into the ambulance while my sister got the gurney – not to imply that 'getting the gurney' was some kind of treat by any means.  They say that she must have seen the vehicle coming before it got to us because witnesses reported that she actually tried to shove me out of the way right before the impact.  It was a big jeep, precisely the kind of vehicle that I dreamed of getting myself when I was old enough to drive and if that isn't enough irony for you it was also precisely the kind of jeep that my oldest brother would later own when he returned from serving our country in Desert Storm.  The tires were probably nearly as tall as I was and they tell me that it was actually the tire that got me – or 'clipped' me, rather – due to the shove from my sister as she tried to gallantly protect me by making every effort to stop the front bumper of that jeep with her forehead.

We both went flying.  They found us yards away from the cross walk and yards away from each other with that stupid, silly jump rope still tied around my sister's midsection but nowhere near mine.  That was only the first time that my sister saved my life, there would be others yet to come but at only eleven years old she had already become the wholly underappreciated hero that I failed to acknowledge for far too long.

My whole family practically lived in the hospital for the first few weeks.  We held my 7th birthday party in my sister's room and though I can barely remember what I received for my 34th birthday (less than a year ago), I remember every present that I got that year along with as many of those little hospital ice cream cups as I wanted.  (Side note: Best.  Ice cream.  Ever!)  I was only kept in the hospital for one night for observation and released the next day but my sister was there for a while.  That first night we were in separate rooms on opposite sides of the ward which was like this big rectangle with the nurse's station in the middle.  My mom spent the night in my sister's room and my dad spent the night in mine.  I remember the nurse coming in far too frequently to check on me during the night.  I know now why she woke me up every hour on the hour and why she had to keep sticking me with needles … well, actually no, that part is still a mystery to me.  How many blood samples can they possibly need from a 6-year-old?  Were they trying to make sure I'd not been snorting lines right before crossing the street?  At any rate, I suppose I got fed up with it at some point.  To be fair, I remember the poking and prodding but the rest of what I'm about to recount exists entirely in the memory of the story as my mother told it.  Apparently, my loud complaints could be heard throughout the ward in the wee hours that night; something akin to 'STOP IT, YOU'RE HURTING ME!'  Ya'll, I swear I didn't mean to do this next thing and I want to go on record as saying that I have nothing but the utmost respect for nurses everywhere – if the poor nurse who was taking care of me that night reads this: I am SO unbelievably sorry!

In my defense, the cast was less than 24 hours old, possibly even less than 12.  It's not like I'd yet gotten used to having a 6lb boxing glove on my arm.  I like to think that I was probably trying to just push her away and too groggy to realize why my arm felt so heavy.  Perhaps I was even just trying to roll over and had to give it some swing to bring it with me.  Oh, my shame right now … yes.  I hit a nurse.  I DIDN'T MEAN IT!  I swear I don't even remember doing it but my mom says she heard me protesting and whining and then there was a loud THUD followed by the nurse shouting "Oh! The little shit just punched me!" or something along those lines.  Don't go blaming the nurse for calling me a little shit.  I'd just clocked her clean in the eye socket with a plaster cast – yeah, they still used plaster in those days!  Calling me a 'little shit' shows amazing restraint in my opinion because if that had been me I would have used every bloody curse word I could think up in six languages!  Again, if you're reading this – I'm sorry.  Hell, I will apologize to every nurse that has ever been clocked by a little kid in a cast even if you're not 'my nurse'.  I do remember her black eye the next day though.  That part I can recall quite well.

One other event from those first few days of visiting my sister in her room after I'd already been released involves my father.  I'm not certain but I think this must have been the day that I was released or very soon after.  I know it was before my birthday.  I was bored and being a pest so my dad took me for a walk through the hospital to help burn off some of my energy and we ended up in the hospital gift shop.  We were browsing in separate areas but it was a tiny gift shop (I have closets that seem bigger now) so we were never more than a few footsteps apart.  I found this silly little game in the toy section: it was a piece of heavy yellow cardboard with bumblebees on it and a piece of clear plastic with little shallow depressions in it and then there were these tiny metal balls that you had to get into the little depressions by carefully tilting the cardboard this way and that.  It was silly and cheap and something to easily get bored with but I was playing with it when my dad surprised me by asking, right over my shoulder "Do you want that?".  I'd not even heard him come up behind me and I was normally the kind of kid who wanted everything.  I was probably a nightmare on shopping trips, one of those kids always asking "Can I have this?  Can I get that? I want one!" but I guess I must have known that the energy was different because of the accident.  Somehow my small mind sensed that there were burdens of epic proportions on my parents because I said "no".  Shocker, I know.  But in a quiet voice my dad said something that really drove home the gravity of the situation: "Let me get that for you."

It brings tears to my eyes to this day just writing about it because as spoiled as we were my parents weren't incapable of telling us no.  They were determined to raise us to be strong, independent, and well-mannered, so the more we acted out for something the more likely we were to be told no until we learned the lesson that bad attitudes will get you nowhere in life.  Yet here he was, asking me to let him buy me something that I hadn't even asked for.  I know in my heart that he was so grateful that my sister and I were okay that he would have sold the shirt off his back, had it been necessary, to give us the world.  So, I let him buy the silly game and I played with it for a lot longer than I normally would have because even at six years old I knew it was important to him to see me enjoying it.  Eventually it ended up in a junk drawer (we each had one drawer in our rooms that we were allowed to just throw random stuff in without organization of any kind and we called them our 'junk drawers' though the items in them weren't really junk) and I remember playing with it several times at random afterward.  Eventually it was probably thrown out or donated with a host of other things that I'd grown out of but that one silly little yellow cardboard toy will stay in my memory forever.

I suppose you're probably wondering about the man that hit us and what happened to him.  From a legal perspective, I have no idea if any kind of serious charges were pressed or if the courts ruled it an accident and maybe gave him a traffic ticket.  My parents ruled it an accident though.  From the very beginning and to this day it was and is referred to as 'the accident' and that suits me just fine.  I genuinely hope the driver didn't suffer any life damaging charges because I know that from an emotional perspective he suffered far too much.  He was an utter wreck for a while.  A father of his own children, the idea that he'd hit two little girls while crossing the street nearly destroyed him.  He turned up often in the beginning but I don't know that he ever spoke directly to us or got much closer than being an obscure figure in the background that we came to recognize without fully knowing who he was.  I suspect he was probably afraid that we would react badly to him if we knew who he was, worried about further traumatizing us like we might immediately see him with horns protruding from his scalp and brimstone coming out of his eyes and start shrieking, but he was never really the bad guy for us.  Our parents took an utterly different approach: shit happens.  There wasn't this overwhelming need to place blame back then like there seems to be now.  My parents weren't negligent for letting us be home alone for an hour after school; my sister and I weren't to blame for how we crossed the street, though certainly staying home and just waiting would have been smarter; and the man driving the jeep, whose name I don't even know to this day, made an honest mistake that he punished himself for more than anyone else possibly could have.  Yes, he ran a red light.  It happens sometimes.

I'm sure he didn't expect them to make everything all better for us but he brought us gifts on every major holiday for the first few years.  He didn't have to do that.  There was no court order that read 'thou must present thine victims with Purr-tenders in their favorite colors and they must be contained inside of giant, slightly transparent balloons sitting atop Easter grass and surrounded by bits of chocolate as if made by a wizard of excellent skill'.  No such laws exist, though it might be a nice conversation starter if they did.  When I try to put myself in his shoes I am sure that he needed to see us, with his own eyes, he needed to see how we were healing and if we were happy and normal.  He needed closure because he was hurting more than we were but he didn't want to show up empty handed.  My parents told us about how sorry he was, about how much the accident devastated him, about how much he cared.  He never gave the gifts directly to us but my parents made sure that we knew that they were from him and that they were his way of telling our young minds just how truly sorry he was and we forgave him before we had ever considered blaming him in the first place.

So, were we okay?  Did we heal normally?  Yes, in most ways.  The physical damage was the easiest to heal from.  A wrap on my ankle, a cast on my arm, a wickedly awesome looking broken blood vessel in one eye, and a few scrapes – other than that I was fine.  I've done worse damage to myself in my 35 years than that jeep ever did to me.  My sister didn't have it quite as easy.  She had a wicked hematoma on her forehead, fractured her femur and had to spend weeks in traction followed by months in a body cast, and then physical therapy learning how to walk again; but we did heal.  Our grades didn't suffer, I don't recall either of us having nightmares, we didn't become terrified of crossing streets.  A few years later it was almost as though it had never happened at all with the exception of a few small scars here and there.

There were, however, some unexpected side effects.  Things that, in my sister's case, didn't turn up until much later in life; things that can't be directly linked to that accident but that are commonly the result of severe head trauma of exactly the brand we both suffered.  Things that will come to further light as this story progresses and, in some ways, shape and define who we were and who we would eventually become, but at that point in our lives – the post-accident era – we were spoiled little girls who had everything we could have ever wanted.  My dad bought us a Nintendo to help keep us entertained while we were bed ridden, my sister had a tutor that kept her up on her schooling while in her body cast, and we were sent to a Sylvan learning center for testing and evaluation to confirm that we were mentally and intellectually sound.  I don't want to say that the spoiling began with the accident because I think my parents always tried to give us as much as they could afford to, but it definitely seems like the spoiling increased after the accident and that also seems like a natural evolution of behavior for parents overcome with gratitude for the fact that their two little girls survived a potentially life-ending event.

This belief is further supported by another memory from that same intersection a short time later.  My mom, dad, and I were in my mom's beautiful Monte Carlo, stopped at a red light watching a little girl around my age trying to figure out how to cross that same intersection in the same place and going the same direction that my sister and I had been.  My mother panicked.  Every ounce of her motherly instinct went into overdrive and she leaped from the car, dumping her purse into the street in the process and began sprinting between bumpers to get to the little girl before she tried to cross the street on her own.  I reached out of the back seat to retrieve her purse from the ground and my father managed to pull the passenger door closed just as the light changed to green.  I vaguely remember my mother becoming irate at a red sports car as she walked the little girl, hand-in-hand, across the street because it had stopped much too close to the cross walk.  I can definitively state that she was irate because she even slammed the flat of her palm down on its hood and screamed at the driver through his windshield as they were walking past it.  I assure you that this was not normal behavior for my mother who always went out of her way to be kind and sweet and serving to others, especially in public.  That poor kid probably thought she was a mad woman but the reality is just that she was terrified.  Terrified of watching someone else's little girl go through what my sister and I had been through and that's only if she was as lucky as we had been.

Our parents loved us.  They adored us.  In every sense, we were climbing the ranks of the solid upper-middle class in a picket fence neighborhood with a perfect house and a perfect dog and perfect grades and a perfect future.  So how did we find ourselves virtually homeless in 1993; snubbed, sneered at, whispered about right under our noses at the school bus stop, and largely dependent on the kindness and charity of others?  All in good time, my friends.