A Nearly True Story

Oklahoma summers don’t mess around.  It’s not the hundred-plus temperatures—plenty of states can claim that one.  It’s the still air that hangs thick and heavy, so it keeps the oxygen from going into your nose and lungs like it oughta.  Thick.   Makes it hard to breathe; much less finish the house work, or play with the baby.  She’s lying diaper-naked just to have her chubby body against the cool of the cement floor.  

“That’s it!  Larry, I’ve had it.”  Deborah walks by her reclining husband, giving his foot a tweak to make sure he’s awake and listening.  “We can’t just stew in this muggy house any longer.  I’m getting Holly, and we’re going for a drive.”  She picks up her sticky-with-sweat child and walks out the door.

“Sounds good to me,” replies her groggy husband.  “If we can’t catch a breeze today,” he smiles, “we might as well make one.”  He gets up, stretches; and then follows after Deborah and the baby through the swinging screen door.  

Their ’73 Subaru Leone would be a sparkling royal blue if it weren’t for the dust kicked up from the thirsty red Oklahoma clay.  Just a mile down the road, and Deborah and Holly are already deep in serious conversation over what flavor of ice cream they plan to get; smiling and looking at Daddy as if he could have missed their obvious “hint.”  Today was going to be a good day after all.   Hot and sticky, but sweet; just like an Oklahoma summer day.  

“You know,” Larry says, “it’s gonna bust out and rain eventually.”  The blanket of hot air is pregnant with water vapor.  “It’s holding out till the last moment; till it can’t keep it in anymore.”  Already the sky is filling with fluffy, white and pink cotton-candy, growing with new rounded layers; building dreamlike towers in the sky.    

“Well, I wish it would get to it already,” Deborah snorts, “or at least share a breeze.”  She holds the heat of two; herself and her cuddly lap-buddy.  Sweat has already formed an image of her child on the front of her t-shirt and jeans where their bodies are pressed to each other.  

The rain does finally come.  Just like an Oklahoma rain: a little too little, a little too late.  The family has already been cooled by a strawberry shake, a chocolate malt, and a fudge bar— that runs all the way down Holly’s round arms and belly.   By the time they clean-up and step out of the Dairy Queen, all that is left of the rain is a grey overcast sky and the hint of a drizzle.  

The sound of the splashing and hissing tires across the paved road is enough to lull little Holly right to sleep in her mother’s arms.  Not even the extended stillness of a long wait at the towns’ four-way stoplight wakes the drooling babe.  But Larry’s eyes are wide. “Oh, God!”  Across the intersection, a car is speeding, now careening, spiraling, deadly committed to an uncontrolled spin across the slick pavement.  It is as if a large dark hand of death is upon its roof guiding it, flinging it, pressing it hard toward the little family’s car.  

A split second, and Deborah sees too—the inevitable fate racing to them.  “Jesus!”  

All stops.  The drizzle is not falling, but hangs suspended in its sky. No tires are spinning.  No engines run idyll at the light.  Unearthly stillness surrounds them.  A vacuum of silence fills the air.  All is what it was, but is held in a great pause.  “I dreamed this,” Deborah whispers. 

“How did the dream end?”  Larry turns toward Deborah and takes her hand.  His eyes both pleading for hope and filled with bewilderment as he looks around him.  “How did it end?” 

Deborah is back in her dream.  Back in this very moment, but for the first time.  She sees her arms passing her sweet baby into someone else’s arms, and she can hear her own voice.  She is saying, Please! Take my baby!  She returns to Larry’s eyes and answers, “I don’t know.”

The cab of the car becomes a biosphere of its’ own.  Words of love and of life are exchanged.  Holy words, meant for the hearers only.  Words of planning and action, “How should I hold her?  How can we protect her?”  Prayers are spoken; thankful prayers for all Love’s blessings, asking prayers for protection.  

These two and baby are joined by another.  There in the midst of them.  Knees unseen in the back seat, but He places His hands upon their shoulders.  “Everything is going to be okay.”

Time, once suspended, now hits play.  

Crash! 

Tess cannot feel her legs, “Larry!”

“I’m here,” his voice now strained, his words sound labored.

A stranger approaches the bludgeoned remains of the driver’s side window to find the image of a man: a thing without a scalp: it is cut straight across its forehead, what was its hair lies shapeless upon the back of a bloodied neck.  The steering wheel is flattened and shoved deep into the front of the vehicle.  The wheels’ image convexly mirrored in the driver by the cantaloupe shape growing upon its chest.

The stranger hears a breathless cry from the passenger side. 

 “Please!  Take my baby!” Up from the gnarled tin can a pale and crooked arm has handed something to the shape with its bloody skull showing.  

What was a face now a swollen mass of bloody and blue. It turns toward the stranger.  It is handing him a baby.  

……………………………………………………………………………………..

Do not worry.  This is a nearly true story.  We were not going to get ice cream on a hot Oklahoma summer day.  That particular summer day had been wet and dreary from the start, and my parents were going to visit some old friends in Norman; a celebration over moving to Oklahoma and signing the rental agreement on our new home.  We never moved into it.  We may have even lost our deposit– that part I do not know. 

What I do know is that my family was at a four-way intersection on Highway 9; they were waiting at a red light, stopped.  A woman who had either taken too much cold medicine, or the like, had hydroplaned, lost control, and came spinning with such force into my parents car that she was thrown from her car.  She was eventually found hundreds of feet away, in the nearby field.  My father had to convince the police to go find her.  They thought that he had been the driver of the other car.  Men with severe head injuries are not easily trusted to recall the moments before and during such a collision.  

I was eighteen months old.  My mother was in her early twenties, my dad in his early thirties.  Other than his cantaloupe-sized bruise on his chest, hairline/scalp injury (and yes, it was just as I described: his hair and scalp had been sliced and shoved to the back of his neck), he had dislocated his big toe, and he had punctured his lower lip so severely that “he leaked” whenever he drank water (a defect lasting long enough to be an ongoing joke in our young household).  Other than other minor cuts and bruises, he was okay, and was only hospitalized for a few days.  It would be several years later that another doctor would find that he had also fractured a bone in his leg that day; an injury that the Shawnee hospital had never found, or just had never looked for.  My mother had dislocated two vertebrae in her back, broke another vertebrae, and crushed a disc (they had to repair this by taking a piece of her hip bone to replace it, and fusing her spine); she broke her right collar bone, shattered her left ankle, broke her ulna (arm), and dislocated her right elbow (which severed several nerves).  She was bleeding internally.  The doctors had to remove four inches of her small intestine to save her life.  She was hospitalized for six months before being released in a full body cast.  She was never supposed to walk again, but she did. Her doctor said, “it’s a miracle.”  I escaped without a scratch and only a hairline skull fracture.  Had the nurses let me drink from a cup instead of insisting on giving me a bottle, I would have been released that same day instead of the week they kept me for “refusing to eat.”  

Time did stand still in that vehicle.  Jesus did join us in those moments just before the collision. The injuries–the physical,the financial, the emotional, and the phychological–linger in us to this day. This is the true story.