The Social Climber of Davenport Heights (3 page)

I quickly checked myself over. No blood, no protruding bones, no car parts sticking through my internal organs.

“I’m all right,” I said again, this time more hopeful.

My wrists were sore, but I didn’t see any injuries. I ran a trembling hand along my neck and the back of my head. I was shaking, but I was not hurt. I sat there for a couple of moments, just getting my shattered composure back together.

The interior of my car was a strange and unfamiliar place. The deflating air bags hung like a shroud over the dashboard, hiding from view the instrument panel, the clock, the CD player. Against the windshield I could see one bent and truncated wiper quivering spasmodically as if having some sort of electrical seizure. The Beemer didn’t seem to have suffered much damage. The front end was squeezed up tight and the hood was partially buckled, but considering the size of the tanker beside me, I felt fortunate not to have been squashed like a bug.

In the narrow beam from my right headlight I saw that I had almost made it. The tanker had rolled to its side I was wedged between its rear bumper and the guardrail. No harm, no foul, I thought.

My hands were a little shaky as I began looking for my cell phone. The contents of my open purse had scattered on impact. The only thing that was still on the seat beside me was a tube of lipstick and a scattering of business cards.

The rain was sloshing down heavily on the trunk of the car. I looked at the spasming wiper blade once more. Strange. It didn’t seem to be raining at all on the windshield.

It was at that moment that I became aware of the odor. The common, everyday, unmistakable odor. Gasoline. The eighteen-wheel tanker truck, tilted upon its side, was pouring gasoline like a river down the back of my car.

“Jesus!” I screamed.

I tried my door. Of course it wouldn’t budge. There was a truck bumper wedged up against it.

I started to the passenger door, momentarily snarled up by my seat belt. I found the red button, released myself and hurriedly crawled over the console and gearshift to the other side of the car.

The door was locked.

I hit the unlock button.

Nothing happened.

I manually unlocked it.

The handle released, but the door opened only a couple of inches.

I pushed harder on it.

There was no give. The car was right up against the guardrail.

I began banging the door on the metal. The opening did not widen.

I would have to climb out the window.

I pressed the down button for the automatic window.

No response.

A glance at the windshield wiper revealed that it had stopped its tremulous dance. Beyond it I saw smoke rising from beneath the hood of my car.

Where there is smoke there is fire.

The gasoline rain continued to pour down upon the trunk. The smell of fumes was becoming intense.

“Turn off the ignition!” I ordered myself.

I could hardly recognize my own voice.

Frantically I searched beneath the heavy beige remnants of the air bags for the key that dangled from the steering column.

When I found it, I turned off the ignition. I even pulled out the key.

The smoke continued to billow from the engine.

I unhooked the manual latch on the soft-top. It was jammed.
I pushed the automatic button, then twice, again, a half-dozen times. The car key was still in my hand. I tried to use it like a screwdriver to disengage the mechanism.

It didn’t work. I opened the glove compartment and rifled through it for a tool, a hammer, a crowbar, a penknife, anything.

There was nothing but a plastic ice scraper, my insurance and registration and the owners manual.

I grabbed the ice scraper and banged it impotently against the window glass for half a minute.

I began scraping it across the soft-top to no effect. I tried to find a weak spot, a worn seam, a loose edge. There was none. I gripped the plastic scraper like an ice pick and tried to stab a hole through the canvas. It wasn’t sharp enough.

Smoke rising from the hood had now completely obscured my view from the windshield. It had begun to seep inside the car.

It was as if I were the only person in all the world. I was too scared to be panicked. Too horrified to be afraid. I was alone in my car, helpless.

“You’re never alone,” I reminded myself, and began rummaging through the spilled contents of my purse on the floorboards looking for my cell phone.

Fire had to be the worst kind of death, I thought. Choking, hot, painful. It was not a good way to die. And I didn’t want to die.

Why was the phone black? You could never see anything black in the dark. I’ll never have another black phone, I declared to myself.

It began to look as if I might never need one.

I gave up trying to phone for help and lay down on the passenger’s seat, my shoulders braced against the console. I began trying to kick a hole in the window with my high heels. In all
the wrecks I could remember seeing, the windows were always broken. Why weren’t my windows broken? Why couldn’t I break them? I pounded and pounded on them with every bit of strength I had.

The smoke thickened, making me cough. I could hear the gasoline rain pouring unabated. The smell was so strong it burned.

“Please don’t let me die,” I pleaded, hoping someone, somewhere would hear. “Please get me out of here.”

I felt the tears coursing down my cheeks. I thought of Brynn, my sweet, my precious baby Brynn. I saw her in memory as a little toddler, giggling as she chased the bubbles I blew for her on the patio. I saw her all dressed up for her debutante ball, looking so serene and mature. And I saw her looking at me, silently accusing from behind her reading glasses. How would she get over this? Would the guilt from the loss of her mother blight her life forever?

I hurt for her. And I hurt for me. I would never get to hold her again. I would never get to tell her how much I loved her. How glad I was that she was my daughter. How sorry I was that we hadn’t had more time.

“Please God, get me out of here,” I prayed. “I don’t want to die. Please get me out of here.”

I muttered my miserable prayer through tears.

“Get me out of here. Let me live,” I pleaded. “I’ll be a better person. I’ll change my life. If you get me out of here, I’ll…I’ll do good. I promise. Give me another chance and I’ll do good. Please get me out of here. I’ll do good. I’ll do good all my life.”

Silence was the resulting answer. Silence amid the deluge of gasoline pouring down upon the back of the car and the billowing smoke that now seared my lungs.

“Please,” I said more quietly. “Please.”

I lay upon my back. Directly above me, like the pivotal scene
in a B-movie thriller, a huge butcher knife ripped through the soft-top.

I screamed.

It was an instant of terror before I recognized my deliverance.

The knife cut through a jagged line. It was my freedom. It was the chance that I had prayed for. With the strength of desperation, I reached up and began to part the material behind the knife cuts. It was tough and stubborn, but I persisted. It was my chance, my only chance. I was going to take it.

I fought to make an opening in the top. A firm hand grabbed my wrist.

“Come on,” the man said. “This thing is going to blow.”

I stood on the car seat, then one foot on the dash, one knee on the frame. Strong, forceful arms pulled me out onto the windshield on my stomach.

I was free.

We slid down onto the hood, through the smoke and heat of the engine. He pulled me onward. We were standing on the pavement.

“Run!” he told me as he pulled at my arm.

We did.

We ran thirty, maybe forty yards. He dropped to his knees and I went down beside him.

I glanced at my rescuer and saw beside me a withered old man, barefoot, wild-haired, dressed in stripped pajamas.

Behind us the wreckage exploded in a giant fireball that knocked us to the concrete.

M
Y MOTHER WORKED
as a practical nurse most of her life, so hospitals hold very little interest or drama for me. But that night, lying on a gurney in a curtained alcove of the emergency room for what seemed like a lifetime, I concentrated intently on what was going on around me. It was not that the comings and goings of the noisy, coffee-drinking staff were of any importance—I was just trying not to think.

I couldn’t do it, of course. Like the don’t-imagine-an-elephant exercise from junior high, it’s impossible to empty your mind on purpose. It can happen by accident. You can be sitting somewhere and suddenly realize that your brain has been on dead air for an indeterminate period of time. But it’s simply impossible to try to think of nothing, so I tried to think of something else. Something else besides the frightening moments I’d experienced.

Getting help at the scene had not been a problem. The explosion worked significantly better than a 911 call. In no time we were surrounded by fire trucks, ambulances and police cars.

I just wanted to get away. To get in one of those vehicles that wasn’t burning and just drive into the night. The EMS personnel would have none of that.

“Lie still,” I was told a half-dozen times.

It hadn’t been easy. It was a lot worse in the hospital. I suppose I was numb there on the pavement. Too overwhelmed with being alive to be concerned with how close I had come to death. With a little distance, I found myself almost hysterical with fear. No matter how carefully I listened to the mundane conversations around me, I couldn’t quite control the mania that was just underneath my flesh. Lying there in deliberate repose, while bouncing around inside me was a crazy person shrieking in terror.

Deliberately I held on to the here and now. That included an apparatus resembling a giant plastic clothespin attached to my finger and a blood pressure cuff wrapped around my arm that automatically inflated every few minutes. Both were connected to a dazzling array of brightly lit monitors that undoubtedly revealed, to the knowing eye, just what was going on underneath my calm exterior.

Beyond my little claustrophobic cubicle I could hear the intimate details of problems and people hidden behind endless rows of pastel curtains.

There was a small child whining and crying. His mother sounded tired and robotic as she repeatedly told the little one to keep the ice bag on his hand.

Farther down there was someone, drunk or crazy, singing “Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up” in a rendition that Frank Zappa would have been proud to own up to.

Right next to my own space, an old woman tried for at least ten minutes to get the attention of anyone passing by. Finally a doctor stopped and she told him, her voice almost pleading, that she needed to go to the bathroom.

“I’ll get someone,” he assured her.

He must have gone to Australia to do so, because nobody ever showed up.

Across the corridor a man told the attending physician that he didn’t want any X-rays, just a shot of cortisone in his knee would be fine.

I listened and listened.

Somewhere down there was my rescuer. He’d come ahead of me in the first ambulance.

There had been some confusion initially. EMS had thought that he was the accident victim and that I’d pulled
him
out. The fellow had done very little to dispel that notion. When the attendant asked him if he was okay he’d nodded.

“I’m going to be fine,” he said. “Thanks to her.”

I figured that the explosion must have rattled him. I’d certainly felt rattled. I still did.

Abruptly the curtain jerked open and I startled. My nurse, in a uniform that was more tie-dyed hippie than starchy and efficient RN, entered. A good-looking young policeman was beside her.

“Doctor is going to let you go home soon,” she said to me in that slightly too loud and inherently condescending tone professional people often use toward those within their control. “Officer Norton needs to ask you about the accident.”

He was writing something in a small notepad.

“It happened so fast,” I explained before he’d even asked one question.

The policeman looked at me, then at the nurse, and chuckled as he responded, his words clearly for her entertainment rather than my enlightenment.

“It couldn’t have happened too fast,” he said. “From the road evidence, the tanker was only traveling about thirty-five when it jumped the median. By the time it hit you, it must have been closer to thirty.”

“The driver was asleep, I suppose.”

“Dead as a doornail before he ever veered out of his lane,” Officer Norton replied, his matter-of-fact tone seemed almost jovial. “We’ll have to wait for the full report, but the ME on the scene says it was most likely a stroke.”

I nodded. He had been dead already. Somehow that terrified me even more. I had been the only person on that highway. I would have died all alone.

“The man who saved me,” I asked them. “Who is he? Is he all right? Is he still here in the emergency room?”

The policeman flicked back a page in his notepad.

“Chester W. Durbin,” he read. “Seventy-eight years old. Widowed. Resident of Bluebonnet Manor Assisted Living Center, 177th East Loop and Toronto.”

“He’ll be fine,” the nurse said. “We’re getting ready to transfer him upstairs. We’ll keep him a couple of days.”

“He’s hurt?”

“Not as bad as you’d think,” she said. “He’s got some cuts on his feet, a few bruises and skinned knees. Other than that, he’s fine.”

“Then why are you keeping him?”

The nurse was looking at me as if I was an idiot.

I am not an idiot. I was fine and therefore going home soon. If Chester Durbin was fine, why wasn’t he going home, as well?

“He’s an old man,” she answered.

Of course, I recalled how he looked sitting beside me on the pavement, ancient, barefoot, striped pajamas. But a flash of memory had me feeling once again the firm strength of his hand as he grasped my wrist and the sturdy arms that pulled me through the ripped opening of the soft-top.

“He’s in pretty good shape,” I told her. “He must be one of those seniors who pump iron or do tai chi.”

The policeman looked at me incredulously. The hippie RN actually cackled.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “The gentleman is very frail.”

“It’s pretty amazing that he managed to help you out of that car,” the policeman commented. “It must be five hundred yards from the nursing home to the site of the accident.”

The nurse was shaking her head disbelievingly. “It’s hard to believe the old guy could even walk that far, let alone be of any help when he got there.”

The policeman obviously agreed. “What blows me away,” he said, “is the image of him racing down the hill with that big butcher knife.”

“He had the foresight to bring a knife, but not the good sense to put his shoes on,” the nurse pointed out, chuckling.

I lay there trying to reconcile the person they were talking about with my rescuer.

“I have to see him,” I stated suddenly, adamantly, surprising myself. The hippie nurse looked doubtful. “No, I don’t think—”

“Now!” I interrupted her, already scrambling off the gurney.

I was never the type of woman who could easily follow orders. And I was inexplicably desperate to see this man again before he slipped out of my life.

I jerked the high-tech clothespin off my finger and tossed it on the gurney. Getting out of the blood pressure cuff was more dramatic as the Velcro noisily pulled apart.

“Wait!” The nurse’s voice was almost desperate.

“Are you going to try to stop me?” I asked the woman, almost daring her to do so. “Or are you going to help me?”

She hesitated, as if considering her choices. “Let me get you a wheelchair,” she said.

“I don’t need a wheelchair.”

“It’s hospital policy,” she said. “You get in a wheelchair and I’ll take you to see him.”

By the time she wheeled me around to the other side of the E.R., the staff was already in the process of moving Chester Durbin upstairs to a room. My hippie nurse stopped them abruptly and spoke to one of the orderlies privately. I don’t know what she said, but I was given a dirty look before they pushed the bed back into its curtain alcove and told me, “Five minutes!”

I thanked them dismissively. The man in the bed was quiet and appeared tired and sleepy. I felt uncharacteristically timid as I approached him, rising from my chair to stand at his bedside.

“Hello,” I said.

He squinted at me through rheumy eyes.

“Are you the endocrinologist?” he asked.

“No, I’m the woman from the car,” I told him.

“Oh.” He nodded, offering the slightest smile.

“I…I just wanted to thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he replied. His gnarled, brown-blotched hand slid out from beneath the white sheets and patted my own at the bed rail. “You’re all right now?”

“Oh yeah, sure,” I answered. “I’m fine.”

That was not how I felt. I was edgy, nervous, ill at ease. The nurse and the policeman had been right about this guy. He did look very old and unreasonably frail. But I could still clearly recall the strength in the arm that had grasped my hand and pulled me to safety. I couldn’t get things straight in my mind. I wanted to talk about it, get the details, resurrect the chain of events.

“How did you do it?” I asked him.

The man gave a shoulder wiggle that passed for a supine shrug. “I don’t really know,” he admitted with a light chuckle.
“I guess it was one of those curiosities where in an emergency folks discover strength they didn’t know they had.”

I had heard about that sort of thing. Tabloid tales of a man who lifts a truck off a trapped victim, or a child who can’t swim miraculously managing to drag his unconscious father to shore after a boating mishap. “Did you see the accident?”

“No, no, I was asleep,” the man said. “But I guess I must have heard it.”

“You heard it?”

“I must have,” he said. “I woke with a start, like when you have a bad dream. I looked out my window and I could see the truck on the wrong side of the road. I just knew I had to get down there.”

“Where did you get the knife?” I asked.

“The kitchen.”

“Why did you get it?”

He looked as puzzled as I was myself. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I can’t even remember thinking about needing it. I do recall running into the kitchen and grabbing it out of one of the drawers.” He chuckled. “I’d never even been in that room. It’s off-limits to the residents.”

His words left me with more questions than answers. I wanted the events of my rescue tied up neatly, rationally, in a context that I was familiar dealing with. I was not interested in contemplating any mysterious, inexplicable happening. And I staunchly resisted doing so.

From beyond the confines of the curtains I heard a familiar voice.

“I was three strokes off the fourteenth hole at La Cantera last Thursday…”

David.

The confusion in my thoughts immediately eased. David was
here. And with him came the sounds of my own life, my real life. The ordinary safe and comfortable life to which I was so accustomed.

“My husband is here,” I told my rescuer, as if all baffling enigmas had become scrutable. “He’s come to take me home.”

I couldn’t remember being more excited to see David. He was his usual calm, pleasant self. I introduced him to my rescuer. He gave the old man a sort of bedside high five.

“We need to take Mr. Durbin upstairs,” one of the nurses said.

“Of course,” David told him. “Nice to meet you, Chester, and thanks.”

I watched them roll the bed toward the elevator. I was overwhelmed with a queasy sense of unreality. Deliberately I turned my back on the sight.

“David, I want to go home.”

My husband was grinning at me as if everything was fine.

“Sure,” he said. “If it’s okay with Pete.”

The
Pete
in question was emergency room physician, Pete Murfey, M.D., with whom David, apparently, had a golfing acquaintance.

“I think we can let her go. If she promises to get plenty of rest and not blow up any more cars.”

They both had a good laugh. I smiled along with them, but I was faking it. I just wanted to get home. To get back to the way things were before. To forget everything that happened that night.

It wasn’t all that easy.

Over the next few days I convalesced around the house. I had no lingering injuries, a few bruises and some sore muscles, but in general I was all right.

Surprisingly, I wasn’t all that eager to get back to work. I had several things pending. I got Millie Brandt to handle a
closing for me. Everything else I just let ride. Millie and the people at work were floored. Even David seemed curious. But no one was more surprised at this than me.

I liked being on top of things—at home, and on the job. I liked to get down to the minutiae, to personally make sure that all the
i
’s were dotted and all the
t
’s were crossed.
Controlling
was the word Brynn’s shrink used. What an ugly word. It just seemed to me that when I took care of everything, there were no unexpected complications. I had such a problem with delegating that I couldn’t even keep a cleaning lady. I hate housework, but I couldn’t stand opening the silverware drawer and finding spoons in the knife slot. Or walking into the guest bathroom and finding the liner for the shower curtain hanging on the outside of the tub. People couldn’t do things to suit me, so I simply preferred to do them myself.

But in the days after the accident, I was different. I watered the plants on my deck, stared off into the distance and ducked phone calls from the office.

It was almost as if I couldn’t bring myself to resume my life. I wanted things to be just as they had been, but I couldn’t pretend that nothing had happened.

Friends were in and out. David’s mother came by to see me twice. There were flowers and cards and well wishes from associates and competitors.

We called Brynn together. David did most of the talking. She was pretty quiet, as if she didn’t quite know what to say. She called back an hour later, after discussing it with her therapist. Then she didn’t have any trouble speaking her mind.