couldn’t seem to gain my balance. I looked around but saw no one. The van
was empty. My family was gone.
I circled the wreck twice before I spied Dad’s hunched silhouette on a
hillock in the distance. I called to him, and he called to the others, who were
spread out through the field. Dad waded toward me through the snowdrifts,
and as he stepped into a beam from the broken headlights I saw a six-inch
gash in his forearm and blood slashing into the snow.
I was told later that I’d been unconscious, hidden under the mattress, for
several minutes. They’d shouted my name. When I didn’t answer, they
thought I must have been thrown from the van, through the broken window,
so they’d left to search for me.
Everyone returned to the wreck and stood around it awkwardly, shaking,
either from the cold or from shock. We didn’t look at Dad, didn’t want to
accuse.
The police arrived, then an ambulance. I don’t know who called them. I
didn’t tell them I’d blacked out—I was afraid they’d take me to a hospital. I
just sat in the police car next to Richard, wrapped in a reflective blanket like
the one I had in my “head for the hills” bag. We listened to the radio while
the cops asked Dad why the van wasn’t insured, and why he’d removed the
seats and seatbelts.
We were far from Buck’s Peak, so the cops took us to the nearest police
station. Dad called Tony, but Tony was trucking long-haul. He tried Shawn
next. No answer. We would later learn that Shawn was in jail that night,
having been in some kind of brawl.
Unable to reach his sons, Dad called Rob and Diane Hardy, because
Mother had midwifed five of their eight children. Rob arrived a few hours
later, cackling. “Didn’t you folks damned near kill yerselves last time?”
A few days after the crash, my neck froze.
I awoke one morning and it wouldn’t move. It didn’t hurt, not at first, but
no matter how hard I concentrated on turning my head, it wouldn’t give more
than an inch. The paralysis spread lower, until it felt like I had a metal rod
running the length of my back and into my skull. When I couldn’t bend
forward or turn my head, the soreness set in. I had a constant, crippling
headache, and I couldn’t stand without holding on to something.
Mother called an energy specialist named Rosie. I was lying on my bed,
where I’d been for two weeks, when she appeared in the doorway, wavy and