3. The Root of Suffering
Summer
That moment when your heart stops beating. When your lungs stop moving. When your blood freezes.
Delilah, hanging upside down by her shoulder harness, not moving. The van, sitting on its roof, caught by trees on the downhill side, the driver’s side, but looking precarious, like it could slide more at any moment. The mud practically flowing under my feet.
“Delilah!” I shouted over the storm through the shattered passenger window. “Delilah! Wake up! You have to move! Come on, baby.” My voice high, shaking, not sounding like mine at all. “Please, baby. Wake up.”
She just hung there.
Open the door and get her. Except that the doors wouldn’t open. Not the passenger-side one, and not the sliding rear door. This side of the car was completely off the ground, so that wasn’t why. Because the doors hadn’t unlocked. Because they’d jammed. Something. I got my sandaled feet onto the broken-out window ledge and pulled myself up as pebbles of glass showered around me, and the van rocked, shifted, and slid three more feet, front-first. I barely held on, and when it slammed to a stop again with a shudder against another tree, I forced my shaking feet back down to the ground and tried to think.
Get back up to the road and … and try to find somebody in a house. Somebody driving by. And then it hit me. Your phone, you idiot. Call for help. Where was my phone, though? Not in my pocket. It had been in the van, in a nook set into the dash where a radio had once been. Was it still there? I risked another look. No. Our belongings were scattered over the ground all the way up to the driveway. Clothes. Sunglasses. Dishes. Packets of food. Papers. My purse and Delilah’s backpack would be somewhere up there, too.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy to find one phone thrown from a rolling van in the dim light, in the rain and mud, but I tried anyway. I couldn’t think what else to do.
Up the hill and down it again, shifting the sweaters, the twisted legs of jeans, a frying pan, looking under a lone sandal. No phone.
Breathe, I told myself. There’s no perfect thing to do. There’s only the thing you think of next. You have to get her out. The van could slip more and you could be hurt, but what other choice do you have?
Somehow, that changed things. The panic wasn’t in the front of my brain anymore, but sitting off at a distance, its wings folded, waiting, and I was numb, seeing only the task in front of me.
Go to the front and climb in through the windshield. I did it, and the van rocked, but the trees held it, and I was crouched against the padded inside of the roof, my head butting up against the passenger seat, crawling toward Delilah, inching my way so as not to destabilize the van, my sliced, bruised knees protesting. I registered the rasp of my own breathing as if from a long way away, reached around and found the button for the seatbelt, and hesitated.
She’ll fall on her head.
One arm around her waist, the fingers of the other hand on the button, and I pushed. Best I could do.
It didn’t give. Stupid ancient van. Stupid sticky seatbelts. Stupid me for buying it.
Not helping. I tightened my arm around Delilah and pressed my fingers down with all my might. And felt the belt give way.
Both arms around Delilah. She was smaller than me, slimmer than me, but she was so heavy. I couldn’t drop her, though, so I held on, trying to disentangle her from the seatbelt that was still holding her under the arm.
It didn’t work. Her weight was pulling the seatbelt tight, and I couldn’t lift her.
Try from outside. You have no leverage here.
Out the windshield again, crawling over twisted metal, the pebbles of glass, feeling something slice my palm and then my leg, the pain like a line of fire, and ignoring it. Around to the driver’s side again, but it was no good. There was no way through the trees that held the van.
Rope, I thought wildly. People do something with ropes. But I didn’t have any rope, and I didn’t know what to do.
I heard something, then. Didn’t I? An engine? A car door?
Oh. It was a driveway. It was a house.
Up the hillside again. The going harder this time, because it was that much muddier, that much wetter. Pulling myself up by roots, by branches, by the very fronds of ferns themselves. Hand over hand, panting with it, and yelling with everything I had.
“Help! Help! Help!”
I didn’t expect anybody to hear me. I didn’t expect anyone to come. I was shouting because it was all I had left. I realized that I was crying, that I was shaking, but I kept climbing, and I kept shouting. I’d run down the hill to the house. I’d break a window if nobody was home. I’d find a knife, cut the seatbelt.
Wait. There were knives in a drawer in the van, if they hadn’t fallen out. I should have checked. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
I was turning to go back when somebody came into view. A big figure in a raincoat, moving down the bank with enormous strides. Before he reached me, I was gasping, “My cousin. In the van. Trapped. She’s trapped. I need a knife to cut the seatbelt. I need?—”
He didn’t answer. He’d barely stopped. He was past me, then down to the van, looking inside. I followed as fast as I could scramble and slide, and when I got there, he said, “Climb inside. I’ll go through the windscreen after you and lift her up, and when I do, you get that seatbelt off her.”
I didn’t answer. I just did it, and so did he, both of us crowded together in the confined space. In seconds, Delilah was free, the man holding her around the waist with what must have been a major effort. He said, “Grab her legs and swing them around toward you,” and I did that, too.
“Owwww.”
It was a moan. I almost dropped her legs, and then I held on more tightly. “Delilah,” I said, my voice cracking on the word.
“Hurts,” she said. “Hurts.”
“We’re getting you out,” I said, through a throat that could barely open enough to let the words escape. “Hang on, baby. We’re getting you out.”
“Take her legs,” the man yelled in at me. Oh. He’d backed out through the windshield again. “I’m pulling her out now. Come out after her.” So I did that, too. The tears were there again, but I was trying to ignore them. The pain, and the fear, and the panic. None of it would help Delilah. I lifted her legs out the window so she wouldn’t cut them, and then I was shoving my own way out, grabbing with my hands, feeling the palm I’d cut getting sliced again, the blood running down my hand, and ignoring it, then turning awkwardly and dropping heavily to earth.
The man said, “All right to help me get her up the hill?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I can … walk,” Delilah said. “I can …”
“Take her ankles, then,” he said, ignoring that. “And let’s go.”
Roman
I wasn’t sure which of them was in worse shape.
When I’d seen the girl hanging from the seatbelt, her face immobile, her body still, I’d thought she was dead. When I’d got her loose and she’d been limp in my arms, I’d been sure of it. Stunned, though, that was all. Concussed, but coming around, once she wasn’t upside-down anymore. How long had she been like that? You could burst a blood vessel hanging upside-down too long, and with concussion on top of it …
The other girl was a mess. Gasping with effort and fear, hair hanging in long, lank streamers, her blood flowing, smearing, mixing with the mud on her hands and legs. She had the other girl’s ankles, though, and was forcing her way up the bank, sometimes tucking the girl’s legs under an arm and hauling herself up bodily, sometimes dropping to her knees and staggering upright again while I held the concussed girl under the arms and went up backward, one hard-fought step at a time, through the rain and the mud that coated my shoes and made me slip. We dragged that girl up somehow, meter by meter, and when we got to the top of the hill, I was blowing.
“Into my car,” I told the bloody girl. “We’ll put her in the back.”
“I can … walk,” the concussed girl said. I set her on her feet, but kept my arm around her, and she staggered and said, “All right. Maybe I can’t walk.”
“Open the door,” I told the bloody girl, and she ran to do it. I lifted the other one—she was even shorter and slighter than the bloody girl, maybe fourteen? Fifteen?—and got her into the back seat, and the bloody girl scrambled around to the other side and grabbed her.
“Where—” the bloody girl asked.
“Hospital,” I said, and slammed the door, then jumped in, started the car, and backed out of the drive and back onto the road.
“Shouldn’t we call an ambulance instead?” the bloody girl asked from behind me. Her voice was shaking, but she was still thinking, so she couldn’t be too badly hurt, despite the blood. Not even in shock. Should I have treated for the blood first? Pretty clearly not. She wouldn’t bleed to death from those cuts. I didn’t think there was time to get blankets from the house, either, not with the roads like this.
“No,” I said. “They won’t get here faster than I can drive you, not in this weather and with as much as they’ll have going on. Good thing she isn’t worse off, because you won’t get a helicopter out in this muck, either. Ninety minutes. Maybe less.” I put the heat on and put my foot down. The rain was coming down as hard as ever, and I needed to get back to the motorway while I still could.
The girl didn’t answer. She said, “Delilah. Talk to me. Please, baby.”
“I’m kind of … tired for that,” the other girl said. “And my head hurts. Maybe I could just … rest.” What accent was that? Canadian? American?
A choked laugh. “OK. You comfortable?” Not quite the same accent.
“Not … exactly. But I’m OK. I like your hand … on my head. Nice. Except your hand’s … bloody.”
“Oh,” the bloody girl said. “Yeah. Sorry. I’ll wipe it off.”
“Never mind,” the concussed girl said. “I’ll just be bloody. Make me more … interesting.” Silence, then, and I thought she’d either fallen asleep or passed out again. Maybe they both had, or more likely, the bloody girl had passed into the sort of exhausted stupor that followed in the aftermath of effort, cold, fear, and adrenaline. Or, of course, she had gone into shock. I probably should have got that blanket before setting out, but too late now, so I punched the heat higher instead.
I made it back to the motorway at last, put the car to the test once more, and decided this had been the right choice. In any case, doubt didn’t help you, not in the moment. Doubt was for later, when you were reviewing your actions. I focused on the road, on the feeling of the car that came to me through the steering wheel, through my very body. Fast, but under control.
“Breathing in,” I muttered aloud, “I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is the only moment.”
“Oh, my God.” It was the concussed girl again.
“What?” Alarm in the voice of the bloody girl. “What’s wrong? Hurts?”
“He’s quoting,” the concussed girl said. “Haven’t I been through enough?”
I smiled. Somehow. Driving much too fast, my car full of mud and blood, with no idea what would come next. “The resistance to the unpleasant situation,” I said more loudly, “is the root of suffering. Ram Dass.”
“Delilah doesn’t love helpful quotations,” the bloody girl said.
“I’ve got a … helpful quotation,” Delilah said. “Shut the fuck up.”
I laughed out loud.