Chapter 10 #2
—God, even in remembering it Sam struggles to make himself look down, which is stupid.
It’s not as though there was anything particularly gory to see, since by the time Sam did make himself look, both of Jake’s legs were submerged under the inky black surface of the lake.
But even without being able to peer under the surface, Sam knew something was badly wrong.
He didn’t know yet entirely what had happened, and wouldn’t until he could see the wreck from the outside, but he could tell that Jake’s side of the car had been damaged somehow, was bent into an unnatural shape that must have, within it, at least some part of Jake bent unnaturally, too.
Sam concluded, a little breathlessly, that he had too many problems to solve, but that luckily they all pointed towards the same next step: getting himself and Jake the hell out of this car.
Half-assessing and half to reassure himself, he put two fingers against the pulse point in Jake’s neck, absurdly grateful for every beat, as he gripped Jake’s other shoulder and squeezed as much as he dared.
He didn’t want to shake Jake, or drag him through the water, if he had some sort of spinal injury, but it was equally critical that he talk to Jake to work that out, so.
He said—maybe, if he’s honest, he screamed—“Jake? Jake! Jake, wake up! Come on!”
“Y’don’t have to yell,” Jake muttered, irritable, blinking his eyes open.
“M’head hurts—m’leg hurts… Oh, shit.” This last he breathed out in a sort of long exhale of horror, although Sam wasn’t sure if was at realizing their circumstances, which would have been entirely justified, or a result of the pain he was in kicking up a gear.
Certainly he made a keening sound in his next breath and gasped, “Okay, wow. Okay! Leg really hurts, Sam. Really hurts, really fucking hurts, shit, shit—”
“Stay calm,” Sam said. It was an absurd thing to say; how could anyone stay calm in a situation like that? He, himself, didn’t feel calm at all, but the words sounded like he did, firm and convincing for all the command they issued was useless. “Do you feel like your spine is broken?”
Jake turned his head and made a face at Sam, somewhere between frantic, agonized, and annoyed. “How would I know? What does having your spine broken feel like?”
Sam was already unbuckling his seatbelt. “Well, yours probably isn’t, because you just turned your head, so. Still—can you feel your arms and legs? Move them?”
“Feel them, yes. Too much. Move them…” Jake sucked in a deep breath, his face going very pale. “Mostly… yes. Left leg feels…” There was a pained pause, in which Jake took a couple of shallow, half-sobbed breaths, before he managed, “Stuck.”
“Jesus. Okay. Got it,” Sam said. “Just hold on, I’m coming around.” He jumped over the edge of the door and into the water only an inch or so below him.
He’d worked out already that, strangely, the car didn’t seem to be interested in sinking any further into the lake than it had while Sam was unconscious, and had filed this away as odd, but non-urgent.
As he swam around to Jake’s side of the car, the solution to this little mystery was made horribly clear to him, although he rather wished, then and now, that it hadn’t been.
The Jaguar had landed in the lake, right enough.
It was a long car, with the engine and front end taking up easily two thirds of its total body; the cab and the trunk were crammed into the back third of the machine, as though it had been an inconvenience to the designers to have to include them at all.
This final third of the car had, at least partially, escaped submersion into the murky depths below, but as Sam paddled around to the passenger side, his whole body aching with the cold of the water, he realized why with a sinking heart.
Ringing Scenic Lake, spaced about fifteen feet apart, were low, round cement pylons, each one roughly the size of a log, sticking up about three feet above the waterline.
These were affixed with a series of large sturdy metal hooks and were used as tie-offs for the boaters, mostly in kayaks or canoes, who enjoyed taking the occasional dip in the lake.
And, in descending from the road above, the Jaguar had managed to land bang on top of one of them.
Neither object had managed to quite destroy the other, but Jake’s side of the car was crumpled slightly inward from its encounter with the useless guardrail, and, more significantly, upward by the pylon below.
It was remarkable, at least from where Sam was looking at it, that he only felt like one of his legs was trapped; it could easily, maybe even more easily, have been both of them.
“Shit,” Sam said, horrified, treading water next to him.
He was beginning to feel shaky somewhere deep in the marrow of himself, the numbing cold of the lake seeping past unpleasant and into alarming.
He wanted to wait for the paramedics—what did he know about dealing with something like this—but he had a distant, nervous clock in the back of his mind, one that was counting down to one or both of them freezing to death.
It happened, he knew, faster than people thought it in these kinds of temperatures, especially dealing with shock or adrenaline.
“Can you do something, please,” Jake ground out, clearly strangling back a scream of pain, “your lips are turning blue and it also hurts, Sam, okay, in case you were wondering, it fucking hurts a lot—”
“Yeah,” Sam said, his mind racing, “Yeah, I’ll do something.”
And the truth is, to this day, he doesn’t quite know how he got Jake out of that car.
Maybe it was an adrenaline rush, like those stories about mothers lifting their cars to rescue their trapped children; maybe it was luck, that night’s single stroke of it.
All he’s completely sure of is that he’d swum around, and braced his feet against the submerged hood of the car, and sliced up his arms reaching through the shattered windshield to grip at a hunk of misshaped plastic and metal and heave upward, and he only remembers about his arms because of the scars.
It took a number of tries, he knows that.
He knows he was sobbing and screaming, and that Jake was sobbing and screaming by the time Sam heaved so hard he was sure it would kill him, and Jake yelled, “Yes! Yes! I’m out, holy shit, Sam, I—oh, fuck,” and visibly nearly passed out, going so pale he looked, frankly, dead.
Sam has always assumed that it was trying to move his now-freed leg that had done that, but he’d never gotten the chance to ask Jake; the Freezing to Death clock in his mind had started to tick quite urgently, by that point.
He swam to shore on reserves he hadn’t known he possessed, dragging Jake, half-conscious, behind him.
“Sorry,” Sam whispered as he pulled Jake up on to the nearest bank, and Jake made a noise like a dying animal.
“Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry.” He collapsed for a few seconds in the reedy mud, gasping for air, every part of him aching; then he stripped off his sodden sweatshirt and rose painstakingly to his knees, tied it in a makeshift tourniquet around Jake’s injured leg.
He wasn’t at all sure it was the right thing to do—he wasn’t, after all, a doctor—but certainly Jake was bleeding heavily, and Sam had been a practice dummy for his parents and their friends enough times to understand the basics of how it was done.
When he’d managed that, he looked around, deciding quickly there was no way he’d be able to get the both of them up the slope to the road.
On the theory that he might as well, he dragged himself around to sit at the crown of Jake’s skull, crossed his own legs, and very carefully lifted Jake’s head up until it was resting in Sam’s lap.
Sirens began to wail in the distance, which was good; Sam’s phone, which he’d forgotten even possessing, had surely drowned already.
The other driver must have called 911. Sam had also forgotten that there was another driver, or, indeed, another car.
His world had narrowed to a single point, no bigger than the space it took to contain himself, Jake, and the sick, abrupt horror of what had happened.
It was jarring to suddenly remember there was anything beyond that, or ever had been.
It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes ago, but Sam felt separated from the person he was when he got into the car by a gulf of years.
“Oh, God,” Jake said. It was so thick with pain as to be nearly unintelligible.
Sam was expecting what he said next to be, My leg or Seriously, my leg, or maybe just a long Arrrgh sort of sound.
So it took him a second to process what he was hearing, and then another to get over the surprise, when Jake moaned, “The car.”
“The what? Jake, it’s just a car,” Sam said, as gently as possible. “Your leg—no, don’t! Don’t look at it, keep looking at me, that’s good—but it’s, uh. I wouldn’t worry about the car, right now.”
“But it’s my dad’s Jaguar,” Jake said, and moaned again. “It’s in the lake. You don’t understand, Sam; he loves that thing more than any of us! I didn’t want to murder it, I don’t have a death wish, I only wanted—oh my God, he’s going to kill me. He’s going to kill me, oh my God, oh my God—”
“Jake, c’mon, stop,” Sam said softly, keeping his voice calm, soothing, through sheer force of will.
It was too surreal, having this conversation while they were both sprawled out on the reedy edge of the lake, soaked and covered in mud and blood, Jake’s leg mangled and hard to look directly at.
He ran a hand through Jake’s hair and, casting around for anything to calm him down, added, “Look, just focus on staying conscious, okay? I was the one driving anyway, so I’ll just say it was my idea, how about that?
When the police get here? He’s not my dad; there’s only so much he can do to me, right? Okay? Jake?”
However, in spite of Sam’s request, Jake had lost his grip on consciousness, sprawled limp across the mud, his head in Sam’s lap. There was no way to know if he’d even heard Sam’s offer, let alone what he would have replied.
But Sam did it anyway, although it wasn’t the police who arrived next.
It was his own parents, who, as it turned out, had run down from the high school when the driver who hit them burst into the benefit yelling about an accident.
The man was apparently a parent himself, speeding because he’d been running late to the event, and David and Mara—along with the handful of other doctors in the room—had immediately grabbed what supplies they could find and headed to the scene.
Sam doesn’t think he’ll ever forget his parents’ faces, the way their expressions had gone from concern to shock to sheer terror between blinks as they realized it was him in the accident.
His mother had let out a single, choked-off sound, more gasp than sob; his father’s eyes had widened in brief, watering horror.
Then they were doctors again, the same doctors they’d been all Sam’s life.
They smoothed out into the versions of themselves he’d known best when he was small and regularly keeping himself a secret during their patient exams on days they couldn’t find childcare.
They asked questions and gave instructions and barked orders at the other people who had come down from the school with them.
They told Sam it was all going to be fine, that he should try not to panic, that he’d done the right thing by tying the tourniquet.
They made someone get Sam a blanket while they did what they could to get Jake ready for transport to the hospital.
They didn’t ask who had been driving, whose car it was, whose idea it had been to take it. Sam allowed himself to believe that this meant that it wouldn’t matter to them; the truth was, it just wasn’t important in the moment.
And they heard him, anyway, when the police turned up a few moments later, an ambulance hot on their heels.
They heard him talking to the cop; they heard him when he said it was all his plan, taking Mr. Thompson’s car.
That he’d pushed Jake into it; that Jake had only come along to keep an eye on the Jaguar.
The cop he talked to while Jake was loaded onto a stretcher by a team of paramedics was an older man with a face like a worn-in boot.
It was obvious that he didn’t believe Sam, even though David and Mara, stony-faced behind him, clearly believed him a little too much.
The officer tapped his pencil against his notebook when he finished taking Sam’s statement, frowning down at his own notes, and then looked up a point beyond Sam and whistled.
Sam turned to take a look for himself and grimaced.
What had to be the bulk of the guestlist for the Horseshoe Heights High benefit had apparently decided to follow David and Mara, if at a slower pace.
Fancily dressed rubberneckers who had escaped the event were now peering curiously down at them, muttering amongst themselves.
At the front of the crowd was Patrick Thompson, who, as Sam stared at him, got close enough to take in the full scene before him and then shrieked, “My CAR!”
Terrified of making eye contact with the man, who was rapidly turning purple, Sam twisted back around to face the cop.
Raising his eyebrows, the cop glanced at his notebook again and said, “Right, so, just to confirm—you’re sure this is your official statement? Your full account of what happened here tonight? Nothing you might have left out, or changed around?”
For a second, Sam considered telling him the truth. It was only a second; in the next one he caught a glimpse of Jake’s ashen, unconscious face as he was loaded into the ambulance. A face that, if Sam had only been more careful, might be smiling and laughing at a party with him right now.
“I’m sure,” Sam said, resolute. “It was all me.” The cop sighed and shook his head, but didn’t argue.