Chapter Twenty
Auralia
The moments from up to down didn’t exist in Auralia’s brain.
She had no sense of time or her body in space.
If she were injured, adrenaline had masked it.
Somehow, her knees were in the seat and her elbows were on the back of the seat that had been lowered to its full extent when she was dangling from the bridge, and her ass was pressed into the steering wheel, the yoga “child’s pose” of car accidents.
Outside, the water boiled a few inches below her open window.
Auralia came to her knees and leaned as far as she could out of the window, dragging the black bag with her clothes and phone out into air as thick and heavy as a wet sponge.
She flung the weight toward the front of the car and whipped it back toward the trunk, which had popped open in the tumble. She let the velocity of her swing carry the clothes bag into the bowl of the trunk. Once it successfully landed, she let go of the knot and worked to catch her breath.
This moment was replete with anxiety.
The way the current broke at the back of the car, the roiling foam along the sides made her worried that it would form a suction and pull her under.
Sitting around bonfires, entertaining each other with stories, the adults used to scare the children with tales of those who drowned in the Gulf and how their spirits washed up on the shore.
There was always the story of the person who survived the original impact but was drawn under the waves by the suction of the boat.
Creed’s dad told one of those stories to explain away the feu follet, the ghost lights that could sometimes be seen over the water.
They were glowing orbs that appeared at night in the Bayou.
His Mémère said that feu follet were spirits playing tricks, trying to spark people’s curiosity, enticing them deeper and deeper into the winding Bayou until they were hopelessly lost, and there they died.
The lights just tested naughty children to see if they could be lured to their death—a cautionary tale.
Creed’s father, whom everyone called Papa Jacques, said, “No, the feu follet weren’t to be feared; they were to be pitied.
” He believed the lights that glowed bright and hung in the fog right where a lantern would hang from an outstretched arm were the souls of unbaptized babies trapped in limbo, and of course, the souls of drowned folks who went out to catch dinner and never went back.
Auralia remembered that when she heard those stories, she’d started to cry.
She was a little thing in this memory, maybe seven or eight years old.
Creed had come over with a blanket and wrapped her tight, kneeling to look at her earnestly.
“You know, Jean-Marie and I were talking about this. And you know that your brother is supposed to see clearly, that’s what Miss PittyPat told us, you remember that day? ”
She’d nodded her head with a wobbly chin as she tried not to cry because she wanted to seem brave to Honoré
“Jean Marie says they’re part of the fairy realm, and they show up to cast protection on the land and sometimes try to lead a lost person to safety.
So they weren’t leading them to their death but showing them the way home.
I’m thinking Jean-Marie’s right and that the lost person was just too far away to get to safety before the morning came and the light dimmed. ”
“I’m not scared,” Auralia had whispered. “I’m sad for all the families who cried.”
Why the hell am I thinking about feu follet?
That memory shifted through Auralia’s mind as she, gripping her bag of air tightly in one fist, brought her right leg out the window and down into the water.
Something in the river wrapped her ankle and tugged.
Her brain, primed for something otherworldly, shrank into a tiny ball in her cranium.
A scream ripped from her lungs, and she sent it winging out in a cloud of horror that was whipped through the air and sailed downriver.
Auralia’s arm spasmed out as she reflexively caught hold of the headrest on the driver’s seat and clung to it with an iron grasp.
Something had grabbed hold of her ankle and was walking up her leg.
She squeezed her eyes shut. There was no obvious explanation for the weight that wanted to drag her from the car.
Something was hand-over-hand moving up her leg.
With her memories already tuned to Bayou legend, her imagination conjured the rotting flesh of a drowned person come to life.
That Auralia didn’t piss herself was a miracle.
She couldn’t fathom this sensation.
She screamed again as a head emerged beside her, the current shifting to make way for this new obstacle on its journey.
A man, hair streaming with water, clung to her knee.
In shock, Auralia couldn’t move. Couldn’t register. Couldn’t breathe.
The man, holding tight to her leg, swung his head around, gauging, assessing, and planning, before he pulled harder on her calf to leverage his own feet onto the side of her car and launched himself out to the side toward the opposite shore, some ten or fifteen feet away.
Did he realize she was there?
Did he register that her leg was the rope he used to climb to safety?
She sat there in shock, willing herself back in her body, back to the present, back to reality so she could understand this scene.
Had he been whipped down with the turbulent waters and happened to catch on to something?
Perhaps he was half-drowned, and he, too, had adrenaline brain, where everything that wasn’t connected to survival disappeared.
He pulled himself onto a rock and stumbled forward. Barefooted, in dress pants and a button-down shirt, Auralia realized that it was Morrison.
And only then did Auralia remember that the family’s SUV had plunged over the side of the bridge railing ahead of her car.
The current must not have washed their vehicle downriver the way she’d imagined.
As she’d dangled over the edge, there was nothing in her visual field that was beneath her other than water.
In her mind, the family had been fine following the plunge.
Modern-day high-end vehicle engineering being what it was with the surround of airbags, she thought that as they plunged, they’d float off.
And as they did, the family followed the four steps for surviving a car in the water: putting the windows down, unfastening the seat belt, exiting the car, and assisting the person in the vehicle.
Or, if not that, then the family took a crazy ride around the curve that made the dell. They hit the shore and climbed out just fine.
To her horror, Auralia realized that from her vantage point, dangling in her car, she simply couldn’t see them below, where the family was fighting for survival.
She had been yards away as a family struggled to stay alive.
When her own car went over the edge, it hadn’t landed on a rock outcropping or a sand bar as she’d assumed. She must have landed on the Morrison’s vehicle.
Auralia’s body contracted as if she braced to take a blow.
She stuck her head through the window and pushed her neck around until she could see the bridge the most clearly, making sure that another car wasn’t about to be jammed forward and come down on top of her head as she escaped her own predicament.
It seemed clear.
No bumpers were visible, at least. Also, no one came and leaned out to see what the screaming was all about.
Two cars over, and the injuries up top must be significant if there were no bystanders and no curiosity. After all, it wasn’t every day that two cars flew off a bridge.
The dad escaped.
There he stood on the bank with his hands on his knees, sucking in air to fill his lungs, coughing and hacking, and spitting out water.
When he stood, he looked up the hill, planning his route out of there.
He didn’t look up and around to see if any helpers could get involved in a rescue.
Most confusing to Auralia, he didn’t look back at the cars in the river. He didn’t see Auralia in the back seat of her own vehicle, with her leg dangling into the rushing waters.
That meant one of two things. Either Morrison’s family was dead and he knew it, or he left his family to die.
Auralia’s instinct was to go over the side and check for herself.
But some inner warning system reminded her that, as hard as it was, slow and steady was the way to win the race.
She needed to get to the shore. There, she could better assess and make decisions about a rescue effort.
Though time was precious, her mentor Remi’s voice was the little bird in her ear, “Thinking saves lives, especially yours. Take the time to evaluate and plan, then go.”
Auralia decided the fastest thing to do was to follow her original plan.
Auralia’s next task was to get herself into that cavity.
One of her roadblocks would be that there was no room to step into the trunk cavity.
In there, she kept two bins. One barely had anything in it; it was simply her day-hike pack with “Survival Ten” items that she’d never go into nature without.
She’d heard a hundred tales of search and rescue missions that would have been successful had they just gone out prepared.
And if only to save herself from becoming an ancestral cautionary tale whispered around the bonfire back home with the tree frogs singing their lament.
Once she reached shore, that pack might be extremely helpful. That, and the bin it was packed in was watertight. Bonus.
The other bin taking up space back there was from a recent camping trip with a bunch of friends.
She hadn’t yet had time to take the things out and clean them up to repack; the items would be grungy, for sure, but they were usable.
She just didn’t remember if this was the box with the pop-up tent and sleeping bag, which would be helpful, or if this was the clutter box.
Auralia wanted to use both boxes as floatation devices. She was fairly positive the lighter one should float. She’d have to test out the camping box and see if it was friend or foe.