Death Came Knocking

The four of us girls were chatting away in the dark cocoon of my Aunt Lydia’s car on our way back to Carlsbad, New Mexico after taking my cousin Grey to college in Las Cruces. It was labor Day weekend and we were on the last leg of an all day trip.

Twenty miles east of El Paso, the fading remains of day lay behind us, a blackness was settling over the moonless, windswept desert. Lights of sporadic lines of oncoming cars danced far ahead of us, twinkling in the distance. The highway was a two lane ribbon of asphalt stretched between barbed wire fences. It rose with the hills and dipped and curved with the valleys. About half the time, we were driving in no–passing zones: suddenly there would be a yellow line and we’d know we were topping a hill.

Grey's sister, Darla, Jane and I were starting our senior year in high school and this was a fun jaunt, taking Grey off to college as a freshman. Darla and I were in the back seat, sitting center and forward, our arms on back of the seat to participate in the conversation. Jane, Bob’s girlfriend, sat up front with my older sister, Carol who was twenty-one, and had been entrusted with driving us for the day in the family car. Carol's husband was at work, her toddler daughter was with Mother. We were all eager to get home.

“I don’t know whether to pass this truck or not,” Carol said as we edged up behind an eighteen wheeler. “There’s no yellow line, but I’m not sure how far we are seeing, since there are so many hills along here.”

“Well, it looks like there’s nothing coming right now,” we encouraged her. "Go ahead."

So she stepped on the gas and eased the Ford sedan into the left lane, rushing to pass quickly. Halfway around the truck we entered a no-passing zone and almost immediately, the lights of an oncoming line of cars peaked the hill right in front of us.

Carol hesitated only a split second before floorboarding the gas pedal, but there was neither time to get around nor to slip back behind the truck. I stared in terror at the headlights hurtling at us, close range, involuntarily screaming “No! No!” Carol edged almost against the truck, riding the brake, and just as it appeared the car would smash into us, she jammed the brake and lost control. We lurched sideways in a tight spin. I was plastered against the door with Darla pinned against me as we spun around and around in a void where sound and time ceased to exist.

After a short eternity, I noticed lights flashing past the car window. I slowly became aware of a disembodied voice insisting, “Stop screaming. Stop screaming. We're okay.” It was registering against a high-pitched scream I hadn’t heard before. Slowly, ever so slowly, I came swimming up from an abyss. Jane was speaking calmly from the front seat. The sound stopped and there was absolute silence, not even a heartbeat. I don't know who had been screaming. It may have been me.

“We really are okay.” Her voice sliced through me like a high voltage electrical charge. I couldn’t seem to breathe or feel my body, just the jolt to my nervous system of her voice breaking that disembodied silence.

“I’m going to check the car, but I think it’s fine,” Jane stepped out and walked around it. I could see her getting out, but it was like watching a movie on TV from across the room. It was far away. Removed. Small. Had nothing to do with me.

We sat motionless for a moment then one by one, we almost fell out of the car, wobbly, like our legs couldn’t quite support us. Edging to the barbed wire fence, as far as we could get from the highway, we shook and laughed at nothing. My teeth were chattering from the overdose of adrenaline, my mind replaying the lights in my face. The moment of impact that hadn't happened seemed suspended somewhere in space, waiting to end our lives when we weren't paying attention. I could feel it out there.

Jane kept talking, chatting about nothing, as if the world was normal and this was just a little respite from the drive. Her voice was an irritant, like a mosquito buzzing in the room when it’s too dark to find it. I wasn’t sure we were still alive and she was running off at the mouth about inconsequential stuff. I couldn’t even follow her conversation.

Instead, I was still caught in that moment of terror. There seemed to be no logical way for us to have survived the head-on collision. My mind kept examining it. Did we actually manage to slide between two speeding cars, off the far side of the highway, continuing to spin while a dozen cars passed within a few feet of us? Or did we crash and our minds continued forward with the story line we had going originally. Were we suspended between the knowledge of imminent death and the impact? Like a limbo? I wasn’t sure. Reality itself had become suspect.

After a short discussion, we agreed that it was best to let Jane drive home since she seemed to be the only unrattled one among us. We also decided that this incident should remain a secret. No reason to worry our families and we wanted to protect Carol from blame. I noticed that although I participated in conversation, I wasn’t sure my body was breathing or what I said. Words vibrated in the air, but did they come from inside me? Everything seemed to be relayed from far away.

Once on the road again Darla and Jane conversed quietly from the front seat, their voices rising and falling but the words were meaningless sounds. Carol and I sat in the back seat while she tried to process her choices and her fears around having done the wrong thing. It weighed heavily I knew and tried to reassure her, we had participated in the decision after all, but all the while I felt strangely hollow. Not really present.

We turned and kneeled on the seat, looking out the back window at the stars and shared how we were marked by this happening, wondered if we were spared for a reason. On the other hand, we questioned if this was what death felt like. How could you tell if you were dead? We decided we wouldn’t know until we walked into Aunt Lydia’s house: if she saw us, we were still alive.

It was late when we stepped onto the porch. Aunt Lydia met us at the door. “Well, the wandering gals came home again. I’ve got you some cookies and milk.” Carol and I looked at each other, a silent high five of affirmation.

But a part of me knew that in some other probable reality, we all died that night. And there were repercussions that reverberated through our known world. . . I have felt the undertow of it ever since. Waiting for the impact . . .