Dianne Drake - P.S. You're a Daddy!

“Well, if you find yourself craving company, my office is on the main street. Stop by any time. We can have lunch or I can show you around. There’s not much to do here so it’s always nice to make new friends.”

She liked Kelli. Maybe under other circumstances they might have been friends. But she wasn’t here about friendship, wasn’t here to have lunches or insert herself into the local culture. This trip was only about finding out what kind of man had fathered Emily’s baby, and once her curiosity was satisfied, she’d leave. Hopefully she would return to the larger apartment her own real estate agent was scouting for her right now. Another of those life changes happening too fast.

After hastily unpacking and tossing a few articles of clothing on the bed rather than hanging them, Deanna fixed herself a pitcher of lemonade and headed out to the porch swing. This was her next month: sitting, watching, hoping to learn. So why not start it now?

“They say your daddy isn’t too personable,” she said, laying her hand protectively over her belly as she lowered herself into the swing. “But that doesn’t really matter, does it? Not to either of us. I want you and love you, so it’s going to be fine even if he is an old grump.” Although somehow she’d wanted him to be pleasant, and she was a little disappointed by the prospect that he wasn’t. “So what else are we going to discover?”

The truth was, now that she was here, she was scared about it, and feeling more alone than she ever had in her life. “But we’ll get through it,” she said. “I always do.” A fact that scared her even more because, for the first time since she’d agreed to carry this baby, she realized she didn’t want to do it alone. But alone was what she was.

So very alone. And nothing could fix that. “So now I’m going to cry,” she said as the tears welled in her eyes. “Damn the hormones.” And the loneliness.

IT UNVEILED ITSELF before her eyes, almost in slow motion. Even from her mountaintop perch she saw the beginning of it, two cars climbing up the modestly steep highway leading into town, one in the front, one bringing up the rear at a safe distance.

Nothing out of the ordinary except the deer that darted out in front of the first car then paused in the middle of the road to stare at its would-be attacker, and run safely off to the other side. All this while the first car swerved to avoid it then jammed on its brakes, sending it into a fishtail that caused it to cut in and out, from lane to lane, over the center line, then whip back to the other side. Correcting and over-correcting to right itself.

That’s when the full realization of what she was witnessing grabbed hold and propelled her off the swing and right up to the rail of the porch for a better look. And as that horrible realization sank in deeper, and the second car jammed on its brakes to avoid the veering of the first car, her hand crept to her pocket and her fingers wrapped around her cellphone as the second car braked too hard and skidded … and skidded … and skidded …

A sickening crunch of metal permeated the mountain air, one so hideous it caused a roost of black birds in a far-off tree to flee their sanctuary with great protest and screeching. Holding her breath, Deanna didn’t divert her eyes from the road below as her fingers slid over the phone’s smooth face. She glanced down just long enough to see the numbers to push, and pushed.

Then, as she looked back down the side of the mountain, the second car was flipping, side over side, repeatedly hitting the pavement. Its course to the edge of the road clear, the clutching in her heart turning to a stabbing pain. “Dear God,” she murmured, as the emergency dispatcher came on.

“This is 911, what’s your emergency?”

“No,” Deanna cried in a strangled scream, hoping God or somebody would hear her and stop the second car’s inevitable plummet over the side of the mountain.

“What’s your emergency?” the dispatcher asked again, followed by, “Miss Lambert, are you all right? Please, can you hear me?”

Hearing her name snapped her back into the moment. “Yes, I’m here, and I’m watching a wreck in progress. Two cars …” She glanced left, to the semi heading down the mountain, its driver not yet able to see what was ahead. “And maybe a semi, if it doesn’t get stopped in …” Her voice trailed off as she watched the second act unfold.

“Where, Miss Lambert?”

Again, hearing her name from the dispatcher jolted her. “It’s a road I can see from my porch, but I don’t know its name. I’m in my cabin …”

“Above the Clouds,” the dispatcher supplied, then asked, “South porch?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me, exactly, what kind of damage or injuries we might be looking at?”

Massive, devastating injuries, she thought. “Yes. One of the cars has just gone through the guardrail and over the edge. And the other …” She swallowed hard. “It hit the guardrail a few times and it’s still trying to correct itself on the road … I think the truck coming from the other direction’s going to hit it.”

Whether or not the driver of the semi saw the impending disaster ahead, or simply assumed the car careening head first at him in his lane would move over, Deanna had no idea, but the excruciating squeal of the semi’s brakes and the low wail of the truck’s horn was what snapped her totally out of the surreal watching mode and into action.

“I know exactly where it is,” the dispatcher said, “and I’ve sent out an alarm to the volunteer fire department. They’ll be there as fast as they can.”

How long would that be? In a study concerning rural emergency response times Deanna had conducted last year, she’d discovered that those waiting times could be fatally long—sometimes thirty minutes, up to an hour. And from what she’d just witnessed, there were people down below who needed help before that. “What about the local doctor?” she asked. “Can we call him?”

“He’s out mending fences right now, but I’ll give his grandpa a call and see what we can do to get him there. Kelli Dawson’s my daughter, by the way. And I know this is probably not the best time to say this, but welcome to Sugar Creek, Miss Lambert.”

She heard the cordial greeting, but it wasn’t registering because … “Oh, my … No!” The semi didn’t hit the oncoming car, as she’d thought it might, but in its attempt to do a hard brake, it jackknifed and turned over, sliding on its side along the road.

And the car swerved right into it, hit the back end of its trailer with full-on force, bringing both the truck and the car to a stop. “More casualties,” she informed Kelli’s mother. “Two cars and one semi now. Can’t see how many people …” Wasn’t sure she wanted to see how many people.

But after she’d clicked off from the dispatcher, curiosity got the better of her and she grabbed her binoculars, took a look. Nobody was moving. No one was trying to climb out of the carnage. No one was trying to climb up the side of the mountain from where they’d toppled off.

And there was no one there to help. That’s what scared her the most. People down there needed help and she prayed they weren’t past the point where help mattered.

Without a thought for anything else, Deanna grabbed her medical kit, one she carried out of habit more than necessity, and sprinted for her car. She backed it out and headed down the steep road, making sure not to speed lest she ended up like one of the cars below. At the turn-off to the highway, she slowed to let a minivan by, made a left-hand turn and headed for the crash site, hoping help would be there when she arrived.

But the minivan was the only car present, and the woman driving it was standing outside her vehicle, torn between running to look for victims and trying to subdue three small children in the rear of the van. Her cellphone was in her hand and she was physically standing in front of the van’s door. Was she trying to block the view from her children? Deanna wondered about that as she pulled alongside the van, waved to the woman, then continued to drive into the heart of the scene.