Shoved to Them
It was still raining by the time I hit Houston. I was trying hard to ignore the battery light on my dash and mostly succeeding. Every so often, I glanced at my GPS and smiled as the time to my destination dropped under an hour and then a half hour.
As I came into Houston proper, the highway widened to five lanes in each direction and I took the middle of the five. The rain was pretty heavy by now and the road-spray was making to hard to see, but the Houston drivers ignored it and were still whipping along at 65-70 mph. A few miles further in, I hit thick pea soup fog and visibility was nearly non-existent. I judged my speed by the taillights in front of me. Traffic had slowed, but barely. The GPS showed that I only had 20 minutes further to go, and that was a good thing as both it and my phone needed to be charged – I wasn’t plugging in either one in an effort to spare the battery. I wasn’t that worried about either, I just wanted to be able to see.
And then the car died.
There had been no warning. I was driving along and everything was fine, and then it wasn’t. The car was completely dead. I tried the ignition, hoping like anything that it would roar back to life, but it didn’t make a noise. The lights on the dash and on the outside of the car faded away to nothing. And there I sat – in the middle of the highway in holiday traffic, in the thick fog and rain, in a tiny black car….with no lights.
My hands searched frantically up and down the steering column for the hazard lights, but they weren’t there. Cars were coming out of the fog within a few feet of me, slamming on their brakes and hydroplaning past me.
I called my husband and sobbed/shouted into the phone “How do I get off the highway?! There are two lanes on either side of me, no one can see me!! What do I do?! What do I do?!? and where are the eff-ing hazard lights?????”
He struggled to remain calm as he heard the panic in my voice, “The lights are on the console by the a/c controls. It’s a button you push. I don’t know how you get off the highway. Let me see if I can find a number for you to call. Hang on.”
I sat there waiting for him and watching dozens of cars miss me by inches. The blaring horns were angry as they shot past. I found myself crying and apologizing to the other drivers. It was then that I began to think about the reality of where I was. The other drivers couldn’t see me until they were almost on top of me, and then it was only their brakes, driving skills, and a little luck that had kept me from being hit thus far. Eventually, that was going to all run out. In a few minutes, one of them was going to hit me. All it would take was one distracted driver or someone with old brakes and I was going to be hit.
I could vaguely hear my husband reading off phone numbers at me, but I was shaking too hard to listen. The reality was dawning on me that once that other car hit me, I was going to die. My car was small and almost everything flying past me was a truck or an SUV. One hit would send me spinning into traffic and then….there was no “then”. If I got hit by one of these trucks, I was dead. Period.
I took the phone away from my ear and stared at it. “Text me the numbers. I can’t write them down.” I said slowly. “I’m hanging up on you now. I’ll call when I get off of the highway.” In my head was the clear thought “I love you too much to let you hear me die.”
So I closed my eyes and waited. I breathed, willed myself to stay calm, and said aloud,”God, if today’s the day then I’m ready to go.” Tears ran down my face, and I added “but, Guardian Angel, I’d really rather not do this today.” I looked down at a picture of my children on my phone, and I sobbed and shook…and whispered goodbye.
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