Seconds passed, perhaps minutes.
I groaned, squinting against the intense morning sun. My head felt heavy. Every limb felt heavy. Propping myself up on bruised elbows, I reached for my necklace instinctively. Still safe. I wiggled my toes in my boots, relieved that they moved.
Wincing from the pain on my right side, I sat up slowly and blearily took stock of myself. My jeans were torn and streaked with blood. My leather jacket was shredded by gravel. The knuckles of both my hands were bleeding, and my right wrist was throbbing painfully. I gingerly opened and closed my fist; it hurt – badly. When I took a shaky breath, the ribs on my right side seethed with pain. Thankfully, the helmet Evelyn had gifted me was still resting on my pounding head. I wasn’t sure I’d still be alive if it weren’t for that.
Still dazed, I looked around. My bike lay on its side several feet away. The right mirror had been knocked off, and I could see streaks of blue paint scraped across the asphalt. But my throat caught when I saw the truck, lying on its left side, hydraulic fluid seeping across the street and smoke still trailing from the brakes. The front windshield had shattered into hundreds of blue fragments that lay glimmering across the asphalt. And then I saw the driver.
I stifled a sob at the sight of him, slumped against the left side of the cabin, his limp body parallel to the street. There was blood, but I couldn’t tell how much. I stood up – very cautiously and slowly this time – and took as deep a breath as I could without causing my ribs to spasm. With effort, I took a shaky step, and then another. My pulse was crashing in my ears like ocean waves, spurred by the terror of what I might find in the cabin of that truck.
I crouched in front of the cabin with bated breath, careful not to cut myself on crushed glass as I peered inside. When I saw that the man was strapped in and still seemed to be in one piece, I let out a relieved sob. He was unconscious. His forehead had been cut fairly deeply. But he was breathing. I surveyed the cabin of the truck. It had a CB radio, which had been knocked from the dash but otherwise appeared to be in one piece. Wheezing with effort, I reached down beneath the dashboard for the receiver, which was dangling by its coil. I didn’t know who to call but I knew I had to radio someone to come help him.
Don’t attract attention. Don’t let them find you.
The admonition seared through my head like lightning, stopping my hand dead in its tracks. The man let out a small groan and moved his head slightly. As his eyes fluttered, my stomach wrenched with fear. Before I could make a move, I heard the distant sound of a car approaching.
Don’t let them find you.
I staggered away from the truck and stumbled back to my bike. Using all my strength and then some, I hoisted it back up, grunting from the stabbing pain in my side, and somehow managed to mount it. It was by sheer willpower, and a good dash of luck, that I didn’t immediately topple off the other side. The sound of the approaching car was getting louder. Panicking, I turned the key, which was still in the ignition. The engine stalled, sputtered, coughed, and then finally roared to life. I took one last look over my shoulder as an old brown Corolla with a mismatched red hood approached the scene and breathed a sigh of relief. The truck driver would be okay. Wrenching the throttle back without another glance behind me, I tore away as quickly as I could.
***
I can’t tell you how I made it home. I honestly don’t remember anything but blurs of trees and searing pain. But somehow, I found myself back at my cabin. After haphazardly leaning the bike against the side of the house, I took off my helmet. The green paint was cleanly scraped off one side and there was a small dent in it from what was probably a rock in the road. It vaguely registered that it could have been my skull. Feeling queasy, I tossed the helmet in the grass near the bike.
As I stumbled over to the well behind my house, it occurred to me that I had left the side mirror lying in the road at the accident and, in my delirium, was extremely irritated at myself for not grabbing it. It took much more effort than it should have to turn on the generator connected to the well pump, but eventually it roared to life. With my head throbbing, the deafening noise of the machine was almost unbearable; I clamped my hands over my ears and stumbled back to the cabin.
Groaning, I limped through the back door and into the kitchen, where I tossed my threadbare jacket on the single chair at the table. Then I fumbled through the junk drawer until I found scissors. Sinking to the cold linoleum floor, I peeled off my boots, my ribs protesting with pain, and set to work cutting off the remainder of my shredded jeans, which were matted to my skin with dried blood. I wondered how bad those cuts would look once I washed the blood away. Leaving the bloody shreds of denim on the floor, I stood up precariously, steadying myself on the kitchen table, then made my way to the bathroom using the walls for support. Cradling my right hand, I used the other to turn on the water to the clawfoot tub in the middle of the bathroom and peeled off the rest of my clothes while it filled. Normally, I would heat the water in the fireplace before climbing into an otherwise ice-cold bath, but at that moment I had neither the strength nor the mindset for that.
After all that effort, the tiny room started to feel as though it were spinning. I leaned heavily on the bathroom sink and looked at my scraped face in the mirror, idly wondering if I had a concussion. As I tilted forward to examine my pupils, I noticed something odd. My right eye, the one that was slightly darker, suddenly seemed far more purple than blue. When I peered closer to look at it, my iris seemed to flash, reflecting a bright purple, almost-ultraviolet glint. Much like a ray of sunlight catching a polished river stone. But there were no bright rays of light coming through the tiny, dirty window on the wall behind me. I blinked twice, shaking my head, then winced.
God, I must have a concussion, I thought grimly.
The tub was nearly full by that point, so I twisted the squeaky faucet closed. Dipping my bloody knuckles in the water, I grimaced at the glacial temperature. Gingerly, I lifted my leg and hoisted myself into the tub, gasping from the cold. God, I didn’t want to get in there. But as I surveyed the bruises purpling beneath my skin, I convinced myself that a cold bath would be therapeutic. The moment I slid into the freezing water, goosebumps erupted across my flesh but I welcomed the ensuing numbness. The tub became red and murky as all the dried blood and dirt from my abrasions dissolved in the water.
As I sank deeper into the tub, my thoughts drifted to the day Evelyn had given me the motorcycle. It was more than two years ago, on a winter morning that had felt even more frigid than this bathwater. The snow had been relentless for days and was accumulating in deep white drifts against the cabin. Even by Colorado standards, it was unbearably cold. At that time, I hadn’t admitted to her that I possessed no mode of transportation, save for my overused feet – one of which was boring an actual hole through my tattered boot. Like the snow piling outside my windows, the guilt of not visiting Evelyn for a week was weighing heavily on my mind, creating an intense conflict of interest vis-a-vis my deep aversion to the cold. Eventually, duty – and maybe a bit of loneliness – prevailed.
Two and a half hours after making up my mind to venture into the frozen white tundra, I found myself on Evelyn’s doorstep shivering like a frost-nipped leaf, sheepishly averting direct eye-contact while admitting to her that, yes, I had borrowed a rusty abandoned bicycle that I’d found leaning against a light post in order to avoid walking the whole way up to her house. Much to my chagrin, I’d only managed to make it halfway up the partially plowed road before realizing that the battered single-speed bicycle was not going to make it through the two-foot snow drifts. Because of that, I’d had to abandon the bike in a ditch and trudge the rest of the way to her house on foot. In a blizzard. Without gloves. Or a hat.
After listening to my piteous tale, her eyes narrowed to nothing more than slits as she regarded the icicles in my hair, the holes in my boots, and my frozen fingers, which were ineffectually stuffed into my damp jacket pockets. Despite being slightly stooped and at least a head shorter than me, there had been a handful of moments over the years where I was the tiniest bit scared of Evelyn. This was one of those moments.
I squirmed awkwardly, sincerely wondering if she was going to hit me over my snow-dusted head with a rolling pin. Instead, she yanked me inside and wordlessly handed me a thick blanket from the couch. Wrapping it around my wet shoulders, I obediently followed her around the house as she lectured me about stealing, gesticulating wildly as she spoke: “Doesn’t matter if the bike looked abandoned, the owner might very well have come back to find it missing and been beside themselves!” – and how mad she was that I’d “been walking all over the place like some poor frost-bitten vagrant!” and demanding, as an aside, for me to “Fetch that Tupperware, it’s too high on the shelf! Damn builder making everything in this place fit for a professional basketball player…”
She poured me a steaming cup of tea as she continued her harangue, and I sipped it appreciatively, warming my fingers on the hot mug. Eventually we made our way out to her garage where she marched over to a large lumpy item covered with a dirty sheet. She tugged off the fabric with a flourish, sending a cloud of dust into the air. Coughing, I looked through the falling haze of years-old microparticles to find a slightly rusted, paint-chipped, vintage motorcycle. I knew nothing about bikes at the time but even in its slight state of disrepair, I thought it was simply magnificent. My throat caught.
Evelyn peered at me through the narrow slit of a stink-eye. “This was my Donald’s and now it’s yours. Don’t want anything for it, save for you to return that bicycle from exactly where you got it.” She walked over to the bike’s handlebars where a drab green metal helmet was hanging. Taking it in her hands, she regarded it tenderly, then turned to press the helmet into mine with the stark admonition: “This was my father’s, from the War, before it passed to my husband. I always told Don that if he ever left home without a helmet and survived the trip back, I’d kill him myself.”
My eyes overflowed, partially from the motes of dust still hovering in the air, but mostly because it was the kindest thing I could remember anyone doing for me. I hugged her tightly and she muttered something gruffly into my neck about renewing the registration and lending me her winter boots for the return trip.
***
Shivering in the tub, I couldn’t help but smile at the old memory. Then a terrifying thought yanked me from my reverie. Evelyn knew I didn’t have a driver’s license and she didn’t like it one bit, but I’d sworn up and down that I would be extremely careful while riding, a vow that had barely earned a dissatisfied grunt in response.
She’s going to kill me, I fretted, all at once aware of the fact that I couldn’t feel my toes.
When I surveyed myself once again, my blood-drained, white fingertips were wrinkled and my muscles were appreciatively numb. Gripped by the sudden urge to sleep, I reached for a towel with my less injured hand and gently wrapped myself in it. Without bothering to drain the bloody bathwater, I stepped into a pair of old slippers and shuffled out to the living room, where I slumped into the old sunken sofa in front of the fireplace. The fire from the night before was almost completely out, save for a couple of hot coals. My teeth chattering, I curled up under nothing but the damp towel, too worn out to reach for the wool blanket on the far end of the sofa.
As I faded into a long fitful sleep, I dreamt that the coals of the fireplace suddenly roared to life and could almost feel the comforting warmth wash over my battered body.