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What happened next shocked Amanda to her core. Quivering, she stretched her arms out to investigate the shards of glass that had struck her. Little flecks of blood oozed out across her porcelain skin. She then turned her face to the left to watch as Sam unbuckled his seatbelt and called out to her, his eyes as large as orbs.
“Amanda! Do you hear me? Amanda, are you all right?”
Lost in the nightmare of these strange moments, Amanda felt herself nod. Sam then rammed into the driver’s door with his shoulder and jumped into the darkness outside. “I need to check on the others!” he called back to her.
As delicately as possible, Amanda flicked the glass from her arms and stepped from the car. A long string of blood oozed down her arm and stained her dress.
Once outside the car, she tried to make sense of what had happened. A collision had happened directly in front of them, with a maroon Chevy Cavalier pulled out from a dark road directly in front of an approaching BMW. The maroon Chevy and the BMW had practically knocked heads, casting billowing smoke into the night's air. The accident had happened so swiftly that Sam, who’d been coming up the hill behind the BMW, hadn’t had time to stop and had smashed into the tail-end of the BMW, crunching both his front and their back.
In the shock that hung in the air immediately after the crash, Sam hobbled toward the BMW, which looked worse for wear. Every second seemed to stretch on for at least a minute, making it difficult to understand when, exactly, the crash had occurred. Their lights remained on, casting a ghoulish glow between the trees on that back country road.
“Sam?” Amanda cried, suddenly terrified. She wanted to wrap her blood-stained arms around him and hold him close. She wanted to call Susan to pick them up and take them back home.
“Stay back, Amanda. There’s a ton of broken glass everywhere,” Sam called.
At that moment, the Chevy Cavalier that had slammed into the front of the BMW turned its engine on. Amanda stayed back, genuinely shocked as the Chevy unlatched itself from the BMW. The driver drove its hind end down the road it had come out from, performing a wheel-screaming U-turn and casting itself back into the darkness. The vehicle was gone in an instant, leaving the two cars behind.
“What the hell!” Sam called out, his voice echoing out across the woods. Amanda had never heard him filled with such rage.
Unable to hold herself back any longer, Amanda hustled around the back of the convertible and wrapped her arms around Sam. He remained frozen in surprise, with a gash of blood across his forehead that made him look like an action star.
“I can’t believe this!” Sam muttered, aghast. “They just drove away after causing this accident.” He then snapped his fingers and leafed through his pocket to grab his phone. “DTXQ12. DTXQ12.”
“Sam? What are you talking about?”
“The license plate,” Sam shot back. “I caught a glance when the jerk made a U-turn.”
Sam’s fingers flashed over the screen of his phone as he noted the license plate. As he finished, a wail came out from the BMW. Amanda moved forward as quickly as she could, although her legs quivered with panic with each step.
“Sam! Call 911!” she screamed back as she approached the BMW to discover an older woman in her sixties, her head sloped back against the seat rest and a bloody hand across the steering wheel. The front window had completely shattered, casting glass across the woman’s thighs and arms. Her closed eyelids caught the strange light from her headlights, which bounced back from the trees.
“Oh my God,” Amanda whispered, pressing her palms together as she leaned down to speak to the older woman. “Can you hear me?”
The woman moaned in response.
“Ma’am, please don’t move around at all. You’re covered in glass,” Amanda coaxed. “We have an ambulance coming. You’ll be taken care of. I promise you that.”
Amanda remained stationed at the front of the BMW, eyeing the damage from the corner of her eye. Black tire tracks led from the main road out into the woods, proof that the guy had wanted to get out of there fast.
Behind her, Sam called 9-1-1, describing where they were on State Road, near the North Tisbury Farm, about halfway between the beach and the Sheridan House. “There was a hit-and-run,” Sam explained. “The guy just hightailed it out of here, but I managed to write down the license plate number.”
“What kind of person would do this?” Amanda asked Sam as he hung up and joined her at the front of the BMW.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Behind them, the woman no longer moaned with any sign of injury. Instead, she remained silent, which was so much worse.
“I’ll call Mom,” Amanda whispered, her hand shivering as she brought the phone to her ear. The call rang out across the night before finally reaching the cozy ecosystem of Susan and Scott’s cabin along the water.
“Honey! How are you? You snuck out of the office today.”
“Mom. Don’t freak out.” Amanda’s voice was strained as she described all she could about the past five minutes. Throughout, Susan was quiet yet clearly terrified.
“Sit tight, honey. I’ll come to pick you and Sam up right this minute. Does Sam have an emergency kit in the truck? Maybe station some flares, so other vehicles can see you.”
Amanda and Susan, both ultra-prepared for something like this, always kept an emergency kit in the truck. “I’ll check,” Amanda muttered, cursing herself for her lack of preparation. She had a hunch (soon verified) that Sam wasn’t as prepared as she would have been.
“Get out of the road,” Susan ordered. There was the jangle of her keys, the rush of her spring jacket over her shoulders. After a split-second, during which she muttered something off the phone to Scott, Susan added, “Honey? I love you. I love you to bits. I’ll be there soon.”
About ten minutes later, they heard the first of the sirens. They roared out across the wooded hills, screeching against the somber darkness. Red lights flashed across the surrounding trees as the ambulance and two police vehicles arrived and made a perimeter. Amanda and Sam pulled back, watching as the EMT workers worked diligently, opening the car door delicately and taking scissors to the woman’s seatbelt.
Two cops approached Sam and Amanda and asked them a series of initial questions. Sam took the reins, describing the crash. When they asked Amanda what she’d seen, she said, “I was fast asleep until the crash. After that, all I saw was that monster driving away from the scene as fast as he could.”
“Or she,” Sam reminded them. “We couldn’t see the driver at all. But I have the license plate.” He leafed again through his pocket to draw out his phone so that he could translate the number to the officers.
“Amanda!” Susan’s voice rang out across the scene of the accident. She’d parked about twenty feet to the north of the police vehicles and ambulance and waved both arms wildly like a flight coordinator. Scott stood beside her with a hand raised over his eyes to try to peer through the flashing lights.
As Sam continued to speak to the authorities, Amanda hustled around the ambulance and flung into her mother’s arms. Susan Sheridan was everything she’d always been— warm, smelling of lavender and whatever she’d cooked for dinner that night, ready with an encouraging word and a hand to smooth over her hair.
“It’s okay, honey. You’re okay.” Susan repeated this like a song, wrapping her arms around Amanda and shifting left, then right.
A few minutes later, the EMT workers managed to lift the stretcher into the back of the ambulance. The doors pounded closed behind the stretcher, and the vehicle again let out that horrible shriek. Susan, Amanda, and Scott hustled out of the way and watched as the ambulance rushed back to the Oak Bluffs hospital. Amanda said a tender, silent prayer for the woman on the stretcher— a woman out for a drive in the darkness, headed for a terrible fate.
Sam finished up with the police officers and headed toward Susan, Scott, and Amanda. The blood on his face had dried and now looked like Halloween makeup. Amanda shifted from Susan to Sam and burrowed her head against his chest, listening to the whack-whack of his heart. We’re alive. We’re okay, she told herself. We got through this together.
“I can’t wait till they find the person who’s done this,” Sam muttered angrily, his eyes cast back toward the two crunched-up vehicles.
It took some coaxing, but Susan finally dragged Sam back to Scott’s truck. Once there, Sam and Amanda slipped into the back seat and buckled themselves up, their fingers latched tightly together. Amanda had to fight the urge not to beg Scott to drive ten miles an hour. Sam spent most of the drive back to the Sheridan House with his chin to his chest.
“Everyone’s back at the house waiting for you,” Susan said up front. “Christine’s already making a big pot of clam chowder. Audrey says she’s cracked your favorite bottle of wine.”
“God, how I love my family.” Amanda couldn’t muster the strength to laugh much at all. When she looked down at her hands, they still shook uncontrollably.
When Scott parked out back, Audrey, Lola, and Christine hustled out of the Sheridan House, their eyes marred with concern. Amanda and Sam eased out of the truck, already stiff from the accident. A blotchy-faced Audrey rushed toward Amanda and hugged her gingerly, which was such a role reversal. Normally, Amanda felt like she had to handle Audrey with care.
“Thank God you’re in one piece. What happened?” Audrey asked, breathless.
Amanda shook her head. “I heard you cracked that bottle of wine.”
Audrey nodded knowingly and guided Amanda into the Sheridan House, past Christine, and Lola, who looked bug-eyed and fearful. Sam stepped in after her, his hand cupping her elbow. Amanda sensed that they couldn’t be far away from one another, not that night. Not after what they’d been through.
A big pot of clam chowder bubbled on the stovetop. Max bobbed around on the floor at Grandpa Wes’s feet, smacking his palms together.
“He won’t sleep,” Audrey said, disgruntled. “I think he knew you were coming back.” She dropped down to draw Max into her arms, where he bobbed excitedly, greeting Amanda.
Christine poured Sam and Amanda glasses of wine; her brow furrowed knowingly. Christine was the type to understand that you didn’t always want to talk about your pain. Grandpa Wes’s eyes were wounded, yet he kept silent, as well. Lola hurried to the speaker system and put on a Jim Croce album, which brought a collective sigh of relief.
“We’re just glad you’re okay,” Susan finally added. There wasn’t anything else to say.
Exhausted, Amanda and Sam stepped into the bedroom that Amanda had taken as her own, there downstairs next to Grandpa Wes’s in the add-on that Scott had built over a year ago. With the door closed behind them, Amanda and Sam curled up on Amanda’s mattress and stared at the new white walls. Outside, there was the murmur of the rest of the Sheridan clan. It wasn’t difficult to imagine their current topic of conversation. Amanda was just grateful she couldn’t make out their specific words.
“Please, don’t go home tonight,” Amanda breathed into Sam’s chest.
“There’s no way you could get me to leave,” Sam murmured back, his hand stretching across the back of her head.
“Really?”
“I told you, baby. I’m in this for the long haul.” Sam’s eyes watered longingly before he closed them and kissed her gently.
The long haul.
“Don’t they always say, ‘In sickness and in health?’ And what’s the other one... ‘From car accident to car accident?’”
“I think that’s the expression,” Amanda affirmed with a soft laugh.
“Good.”
Did this mean that Sam wanted to propose to her?
“I love you, Sam,” Amanda whispered, her voice hardly anything at all as she drifted off to sleep. “Thank you for taking care of us today.”
By the time Sam answered her, Amanda had drifted off to the land of dreams once more. But they remained like that all night long, tucked safely against one another, grateful for the time they had left.