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They were on the way home when it happened. A car behind them followed too closely, blinding Paul with its headlights.
“Damn tailgaters,” he muttered.
“Golly, Dad, must you swear right after Mass?” Rachel complained from the back seat.
He was too tense to answer. Between seeing Lacey in the church, and now this, the holiday was turning out to be even worse than he’d anticipated.
Paul stepped on the brake and tapped it lightly, slowing down gradually. Maybe the car behind would take the hint and pass. The street was dark here, but there was plenty of room on either side, whereas farther up the hill, it narrowed dangerously.
But the driver behind him stayed on his tail. Dammit, why didn’t it pass? Was it someone unfamiliar with the streets on Queen Anne Hill?
Paul sped up, and the other car did, too. He couldn’t shake it, and now he was beginning to worry. What if this was some nut, hoping to cut them off at some point and carjack them? Or what if he was following them home to grab them in the driveway?
Even as he thought it, the car pulled out into the middle of the road and came closer, its front end nudging the left rear bumper of the Infiniti. Paul felt the bump and then heard a loud, metallic screech. The steering wheel began to slip from his grasp, and he clenched his fingers around it. “Hang on!” he yelled as the Infiniti swerved from side to side.
“Oh, my God!” he heard Gina cry.
“Daddy, what’s he doing?” Rachel yelled.
Ahead was a large old cedar tree that stuck a couple of yards into the road, its trunk easily three feet in diameter. Paul saw it looming ahead of him and jammed his foot on the brake. The street was slick from the rain, however, and he could do nothing to stop the Infiniti from skidding and barreling straight into the tree.
Metal careened against wood. Glass crashed. The front air bags deployed, and Paul felt as if he’d hit a wall as the bag on his side slammed against his chest and face. Gina screamed, and Rachel flew forward. Paul felt her impact on the back of his seat.
It was over within seconds that seemed like hours. Paul sat shaken, nauseated, and as the air was automatically sucked out of the bags he looked over at Gina, who sat upright with a dazed expression on her face.
“Are you all right?” he managed.
Gina nodded. “Rachel?” she said, her voice shaking.
Rachel was crying, and though Paul was still in shock and felt weak, he managed to unbuckle his seat belt and get out, opening the back door. Rachel sat crumpled over, her face in her hands.
“Honey, are you okay?” he asked, his voice not much more than a harsh whisper. His legs shook, and he could barely hold himself upright. He grabbed hold of the door to keep himself from falling.
“Mommy,” Rachel said in a strange, hollow voice. “Is Mommy okay?”
She sounded like a little girl, and tears came to Paul’s eyes. He looked at Gina, who was feebly trying to reach back to Rachel.
“Yes. I think she’s fine,” he said, though he wasn’t sure at all.
Gina began to unbuckle her seat belt and slide out. Moving slowly around the car and holding on to it for support, she reached Paul. He took her arm to steady her. Gina leaned into the car. “I’m fine, honey,” she said. “Just shaky. What about you?”
“I think I’m okay,” Rachel answered, unbuckling her lap belt. “My head hurts. It hurts real bad. So does my tummy.”
Gina touched her gently, feeling her forehead and scalp. “I don’t see any cuts. You do have a pretty good lump starting on your forehead.”
“She didn’t have her shoulder harness on,” Paul said. “She slammed into the back of my seat. I felt it.”
“Rachel, for God’s sake, how many times have we told you—!” Gina broke off. “Honey, it’s okay. You’re safe, that’s all that matters. We should get you to the hospital, though. You need to be checked out.”
“No, I’m okay,” Rachel said, though she clearly was not.
“We just have to be sure,” Gina insisted, starting to cry.
“Your mother’s right,” Paul said briskly. Looking at the front of the car, he saw for the first time the full extent of the damage. The hood was crunched like an accordion, and glass from the driver and passenger side windows was all over the place.
It was a miracle, he thought, that he and Gina hadn’t been badly hurt, if not killed. The windshield, made of safety glass, had held in one piece. It looked like a thousand spider webs against the beam from the headlights, which oddly enough still worked, outlining the tree.
With a shaky hand Paul took his cell phone out of his pocket, and punched the speed dial for 911. After asking if everyone was all right, the dispatcher told him it might be ten or more minutes. “We’re short-staffed because of Christmas Eve, but there’s a car and paramedics on the way.”
Paul slumped to the ground, his back to the rear tire. Gina sat on the edge of the back seat with the door open, holding Rachel’s hand and making mothering noises.
“Whoever that was,” Rachel said in a tight voice, “they did that on purpose, didn’t they, Dad?”
Paul hesitated. “I…we can’t know that for certain. It’s dark, it might have been someone who didn’t know the road.”
When the police and paramedics arrived, the medics checked Gina and Rachel for injuries as a young officer talked to Paul.
“This isn’t the first time somebody ran into this tree,” the officer said. “You see how the street starts to narrow, down there a block? People aren’t prepared for it, and they think they can make it around you. You get over to the right to let them pass, but then that tree looms up and there’s not enough room for both of you.”
“I drive this street every day,” Paul said impatiently. He wanted this to be over, and he wanted Gina and Rachel safe at home. He still felt shaky himself, and he needed a drink, a bed, some sleep. “I know precisely where this tree is,” he said, “and I also know that we’ve asked for years to have it taken out.”
“I agree with you, it’s a hazard,” the young cop said. “Especially at night. Seems to me I heard the city’s trying to do something about it.”
The uproar over this tree had been in the Seattle papers for months. The owners of the property wanted to preserve the ancient tree, and were being supported by a local preservation society.
“You know,” the cop said, “maybe the person behind you was new around here. Maybe he or she didn’t know the street all that well.”
Paul’s voice hardened. “They didn’t stop to see if we needed help.”
“Right. Well, I’m writing it up as a hit-and-run. You remember what the car looked like? Did you get a glimpse of the driver?”
“No. It all happened too fast, and like I said, I knew the tree was there. I was trying to keep from hitting it.”
“Yeah. It’s a hazard, all right.”
Paul nodded. Something in his gut, however, told him that what had happened here tonight was no accident. Someone had deliberately tried to run them off the road.
At the hospital, Rachel was given a near-clean bill of health. “She may have headaches for a couple of days,” the weary E.R. doctor said to Paul. “Also, since she wasn’t wearing a shoulder harness, the lap belt caused some bruising in the abdominal area.” He shook his head. “Lucky for her, you must have been able to slow the car before impact. Lucky for all of you, for that matter. If you’d hit that tree at any real speed, you might not be standing here talking to me now.”
Gina shuddered. She didn’t want to think of what might have been. All she wanted to do was get home and go to bed.
I am so tired of Christmas Eve, she thought. Would they ever have a happy one again? One not fraught with some terrible event, or the kind of gloom that event left them with, like a perverse gift of some evil Magi?
Oh, stop complaining. Like the doctor said, one or all of us could be dead now.
As it was, her neck hurt, and there was a vague pain in the area of her collarbone. “Whiplash,” the doctor said. “Also, probably the force of the seat belt holding you back. There’s a bruise on your collarbone. It should go away in a few days.”
He had wanted to take X rays of her neck, and Paul had wanted that, too. But the X-ray department was backed up with holiday revelers who had fallen down stairs, slipped on a dance floor, rear-ended another car. It would take hours of sitting here, waiting.
“If I don’t feel better, I’ll come back the day after tomorrow,” Gina promised.
Paul shrugged off his back pain as something he experienced now and then, and begged off from the X rays as well. “I really just need to get home and sleep,” he said. Foremost in his mind, however, was that there wasn’t any Scotch in the hospital, and he needed a drink—bad.
The Infiniti had been towed to a shop to be repaired, if possible, after being checked out at the site of the accident by the police. They had taken samples of paint that didn’t match the Infiniti, and anything else the forensics lab could use.
After picking up muscle relaxants and painkillers at the hospital pharmacy, Paul, Gina and Rachel rode home silently in a cab, each deep in his and her own private thoughts.
The next morning they all slept in. When they got up sleepily around eleven and poked without appetite at eggs that Gina managed to scramble, they barely remembered it was Christmas Day. In the afternoon they watched movies on tape. Around five o’clock, when the sun had gone down, they lit the Christmas tree and made an attempt at celebration by opening each other’s presents.
“Thank you, Mom, I love it,” Rachel said, opening a glittery gold box and holding up a pink cashmere sweater. She didn’t try it on as she normally would, but put it back in the box, on the floor.
Gina knew how she felt, and simply accepted the thank-you, telling Rachel the same when she opened her own gift of perfume.
Paul did his best to raise their spirits by putting on his new dark green fleece jacket and modeling it, as if on a runway. He looked handsome—like a movie star, Rachel said, smiling—and Gina smiled, too, and agreed. Soon, however, they fell back into sitting silently, watching rain beat against the windows that looked out on the city of Seattle.
It’s the muscle relaxants, Paul thought. They’ve turned us into zombies. Or maybe it’s post-traumatic stress.
But he knew that wasn’t the reason for his mood, and maybe not for Gina and Rachel’s, either. He’d bet that they, too, were thinking: Who would want to hurt us so much, they could do a thing like that?
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