An Angel On Her Shoulder

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An Angel On Her Shoulder Page 8

by Dan Alatorre


  I glanced at the odometer—over 200,000 miles. That was a simultaneous source of pride and embarrassment. I preferred driving a new car, of course, but as long as the car was drivable and had air conditioning, keeping it was the smart thing to do.

  That smart decision didn’t seem so smart now.

  I pulled into a gas station. Slipping the transmission into neutral, I revved the engine a few times. The car acted fine, like whatever had been clogging it was now gone. I stepped out and looked underneath. No tree limbs.

  Inside, Sophie was waiting to go see cousin Vanessa.

  I got back in and revved the car one more time. Nothing. I dropped it back into drive and turned around, listening for any noises. Pulling onto the road again, I cut off the air conditioning and radio, put down the windows, and listened. I didn’t hear anything strange.

  As I made my way to the interstate, the car acted perfect. Whatever it was seemed to have cleared itself up.

  Probably a stick from a tree in our yard that got stuck underneath, and it broke free on the off ramp . . .

  I got back onto the interstate. This time the accelerator responded fine. The car got up to speed quickly and my pulse returned to normal.

  “Daddy, the wind is blowing too hard on me!”

  I reached down and held the window switches, putting up the windows, then I turned on the air conditioning. Cocking my head and listening, the car seemed fine.

  Three bridges connect Tampa to St. Petersburg. I-275 runs across the middle one, a long narrow ribbon that stretches ten miles over the bay. Once on that bridge, there are no exits until the other side. And of course, parts of the bridge were being worked on, so there might be delays.

  As we approached, I still listened to see if the old car was going to tell me something or not.

  I didn’t hear any hissing or rattles; the accelerator was working fine . . . we came to the “last chance” exit. I thought about pulling off, but only for a moment. It seemed like whatever had been wrong with the car before, it wasn’t wrong any more.

  I eased my car onto the bridge. The water of the bay was beautiful, a glorious shade of blue, with a few ripples on the surface. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the sun was beaming down. It was hot, but otherwise, it was a real chamber of commerce day.

  BOOM!

  The car lurched like a cannon had been shot off under the hood. My hands tightened on the wheel. The engine hissed louder than ever—it was all I could hear.

  This time, there was no handy off ramp. Construction cones and sawhorses blocked the emergency lane for miles. A strange plastic smell came into the car.

  In the other lanes, cars streaked by at seventy and eighty miles per hour. Ten miles of bridge and no place to pull off. Even slowing down could be dangerous. Cars behind me wouldn’t be expecting that. We could end up in a huge pile up.

  The smell got stronger and the hiss got louder. Something was definitely wrong, and there were no good choices for what to do about it. I cracked open the windows to let some fresh air in.

  Sophie said something, but I couldn’t hear her over the engine noise.

  I took my foot off the gas pedal. The car began to slow down. Once again, I turned on the emergency flashers, hoping the speeding commuters behind me would notice in the bright sun.

  With the windows open, each construction sawhorse made a whoosh as we passed it. They were too close together to avoid hitting any at that speed, if I decided to try to pull into the emergency lane, and I couldn’t risk slowing down too much or I’d get rear ended from another car.

  A faint line of smoke streamed out from under the hood. There was no time left. I gripped the wheel and took a deep breath.

  “Hang on!” I turned the car into the sawhorses. The first ones smashed into the side of the car, jolting us with rapid metal and wood crunches. The next ones slammed into the grill and piled up underneath as pieces flew into the windshield. The debris under the car clogged the front tires and threatened to pull the steering wheel from my hands.

  Flames flickered under the hood. The pile of sawhorses under the car blocked the steering. Three feet away on the left, cars roared by, horns blaring. Three feet to the right, a small concrete wall and a forty foot drop into the bay.

  Gripping the wheel as best I could, I hit the brakes. Splintered sawhorses flew everywhere. Construction gravel spewed all over but helped slow us down.

  Now black smoke poured out of the hood. Orange flames burst upward in front of my eyes. Inside, the car filled with smoke.

  I hurried to unclip Sophie from her car seat, straining backwards to reach. No good. I couldn’t get both hands far enough to undo the clasps. It didn’t take long to undo it, maybe it took twenty seconds, tops. That would be enough time.

  I jumped out, dodging the speeding traffic on the driver’s side. The wind from each passing vehicle shoved me back and forth, threatening to suck me onto the road. I reached the side door and flung it open, releasing a cloud of smoke as it did. One, two, three, the car seat was unbuckled and my daughter was free. Holding her to my chest, I rushed around the door and ran to the front of the car.

  I turned back to see the flames growing larger. Thick black smoke churned upwards into the pale blue sky.

  The slight wind on the bridge came from the west, so I had been driving into it. As I stood in front of the car watching the smoke pushing out faster and faster from under the hood, I thought about going to get anything of value inside. In the amount of time it took to wonder, the decision was made for me. It was only seconds before the whole car was engulfed in flames.

  There, in the middle of a sweltering hot bridge, I stood with my daughter in my arms. I had no time to grab my cell phone. I hadn’t packed a cooler because it was a short drive across the bridge. We stood there, with the sun scalding our heads and the pavement frying our feet, as a black column drifted to the heavens. The flames ravaged the car like a pack of starving animals.

  Traffic whizzed by at seventy miles per hour or more, barely a few feet from us. There was no place else to go, so I stood there, getting tugged on every time a car went past.

  I glanced at Sophie’s face as she watched the car become completely engulfed in fire. Two little smudges of dirt were under her nose. They were from the smoke. The few moments we were stuck breathing it was all that were needed to lightly coat our faces and clothes, but the real danger was from inhaling it. The fire is eating the air with you, but it eats it much faster. A few seconds more behind the wheel and I would have passed out from lack of oxygen.

  Then there would have been no one to get my daughter out of her car seat.

  She would have sat there, strapped in, struggling against the intense heat and the acrid smoke, until the fire took the last bits of air available. The two marks under her nostrils were a sign of how close we had come to doing exactly that.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She looked up at me.

  “Let’s try to blow your nose.”

  Holding her in my arms, I raised one hand and pinched her nose slightly with it. “Blow.”

  She blew. Black dirt splattered onto my hand. Smoke residue.

  “Again.”

  More black. And more, the third time. I wiped it off on my hip. Then I did the same for myself.

  It was a freak occurrence. I had just had the car serviced. Clean bill of health. But a random short in the electrical panel for that model caused a spark that happened to catch just right. They sold a million of those cars, and none of the others would have that happen. The service records showed that we had properly maintained the vehicle. Everyone, the police, the insurance inspectors, the insurance agent, all agreed: we were lucky.

  Standing on the bridge in the ninety-five degree heat, we didn’t feel lucky. It was hours before we got off the bridge. Other drivers had seen the fire and called for help, but it was a fire truck that arrived first. When the police finally arrived, they wanted statements and answers. They were sympathetic, but they didn’t
have sunscreen. The firefighters gave us bottled water, and the paramedics checked our lungs.

  We were fine. Scared, but fine. And tired.

  I consoled myself that I now had a good story for another time. Sucks when your car gets burned up.

  In the dark of the hotel room, I recalled feeling something else that day, too.

  Calm. Just calm.

  It was a characteristic I felt I always benefited from at work. In tough situations, when others panicked, I was able to keep cool. Really, that was when I performed best. It was the same during the car fire. Before I plowed into the sawhorses, I went through the steps necessary in my head. Get Sophie out. Get clear of the car. Lack of time would not allow me to keep driving.

  It saved our lives—even the firemen said so. They noted that if I had tried to drive even a few moments longer, the car would have been too filled with smoke, knocking me out, possibly crashing into the bay. At highway speeds, anything was possible.

  But when I did the math in my head, I knew I only had enough time to get my daughter unbuckled from her seat and to safety if I stopped immediately. I knew I’d probably destroy the car in the process. So I just did it. It never occurred to me to be nervous. There wasn’t time for that.

  That was true in the NICU, too. Watching our little baby wired up to machines, and watching my wife get weaker and weaker from stress every day, not knowing what would happen or how long it would all go on, I had a strange sense of calm. I prayed, because it felt right to pray. But I never let myself consider that our daughter wouldn’t be safe.

  To be honest, I actually worried a little that this ability to remain calm in such dire circumstances might somehow be abnormal.

  Back at the winery, I had only worried after I talked to Mallory. When I realized that she thought she had lost her whole family. Considering that, I felt tension. But at the time, I was almost detached. My impulse to go help the woman who had been hit was immediately replaced by the desire to protect our daughter for what she might see if I did rush over to help the victims. I let others rush in.

  I did not need to be a hero. I needed to be a good father.

  So why did I feel bad?

  Chapter 11

  The drive back to Florida was intentionally uneventful. Few stops were made; not a lot of conversations took place. Sophie’s oncoming head cold would be best fought with sleep, and if Mallory was going to catch it—and riding for twelve hours next to our daughter, she would—then sleep was her best defense, too.

  I just drove. The van’s satellite radio let me keep up with sports and news, so I checked out the weather situation for the ride home. A tropical storm formed off the east coast of Florida, but nobody knew which direction it was headed yet. That could mean a long drive back to Tampa in the rain, or the swirling winds of the brewing storm would pull all the moisture away from Tampa and give me crystal clear skies the whole way home.

  Either way, the best place for me now was Tampa, not thinking about my family getting a cold. And definitely not thinking about the three tragedies.

  But long drives are long for a reason. The endless stretch of gray asphalt ribbon allows minds to wander. To go where they shouldn’t.

  Mallory admitted how much things looked less and less like coincidences and more and more like . . . what, exactly? It haunted me.

  I didn’t know Virginia. It wasn’t fair to decide about a place after such a short period of time, but I didn’t know it. I couldn’t trust it. I knew Florida and I knew Indiana. I knew what to expect when things happened in the places I knew. I didn’t know Virginia that way. The small town law and their ways of doing things . . .

  It bothered me that the officers at the winery never took a written statement. It bothered me that close friends were so ready to throw old Mr. Hill under the bus. Lots of things bothered me about that day.

  I didn’t have answers. I didn’t understand Virginia that way. Florida, I did.

  And I would get some damned answers.

  I had time to make phone calls. I didn’t know the rules in every state we were going to pass through—driving while talking on a handheld cell phone might be illegal in some—so I played it safe and looked up the numbers I wanted while I was getting gas. They were ready to go when we started driving again.

  The first call was to our church, Our Lady Of Mercy. Although I didn’t attend mass regularly after Sophie’s baptism, I felt comfortable in my years of Catholic schooling to sit down with the head of the parish and discuss the connections between the strange things that kept happening to our family. It was worth a shot. Who do you go to for stuff like that?

  Then, I knew that an old high school friend was supposed to be a practicing priest somewhere in the area, and I had just run into my eighth grade English teacher at my niece’s wedding—he was a priest, too, and although it might make for an awkward conversation after so much time, he knew my dad and our whole family. He might be able to help.

  After that, I figured I’d end up wherever this was all headed anyway. Like a boat on a river, the direction of the current would influence things. If my wife was right, if these odd happenings were related somehow, then my family was on a course we weren’t directing, heading to a place we shouldn’t go. We needed to do our best to not end up there.

  Chapter 12

  “Did you call the church?”

  Mallory’s words were loud enough for me to hear but quiet enough to not draw our daughter’s attention. Sophie sat at the table pretending to eat while I fried a couple of eggs. I rarely ate breakfast, but I needed some energy after the long drive home.

  Instead of the usual cartoons, we had the TV turned to the news. The tropical storm, now larger, was headed to Tampa. I glanced out the window toward Sophie’s swing set: blue skies and green palms, still as statues. The swings weren’t even swaying, it was such a calm day. I leaned down to see the oak trees. They, too, stood tall and unmoving.

  I shook my head. Weather forecasters.

  Some storm preparations might be in order soon, but the first order of business was breakfast. The lack of cartoons made Sophie an even slower eater than usual.

  “I called the Church.” I turned my attention away from the meteorologist’s patented Doppler radar and back to my eggs, ignoring the colorful array of animated swirls on the TV. “I got their answering machine.”

  “They have an answering machine? And nobody answers at, what, nine-thirty in the morning on a week day?” Mallory grabbed the newspaper and took a seat next to Sophie.

  “I know, it seems weird.” I slid a spatula under the eggs and slid them onto a plate. “I can drive over later if they don’t call back. I guess they’re busy with, you know . . . church stuff.”

  “I guess.” She opened the paper and glanced at it, then laid it down. “Are you sure that’s even a good idea? I mean, what are they going to do?”

  “I don’t know what they can do.” I shrugged, picking a fork out of the drawer. “But it seems like a decent place to start. The Church has ideas on dealing with . . . exorcisms.”

  Mallory bristled at the mere mention of the word. When I mentioned it upstairs, she insisted Sophie was not possessed. I agreed. But it still launched a fight.

  “It’s just an example. They have rules for dealing with these types of things. If this is even one of these types of things.”

  Silence.

  “Look.” I laid my plate on the table and sat down. “You and Sophie play around the house today. Do some gardening together, have some relaxing quality time. I’ll go over and see the pastor at Our Lady Of Mercy and see what he thinks.”

  “He’s going to think we’re crazy.”

  “Yeah, well.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Honestly, wouldn’t that be the best possible outcome?”

  Mallory narrowed her eyes.

  “To have somebody with a clear head listen to all the information and decide that there’s nothing to it, and that we’re being ridiculous?” I cut into my eggs. “Man, t
hat would be music to my ears. I would love to hear we’re being hypochondriacs or whatever you’d call this.”

  Mallory lifted the paper up again. “Just go. Try not to get yourself thrown in the loony bin while you’re gone.”

  I grinned. “I’ll do my best, but I can’t promise anything.”

  I volunteered to do the breakfast dishes so the girls could get an early start on the gardening. When the church didn’t call back right away, I dug into the pile of work on my desk. After a few hours of updating reports, I took a break and allowed myself to do a little searching on the internet, looking for possible solutions to our situation. Mostly I found websites that were obvious scams, each one seeming hokier than the last, but there were a few that had possibilities.

  “Help For The Hopeful.” A simple black ad with white lettering, like a chalkboard, appeared when I searched paranormal activity solutions. A small white cross adorned the ad’s middle, blinking like a tiny neon light. Something about the ad seemed remarkably understated and honest. As I went to click on it, the phone rang.

  After giving my boss an update on a few reports, I pushed away from my desk. Somebody from the church should have called by now. I got up and walked over to the back window.

  Mallory and Sophie had been planting a border of small purple flowers around the palm trees on the terrace. Mother showed daughter each step, taking time to ensure it was done properly. I smiled at their matching hats and gardening gloves. Sophie appeared keen to learn everything, although she clearly enjoyed some parts more than others. Digging with the hand spade was one. Patting the dirt down around the newly nested plant was another. Mallory had to redo more than a few plants after Sophie jammed them into their new home.

  It looked like the project was having the desired effect—relaxation.

  The clock on the cable TV box read nearly one o’clock. I definitely should have gotten a call back from the church by now.

  The back door swung open. Dirty but happy, the gardeners stomped their feet to knock the mud off.

 

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