Page 6 of Catch a Kiwi
I’d slowed automatically for the drive, and now, I turned in. And nearly hit a splintered wooden beam.Post box,I realized, because the box itself was on the ground, a few white envelopes spilling out of it.
I didn’t swear. I stopped, got out of the car, and ran to haul the broken pieces out of the way. That’s why I was dragging a piece of splintered wood when I heard the shouting. Not on the road. In the bush. In the rain. Down the hill.
“Help,” the voice was yelling.“Help!”More than scared. Panicked.
I ran.
3
THE ROOT OF SUFFERING
Summer
That moment when your heart stops beating. When your lungs stop moving. When your blood freezes.
Delilah, hanging upside down by her shoulder harness, not moving. The van, sitting on its roof, caught by trees on the downhill side, the driver’s side, but looking precarious, like it could slide more at any moment. The mud practically flowing under my feet.
“Delilah!” I shouted over the storm through the shattered passenger window.“Delilah!Wake up! You have to move! Come on, baby.” My voice high, shaking, not sounding like mine at all. “Please, baby. Wake up.”
She just hung there.
Open the door and get her.Except that the doors wouldn’t open. Not the passenger-side one, and not the sliding rear door. This side of the car was completely off the ground, so that wasn’t why. Because the doors hadn’t unlocked. Because they’d jammed. Something. I got my sandaled feet onto the broken-out window ledge and pulled myself up as pebbles ofglass showered around me, and the van rocked, shifted, and slid three more feet, front-first. I barely held on, and when it slammed to a stop again with a shudder against another tree, I forced my shaking feet back down to the ground and tried to think.
Get back up to the road and … and try to find somebody in a house. Somebody driving by.And then it hit me.Your phone, you idiot. Call for help.Where was my phone, though? Not in my pocket. It had been in the van, in a nook set into the dash where a radio had once been. Was it still there? I risked another look. No. Our belongings were scattered over the ground all the way up to the driveway. Clothes. Sunglasses. Dishes. Packets of food. Papers. My purse and Delilah’s backpack would be somewhere up there, too.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy to find one phone thrown from a rolling van in the dim light, in the rain and mud, but I tried anyway. I couldn’t think what else to do.
Up the hill and down it again, shifting the sweaters, the twisted legs of jeans, a frying pan, looking under a lone sandal. No phone.
Breathe,I told myself.There’s no perfect thing to do. There’s only the thing you think of next. You have to get her out. The van could slip more and you could be hurt, but what other choice do you have?
Somehow, that changed things. The panic wasn’t in the front of my brain anymore, but sitting off at a distance, its wings folded, waiting, and I was numb, seeing only the task in front of me.
Go to the front and climb in through the windshield.I did it, and the van rocked, but the trees held it, and I was crouched against the padded inside of the roof, my head butting up against the passenger seat, crawling toward Delilah, inching my way so as not to destabilize the van, my sliced, bruisedknees protesting. I registered the rasp of my own breathing as if from a long way away, reached around and found the button for the seatbelt, and hesitated.
She’ll fall on her head.
One arm around her waist, the fingers of the other hand on the button, and I pushed. Best I could do.
It didn’t give. Stupid ancient van. Stupid sticky seatbelts. Stupid me for buying it.
Not helping.I tightened my arm around Delilah and pressed my fingers down with all my might. And felt the belt give way.
Both arms around Delilah. She was smaller than me, slimmer than me, but she was so heavy. I couldn’t drop her, though, so I held on, trying to disentangle her from the seatbelt that was still holding her under the arm.
It didn’t work. Her weight was pulling the seatbelt tight, and I couldn’t lift her.
Try from outside. You have no leverage here.
Out the windshield again, crawling over twisted metal, the pebbles of glass, feeling something slice my palm and then my leg, the pain like a line of fire, and ignoring it. Around to the driver’s side again, but it was no good. There was no way through the trees that held the van.
Rope,I thought wildly.People do something with ropes.But I didn’t have any rope, and I didn’t know what to do.
I heard something, then. Didn’t I? An engine? A car door?
Oh. It was a driveway. It was ahouse.
Up the hillside again. The going harder this time, because it was that much muddier, that much wetter. Pulling myself up by roots, by branches, by the very fronds of ferns themselves. Hand over hand, panting with it, and yelling with everything I had.
