of metal against metal, showers of yellow sparks plumed up, mingling
with the falling snow, like swarms of summer fireflies that had flown
through a time warp into the wrong season.
The car shuddered to a halt, canted up slightly at the front left
corner, evidently hooked on a guard post. For an instant the resultant
silence was so deep that Lindsey was half stunned by it; she shattered
it with an explosive exhalation.
She had never before experienced such an overwhelming sense of relief.
Then the car moved again.
It began to tilt to the left. The guardrail was giving way, perhaps
weakened by corrosion or by the erosion of the highway shoulder beneath
it.
“Out!” Hatch shouted, frantically fumbling with the release on his
safety harness.
Lindsey didn’t even have time to pop loose of her own harness or grab
the door handle before the railing cracked apart and the Honda slipped
into the ravine. Even as it was happening, she couldn’t believe it.
The brain acknowledged the approach of death, while the heart stubbornly
insisted on immortality. In almost five years she had not adjusted to
Jimmy’s death, so she was not easily going to accept the imminence of
her own demise.
In a jangle of detached posts and railings, the Honda slid sideways
along the ice-rusted slope, then flipped over as the embankment grew
steeper.
Gasping for breath, heart pounding, wrenched painfully from side to side
in her harness, Lindsey hoped for a tree, a rock outcropping, anything
that would halt their fall, but the embankment seemed clear.
She was not sure how often the car rolled-maybe only twice-because up
and down and left and right lost all meaning. Her head banged into the
ceiling almost hard enough to knock her out. She didn’t know if she’d
been thrown upward or if the roof had caved in to meet her, so she tried
to slump in her seat, afraid the roof might crumple further on the next
roll and crush her skull. The headlights slashed at the night, and from
the wounds spouted torrents of snow. Then the windshield burst,
showering her with minutely fragmented safety glass, and abruptly she
was plunged into total darkness. Apparently the headlights blinked off
and the dashboard lights, reflected in Hatch’s sweat-slicked face. The
car rolled onto its roof again and stayed there. In that inverted
posture it sledded farther into the seemingly bottomless ravine, with
the thunderous noise of a thousand tons of coal pouring down a steel
chute.
The gloom was utterly tenebrous, seamless, as if she and Hatch were not
outdoors but in some windowless funhouse, rocketing down a rollercoaster
track. Even the snow, which usually had a natural phosphorescence, was
wind drove them through the empty windshield frame, but she could not
see them even as they frosted her lashes.
Struggling to quell a rising panic, she wondered if she had been blinded
by the imploding glass.
Blindness.
That was her special fear. She was an artist. Her talent took
inspiration from what her eyes observed, and her wonderfully dexterous
hands rendered inspiration into art with the critical judgment of those
eyes to guide them. What did a blind painter paint? What could she
hope to create if suddenly deprived of the sense that she relied upon
the most?
Just as she started to scream, the car hit bottom and rolled back onto
its wheels, landing upright with less impact than she had anticipated.
It came to a halt almost gently, as if on an immense pillow.
“Hatch?” Her voice was hoarse.
After the cacophonous roar of their plunge down the ravine wall, she
felt half deaf, not sure if the preternatural silence around her was
real or only perceived.
“Hatch?”
She looked to her left, where he ought to have been, but she could not
see him-or anything else.
She was blind.
“Oh, God, no. Please.”
She was thirsty, too. The car seemed to be turning, wallowing like an
airborne kite dipping and rising in the thermal currents of a summer
sky.
“Hatch!”
No response.
Her light-headedness increased. The car rocked and wallowed worse than
ever. Lindsey was afraid she would faint. If Hatch was injured, he