12
We took 295 heading north toward Baltimore and drove in a pleasant quiet. Part of me wanted to be a helicopter parent, remind him to do this or do that, tell him how to handle one academic crisis or another.
But Damon had left home at sixteen to chase his dreams. He knew how to take care of himself already, and that made me both proud and sad. My job as a parent had shrunk to the role of adviser, but once upon a time, I had been all he had.
Passing Hyattsville, Maryland, I flashed on the moment Damon was born, how my first wife, Maria, had sobbed with joy when the nurse laid him on her belly, a squirming, squealing miracle that I’d loved in an instant.
I managed to keep my mind from going to the night Maria was killed in a drive-by. Instead, my memories were of those first few years after Maria died, how ripped apart I’d felt unless I was holding Damon or Jannie, who’d been an infant at the time. Without Nana Mama I would never have been able to go on. My grandmother had stepped in as she had when I was a boy. She was Damon’s mother as much as she’d been mine.
Damon and I talked baseball near Laurel, Maryland, and both of us agreed that if Bryce Harper could stay healthy, he would put up Hall of Fame statistics. We’d gone to New York a few years ago for the All-Star Game and watched him hit in the Home Run Derby. Harper had freakish quickness and strength.
“He’s like Jannie, you know?” Damon said. “An outlier. There’s something special about them. You just see it when they move.”
“You’re not so bad yourself,” I said.
“I’m good enough to be a seventh or eighth man in Division One.”
“Never sell yourself short,” I said.
“Just being honest, and I’m good with coming off the bench, Dad,” he said. “Jannie, though? She’s in a world where very few people get to live.”
That was true. Seeing my daughter run on a track was like watching a gazelle chased by a lion and—
“Dad! Watch out!”
Six or seven car lengths in front of us, a twenty-seven-foot Jayco camping trailer attached to the back of a Ford F-150 pickup had started to swerve wildly. I got my foot on the brake a split second before the camper and pickup went into a wide, arcing skid and then jackknifed, flipped, and careened left, inches off our front bumper.
I hit the gas, shot forward, and went by it. The trailer smashed an oncoming car, the pickup slammed into something else, and then the whole mass of twisted metal went across the fast lane and down the embankment behind us.
“Holy shit!” Damon yelled. “Holy shit, we just almost died!”
My heart was slamming in my chest, and my hands were trembling on the wheel as I got over on the shoulder. We had almost died. The Grim Reaper had been right there but passed us by.
“C’mon,” I said, yanking out my cell and dialing 911. “We’ve got to help.”
Damon jumped out and ran back down the road to the embankment while I told the dispatcher what had happened.
When I reached the pickup, Damon shook his head. The driver was dead and hanging out the back window. We heard a baby crying in the car that had been hit by the travel trailer and flipped onto its roof.
“Help!” a woman yelled. “Someone please help us.”
Damon got down on his knees by the car and I did too. The young mom’s head was bleeding hard. The baby was upside down but appeared uninjured, mostly just upset about being upside down.
“We’ve got an ambulance coming,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Sally Jo,” she said. “Sally Jo Hepner. I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. Am I gonna die?”
“I think you’ll need a lot of stitches, but you’re not going to die. What’s your baby’s name?”
I could already hear sirens.
“Bobby,” she said. “After my dad.”
Damon had wriggled in through the window and gotten the car seat free. He squirmed back and pulled him out. Bobby Hepner was fussing, but just showing him his mother seemed to quiet him down.
Firemen and EMTs were on the scene within five minutes of the crash. We stayed until we saw the mom safely extracted from the car and put on a backboard with a neck collar, just in case. One of the EMTs carried her baby into the ambulance.
“Looks like our work here is done,” I said. “Let’s get you to school.”