There were sirens, and blood, and shocked children, and there were two mangled cars in the road.
I remember hearing the wreck, the smash, from over the hill.
I remember running as if through a bad dream, legs trapped in molasses.
I remember thinking my loved one was in that tangle somewhere.
But then I saw her green van, not the green van that lay crumpled and forlorn before me, some stranger still trapped behind the wheel, and even as I helped the children from the other vehicle, the truck, to sit at the roadside, looking shellshocked, me feeling useless, there was some withheld part of me leaping as I saw my sister's puzzled face behind the tinted window of the van she'd actually been riding in, unwrecked, idling as the emergency crews came to tidy this mess that had happened only 5 minutes before she was due home.
I also remember the unhurt children helped to the roadside. Shivering, though it was August.
