Content area
Full Text
Woke in the ambulance
Didn't know what had hit me, and woke in the speeding ambulance
Speaking of the accident (as she would afterward call it, when she spoke of it at all) she intended to give, to friends, an account of her own folly. How impulsive she was. Yet brave. Yet reckless. Woke in the ambulance and the first thing I asked, Am I still alive?
Rachael her name was spelled in the old way R A C H A E L.
Rachael this was a sign (she'd so interpreted it, since girlhood) of
belonging to another, more significant time.
Rachael she was not a girl any longer. A woman who'd behaved, in an emergency, without due caution.
But the boy was hurt! I had to help him.
Yes. There was a boy!
What relief, to get outside! After the storm. She'd walked on Pine Ridge Road in the breathless aftermath of pelting rain, gale-force winds. Oh, but Rachael felt good, outdoors after that long thunderous night! Her breath steamed. For mid-April, it was damned cold. But blindingly bright. The storm had been blown away. The sun, pale and opalescent, looked to have been washed clean. Everywhere were puddles glaring with light like broken pieces of mirror. The road was strewn with storm debris. Fallen limbs of trees, enormous branches, an uprooted, aged pine. A heavy pine bough had crushed a neighbor's mailbox. Tree branches were twined in telephone lines that drooped as in a surreal work of art. Beside the road high tension wires hung loose, crackling dangerously, giving off visible sparks. Rachael heard a warning sound as of a hive of maddened wasps.
In the night she'd heard the Harpie-cries. Spirits of storm that carry souls to Hades.
Hiking now in the center of the road, where there were fewer puddles.
This was a semi-rural, semi-suburban neighborhood built on a densely wooded glacial ridge above a city of forty thousand inhabitants, in eastern Pennsylvania. Most of the houses on Pine Ridge Road were small mansions originally built by railroad and mining executives in the early decades of the twentieth century; made of sandstone, or limestone, or brick-and-stucco, or granite. Some of these old houses were in immaculate condition; others were weatherworn and...