The Tell

Thump. Thump. Thump.

That was the sound that got through, low and steady, coming up through the seat and the wheel and into me, and it pulled me up out of somewhere I should not have been. In the half second it took to open my eyes I understood all of it at once. Not a dream. Not the kind you wake out of and lie there grateful. I was in my car and my car was moving and I was not driving it. The thumps were the reflectors going under my tires. I had crossed the line on a two-lane road and there were headlights out in front of me where nothing should have been, and they were close, and they were coming.

Oh God.

Not the curse. The other one. The shortest prayer there is, the one with nothing on the end of it, just help, and there was no time for the rest of it anyway, because then it was loud and it was dark and I was going over.

I hit their back tire, driver's side, and spun them out, and my own tire blew, and that is what put me over. Three times, or four, nobody could say for sure. A hundred feet off the road, near enough. I did not feel any of it. That is not me being careful with the memory, it is the fact of it. No sensation of turning, no falling, no sense of the world rolling around me. Loud and dark and long, and then it stopped.

And nothing hurt.

I did not lie in that wreck afraid. What came up in me was joy. A wave of it, huge and stupid and pure. I was alive. I had been sure, in that last half second, that I was going to die, and I had not died, and the adrenaline came up under everything and burned it clean out of me, and I went from gone to wide awake in one breath. My car was destroyed and I was lying on my side inside of it and I was happy.

So I reached for my phone, and my phone was there.

When I drive I keep it jammed down between my leg and the seat, because I hate it in my pocket where your hand fights the seatbelt every time. That car had just gone end over end down a highway and off it, and my phone was still wedged right where I put it. If it had been anywhere else it would have been out in the grass in the dark somewhere, and the whole night after that goes a different way.

I called Rachael. She was asleep, barely far enough along with our third to know it, her phone on silent, and back then neither of us knew you could set a phone to let one person through. I called six times. She never moved.

So I called the next person I would call, which is Peter. He is a pastor and a friend, and he is the kind of man who will spend his entire night on you if you call him at midnight, which is exactly what he did. He picked up playful, the way you answer a friend calling late. I said, I was just in an accident, I don't know where I am, I don't know exactly what happened, but I'm alive. I said it the way you deliver good news. From inside that car it was the only news there was.

His voice went flat. Have you called 911?

It had not once entered my mind. I dialed my wife six times and then I dialed him, because what I wanted was to talk to somebody. I was alive. I was not hurt. What did I need them for?

Then there was a person walking into the woods where I was, a phone up against their ear, and I said into mine, somebody's here, they probably called. Are you okay? they said, down through the window. Yes, I said. I'm all right. I'm not hurting, I'm fine. Cheerful about it. Glad. Peter told me later they had probably taken me for a man in shock, talking like that, and I understand why they would. It was not shock. I had not died and I could not get over it.

I did try to get myself out. I kicked at the windshield and it would not go, and I quit fast because it hurt.

The fire department came and could not get the doors open, so they cut the windshield out, and then could not pull me through it, because the steering wheel sat between me and the opening. Somebody passed a blanket in through the gap and told me to cover up. Then they broke out the driver's window and brought me out that way, with the blanket over me, and put me in the ambulance.

Peter was still on the line. Ask them where they're taking you, he said. So I said, my friend wants to know where he can meet me, and one of them said Waterman, which is the hospital closest to my house. He said, okay, I'll meet you there, and we hung up. Somewhere between that ditch and those doors somebody made the call that I belonged in a trauma unit, and the trauma unit was at Sanford, and nobody told my friend. He was in his car two hours that night, at the wrong hospital first, tracking me down.

There was a smell in that ambulance I did not recognize and have never smelled since. Then the adrenaline let go of me and I went under, and there is nothing after that.

\* \* \*

I came up hours later in a hospital room, and Peter was sitting there, and I looked at him and came apart. I do not know what I said. I do not know that I said anything. He says I woke and cried and slept, and woke and cried and slept, and did it more than once. They had asked me a lot of questions somewhere in there and I do not think I could have answered any of them. I was scared, and I could not have told you of what.

At some point a doctor was standing there telling me they had scanned me and poked me and x-rayed me while I was out, and there was nothing. Some arthritis coming on in my hips, he said, half kidding, something to deal with one day. Other than that, good to go. I could not take it in. Even the people in that room kept saying it, that I did not look like a man who had just been through what I had been through.

And then a police officer walked in, and everything in me braced, because I had been drinking.

He had come about a ticket. Reckless driving, and that was the whole of it. He did not ask me one question. Nobody drew my blood that night. Nobody suggested it. I have never been able to explain why, and I have stopped trying, because to say that I did not count it as grace would be a lie.

Then, partway through, he mentioned the people in the other car.

And the floor went out from under me, because I had not thought about them. I knew at the instant of impact that I had hit somebody, and then that knowledge went somewhere and did not come back, and it took a man in a uniform standing at the foot of my bed to bring it into the room. For a moment I was face to face with what I might have just done. That was the hardest moment of the whole night, and the only one I would call unbearable. He said they were all right. They had asked to be taken in and looked over, but they were not hurt. He said they walked away from it in better shape than I did.

\* \* \*

Here is how I got there. The holidays were on us, which is the busy season when you DJ, Christmas parties stacking in on top of the weddings, and I had come through one long stretch of them and was at the back end of a second. A couple of weeks before, Rachael and I had gone to a vendor Christmas party, and getting out of the car in the lot she caught a smell nobody else could smell, and I said, yep, you're pregnant. That was always her tell. All three times, it was a smell. We were not the kind to sit on that news, so we told everybody that first week of December. Our third. That is Ransom.

So that is the ground this night was standing on. A full calendar, a new baby coming, good news in my house, and one more wedding to work.

And I was tired. Genuinely tired, two stretches deep into a season that does that to you, the kind of tired that stops announcing itself and just becomes how you are.

At the wedding I ordered a drink. I did that sometimes, depending on the venue, depending on the team, whenever it was allowed. That night it was allowed, and I ordered one, and then the bartender started bringing me drinks I had not asked for. I did not send any of them back. What I remember thinking, and I remember it clearly, is that this guy is really nice. That is where my attention was. I probably missed dinner, the way you do when the timing of an event runs against you, but I cannot swear to it.

I do not know how many I had.

I do not remember packing up my equipment. I do not remember carrying it out or loading it. I do not remember leaving the building or getting into my car or pulling out onto the road or any single mile of the drive.

The next thing in my life is thump, thump, thump.

That is why I could not stay awake at that wheel. Not the season. Not the hours. I fell asleep at the wheel of my car on a two-lane highway because I had had too much to drink on an empty stomach, and I put my car through somebody's back tire at speed. The adrenaline covered it well enough that a room full of hospital people and a police officer never asked. Peter told me long afterward that he had had his suspicions that night, but that I had just come through something violent and there was nothing about me a man could point at.

\* \* \*

They had cut some of my clothes off me somewhere in all that, and I remember what I thought when I saw them. Not my good vest. That was where my head was.

Peter drove me home, and it was a quiet ride, and it was very late or very early depending on how you count it. I had my keys, so I let myself into my own house without waking anybody, and I went down the hall to our room trying to think how a man wakes his wife gently for a thing like this. I never wake her. So the waking was already the news.

She came up out of sleep all at once. I don't know if it was my face or if she just knew.

What's up?

I was in an accident, I said. But I'm okay. I'm here. The car rolled over. I tried to call you.

And she remembered her phone on silent and put that together, and she sat up in the dark and looked at me standing whole in the middle of our bedroom without one mark anywhere on me, and she said, are you okay? It did not look real to her. It did not look like it had happened at all.

I told her Peter had come and gotten me. I told her roughly where it happened, on the back road out on 44. I told her I had fallen asleep at the wheel, and drifted.

I fell asleep.

Every word of that was true, and I did not have to work at choosing it. I did fall asleep. The reflectors woke me. I was tired, honestly tired, deep into a hard season, and so the story stood up on its own legs and did not need one thing added to it, which is exactly why it worked. I did not make anything up. I did not build a story. I told her the truth and I left out all of the why.

I left out the drinks.

And that is how I lived. Not fabrications. Not invented stories. Just the true thing with the part cut out of it that would have made me look bad, handed to the person it was owed to, and she takes it, because why wouldn't she.

There was no moment in that bedroom where I stood there and chose it. There was never a version of me at a fork weighing it out. That choice got made hours earlier, in a hospital room, when nobody drew my blood.

I fell asleep after that. I do not think she slept at all.

\* \* \*

I did not go to church that morning. I woke in time to stream it, and Peter was on the platform preaching after the night he had just spent, and I watched my friend from my couch and thought, that is amazing. I did not get up off that couch much for the rest of the day.

It was a heavy day. The accident was bad enough on its own, but the accident is not what made it heavy. The weight was the lie, and it was on me from the time I opened my eyes.

I called my mom, because of course I did, and I told her about the accident, and I left out the same part. It was not a decision by then. The story came out of me already shaped, with the one piece gone, exactly the way it had come out in my bedroom hours before, and by that point it was simply what had happened. That was the story. That was the only version there was.

And underneath the whole day one question kept coming back around at me. Would people believe me? Would everybody believe me? My church family most of all.

At some point I picked up my phone and there was the last picture I had taken, from the night before, at the venue. A warehouse somebody had turned into something beautiful, and me talking over it about how they had pulled it off. I sat there looking at it. That was almost the last picture I ever took. That was almost what got left behind of me. And it is not even a picture of me.

That evening I drove out to the junkyard to see about the car and it was closed, whether we were late or they had shut early I do not know, but I could see it from where I stood. It was under a tarp with a wheel set on top to keep the wind from taking it, the exploded tire still partly attached to it, and a man cannot see much of a car that way, which was as much of it as I could have handled. Rachael and the girls were with me. I was glad it was covered. They did not need to see what was under there.

Around dinnertime I posted a picture of it. The tarp and the wheel.

I wanted the prayers. I needed them and I knew I needed them. And I also knew exactly what I was not saying while I asked, and the wanting and the guilt sat in me at the same time and neither one moved the other, and I posted it anyway. There were two pictures on my phone by then, about twenty-four hours apart. A room somebody had made beautiful, and a tarp with a wheel on it.

Late that night I was in the bed in a funk, not ready for sleep, not doing anything, and I looked at my phone and saw on the door camera that a package had come. Just a box, sitting out on the porch. So I got up to go get it, the way you get up to get a package.

And at my own front door I stopped.

I stood there with my hand on it and I did not want to open it. And when I did open it, I did not want to go out. I did not want to step into my own yard. What it was, and I knew it standing there, was fear of the dark. The plain kind. The kind a child feels. I do not know that I had ever felt it in my life, not once that I can remember.

I put my arm out through the doorway and got hold of the box and pulled it in without stepping outside, and shut the door.

And right after that, the phone rang. Dave and Aslinn, two of the best friends I have, calling for no reason they could have named, asking if they could pray with me. I needed it more than I had words for. Praise God for people who walk in the Spirit, because they knew what I needed before I had told a soul.

\* \* \*

I went back for the car the next day, and it was uncovered.

I had gotten the address off the bottom of my ticket. I started in the office with the paperwork and asked the tow driver what he had seen out there. He said I must have had some real speed on me, because his cable runs a hundred feet and he had used almost every foot of it bringing my car up to the truck. He said he has seen a lot of cars flip. He said mine looked closer to three or four times.

Then I looked in it, and I saw the dolly.

I haul my equipment on a dolly, and the dolly rides up on top of the load, resting there, the way it always does. When the car went over, the dolly came down on my head. Not into it. Against it, or near enough that I had to move the thing off me to get out, and I had done that in the dark without one thought about what it was. Standing there in daylight looking at where it sat, I did the arithmetic on it. That thing could have split my head open. It should have. I had not thought about it one time until that moment, and then I could not think about anything else.

There was almost nothing to save. The car had come to rest down in a ditch with water in it, water and sand, and I never learned where the water came from. I pulled out what little was worth pulling out.

And then I saw the other car, sitting in that same yard, right next to mine.

The one I hit. It was beat up. Set beside what was left of mine, it was almost nothing. I stood between the two of them and saw with my own eyes what the officer had told me in that hospital room, and it was the only thing in those days that lifted instead of sank, and I was more thankful than I knew how to say.

\* \* \*

The fear did not leave with the daylight. It kept coming back, a few days of it, that childish dread arriving at night in my own house, and I had no idea where it had come from or what to do about it. So I told Peter. I told him I was struggling, that I was afraid of the dark.

His counsel surprised me. He did not tell me it would pass and he did not explain it to me. He said, well, maybe you should ask God where he was. Where was he during the accident?

So I prayed it. God, show me. Show me what happened. Show me where you were.

And he showed me, in one of the most vivid dreams I have ever had. He showed me why there was not a scratch on me.

He was holding me. Cradling me the way you cradle a baby, the way you rock a baby to sleep, and he held me like that while the car went over and over and came apart around me.

And it lined up exactly with what that crash had felt like from the inside. I never felt myself go upside down. I never felt the turning, never felt the turbulence of it, none of it. It was quiet, and it was loud, and nothing in that car ever touched me. He held me through it. That is why nothing touched me. That is why I do not carry a mark from it anywhere on my body. The only thing that hurt me the next day was my right foot, from kicking at that windshield, and that one was mine.

I had a real encounter with God that night. As real as anything that has ever happened to me, and I have never once doubted it.

It should have been enough to change me.

And later that same night, when the test came to tell the truth, I failed it.