Triggers

Chapter 41

Nikki Van Hausen was driving home from her meeting with Jan Falconi; she hoped the poor girl could find some peace. In her trunk were a couple of “Open House” signs that she’d need tomorrow; Sunday was a big day for such things.

Open house.

Letting strangers in, letting them poke around, letting them imagine their own lives superimposed on the bare bones of a building: this place, but with their furniture. People would come in and try to decide whether this was a suitable spot for laying down years of new memories.

It was snowing. Nikki turned on her windshield wipers. As she drove along, she was distracted by Eric’s memories—a press conference this afternoon, the surgery yesterday morning. So much had happened in such a short time!

And those were just his new memories. Eric was fifteen years older than Nikki. It was strange to think that she now had more memories in her head of his life than of her own—a decade and a half more, to be precise: another fifteen Christmases, a dozen more vacations, the big bash when he’d turned forty, the more subdued one when he’d turned fifty, splitting from his wife, burying his parents, watching his son head off to college.

Despite the fact that the streets were slick and wet, the traffic was sailing along. She had her radio set to DC101. The current song was “Don’t Cha” by the Pussycat Dolls, and she realized as it played that Eric didn’t know it at all; it didn’t conjure up any memories for him—he was the wrong generation.

A car cut in front of Nikki, bringing her attention fully back to the road. She hated aggressive drivers at the best of times, and when it was snowing, there really was no excuse for it.

The Pussycat Dolls sang their final refrain and a traffic report came on. Things were moving surprisingly well, and—

And another maniac came careening past her, cutting in and out of traffic, and—

And the car in front of her, a white Ford Focus, swerved to make room. Nikki hit her horn, two other cars veered, she heard the squeal of tires and the sound of a high-speed impact, and she saw the Focus roll over as another car plowed into it. She pumped her brakes, but—

Damn! She hit the car in front of her, and her air bag deployed. She pitched forward into it and heard more groaning metal plus the sound of shattering glass, and, muffled by the air bag, screams.

She was dazed for a few moments, then the air bag deflated, and she saw a red carnation bloom of blood on it as it pulled away from her face. She reached a hand up and it came away wet; she looked down and saw blood dripping onto her pantsuit.

Nikki turned off her car, then flipped down the visor and looked at herself in the mirror on the back of it. Her nose didn’t seem to be broken, thank God, although it was certainly bleeding.

Her back hurt, but not severely. Her windshield had cracked in a thousand places, and that made it almost impossible to see what was in front of her. She went to check her rearview mirror—and saw only the stem that had attached it to the window; the mirror itself must have gone flying in the impact.

She used her sleeve to wipe the blood from her nose; she really needed something to stanch the flow, though, and her purse had gone flying, too, apparently.

Nikki looked out her side window. Another crashed car was right up against her door—she couldn’t get out that way. And so she undid the seat belt and hauled herself across to the passenger seat. As she made her way over the center hump, she saw her purse way in the back, on the shelf beneath the rear window. She continued across the front and tried to open the passenger door. It was stuck and she was afraid that it had been damaged in the crash, but—

But no; it wasn’t stuck—it was just locked. She never used this door, and it took her a second to find the release, blood falling like rain from her nose onto the tan upholstery.

The door opened. She hauled herself out into the early-evening darkness and surveyed the damage to her own car. The front end had accordioned. She had the presence of mind to worry about whether the gas in the tank was going to explode, and she bent down—an action that sent daggers of pain through her—and looked underneath to see if gasoline was leaking out. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but she didn’t think so.

And then, hands on hips, she surveyed the scene. In front of her, all three lanes of traffic were blocked by smashed vehicles that were now skewed across the road. The asphalt glistened in the streetlamps, and snow continued to sift down. She went over to the guardrail on the right side and climbed on it so she could have a better view.

Another wrecked car and a smashed pickup truck were blocking the road in front of the three cars she’d already seen. Some of the other drivers and passengers were out of their vehicles now, too. She looked behind her and saw cars backed up as far as she could see. Horns were blaring, and there was another sound: someone screaming, “Help! Help!”

The source was off to her left: the furthest of the three cars blocking the highway. She headed over to see what was going on, and—

Damn! Her feet almost went out from under her, and she felt a jolt of pain; the road was slick with ice. She steadied herself by grabbing onto the side of one of the other wrecked cars. Its driver was now outside, too, but he was just leaning against his front fender, looking dazed, his face bloodied. She made her way over to the car the screams were coming from—and, as she got closer, she saw that the entire windshield had shattered and fallen away, and the front end of the car was pushed in even more than her own had been. She approached from the car’s right side. There were two people within: a male driver and a female passenger, both white, both in their forties.

“Are you okay?” Nikki said.

“My legs!” the woman shouted. “They’re pinned!”

Nikki craned to look inside; the car had been compacted enough that the dashboard was right up against the woman’s chest; there was no way to get her out.

“And my husband,” the woman said, imploringly. “My husband!”

The only way to get to the other side of the car was by clambering over the trunk, which was still reasonably intact. Nikki did so and made her way along the driver’s side to the front door.

“It’s locked!” Nikki called out. She tried to reach through the space where the windshield used to be, and the pinned woman stretched as much as she could, trying to reach the unlock button; it was the passenger who got to it first, and the door unbolted with a sound like a gunshot.

Nikki opened the ruined door—it took all her strength to get it to swing outward, given how twisted it was. The steering column was bent downward. The male driver had been thrown forward and his neck had smashed against the top of the steering wheel; the car either was too old to have a driver’s-side air bag, or it had malfunctioned.

The man had been exposed to the elements longer than Nikki had, and he wasn’t wearing a winter coat; Nikki could see his parka draped across the backseat. Still, she thought, it wasn’t that cold; he shouldn’t be turning blue from the chill, and—

And it wasn’t from the chill; it was from lack of oxygen! She didn’t want to move him—he might well have a neck injury, but if he wasn’t breathing, then any other injury wouldn’t matter in a few minutes. She steadied his head and neck as much as she could with her hands as she gently tipped his whole body backward into the seat.

His throat was caved in, right below the jawline.

Nikki stood up and looked around again, but nothing had changed. There was no way an ambulance could get to them.

“Help!” she shouted. Perhaps eight or nine people, in various states of injury, were visible outside their vehicles, some bloodied, a couple lying down on the asphalt. “This man needs help! Are any of you doctors?”

A few of the people looked at her. One man shouted, “No,” and a woman called out, “Let me know if you find one!”

Nikki inhaled deeply then let the air out; it was cold enough that she could easily see her own breath, and that of the woman pinned in the passenger seat—but there was no sign of any breath coming from the driver.

She felt herself beginning to panic. Christ, what to do? What to do? She rubbed her hands together, trying to warm them. Then she brought them to her face to blow on them, and saw them—covered with blood.

And it came to her: this man needed a crike—an emergency cricothyrotomy—right away. No, no, not right away: stat.

And—yes, yes, yes—Eric knew how to perform one, and so she knew how to do it, too.

But he—she!—needed a scalpel, or at least something really sharp.

“Oh, God!” said the pinned woman, looking now at her husband, whose blue color was becoming more pronounced. “Oh, God—he’s dying!”

Nikki undid the man’s seat belt, and, with great effort, pulled him out onto the cold wet pavement, laying him on his back. She didn’t have a razor blade or knife—not even back in her purse. But there were shards from the car’s broken mirrors, and she found one that was long, narrow, and pointed.

The top part of the man’s Adam’s apple was crushed. She moved her fingers down about an inch until she felt the bulge of the cricoid cartilage. She backed up a bit, finding the valley between it and the Adam’s apple—the cricothyroid membrane.

She knew she should sterilize the mirror fragment and the man’s skin, but there was no way—and no time!—to do that. She held the shard as firmly as she could without cutting herself, and she drew it horizontally down the man’s neck, above the membrane, but—

But she didn’t even break the skin. Knowing how to do it wasn’t the same as having the guts to do it, it seemed.

“What are you doing?” shouted the man’s wife, who could only see that Nikki was on her knees at the side of her husband; her husband’s body was mostly out of view.

It was a good question. What the hell was she doing?

What she had to do. What she—what Eric—had trained to do.

She took another deep breath, then tried the cut again, this time at least breaking the skin. But she had to go twelve millimeters deep—except she had no idea how much twelve millimeters was. Damn! It was—it was—

About half an inch.

She pushed the glass in further, making the incision. Blood welled up, thick and dark, and—

Damn! The glass broke; the sharp tip was now stuck in the wound. Nikki threw the rest of her impromptu scalpel away and it clattered against the pavement. She used her thumb and forefinger to dig out the piece of glass, tossing it aside as well. The tissues pressed together, closing the incision.

Nikki reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a ballpoint stick pen—one with her firm’s name emblazoned across it; a good real-estate agent always had a pen handy to close the deal. She pulled out the writing tip and its attached tube of ink, and fumbled in the cold to pry off the blue end cap until, at last, she had a plastic tube open at both ends.

She was supposed to insert the tube about twenty millimeters, and, well, if twelve was half an inch, then…

She pushed the tube into the incision. And then she blew into the tube and placed her palm flat on his chest. It rose! She paused for five seconds, blew in again, waited another five seconds, exhaled once more, counted off five more Mississippis, again and—

And the man’s eyes fluttered open.

She waited to see if he was breathing well on his own—and he seemed to be; she was pleased to see puffs of condensation blowing out of the end of the tube.

Nikki rolled back on her rump, drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them, and just sat there, waiting for her own breathing to stabilize. After a minute or two, she reached up to touch her nose to see if it was still bleeding; it wasn’t—but it certainly was tender to the touch.

Off in the distance, she heard sirens; God only knew when trained medics would get here, but…

But she was a trained medic now, it seemed. And as much as she’d freaked out at the hospital, as much as she really didn’t wish to intrude on Eric’s and Jan’s lives, as much as she just wanted things to be the way they had been before this craziness began, she had just saved a person’s life.

And that was something she’d always remember.