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ther’s voice as the oncoming vehicle drew closer.
“Dim those lights, you son of a bitch.” He flashed his own lights.
“Hank,” their mother reproved. Headlights, two blinding orbs, flooded the interior with harsh white light. “Hank! Watch out!”
Too late!
Trying to avoid the imminent collision, Father cranked on the steering wheel, and the car began to slide. Out of control. The passing truck hit their rear end and sent the Volvo spinning crazily. Cleo screamed and was flung across Grace. Grace’s head hit the side window. Pain exploded in her skull.
Mother was yelling, “Watch out, watch out, oh, God!” as the wagon hit the rail, bounced back onto the slick pavement, and skidded ever faster to the other side of the bridge.
The reeling Volvo crashed through the guardrail in a horrifying groan of twisting metal, popping tires, and splintering glass.
Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God . . . Down the car plunged!
Cleo was screaming.
Mother prayed.
And Father cursed as Grace lost consciousness. She didn’t feel the crash that snapped her mother’s neck and caused broken ribs to puncture her father’s lungs. She hadn’t been awake to
witness Cleo being flung from the car and pinned beneath it, crushed to death.
Eighteen days later, Grace awoke in a hospital to learn that the rest of her family was gone. Dead. She’d managed to live, though she’d been half frozen in the creek waters, her body temperature
CHOSEN TO DIE
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dangerously low, only a few bruises from the seat belt and a concussion to indicate she’d been in the deadly wreck. No other driver or damaged vehicle had ever been located and when she was advised that her family was dead, she’d simply answered
“No.”
Because she saw them.
Talked to them.
All of them: Father, Mother, and Cleo.
Even now. Forty-some years later.
Of course, the hospital staff were sure she was crazy, hallucinating, her brain conjuring up images. If only, she thought now as the dog rounded a corner and she saw her small house, flanked by snowdrifts and dark as sin, sitting on a small hillock just off the road. Rubbing her arms, Grace picked up her pace and told herself that even if she told someone about her latest vision, she’d be disregarded. Sneered at.
Before the accident, as a child, she’d sometimes been lost in daydreams. Had been left on the playground more than once, never hearing the bell or the hoots and laughter of the other children. Then, she’d been teased and had often run home crying, only to hear her mother say she was “special,”
while Cleo cringed at “the weirdo” who was her sister. Those days her dreams had been labeled as nothing more than the fantasies of a “gifted” child. There had been no medical reason that she sometimes blanked out. And though her IQ tests and exams had placed her right in the center of normal, her mother had always whispered to her that she was smarter than the others who cruelly taunted her, that they, the ones who called her “retard,” were to be pitied. But the playground barbs cut deep and after the 32
Lisa Jackson
accident, when Grace still spoke to her dead parents and sister on a regular basis, worrying her aunt Barbara, and after she adopted her first puppies—
two wolves who had lost their mother to a poacher—
her visions had increased. Become more real, more definitive.
Those school bullies were right. Her condition was weird.
Now she made her way up the path to her door and found it ajar. Inside the house was cold, the ancient furnace unable to keep up with the frigid arctic temperature swept inside by the howling wind. Locking the door behind her, she turned on the lights and kicked off her boots.
