She was no longer uncertain. Nor was she afraid. Now she was positively terrified.
She knew what had happened. The impossible. The unthinkable. Her water had broken. And it had shocked her so badly she’d done just what she knew she shouldn’t have, which was tromp on the brake, and as a result her car had skidded off the icy road and was now stuck in a snowbank, like those of all the other poor souls she’d passed and pitied. And now she and her baby were in big trouble. Desperate trouble.
Oh, God, she thought, what am I going to do?
Get ahold of yourself, Bella. Don’t panic.
All right, it was a little late for that last bit of advice. But she did need to get ahold of herself, stay calm, and think.
Okay. The first thing she had to do was get help. Please-somebody help me!
But she couldn’t just sit here and wait for someone to come along. There was no telling how long that might be, and she had to get to a hospital now. So there wasn’t any way around it; she was going to have to get out of the car and try to flag someone down. Someone… someone in one of the endless caravan of trucks that continued to growl slowly by, only a few yards and a whole world away.
Jimmy Joe had lost the New Mexico radio station, which was just as well. He had no business listening to the likes of “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” when he had enough to do just to keep his rig on the road. The CB was really cracklin’, too, what with a few hundred drivers all stuck in the same place and all trying their best to relieve the tedium and tension.
“Eastbound, you got a four-wheeler on the side at mile marker…”
“Yeah, you got two more down here… ”
“Hell, you got ‘em everywhere! I quit countin’.”
“Federated, you okay down there?”
“Yeah…think I got me a little problem…
“Man, I mean, this is criminal. ”
“Can you believe an interstate in this condition?”
“Anybody got any idea what it’s like in Amarillo?”
“S’pose it’s like this all the way to Oklahoma?”
“Oh, man, I sure do need to?ee. ”
“Well, you better open up the door, then, ’cause you ain’t gonna find no bushes out here!”
“Uh…eastbound. on that four-wheeler on the side…looks like you got somebody out of the car, trying to wave somebody down. Ah, hell…looks like a lady-you believe that? What’s she doin’ out here, anyway?”
When he heard those words Jimmy Joe felt a jolt that went right through his insides. What’s she doing out here? Wasn’t that just what he’d said to himself the first time he’d set eyes on that crazy red-haired pregnant lady from California? The one he hadn’t been able to get his mind off since.
A four-wheeler on the side and a woman trying to flag somebody down-he sure didn’t like the sound of that. How many women could there be, out here all alone in conditions like this? He picked up his mike, thumbed the Talk button and growled, “Uh, what’s the twenty on that four-wheeler with the lady wavin’? Come on…”
He waited through some crackling and muttering, counting his own heartbeats, before the answer came back. “Uh…cain’t see the mile sticks… Make it ’bout a mile past the grain elevators at the Adrian exit. That’d be…what, twenny-two?”
Jimmy Joe watched the grain elevators at the Adrian exit crawl past his windows and swore out loud, which was something he didn’t do often, having had his mouth washed out with soap more than once in years past for that offense. He did so now because he knew it was a good twelve miles to the next exit, which at this pace was going to take him more than two hours, and that meant there wasn’t going to be any way he could get off the interstate. And there sure wasn’t any place to pull over to the side. So it looked like, if he was going to stop and pick the lady up, he was going to have to do it the hard way, which was to stop the whole blamed line of traffic.
Picking up his mike again, he thumbed it on and growled, “Breaker…this is the Big Blue Starr. I’m gonna be slowin’ down here in a little bit. Gon’ try an’ pick up the lady. Just don’t want anybody crawlin’ up my back door…”
From all up and down the line the responses and assurances came crackling back at him. And then, loud and clear, one that made his blood run cold:
“Oh, Lordy, looks like she’s got one in the oven, and from the looks of ‘er, she’s ’bout to pop, too. Somebody better get ’er, quick.”
“I’m on it,” Jimmy Joe said grimly into the mike as he checked his mirrors once more and then turned on his four-way flashers. “Hey, yellow truck-J.B. Hunt, that you on mah back door?”
The answer came back-a woman’s voice, calm and confident. “I got you, Big Blue. You got lotsa room…go for it. Ten-foh.”
“Thank ya kindly… ’Preciate it.” He hung up the mike as the word was being passed back up the line.
A strange calm settled over him, the way it did sometimes when his way, though difficult, seemed clear and certain. Outside his windows the white crept by, yard by yard, while inside the cab he counted off the seconds with his own heartbeat and the chatter on the radio faded into a tense and waiting silence. In his mirrors he could see the J.B. Hunt truck’s headlights dropping back. How much longer? he wondered. A mile past Adrian-that would make it ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Seemed like an hour already…
At last he saw her, a tiny figure standing hunched and forlorn beside her disabled car, too dispirited now to even wave. There was no mistaking the silver Lexus or that red hair, either, although the rest of her didn’t bear much resemblance to the Mirabella he’d come to know. Nothing very uppity about her now, that was for sure. Not a trace left of that know-it-all tilt to her chin. She looked cold and scared, plumb done in and all alone. “And what will the poor robin do then, poor thing?”
Carefully manipulating brakes and gears, he eased his truck to a gentle stop. Behind him, in an unbroken line that stretched clear back to New Mexico, one by one the other drivers did the same. Then, while a thousand rigs sat idling on the icy interstate, Jimmy Joe set his brake, opened the door and stepped out into the teeth of that freezing wind. It just about took his breath away.
He made his way around the front of the Kenworth, holding on to the bumper and slipping and sliding on the unevenly packed ice. When he got around to the other side, Mirabella was just struggling through the ridge of filthy black snow thrown off by all the truck tires. She was bent over, half crouching, with both hands held out to keep her balanced, and through the wind-whipped ribbons of her hair her eyes reached for him like prayers. In all that whiteness, the palest thing he could see was her face.
“Jimmy…Joe,” she gasped, clutching at him. “I have to…get to…” And now he could hear what he couldn’t before. She was sobbing.
“Easy…easy, now,” he said, soothing her the way he did J.J. when he’d had a bad dream. “It’s okay…I gotcha. You just hold on now… Here, put your arms around my neck.”
She did as she was told, her big, scared eyes never leaving his face, and somehow he got his arms under her and lifted her up like a baby. Praying that the Lord would guide his feet because he sure couldn’t see where to put ’em, he carried her through the rocklike frozen sludge to his truck, set her down on the first step while he got the door open, then braced himself and levered her up and into the cab.