The Crane Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

nearly far enough. The car hit his knees, spinning him around and throwing him to the pavement, out of the way, as she ploughed on through George and the bike.
    George saw the impact, of course, but he couldn’t remember feeling it. Roy had been thrown out of his line of vision, and suddenly here was this massive, unstoppable block of metal filling it, knocking the wind out of him as he flattened his stomach across the bike seat and onto the hood of the car.
    It didn’t stop. It kept coming. There was nowhere for George to put his feet, nowhere he could stand that made sense as the ground was dragged away from underneath him, and he fell, still so surprised it was happening it seemed as if only his eyes were working, that each of his other senses – ears to hear it with, feeling to register pain – had been shut off.
    He fell with the bike, its handlebars catching the front bumper, and as the old lady
still
drove on, ten, twenty, thirty feet past the crosswalk, George slipped all the way to the ground, the body of the bike pushing him along the road in front of the car. He remembered the sensation vividly, more vividly than any other detail of the accident. It felt like sliding on his back across snow, any feeling of pain from the scraping still just a future possibility. He was helpless to stop it anyway, his arms refusing to grasp anything, his legs refusing to push him out of the way, his head refusing to even look around for help.
    What he remembered most was that it was, paradoxically, a moment of tremendous calm. All he saw was the sky above, its serene and soothing vastness, looking impassively down on him as he bumped and scraped along the pavement, pushed by a massive car and a fallen bicycle. It was a moment like when he found the crane, or the crane found him, a moment of stopped time, a moment to live in forever. He stared back up at the sky with a kind of ecstatic disbelief and was only able to ever remember a single coherent thought, ‘This is really happening.’
    ‘This really happened,’ George would say as he told the story. ‘It sounds like I’m making it up, but I’m really, really not.’
    The handlebars dislodged from the bumper of the car, and the bike fell, but somehow – luckily? miraculously? improbably? impossibly? – did so in a way that the old lady’s car pushed it to one side and George along with it. Instead of being crushed flat by the tires, George had a close-up view of them as they drove past, inches from his face as the car trundled down the road.
    And then there was only silence. Utter silence. George, still on his back, glanced up the street and saw Roy. Such a little amount of time had passed that Roy was still lying on the road, too, struggling to get up. George did the same, and he and Roy discovered at the same moment that neither of them could walk. Both lurched forward and fell in exactly the same way.
    Which made them laugh.
    Nearly forty years later, George could still remember the feeling of that laugh, the sincerity of it, the
truthfulness
of it. In their mutual, eight- and nine-year-old shock, before the inevitable pain that hovered seconds away came rushing in, before the acceptance or even knowledge that they had just survived a possibly fatal calamity dawned, they had, for an instant,
laughed
.
    But the world would no longer wait. What was probably not more than a dozen adults but what felt like
thousands
came running in a flood from the forecourt of the gas station and out the glass doors of the supermarket, unthinkable terror written so clearly on their faces that all at once the pain showed up, too, and George began, suddenly, to cry.
    They put their hands on him and Roy, lifted them from the pavement and out of the road, while some of them also went racing angrily after the car of the old lady, who was only just now coming to a stop a good hundred feet past the point where she’d hit them. These people called the ambulances that came, and a fire truck, too,