The Vow: The True Events That Inspired the Movie Read Online Free PDF Page A

bone at the base of where my nose should have been. Lower on my face I felt what I first thought was a badly swollen lip. It was not. It was my nose, hanging down in front of my mouth by a flap of skin.
    At last I heard another voice, but it wasn’t Krickitt’s. “Give me your hand! I’ll help you out!” I turned to the window and looked straight into the face of a stranger, our very own Good Samaritan.
    “I can’t move my legs,” I shouted back.
    “Turn the motor off! This thing could explode any minute.” After a moment of confusion, I realized the man was talking to our passenger, who had been riding shotgun. Somehow he had made it through that whole ordeal with only a separated shoulder. Though he had been a bit dazed, he had been able to get out of the car, and at the stranger’s command he reached back in to get to the ignition.
    “The key’s broken off,” he said.
    “You’ve got to get it turned off!” the stranger demanded. After some desperate jiggling and twisting, the ignition switch turned and the engine fell silent.
    “Okay, I’m coming in to get you,” the man said. Dropping to his stomach, he army crawled through the window beside me. I grabbed him around the shoulders, and he held on to me with one hand while he used the other to help scoot us backward out of the car and over to the grass beside the highway.
    I saw then that another vehicle had stopped. A husband and wife headed toward us, leaving their children in their van. “You kids stay inside and pray,” the man instructed as he approached our car. He looked around at all the wreckage and blood and, without any show of panic or defeat, put his hand on one of the upturned tires and started praying. His wife came over to me in the grass to see what she could do to help. She was afraid I was bleeding to death until she discovered much of the blood on me wasn’t my own.
    The couple introduced themselves as Wayne and Kelli Marshall and offered to do whatever they could to help. At the moment, the only thing I needed was to know that my wife wasn’t dead.
    As my rescuer wrapped me in blankets from his truck cab, another car stopped and the driver hurried over to me. She said a few words, then stopped abruptly with a look of horrified recognition on her face. “Oh my goodness! You’re Danny Carpenter’s son! Your cousin Debbie is my best friend! I’ll get in touch with your family,” the woman said and left the scene to start making calls.
    I couldn’t help but be amazed at how God was already taking care of us. There we were in the middle of nowhere and we had already encountered a rescuer, a prayer warrior, and a family friend.
    The drivers of the other two vehicles involved in the crash had no visible injuries, and the two passengers in the pickup only had relatively minor wounds. The same could not be said of Krickitt and me. Not only was I in bad shape physically; I was also numb with shock. All I could think about was Krickitt trapped inside the twisted-up car a few feet away, looking like she was either bleeding to death or already dead. Her head was caught between the steering wheel and the roof where the top had been crushed during the rollover. I realized that if I’d been driving I would have been killed instantly, because I wouldn’t have fit in the space remaining after the impact and my skull would have been crushed. But in Krickitt’s case, we could see that unlatching her seat belt before her head was free would probably break her neck if it wasn’t already broken.
    Within minutes the police and ambulances started arriving. It was obvious that Krickitt would have to be cut out of the car, but the EMTs were afraid to wait that long to start treatment. So one of them, DJ Coombs, crawled inside the car—not mentioning that she had severe claustrophobia—and started giving Krickitt IVs and monitoring her vital signs as she was still hanging upside down from the seat belt. Krickitt seemed to drift in and out of