Luck on Our Side

by Allison Toohey

for English 3040 Literary Nonfiction, ETSU, Fall 2004

About the author: Allison Toohey is a little over halfway through college and has had a few jobs, lived a few places, and had a few hobbies. Her latest plans are to eventually become more consistent than her unfortunate distrust of Ritalin.

It was well past two in the morning when I finally pushed a warm beer aside to check a little digital clock perched on Will Efird’s micro fridge. Ever since he and I had met in UT’s Presidential Court we’d spent at least one night a week sitting across from each other in his chilly little dorm room talking the night away about issues that we enjoyed pretending had nothing to do with ourselves, while we innocently took turns easing them in different directions. Tonight we’d managed to come around full circle to the same subject so many times that I was beginning to wonder if he noticed who’s fault it was.

“I don’t really think something like that would have to constitute a death wish,” I said, scooting my small girl frame back further against the wall. “I mean, is there not a chance that someone like that could just be lacking a sense of consequence because they’ve never been in a real accident before, and not really believe, deep down, that they could be hurt or killed? You know, just doing it for a bit of a rush or something?”

He eyed me suspiciously. “What kind of rush could you possibly get from letting yourself fall asleep at the wheel?”

I knew I shouldn’t have had that last beer. “Well, on a straight highway, there are rivets in the side of the road. They wake you up, you know.”

I could trace the start of the problem back to an afternoon about five weeks earlier at my parents’ house in Kingsport. I remembered climbing out on the roof outside of my bedroom to sit away from the house on the warm, black shingles while my family mumbled amongst themselves about something on the inside. At some point the mumbling grew closer until there was a fumbling and my window slammed shut. I looked around for a moment, not too concerned, until I remembered that the windows could only be opened from the inside, at about the same time that I noticed a big, humming wasps’ nest hanging from the upper roof a couple of feet above my head.

After laughing at the situation for a minute, I turned and knocked on the window for a while. It didn’t take long for me to give up, though, because the house has always been soundproof enough to muffle my most determined responses to my mother screaming up the stairs at me.

I walked to the edge of the roof and thought about it for a minute. About fifteen feet, I decided. The grass didn’t seem too far away from this distance, but if I wanted to make it to the grass, I’d have to clear the bushes and the sidewalk. I couldn’t crouch down and drop off. I’d have to take a flying leap. I wasn’t sure how badly I could get hurt, but before I could fully decide between bees and broken ankles, I was in the air and flying toward the ground at the speed of my worst falling dreams. It reminded me, in a way, of jumping off of the high dive for the first time. I never thought I’d hit the water, and I didn’t expect the ground.

My feet didn’t catch me. Looking back on it, I can’t imagine how they would have. My left knee pummeled an arm, and my right knee flew up and hit me in the chin so hard that my head flew back violently against the ground. I laid very still for a good while, afraid that my neck was broken and that I’d be paralyzed if I moved an inch, but the pain ebbed after a few moments and I gained the courage to stand up.

After staggering inside and lying down for a while I found out that the only injuries I had were a bad bit of whiplash and some bruises under my chin and my arm, which only took a week or so to heal.

I didn’t tell anyone what I’d done, but it felt like an awful secret. For an instant, as fast as lightening but perhaps in a time frame of its own, I had seen on the ground below me the rest of my life in such sharply contrasting possibilities that it made my head reel. In the next few seconds, I was gong to die, get injured, or simply get up and walk away. None of these possibilities were any more or less plausible to me than the next, and the choice was no longer mine.

When I walked back in the house, working to hold my head up straight, my parents looked up from their newspaper and skillets and half smiled, not the least bit surprised to see me. Nor should they be, I thought. I’d started this day, and for whatever reason, I was going to finish it.

About a week after I jumped off of my roof, I closed my eyes for a few seconds while driving fast at night on an empty back road. I counted to ten with just enough of a squint to watch out for headlights. If this was my time, I decided, I didn’t want to take anyone else out with me. I smiled when I opened my eyes unscathed, feeling as though fate was still on my side and that this was somehow proof that I was meant to be part of this point in time and space, and that I still had something to contribute to the grand scheme… I frowned at the words, wondering when I had come to believe in fate or any sort of a “grand scheme.”

I’d become superstitious, too, carrying certain things around with me that I believed to be lucky, avoiding other things. If the three phones in my house began ringing, I would have trouble choosing which one to answer, as though I’d been confronted by three identical doors in a funhouse. I was afraid that the choice might somehow change the outcome of the conversation. I knew there was something wrong with me, but I let it go. Whatever came of this sudden change in my personality was meant to be, I decided.

By the time I found myself sitting on Will’s bed late at night, having a hard time defining a death wish, my continued existence was a freak accident. In the previous three weeks I’d begun risking my life in ways I’ll never relate openly, and written several letters to my friends and family, convinced I wouldn’t last the year. I kept the letters in a shoebox in the trunk of my car.

Driving from Knoxville to Kingsport after saying goodbye to Will at 3:30 a.m., I contemplated the long stretch of highway 11W that lay dark and empty for miles behind and ahead of me. I imagined that it was something like how purgatory might feel, if Heaven and Hell were both empty.

Traveling at a good speed, I suddenly noticed a small grayish figure emerging from the background on the side of the road. It was a hitchhiker, wearing gray coveralls and carrying a large gray bag from his shoulder. “This guy looks like Michael Myers,” I thought as I slowed down beside him, without giving it a second thought. I pushed my CDs into the floorboard to make room for him.

He came around to my side of the car and held out his bag. “Thanks so much, ma’am. Here’s my bag and coat to keep in the back so you’ll know I don’t have a gun or nothin’… Ma’am, are you alone?”

“Yeah,” I shrugged, feeling tense.

“Ma’am, that’s dangerous.”

I hadn’t anticipated his reaction. I was embarrassed. He looked unsettled, but thanked me again and got in the car.

“Hitchhiking’s pretty dangerous too, you know,” I informed him, trying to regain some of my dignity.

“Well the truth is,” he mumbled, changed suddenly, “I don’t really care right now. I just lost my job, and got in a fight with my girlfriend, and I didn’t feel like walking home through the rain tonight.”

I was a bit thrown off by his honesty. “So I take it you haven’t hitch hiked out here in the middle of the night much before?”

He said he had, and that once a drunk man had pulled a gun on him. “Just to mess with me a little, I guess.”

We casually exchanged stories about things we’d done in our lives for no reason other than to tempt fate until I couldn’t believe we were alive and riding in a car together. We had friends who had died young from playing with guns and driving too fast and knew there was no reason we shouldn’t be among them.

I wanted to know more about him. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, and told me he had lived in Morristown all his life. He was tired, and his clothes were smudged in places from work at a local factory. He was one of several employees laid off from work that week. He wasn’t much fazed by it though, he told me, and was sure he could find work elsewhere, but he had the demeanor of someone as lost on this familiar stretch of highway as I felt. It seemed as though I could drop him off almost anywhere and his life would resume more or less where it had left off. I realized suddenly that I felt closer to him than I had to anyone in a long time.

The road I dropped him off on wasn’t very far from where I’d picked him up. I found myself genuinely worried about this soft-spoken man, who carried nothing to protect himself in this stretch of frightening nowhere. Surely he can defend himself, I thought, but the look on his face made me feel like his mother. I wanted to thank him for making me want to see him safe and preserved away from the cold. I thought about the letters in the car and the people I’d written them to. If I could feel the way I did about the well-being of someone I had never seen before, I couldn’t imagine how my mother would feel if she knew why I had written her a letter.

“Promise me you’ll take care of yourself,” I said, “and I promise I won’t pick anyone up on my own again.”

Promises were exchanged, he thanked me again and we parted ways. I cried part of the way home. A few days later, I opened up to some friends about what had been going on with me, and was treated later for a bout of clinical depression, which I found out runs in both sides of my family.

When I look back at those weeks of my life, I think of my friend Drew, who, a few weeks after losing his best friend, Charlie, in a car wreck, picked up a dirty glass bottle he’d seen lying on some railroad tracks, and took it home to the safety of his bookshelf. “I want to keep intact,” he said. “I passed it walking along the tracks all the time. For weeks it was always right there in the middle of the tracks, but it was never broken. It reminds me of people, in a way. I’m not surprised Charlie died, really. I think it’s more of a miracle in this world that people manage to stay alive.”