The Vow Page 3

  I felt truly awful, so I had no problem taking her up on her offer. “That would be great.” I sighed before adding, “This sure isn’t how I planned to impress the in-laws on our first holiday with them.”

  Krickitt flashed me her signature smile; I smiled back as well as I could, but it didn’t compare. She took the wheel with our passenger by her side while I tried to stretch out in the back. Our Ford Escort was brand new but wasn’t designed for a grown man to sleep in the backseat. However, with an eye more to comfort than safety, I realized I could fold down the back seat and stretch my legs out into the trunk. I did my best to get comfortable while I waited for the medicine to kick in.

  Just past six in the evening we passed through Gallup, the last big town before the New Mexico/Arizona border. Darkness was falling fast, and Krickitt turned the headlights on. I finally got into a somewhat comfortable position and dozed off with my head at the back of the driver’s seat and my legs toward the back of the hatchback. Suddenly I was jolted awake by a firm yell of, “Watch out!” as the car quickly decelerated and swerved to the left. I rose up just in time to feel the impact thrust me into the back of Krickitt’s seat. Having slid my head off her seat toward the driver’s door, I looked in the driver’s side mirror and could see headlights zooming toward us, getting larger and larger and then completely filling the mirror in a split second.

  My wife let out a bone-chilling scream.

  The highway patrolman’s report said that at approximately 6:30 p.m. on November 24, 1993, 5.7 miles east of the Arizona/New Mexico state line, a white Ford Escort was involved in a collision with two trucks. Later investigations revealed that a red flatbed truck with a load of car parts had started having engine trouble as it traveled west on I–40. As a result, the driver slowed to about twenty-five miles per hour in the right lane. Traveling at a normal interstate speed, Krickitt came up behind the truck, which was hidden in a cloud of black smoke produced by a defective fuel filter. During the day, the smoke would have been visible, but as night had fallen, Krickitt had been unable to see it from a distance.

  Though the flatbed’s emergency flashers weren’t on, Krickitt eventually saw slow-moving taillights loom into view through the exhaust cloud, braked hard, and swerved to the left. At the same moment a pickup truck following too close behind our car closed in on us.

  The right front fender of our Escort clipped the left rear corner of the flatbed. Then as the car started to spin and Krickitt struggled for control, the pickup came from behind and rammed into the driver’s side of our car. The impact sent our car careening into the air. It sailed thirty feet, slammed back to the ground, rolled one and a half times, then slid upside down for 106 feet and stopped on the shoulder of the road.

  After we were hit, I don’t remember hearing anything or feeling any immediate pain, but I recall every sensation of movement that took place from the moment of impact until our car came to a stop. My face was suddenly jammed between the driver’s seat and the side of the car. My head was jerked back. Then I rolled over to the other side of the car, where my rib cage hit the wheel well. Next I experienced a momentary floating sensation, a slow-motion twisting and tumbling like the dream sequence in a movie. I saw sparks and thought the car was on fire. Finally, I felt a strange tingling sensation in my back. Then everything was still.

  I was too stunned to say anything for a few seconds while my brain started to clear. When I could think again, I didn’t think about the chance that I might be hurt. I couldn’t feel a thing. All I could think of was my wife.

  “Krickitt!” I screamed. I was answered with silence. “Krickiiiiitt!!” I knew I could hear, because I recognized the sound of the car engine running. But my wife of two months was not answering me. I took a few seconds to look around and get my bearings. After a second I realized the car was on its top and I was lying inside on the roof. The sunroof had been shattered during the long, final skid, and I had made the last part of that 106-foot trip on broken glass and pavement.

  Once again I screamed for my wife, and as the sound of my voice died away, I felt something wet on my face. After the ride I’d just taken, I figured I was probably cut and bleeding. I tried to raise my hand up to my face to feel for injuries. I saw my hand slowly come toward my face, dreamlike, as if it were somebody else’s hand. As it got closer a red splotch appeared on it, then another. The hand itself didn’t seem to be hurt, so I figured the blood was somehow coming from a cut on my head.

  I tried to stop the splotches by holding my hand away from my face, but they kept coming. The blood ran down my arm and started dripping down onto the broken sunroof. I finally looked up. It was a strange sensation to see everything upside down, seatbacks pointing down at me, no windows where they should have been.

  My still-muddled mind finally deciphered that the dripping blood wasn’t my own. Overhead, my wife was suspended upside down by her seat belt. Her arms dangled limp. Her eyes were closed. She didn’t move. We weren’t more than a couple of feet apart but I couldn’t reach her. Since it was almost dark, I couldn’t see her clearly enough to tell what sorts of injuries she might have. I suddenly realized that she might even be dead.

  “Krickitt!” I snapped in my hard-nosed coach voice, hoping to shock her into waking up. Her eyes didn’t open, but she stirred a little. Then she let out a long, ragged, sighing breath and was still again.

  I thought I had just heard the last breath my wife would ever take.

  I called her name again and started trying to get out of the car, but I couldn’t move and at first I couldn’t figure out why. There wasn’t anything on top of me or in my way, and I had a clear shot out of the car through the rear window next to me since the glass was completely gone. After a few moments I realized I had no feeling in my legs. I was unable to move from the waist down.

  My nose started to tingle, so I reached up to touch it. I felt something sharp. I was shocked to discover that it was the 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 consciousness; her pupils alternately constricted and dilated—a classic symptom, I later learned, of severe brain injury.

  While the rescue team was still cutting open the car, our passenger and I were loaded into an ambulance. On the way to the hospital in Gallup, the EMTs began cataloguing my injuries. My left ear was almost torn off; my nose was nearly severed. I also had other facial lacerations, a concussion, two cracked ribs, and a broken hand. Doctors would later discover a scraped lung and bruised heart muscle.

  As we sped along, I heard the ambulance attendant call the hospital on the radio. “We have two male accident victims, one in critical condition, one serious. The third victim is still at the scene in severely critical condition.” That didn’t sound good, but I realized that it at least meant Krickitt was still alive.

  When we arrived at the emergency room of Rehoboth-McKinley Christian Hospital in Gallup, I was immediately taken to get an X-ray and CT scan. The medical personnel had discovered a big knot behind my left ear that they thought might indicate a skull fracture. When I was finished, Krickitt was already being given life-saving treatment in another area of the ER, so I didn’t see her, but I knew the news wouldn’t be good. After all, I had seen her in the crumpled car, and it had taken them more than half an hour to cut her out of it.

  Nobody would give me a straight answer about Krickitt’s condition. How was she doing? Was she going to recover? Was she going to be okay? Nobody would tell me, which I realized was not a good sign. I later learned that when one of the ambulance technicians heard Krickitt was still alive hours after being admitted to the hospital, she refused to believe it. She had never seen anyone survive such massive head trauma.

  As soon as Krickitt had arrived at the hospital, the medical staff turned all their attention to her, which didn’t draw any complaints from me. The ER team had given me some preliminary treatment, but I didn’t want to take any sedative or have any other work done until I knew what was happening with my wife. I had been waiting for a while when a doctor approached me. His manner was professional and confident, but when I looked in his eyes I could tell he was exhausted. He handed me a little manila envelope.

  “Mr. Carpenter, I’m terribly sorry.”

  I couldn’t formulate a response before the doctor left the room. There was nothing to do but investigate the contents of the envelope. I opened it with my good hand and slid the items out into the broken one. I stared down at the Highlands University watch I’d had made for Krickitt . . . and her wedding ring.

  When I gave her that ring, I had made a vow to protect her through times of challenge and need. This was definitely a time of both challenge and need, but I felt helpless. There was nothing I could do to protect her now.

  My thoughts and feelings were all scrambled up inside me. I was in pain, and I was exhausted, but most of all I was annoyed that I didn’t know how Krickitt was doing. But all of a sudden, piercing through everything else, was the thought that she was dead.

  I was too incredulous to be sad. It wasn’t that I wasn’t willing to believe my wife was dead; I couldn’t believe it. I was incapable of accepting the fact that those blue eyes were closed forever and I would never again see her smile shining at me from other side of the dinner table. I couldn’t believe that the most joyful, most enthusiastic woman I had ever known could be torn from my life so savagely. My brain simply refused to process the idea that after two months of marriage I was a widower. A widower.

  Some time later a nurse came in to check on me and update me on Krickitt’s status. “We’ve done all we can, and she hasn’t improved,” she explained. “She’s beyond medical help.” Maybe she’s beyond medical help, I thought, but she’s not beyond God’s help.

  The nurse continued. “Still, she’s hanging in there better than anybody thought she would. She’s strong, and she’s in excellent physical condition. The doctor has put in a call for an airlift to Albuquerque.” The door that had seemed shut and sealed only minutes ago had miraculously opened a crack.

  At the time I didn’t know it, but when the medical flight team got orders to fly my wife 130 miles to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque, they were afraid, based on their experience, that it would be a wasted trip. It would take a solid hour for the helicopter to get to Gallup, and then it would be another hour before they could get my wife back to Albuquerque. By then they figured it would likely be too late. Krickitt would be dead.

  But by God’s grace, the staff at Rehoboth-McKinley Christian Hospital in Gallup took a chance on Krickitt Carpenter. As they wheeled her out of the emergency room to get ready for the flight, I saw her for the first time since I had been taken away from the scene of the accident hours before. She was lying on a gurney, surrounded by medical staff that were keeping track of what looked like about a dozen IV lines and monitors. My wife’s head and face were so swollen and bruised that I could barely recognize her. Her lips and ears were blue-black, and the swelling was so bad that her eyelids couldn’t close all the way. Her eyes looked to the right with a blank stare, and her arms moved around aimlessly (more signs of severe head injury). Her body temperature was unstable, so they had put her in a big thermal wrap. To me it looked like a body bag.

  I got up off my bed and grabbed both of Krickitt’s hands. They were shockingly cold. “We’re gonna get through this, Krick,” I said to her. “We’re gonna make it.” I smiled but felt the tears coming just the same. “Don’t you die on me!” I pleaded, my mouth inches from her face. She was wearing an oxygen mask and I could hear her breathing, shallow and tentative. “We’re in this forever, remember? We’ve got a long way to go!”

  When they began wheeling Krickitt’s gurney out to the helipad, I suddenly realized they had no intention of taking me with them. “They have to have two medics and a lot of gear to give your wife any chance for survival,” someone explained to me. “There’s no room for a passenger.”

  I wasn’t a passenger; I was her husband. I was also a patient, I suddenly realized, with fairly severe injuries of my own. I tried to convince anyone who would listen to get the helicopter to come back for me. But that wasn’t to be. Someone told me ther
e were two other active calls at the time, and there was no time to make another two-hour round trip for me. As this registered, I helplessly watched my wife get wheeled through a set of swinging doors toward the waiting helicopter.

  “Hang in there, Krickitt! I’m praying for you!” I yelled, before I started sobbing as I watched the love of my life be rolled up to the waiting helicopter and eased inside. I stood there in disbelief as the rhythmic sound of the copter’s overhead rotor faded into the distance.

  From the moment I had arrived at the hospital, I had tried repeatedly to get in touch with Krickitt’s parents in Phoenix and mine in Farmington, New Mexico. But since it was the day before Thanksgiving, nobody was home. Running out of options, I finally called Krickitt’s old phone number and talked to her ex-roommate Lisa, who still lived with Megan in the apartment the three of them had once shared in California. I quickly explained the situation, then asked her to try and reach Krickitt’s parents, tell them we’d been in a wreck, and stand by for further news.

  Next I called my boss at the university, athletic director Rob Evers. I told him the situation and asked him to track down my parents. He said he’d take care of it and immediately started on the trail. He knew I had an uncle in Albuquerque with the last name of Morris, but he didn’t know my uncle’s first name because everyone called him by a nickname, Corky. So Rob called the telephone operator and explained that he had an emergency and had to contact the family. “We don’t usually do this,” the operator explained, “but stay on the line.” She called every Morris in Albuquerque until she found the right one.

  Uncle Corky had a phone number for my dad’s business partner. Rob called the man, who was eventually able to get in touch with Dad on his cell phone. He and Mom were in Roswell, New Mexico, where they were spending Thanksgiving with my brother Kelly. Dad called immediately. I told him that a doctor had just given me Krickitt’s wedding ring and a, “Mr. Carpenter, I’m terribly sorry.” I was frustrated that I didn’t know what was going on, but I would let him know when there was any news.