Last Tuesday morning, I got a phone call every mother dreads, but is happy she's home to receive. It was from my 17-year-old daughter, and it began, "I'm OK, it wasn't my fault, but I was in a car accident."
My daughter was on her way to South Side High School when the driver of a Jeep ran a stop sign at the intersection of Devon and Oxford roads. The Jeep, headed north on Devon, careened into a westbound black BMW, injuring the driver and passenger, a man who was on his way to Sacred Heart Academy with his 14-year-old daughter. Its airbags deployed, the BMW spun around, slamming my daughter's car in the front and pushing it back several yards from the stop sign at which she had paused.
Crying and clearly shaken, my daughter assured me that she and her two passengers, her best friend and her friend's brother, were all right, but she was upset that the father and daughter in the BMW might not be so lucky.
Aside from a terrorist attack or a phone call like this one, it's hard to think of a scenario that would get me out of the house without my makeup, but vanity flew out the window as fast as I flew out the door. I grabbed car keys and some Jackie O sunglasses and headed to the scene of the accident, about a half mile from home.
As I drove up De Mott Avenue, I saw a police car blocking the entrance to Devon Road. I parked on De Mott and ran toward my daughter, whose gray Mini Cooper was intact but leaking something, sitting in the middle of the road. A small crowd of onlookers had already gathered. I gave her and her friends a mother-bear hug and checked them for broken bones, cuts and bruises.
I managed to keep my emotions in check until I saw the condition of the three cars involved. The Jeep, its insides turned out, had lurched over a curb on a street perpendicular to Devon. The BMW was wrecked, and its passengers were being attended to by EMS workers. The Jeep's driver had blood on his face and neck, and seemed to be walking around aimlessly.
It was after I surveyed the scene that I started to crumble, sobbing on a shoulder of my daughter's friends' mother. She was the one now giving me the mother-bear hug, and I was never so grateful for a sturdy shoulder. We've been friends since the girls, now seniors, were in third grade, and even though her kids could have been seriously hurt, her compassion for my family overwhelmed me. Rather than being angry that her kids were caught up in this wreck, she was relieved that my daughter didn't have to go through this alone. Now that's what friends are for.
The father and daughter in the BMW were taken to Mercy Medical Center, where they were both treated and released. My husband called them the next evening to check on their condition, and while their injuries weren't serious, the trauma of the accident was still palpable.
Naturally, the what-ifs hit me as soon as I got home and started talking about the accident. What if I hadn't been home for the call? What if my daughter's car had taken the brunt of the impact like the BMW did? And the most unsettling what-if of all: What if a child had been walking in that intersection on the way to school?
As for the Jeep's driver, I don't know a whole lot. But there are a few things I do know. I know he never contacted my family to apologize for the accident, which he admitted to police at the scene was his fault. I know from talking to the police that he said he didn't see the stop sign because it was hidden by a tree. To test his theory, I re-enacted the accident from his point of view, and I know I saw that stop sign as clearly as I saw the debris of headlights, taillights and license plates strewn on nearby lawns. I also absolutely believe that to cause that kind of damage, the driver had to have been driving entirely too fast on Rockville Centre's streets.
I also know that there was nothing my daughter could have done to prevent the accident. And most important, I know I could have gotten a phone call with news that was a whole lot worse.
And one more thing. Never underestimate the value of having a pair of Jackie O glasses at the ready. You just never know when you might need them.
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