Butterfly Storm

Suzanne Maxwell

With a name like Angie Gabriel, a double angel name, you’d think I would have gone straight to heaven. Gabriel came from my ex-husband, Mark, and I haven’t given it back to him, at least not yet. I like the sound of it better than Ervine, which sounds too much like a small white rodent. I always pictured heaven with choruses of brilliant white-clad angels and beautiful people living together in harmony. That’s not what I experienced. I’ve been to heaven so many times in my dreams that sometimes I think the heaven part is real and this life is the illusion.

I should have died that day. Maybe I did, and maybe I have over and over and the dreams of heaven aren’t dreams at all, but are real.

“Damn ice,” I muttered, tapping the brakes cautiously as my Honda civic continued to race forward.

I was driving too fast. If Mark was here, he would be yelling at me to slow down, but Mark wasn’t here. A fresh round of tears spilled over.

One of my car’s headlights was out. It went out over a week ago—another thing Mark would disapprove of. He always kept his vehicles in top shape.

I glanced over at my daughter, Lucy, but all I could see was the outline of her small face staring forward. She was seven years old, too small to sit safely in the front seat, but she’d made such a fuss about sitting all alone in the dark that I had let her sit up front with me. Mark would never have let her get away with that. My heart thumped in my chest. Was her seatbelt buckled? I always buckled her in, but we left in such a hurry that I couldn’t remember. It was too dark to see and I dared not take my eyes off the road for more than an instant. I could feel that she was awake, but she was being so quiet.

The single working headlight lit up a narrow thread of road that stretched ahead briefly before disappearing into the gloom. Thick clouds hid the stars, leaving no light to reflect from the snow piled high along either side of the road. Something on the edge of the road caught my eye. I sucked in a deep breath, searching for the all too familiar shape of a moose. Moose were deadly this time of year, their fur completely non-reflective, making them all but impossible to see in the dark. In early spring, when food is sparse and the snow is still deep, moose utilize roads to get around. Peering deeper into the gloom, I looked for shapes on the road that shouldn’t be there, but the visibility was so poor I could barely see past the front of the car.

I continued tapping the brakes and with each tap tried to squeeze a little harder without throwing the car into a spin, but the car had a mind all its own. It refused to slow down for me.

My hands gripped the steering wheel. White-knuckle driving was nothing new to me. I’d driven on Alaska’s nasty winter roads in bad weather so many times I could almost drive them in my sleep. But tonight I was on the edge of my seat. All I wanted was for Lucy and me to be safely home.

Mark would never have listened to the salesman who sold me the expensive all-weather tires and convinced me that I didn’t need studs. I delicately tried the brakes again, fearful of going into a spin if I pressed too hard. The all-weather tires were worthless on ice. If only I’d had enough sense to have studded tires put on. I gripped the wheel tighter, trying to force the car to stay on the road but knowing that I had no real control. If the wheels started to slide, there would be nothing I could do to stop the car.

A blast of wind funneling down through a break in the mountains hit the car sideways and spun it completely around. The car’s momentum still carried it forward, only now we were going down the road backward. A flood of tears broke through. I blinked rapidly, my eyelids working like tiny windshield wipers trying to clear the view. Peering over my shoulder to see where we were going, I glued my hands to the wheel, not daring to move even a fraction of an inch.

Bright lights streamed through the back windshield, blinding me, and then whooshed past. I tried to breathe, but my lungs felt choked. The car barreled down the highway backward into the night’s blackness.

“Are we going to Daddy’s house?” Lucy’s voice trembled, and I sensed her small hand clutching the seat between us trying to hold onto something solid.

I wanted to say something encouraging and look at her, but I didn’t dare move my head. My neck was getting a crick from straining to look through the back window, which was still coated with frost on all but a small central area. I focused my attention on the road, sucking in several deep breaths of air to calm myself and clear my muddled brain. If I braked and turned the wheel at the same time, I might be able to put the car into a controlled spin and get us turned back around. But what if I lost control? I would need a soft ditch to land in. Where was I, exactly? Was there a soft ditch out there? The blackness was overwhelming. The dim red tail lights barely lit the road. They were worse than the single headlight. I had to get off the highway before reaching the river, and the icy metal bridge.

For an eerie moment, I couldn’t sense the car’s movement. There was no frame of reference. It almost felt like we were standing still, but the stillness was an illusion. If I didn’t act soon, it would be too late. There was no way I would make it across the bridge driving this way. My breathing rate increased until I was hyperventilating. My face and hands felt clammy. Were we at the bridge already? I had lost all sense of time.

Lucy whimpered.

“It’s okay, Pumpkin,” I said as calmly as I could, but the words stuck in my throat like an oversize lump. Did I actually say them or just think them?

Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes, stomped on the brake, and jerked the wheel sharply right. When I opened my eyes, the damn bridge loomed directly ahead in the dim light.

I screamed!

Then I heard Lucy scream, and the sound echoed over and over in my brain. The car struck the first section of guardrail and glanced off. A loud, grating sound was followed by black silence as we sailed through thin air toward the ice-choked Knik River. As I reached out my hand to shield Lucy, everything went blank.