"Was there anyone else in the car with you?"
The voice said from somewhere off to the left of me.
"What?"
I asked, slowly coming back to my senses.
"Did you have anyone else riding with you?"
The voice asked as my eyes began to focus on my surroundings.
"Y-yes," I replied, suddenly growing aware of what had happened.
"A passenger."
I was still dazed from the apparent accident I had been in.
I was just standing in the middle of a field when the cops rolled up, but I couldn't recall
what had occured.
"Are you sure you had a passenger?"
The voice asked again.
Finally, more of my senses returned and I turned to see two police officers in the field
with me.
One of the two was over by my crumpled car, while the other was shining a flashlight in
my direction.
The officer who was investigating my vehicle shook his head at the one closest to me.
"There's no sign of any passenger.
Are you absolutely positive you were not alone?"
He asked, continuing an interrogation that was beginning to aggravate my heavily cluttered
mind.
"Yes!"
I said loudly.
I suddenly felt my heart racing.
Though I was still quite bewildered by the events that found me aimlessly wandering around
in the grass, I had one solitary and persistent certainty: There had most definitely been
someone else in the car with me.
I suddenly became erratic in my actions as I ran to the car that sat on all four wheels
next to the massive, thick tree that stood alone in the open field.
I was sure that the cops had somehow completely overlooked the man I knew to be sitting in
the passenger seat.
"Calm down, kid," the officer who stood at the vehicle said.
I halfway expected him to reach for his gun when I charged towards him, but he appeared
genuinely concerned about my mental state at the time.
As I made my way to look through the windshield, I expected to see the hitchhiker still sitting
in the seat.
This would prove a much more difficult task than I had realized as the roof appeared to
be resting in the passenger seat.
"H-he was in there!"
I exclaimed as I darted my eyes between the cops, who both wore a similarly confused expression.
"Tell us what happened," the taller of the two asked me.
That was a question I found myself unable to answer.
I remembered leaving my girlfriend's house, and I fully recalled driving down the road
I had traversed many times before, but that was it.
Somehow, I could describe the man who I knew had rode shotgun, but I had no recollection
of picking him up.
"He was average height and build," I told the officer who had asked me all the questions
up until now.
"He had thick, shaggy dark hair, and a bushy beard," I continued.
The cop was writing in his little notepad while I spoke as the ambulance came rolling
up to the side of the field.
"He wore, like, a faded green army coat, with a woolen sweater underneath," I continued
as a paramedic draped a blanket over my shoulders.
"He looked like he may have been homeless, or something.
He was a bit dirty, you know?"
My head started to spin as I spoke, "He didn't smell bad, I don't think, but he seemed like
a really good…"
Somewhere in the middle of my description of the man I had apparently picked up on the
side of the road, I passed out.
Sometime later, I awoke to the sounds of a busy hospital.
I was being rolled through a corridor while doctors and nurses were doing their work on
me.
I was still out of it, but I instantly recognized the voice of the woman who came running up
beside the gurnee I was laying on.
"Oh my god!"
My mom screamed out when she arrived beside me.
"Is he ok?"
She asked, "Is he gonna be ok!"
She screamed louder to the hospital staff who seemed unresponsive to her inquiry.
"Your son is going to be alright, ma'am," the doctor calmly replied, "It looks far worse
than it is," he continued before I fell into darkness again.
The next time I opened my eyes, I was laying in a bed while a doctor or nurse rolled a
tray of instruments up beside me.
I winced when they jabbed the needle into the apparent gash across my left eyebrow.
Within moments after the injection, they began to sew into the cut with a needle and thread.
"Ow," I said.
"Mhmm," the doctor replied as he continued to weave the needle through my brow.
"I-I can still feel that," I said, bracing myself with every poke.
"Uh-huh," the man in the white coat muttered as he kept sewing away.
He seemed quite focused on his task, and my words didn't appear to register with him.
I just continued to grip down on the bed sheets every time he passed the thread through my
open wound.
After he finished up, I realized I also felt a sharp pain shoot through my right arm and
hand.
I looked down to see my knuckles shredded and my arm was a deep purple from top to bottom.
In addition, my left pinky stood straight out, braced by a metal splint.
My mother still sat at my bedside and her eyes were puffy and red while she smiled across
from me.
She wasn't saying much, but I assumed she just wanted to allow the doctor to do his
job uninterrupted.
I couldn't help but wonder if the words I spoke while my eyebrow was stitched back together
had only been in my head.
After the gash above my eye was closed up, the doc went to work on my hand.
There wasn't nearly as much pain while he attempted to close the numerous wounds across
my knuckles, but my whole arm felt numb still.
There was the occasional shooting pain, but only when I tried to move it.
"We'll have to perform some reconstructive surgery on your ear, but we'll let you rest
up some before we start," the doctor said as he got to his feet.
"Someone will be with you shortly."
My mom began to tear up again when he spoke, and I reached up to feel my ears.
I was suddenly concerned that I was missing half a lobe, or something, but I felt my heart
settle back into place when I ran my fingers across the slightly chewed up cartilage at
the very top of my ear.
"Doesn't feel like it needs reconstruction," I shrugged at my weeping mother.
"They just wanna see if they can reattach the bit that was shaved off," she replied
with a smile.
We talked back and forth for a little while as a few more nurses and a different doctor
entered the room.
They investigated my ear for a bit, before they got to work in their attempt to stitch
back the thin strip of meat that had been severed.
It would ultimately prove unsuccessful, but a slightly thinner ear was the least of my
concerns at the moment.
After a while, all of my injuries had been treated, and I was to be cleared to leave
the hospital.
It would take them a bit to have all the paperwork ready, so I took a moment to stroll to the
bathroom to the side of my hospital bed.
"Jesus Christ!"
I said when I looked at my reflection in the mirror.
Blood covered my entire face, and my shoulder length hair was still matted with sticky,
crimson globs.
My right arm was easily twice the size of my left, and it was several shades of purple
and blue.
I couldn't see my left pinky finger through the bandages and splint, but it felt like
it weighed a few more pounds than it used to.
My ear didn't look bad at all.
I honestly don't know why they even bothered to attempt to reattach such a thin sliver,
but I supposed it would just inflate the already enormous bill even more.
I walked back out of the bathroom to see the two officers and the paramedics who had aided
me in the field.
I was already getting prepared to answer a barrage of new questions, but they only wanted
to check in and see how I was doing.
All four of them appeared genuinely surprised my injuries were so minimal.
"I guess I just got lucky?"
I shrugged.
"I didn't know that sort of luck was possible!"
The shorter of the paramedics exclaimed.
"How did you even get out of the car?"
The other asked.
I just shrugged, genuinely unsure about anything that had happened since I left my girlfriend's
house.
"You got someone lookin' out for you, kid," the officer who had interrogated me in the
field said with a laugh.
Eventually, I was released from the hospital with a few prescriptions to pick up and warnings
for what to look out for with my concussion.
My mom drove me to the pharmacy and then back to her house so she could keep an eye on me.
I went to take a shower, but my legs were still shaky from the night's events, so I
just lay in a hot bath for a while.
I wanted to stay in longer, but it didn't take long for the water to become bloody and
filthy, so I just dried off and put on some warm clothes.
After a few days passed, my mom took me to the shop at which they had hauled my poor,
demolished Pontiac.
It was only a short drive from the house, but she wanted to see how bad it was as much
as I.
As we walked up to the small building surrounded by vehicles in many states of disarray, a
tall, slender man approached us, wiping grease and oil off of his hands with a blue towel.
"What can I do fer you fine folks?"
The man asked in a scratchy, but pleasant voice.
My mom went on to explain that we were here to see her son's car that had wrapped itself
around a tree a few days back.
She described the car and the location it had been picked up at.
"I'm so sorry fer yer loss, ma'am," the man replied, bowing his head slightly.
"No need for all that," my mom laughed, "This is him right here," she continued, gesturing
towards me.
The man just stuttered as his eyes grew wide and shocked.
After some back and forth, during which the man would not take his eyes off me, he waved
us forward to follow him.
We walked around the back of the building and into a veritable boneyard of beaten and
broken vehicles before we reached what was left of my poor Pontiac.
My mom gasped, and I just stared, slack-jawed at what lay before me.
The entire roof of the car had been crushed down on top of both the front and rear seats.
There was absolutely no room left for one person, let alone two, to have sat.
On top of that, a wide pool of blood filled the center console and the driver's seat,
along with more that lined the buckled steering wheel.
"We was sure nobody coulda survived that!"
Our guide said, scratching his head with his grease stained hand.
Some days afterwards, we received the police report of the accident that had occured that
night.
According to their investigations, I had lost control of my car due to severe weather conditions,
though I remember no more than a light rain.
It would appear that my vehicle flipped at the tight curve, and wrapped the roof around
the thick tree, crushing it down upon me.
The windshield had shredded my knuckles that still held onto the steering wheel, while
the window bracket crushed my left pinky finger.
The wounds to my eyebrow, ear and right arm, seem to have come from the sunroof as it wrapped
around me.
It was assumed that is how I made my escape.
The concept is still questionable to me as the injuries to my hands would imply I was
still sitting in the driver's seat while the roof crushed down onto the chair I was sitting
on.
My mom and I puzzled over the events for quite some time, until another question dawned on
me.
"How did you know to come to the hospital that night?"
I asked her.
This was a time before cell phones were so commonplace, and her address was not indicated
on my driver's licence, nor did I have any of her contact information on me.
She went on to explain that a man had come knocking on her door that rainy night.
He told her that her son had been in an accident, and he was heading to the hospital as they
spoke.
When I asked her what he looked like, she described an average sized man with dark,
messy hair and a thick beard.
He wore a military style jacket and a thick sweater underneath.
By the time she grabbed her keys and threw on a coat to head out the door, there was
no sign of the stranger, who she thought nothing more about until I made my inquiry.
The accident occured in the fall of ninety-eight.
Some details have surely been adjusted in my mind's eye over the years, but I still
hold the memory of my passenger that night.
I vaguely remember a conversation we had as I drove the familiar road, though I can not
recall a single word we spoke, nor the accident itself.
It could be argued that I imagined the whole thing, or even that I gave the guy a ride
to where he needed to go before I hit the steep curve.
It could even stand to reason that he could have been responsible for the wreck in the
first place, but I highly doubt that scenario.
I don't know if I'll ever have answers to what truly occured that night, some twenty
three years ago, but should I ever again see the stranger in the faded green army coat,
I think I owe him my gratitude.