Nightmare

Yesterday afternoon was gorgeous for a ride: Sunny, warm, and windless. I left at 2 pm, and I planned to be back in time to shower and pick up Zoe from preschool a little after 4.

In 20 minutes or so, I made it to the top of Fairmount Avenue, climbed the quiet roads through the cemetery, pushed my way up Sunset Drive and headed north on Arlington Avenue.

The first part of the descent of Arlington is a little steep, but routine–I’d been this way many times before. In a few minutes I’d finished the the curvy parts and was headed down a long, straight, moderate grade through East Richmond Heights.

There was a car where a car shouldn’t have been, heading south in the northbound lane. He’d crossed over the yellow line, and my mind wanted to believe he would soon duck into a driveway, or veer back, or…

That was about all the time I had. I squeezed the brakes, hard, but there was no chance to steer around and no way to break my momentum.

I was looking down at where my front wheel was about to make contact with the bumper. Maybe that was why I flipped, rolled, and then smashed into the driver’s side windshield with my shoulders and upper back, sending glass shards flying through my helmet vents and into my scalp. I felt the bike rip clear from my clipped-in shoes and continue in another direction.

Then I was aware of my momentum carrying me onward, my butt and back sliding up the shattered remains of the windshield.

And then I was stopped, balanced on a hip and a forearm, on the roof of the car.

An old man got out of the driver’s side below me.

“How fast do you think you were going?” he said.

I asked him to call 911.

“You go ahead and call ’em,” he said. It sounded like a challenge, maybe even a threat.

“No, you call them,” I pleaded. I didn’t know whether my hands could operate a mobile phone.

A passerby was watching from the west side of the street. He had his phone out and agreed to call 911. Then someone appeared on a porch and said they’d called.

My legs hurt like hell. I sat up and dangled them over the passenger side and looked down the street, telling myself to breathe slowly and deeply.

The old man pulled the car, with me still sitting on the roof, over to the curb on the wrong side of the road. He wanted a bunch of things–to see my driver’s license, know my insurance company, to roll up the window beneath my legs, to leave to go pick up his granddaughter.

EMTs arrived. I took this picture from the gurney inside the ambulance.