On Luck

Today I was driving to pick up my eldest son to take him to swimming. That means picking him up a little early from school. Nice little father-son time. I bought two new big fluffy towels maybe an hour before. I'm driving up this big hill in town to get him. Maybe fifty feet in front of my truck, a girl is crossing the road. (There's a junior high nearby.) It's been mild, but today was cold. She crosses in front of me and slips on a patch of ice. She goes from vertical to horizontal in a microsecond. Like, alarmingly quick. She doesn't get her hands out, and her face smashes into the curb.

I drive past her, hoping that she's going to pop up. In my mirrors, however, I can see that she's not moving.

I pull over, throw on the hazards, run back down the hill toward her. By the time I reach her, she starts screaming for help, screaming for her mom. She lifts up onto her hands and knees—at this point I can't see her face, just the back of her head—and a lot of blood is pouring out of her. For some reason I flashed to when Nick Kypreos got knocked out, because here's this puddle of blood blossoming on the ice. She starts screaming that she can't see, and I'm like, Oh fuck, I really hope she didn't knock an eye out. Jesus Christ. I get her to raise her face, and thankfully, it's her nose. She's broken the fuck out of it, and it's bleeding like crazy, but it's not her teeth and not her eyes. Okay.

I run back to my truck and get the towels I have owned for literally an hour. Start to soak up the blood. I'm asking where she lives, her mom's phone number. Mom just got a new phone, girl doesn't know the number. Okay. I call my ex to make sure my kid is met at school (thank you, tiny town and semi-amicable relationship), tell him I'm so sorry about the swimming, but I've got a bloody girl here. Another car pulls up, high school kids, girls who immediately start freaking the fuck out. I'm good, I've got this. I pile the wounded girl into my truck.

Her name is Lizzy. She's 13 years old.

I take her to her mom's house. Their apartment. It's public housing. Single mom. Mom comes out. Lizzy is concussed apart from her broken nose and needs to go to the hospital. Mom has no vehicle, and two more kids, including an autistic 8-year-old, about to come home from school, with no help to look after them. Lizzy needs to go. I ask mom if I should take her. "Would you?" mom says. Yes. Of course.

I take Lizzy to the hospital. Hospital staff are very fucking concerned that a smashed-up 13-year-old girl has arrived at the hospital in the company of a man she doesn't know. Nurse, amazing nurse, and I have a long talk. I explain the situation: family is broke, no vehicle, no dad(s), too many kids. Mom has obviously made some mistakes along the way. But appears to be a loving mom. Just fucking stuck.

Nurse decides she has to call Children's Aid. Thirteen-year-old girls can't come to the emergency room with strange men while mom stays home. I get it, I tell her. But I also get where mom was. Just fucked. Just wants to get her girl to the hospital. Split-second decision to trust a stranger, because she has no other choice.

I stay with Lizzy. We talk while we're waiting. Her dad died when she was four. She has two pictures of him, neither of which show his face, because the rest were lost in a fire that consumed their home when she was six or seven. Family just moved to town. No friends, no support. No fucking money. Lizzy's hungry, because she didn't have lunch that day. Why didn't she have lunch? She looks at me, like, Duh.

Fuck.

We get called in. Doctor's like, Who are you? I'm a stranger. Nurse explains. Doctor's like, Um, isn't that kind of fucked up? Yes, we all agree. It's all fucked up.

Lizzy's nose is in a million pieces. No surprise there. She's also concussed. Possible brain bleed. She can't leave. She has to stay.

In the meantime, Children's Aid calls me. Am I sure Lizzy wasn't punched at school? At home? No, I saw her fall with my own two eyes. She just laid out on the ice. Total fluke. Total accident.

Mom's not a bad mom. She's just in a bad spot.

"I know," Children's Aid worker says. "I see it every day."

Mom, who has been texting me every 30 seconds for three hours, finally finds someone to look after her other kids. No way to the hospital, though. I drive and get her. She races into the emergency room. Tears, hugs, I love you, I love you too. Mom and daughter love each other like crazy. It's the one thing in their lives that isn't missing.

But I can't help thinking this girl is fucked, and it's all because of bad luck. I saw my kids when I finally left, five hours after I was supposed to take my beautiful boy swimming, and I just hung out with them and hugged them and told them how lucky they are. And you know why they're lucky? JUST DUMB BONE LUCK IN THE FIRST PLACE. And they have no idea what I'm on about. They don't know what a gift they were given when they were born to functional people who have had good goes of it and there's plenty of money and they never have to think for a second about whether there's going to be lunch in their schoolbags, because, like, Duh.

And here's poor Lizzy, a good kid, smart kid, with no dad, and no money, and no lunch, and a smashed fucking face because she took a wrong step on a patch of goddamn ice. Just born under a black fucking star. And while I'm so, so glad that there's a safety net here, which means she has a roof over her head, and we could take her to the hospital without thinking about it, and Children's Aid called and were kind—the mom got a bunch of taxi chits out of the ordeal, if nothing else—I really can't shake the idea that so much of what we have and what we don't have just comes down to some stupid genetic lottery.

I know that's not some great revelation. It's just... I don't know. I am kind of fucked up right now. I'm grateful for what I have. I'm broken for Lizzy. At one point she said, "I wish you were my dad" and I had to go take a long fucking walk in the parking lot. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with any of this. I have no idea what any of you are supposed to do with it. I just feel like there are so many Lizzys and it really doesn't seem fucking fair to any of them to be pretty much fucked from birth. The way she was screaming for her mom when the blood was pouring out of her face will fucking haunt me forever.

Fucking hell, that kid. She deserves better. She deserves some good luck, she has earned the heater of all fucking heaters, and I hate how certain I am that she's never going to be the lucky one.

 

The part about the pictures of her dad having no face is heartbreaking. Obviously an uphill battle for her, but many of the people in the worst positions are the most resilient. That's probably of no solace but lots of people overcome things the lucky among us couldn't imagine.

 

She told me in one of them, it's Halloween, and he was dressed as a werewolf. In the other, he's wearing a hat of some kind, and he's kind of turned away from the camera.

I am honestly wondering right now if this girl will be in my life somehow for the rest of it. I don't think I can just forget about her. I also don't want to seem like a creepy weirdo. Maybe she just happened to be in front of me when she fell, and it's not anything more than that. Her nose will be set and her curb-stomping herself will only be the 172nd worst thing that happened to her.

 

One thing you can do is to support programs that help you assist these families and try to provide the kids with some little bit of normalcy that shows them the world isn't an entirely awful place. It might cost you time, money, and sometimes heartbreak, but it will also give you some of the best moments of your life.

 

Nice work, man. Really good.

 

Thank you, but that's not my point. (I hope that doesn't seem like my point.) No one, even on their worst day, is driving past a 13-year-old girl laid out bleeding in the street. I refuse to believe anyone would do that.

I feel like I will be a bad person if today is the last I see of Lizzy. I feel like now the test starts.

EDIT: I am a little choked up about the towels. They were nice.

 

Something similar happened to me once, though it didn't involve a bloody accident ...

About 15 years ago I was downtown getting into an elevator, can't even recall why I was in that building that day, and there was a middle-age couple standing on one side of the elevator, and in another corner was a woman about 25 staring at the floor, and as we rode up I could just feel this tension in the air.

So the elevator stops about 10 floors up, and the older couple hustles out fast, and the young woman goes to step out, and I notice she was silently crying, so I thought WTF and stepped out, too. By that time the couple had disappeared behind the door of what I noticed was a law firm, and I turned to the woman and asked her what was wrong, and she was still sniffling and crying, and just then the door to the law firm opens and a guy in a suit steps out and looks at me and then looks at her and says, "Well, come on, we're all waiting in here," and he said it like an asshole.

So I say, "What's going on here?" And the guy says, "It's none of your business" to me and then "Let's go" to her, and then I remember thinking, "Wow, just like in the movies" as I step between them and say, "Well, I'm making it my business." [lol.]

So the guy shoots me a look and disappears back into the office, and I say to the woman, "Do you want to go in there?" And she shakes her head no, and I say, "C'mon," and we get back into the elevator pretty quick, and we get out of there before the guy comes back and shoots us dead or whatever, which is what it felt like in my head. Weird scene outta nowhere, 10 floors up in an nice downtown office building.

So there's a little park nearby, and I find us a bench and we sit down and I ask her WTF was all that about?, and the floodgates open up and she's crying as she tells me that the couple on the elevator was her asshole boss and his nasty wife, and he had been sexually harassing her, and she had filed a complaint or whatever and had to meet with the boss and his lawyer that day for who knows what, and they showed up at the elevator at the same time, and right before I got there they had bitched her out and said they were gonna ruin her life and all that shit.

So we get to walking up the street, and it turns out she didn't have a lawyer and didn't really know how to fight it and was being intimidated by her jerk boss all the while, and right there on the street was a storefront with "Legal Services" on the window, so we ditched in there and I asked if they could help this woman, and then I got her name and phone number, and I got the hell outta there. Lucky to find Legal Services right there, because I didn't know how to extricate myself from this thing and get back to my own workday.

So another story of Luck, and I hope everything turned out OK for the woman, who was nice-looking but fairly helpless, and her accent hinted that she was from another country, so she was easy prey for her boss. But I never did find out anything. I called her number for a few days to check on her, but nobody ever answered, and it never went to voicemail, and finally I stopped calling, and so it's a mystery forever. Hadn't thought about it for years, and then Type's story brings it all back in a flash. I think she was a nanny or worked in their home, so the guy's wife was her boss, too. She was Eastern European, so maybe they were threatening to send her back to the homeland. And maybe they did.

 

1, good story

2, good job

3, you got a job at the fancy glossy because the janitor stuck his neck out for you; you wouldn't be who you are today without that janitor and a little luck and therefore ...

4, what you did yesterday may have changed the course of history for Lizzy and her mom and family, for the better; you just never know and again ...

5, good job for what you did and how you helped when you could've just driven by as many would have done.

 

Thanks. Again, I really refuse to believe anyone would have driven by. (The next car by stopped, the high school girls. And then a third car eased by, rolled down the window, checked if everything was okay.) I get that with a man, maybe, or if there is just some guy lying in the street. You might just think he's homeless or drunk (although it was, like, 3 in the afternoon and we don't have any homeless people). But a 13-year-old girl? Bleeding and crying for her mom? I think if you don't stop there, you're a really messed up person.

Talked to Lizzy's mom this morning. She was released from the hospital (no significant brain bleed, "just" a concussion). She's home but in a lot of pain. I'm going to take a couple of pictures of the "scene" for her this morning, the ice and the blood, because Lizzy lives one building too close to school to qualify for the bus (so, literally, kids in the building next door take the bus, and she walks, because that's her life) and her mom's going to fight to get her on the bus. So, that's the first thing we can do to make her life a little easier.

I want to do something about her lunch situation next but I'm not sure how to approach that.

EDIT: That's a good point about the janitor, @Songbird. That guy changed my life.

 

Go to the school and explain to officials why you're doing it but don't tell Lizzy's mother.

It's like when people (senior citizens, retired military, etc) go to pay their bill at a restaurant and find out someone else paid it for them and they have no idea who it was -- because it was a gesture of goodwill and love ... and not all goodwill and mitzvahs needs recognition or accolades. You can always send an anonymous letter to Lizzy's mom after the fact telling her that no boy and girl should go hungry at school. There are lots of ways of going about it. You'll figure out the way that works best for everyone involved.

 

I'm a little nervous about doing something behind the mom's back. I don't want to be insulting or patronizing. I don't even know if the high school has a lunch program or a cafeteria, or just a room where everybody eats. Small town, small school. I think I'll figure that out first, just what the options are. If there is a paid lunch available, then that's probably easiest, right? Just write a cheque for the rest of the year and don't say anything to mom? Maybe you're right.

 

You're invested now. You obviously have to put her through college.

You might think that you did her a great favor, but it seems in many ways she did you an equally great favor -- albeit, by slipping and breaking her face -- by reminding you of the inequity of life and how everyone can always afford to be more compassionate.