I sat there shaking for a long time. I could not get the key into the ignition. Eventually I got the key in by holding it in both hands, like a child holding a crayon, and turned it, and the heater came on, blowing cold air and then less-cold air, and I put the car in gear and drove at fifteen miles an hour back down the ramp the wrong way along the shoulder, past the flares, which you are not supposed to do, and onto the frontage road and away.
I drove myself to the urgent care on Worthington-Galena Road. It was not open. I sat in the lot with the heater on full until it opened at eight, and then I went in, and the woman at the front desk looked at me — soaked to the shoulders, a gray scum of pond water drying on my coat, both hands wrapped in the cardigan I had taken off in the car to stop the bleeding — and stood up so fast her chair rolled into the wall behind her.
They kept me three hours. My core temperature was ninety-four point one. The doctor, a tired young woman with a braid down her back, put eleven stitches in my right palm and five in my left, and dug the piece of glass out of the heel of my hand, and asked me four times what had happened, and the fourth time I told her: a car went into a pond on the Polaris exit, and I pulled the driver out. When she wrote up the discharge papers, under Mechanism of Injury, she wrote: Lacerations bilat. palms from broken auto glass, pt. extracted driver from submerged vehicle. Hypothermia, mild. I have that piece of paper. It is in the folder.
I did not go to work that day. I called Winona from the urgent-care parking lot and said I'd slipped on the ice and cut my hands, and she said, "Oh, honey," and that she'd run the vendor payments herself, and not to come in until Monday. I drove home and took a bath so hot that it hurt and sat in it until it was cold, with my bandaged hands resting on the rim of the tub, wrapped in plastic bags from the Kroger, and I did not turn on the television.
Sergeant Whitacre called me the following Tuesday.
He was the trooper who had been setting flares on the ramp, and he was, I came to understand, a careful man. He had noticed a woman come up over the embankment soaked to the chest and walk to a champagne-colored Buick on the shoulder and drive away the wrong direction past his flares, and he had noticed, though he was busy, that the woman had left a trail of blood up the bank and that the man in the navy parka, who'd been so soaked at the cuffs, had not been bleeding at all. He had also taken the man's statement in the back of his cruiser, and the man — he didn't tell me this, but I read it later — had said there was a woman. And the sergeant had gotten the first four characters of my license plate from his own memory and a partial from his dashboard camera, which caught my car as I passed, and it had taken him three working days to run it down to a 2004 LeSabre registered to Etta J. Coyle at an apartment complex in Westerville.
"Ms. Coyle," he said on the phone, "I believe you were at the scene of a vehicle accident on the morning of the fourteenth, at the northbound Polaris Parkway exit."
My mother's rules came up in me like water. Never give anything you don't have to. Never be the one who's written down. I stood in my kitchen holding the phone with my bandaged hand and did not say anything at all for long enough that he said, "Ma'am?"