I was driving that morning because the bus wasn't running. Nothing was running; the whole of central Ohio had been glazed overnight by a freezing rain that came down for nine hours straight and coated every branch and power line and parked car in a half-inch shell of clear ice, so that at dawn the trees along Schrock Road were clattering against each other like wind chimes made of glass, and every few minutes, somewhere off in the neighborhoods, you heard the crack and whoosh of a limb giving way. The schools had closed, but I knew that the vendor payment run had to go out by noon or forty-one small dental practices would not get paid before the weekend, and that I had been driving in Ohio winters for thirty years, and that if I went slowly and left early I would be fine.
I left at six-twenty. I drove the Buick — my mother's old Buick LeSabre, a 2004, champagne-colored, a car nobody has ever looked at twice — at twenty-five miles an hour up the outer belt and onto 71 north. The interstate had been salted, but the salt had not caught up with the ice, and the lanes were a dull gray sheen under the streetlights, with a few cars creeping along in the far right lane with their hazards on. I had both hands on the wheel. I had the radio off.
There was a silver car ahead of me, maybe a hundred yards, going faster than I was. Not much faster — thirty-five, forty. It was a Corolla, I found out later. I didn't know it was a Corolla then. I knew it was small and silver and that its driver was in more of a hurry than the road was, and I remember thinking, without much feeling, That girl is going to get herself hurt.
There was a second car behind me. I knew because its headlights were in my mirror, a big pair, high off the road, an SUV or a truck, holding steady a few lengths back.
At the Polaris Parkway exit the silver car put on its blinker and moved into the exit lane and started up the ramp, and the ramp, which curves up and to the right in a long arc, was not salted at all. I saw it happen the way you see things happen in slow motion and in no time at all. The back end of the little car slid out to the left. The driver overcorrected, and the car snapped back the other way and began to spin, a full turn and then a half, sliding sideways along the ice toward the outside of the curve where the guardrail ends, and it went past the end of the guardrail with maybe a foot to spare and off the edge of the ramp, and it was gone.
I did not decide anything. I want to be honest about this, because Derek said the same thing at his party, and I have thought a great deal about the fact that we both said it, and that it was true for both of us, in different ways. I took my foot off the gas, and I let the Buick drift onto the shoulder of the ramp, and I put it in park and pulled the parking brake and turned on the hazards, and I did all of that without any thought at all, and then I reached up to the visor and unclipped my mother's little red hammer and put it in my coat pocket. I did that without any thought at all, too.
The embankment beyond the end of the guardrail drops maybe twenty feet down a steep grassy slope to a retention pond, one of those squared-off ponds that collect runoff from the parking lots, with a chain-link fence around half of it and a hotel on the far side, and a fringe of dead cattails. The slope was solid ice. I sat down on it in my long camel coat, and slid down on my backside, because it was the only way, and at the bottom I saw the car.
It had gone in nose first. The front half was under the water, and the back end was tilted up, the rear wheels a little above the surface, still turning slowly. The pond had a skin of ice on it, thin and gray, and the car had broken through and there were plates of it tilted up all around, floating and knocking against each other. The headlights were on under the water. I remember that. Two dim yellow lights, deep in the black water, pointed down at nothing. And the taillights were still on, red, above the water.