belt hadn’t held her at this awkward angle, she wouldn’t have been able to leverage the drifting truck.
Her prayer was an inarticulate cry as the oncoming car bore down on them and began to swerve. Beth released the wheel, and her sagging, unconscious father pulled them off the shoulder and across the dry grass. Thanks to the stalled engine, they hit the solid power line just hard enough to deploy the air bags, and then the truck bounced back. The hood was dented and steaming.
Beth had raised her arms in front of her face at the moment she let go, and the skin of her forearms took the sting of the bags’ explosion. Her mind worked quickly, hyper alert, and her body sprang into focused action the moment the car came to rest. In one smooth motion that she had never practiced, she swept the nylon bag out of her way, released her belt, found her phone, activated the speaker, dialed 9-1-1, put the phone on the dash, and had her father unbuckled by the time the operator answered. She was able to say exactly where the accident occurred—which highway they were on, which cross street they had just passed.
“My father had a heart attack while driving. He’s unconscious. He’s breathing. This is his second attack.” Thanks to the first one, Beth knew the latest CPR recommendations. Everything the operator told her to do made sense.
It should have been difficult to get him onto his back, and yet she had no trouble standing over him within the confines of the truck cab. It didn’t occur to her to get out, to try to open his door and drag him onto the ground. Her feet found firm braces against the armrest and the gear box. Her strong legs squatted and lifted while she gripped him under the arms, locked her fingers behind his back, and turned him across the bench seat, her sticky cheek pressed into the sweat of his hair and neck. His knees angled oddly, trapped by the steering wheel. She twisted him at the waist, making his spine as flat as possible.
“He stopped breathing,” she heard herself saying. She dropped all the weight of her back and arms into rapid chest compressions, knowing that there was still enough oxygen in his blood to keep his brain and body alive, so long as she could keep it moving.
Her memory pulled up his heavy sighs, his perspiring forehead, his extreme fatigue, and interpreted all these clues much differently now.
Press-press-press-press.
Was this how God would prove his goodness?
Please, don’t let him die, she prayed. If only she understood the “healing touch” that Jacob claimed she had. If only the miracle worker could control her own gift.
The operator continued to speak to her, and she continued to answer. She heard the creaking of a distant car door and remembered that there was another driver somewhere. She feared his fury. She heard a man’s shout but didn’t know what the words were, didn’t look up until a shadow fell over the truck’s cab.
Her passenger door opened, and hot but fresh air rushed in, lifted her chin. Press-press-press-press. Beth registered that a man stood there, and that a small cut under his eye was blooming and had dripped blood onto his shirt, a green polo with an embroidered design on the right shoulder. Wolf Creek, it said. A mountain-pass ski resort west of the valley. She’d skied there before but had never paid attention to its logo until now. Between two mountain peaks, the head of a wolf looked down on her with piercing triangular eyes. The man’s blood dotted its nose.
Press-press-press-press.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
“It’s stopped,” he said. “I’m an EMT. How can I help?”
13
In the round sanctuary of the Sweet Assembly, Garner waited for Hank to begin his message. Garner had heard it before and liked it about as much as canned green beans that tasted like their tin containers. Even so, he had felt unseated since the storm shattered his kitchen window. The glass had been repaired, but he couldn’t fix the disquiet in his heart. It was clear to him now that the storm had stirred up a need in him like sediment on the bottom of a river, and the water would not clear. He needed his daughter, Rose. He needed her to come back to him.
He needed a miracle, which is exactly what the Sweet Assembly was known for.
Garner sat in the unyielding wooden church pew with a handful of