Clouded Rainbow (4 page)

He stood up, gravitated to his wife’s side, and then held out his hand.

“What are you doing?” Lois asked.

“Just take my hand.”

Lois placed her hand inside Roger’s grasp, and then stood up. Her eyes squinted as she looked at John, who shrugged.

Roger reached into his pocket and removed the item he had carried with him from work, the item he had concealed inside his office desk, the item Lois had rested her eyes on last week during a stroll downtown.

“Open it,” Roger said as he handed her the black case.

Lois did just that and beheld the necklace she had fallen in love with in that store window.

“You remembered!” Lois said.

“I’d never forget tonight.”

Roger kissed his wife deeply. Then he whisked her hair aside and fastened the necklace.

John looked at them with eager eyes.

“Uh, did you need something else, sir?”

“I just wanted you to know that it’s our anniversary.”

“I’ll make this a special night for you two.” John smiled as he scurried on his way.

Roger and Lois sat quietly and basked in the shadowy, tranquil environment. Roger studied the diamond resting against Lois’ radiating skin and the way it sparkled in her brown eyes. This moment was one that Roger cherished. When he would have a few minutes to himself after a busy meeting or a late-night business conference, he would close his eyes and transport himself to a moment like this.

Just as the couple enjoyed the silence together, a sudden outcry erupted from the entryway. Roger and Lois looked at the commotion, as did most of the guests around them.

A bum busted through the entryway door and lunged toward the hostess. She screamed in fright from the vagrant’s unknown intentions. Without hesitation, the restaurant manager widened his eyes and hustled toward the intruder. He knew the occasional beggar would slip through the valet first line of defense and that these bums were more or less harmless, but their abrupt appearance was their involuntary downfall. The manager could not let this man disrupt the customers,
his
customers. The manager signaled to two muscular servers who sprang to action. Before the bum could cause any more disorder, the two servers ejected him out onto the concrete.

Roger shook his head from the actions. While he did feel sympathetic to some of the truly needy beggars, he wished these people would just get a job and leave the civilized folks to eat in peace. Perturbed, he looked at Lois and barked, “Geez. The nerve of these bums!”

4

The night air was cool and moist. Roger and Lois walked from their evening meal as she carried her leftover lasagna in a doggy bag. She hung onto her husband’s arm as he gallantly led the way to the valet podium. Roger felt satisfied. The meal had hit the spot, and all he thought about was getting home to seduce his wife. Roger knew that Lois had one too many glasses of wine, but that was all right. He liked her when she was frisky, and it only added to his desire for her.

“I feel like we’re on our first date,” Lois gently whispered.

“I think someone had too much to drink…my little dynamite,” Roger chuckled.

Lois watched Roger greet the valet driver with his claim ticket. The young man jumped to fetch the SUV as Roger chatted with another valet driver about an exotic Porsche nearby. Lois liked to watch Roger interact with others. She liked how he stood tall and always knew how to direct the conversation. He was a man who lived in the moment and knew how to talk diplomatically. This was a skill, she figured, that must have been fostered from his years of working with big-time business clients.

Roger walked toward Lois, but as his eyes filled with his wife’s glowing face, the roar of his SUV’s gas-guzzling engine consumed his focus. It was followed by the sound of tires screeching. Roger flared up like a mother hearing a stranger abusing her child.

“Whoa! What the hell are you doing?” he shouted at the culprit.

The college-aged man had a look of embarrassment, as he realized that one of his customers had finally caught on to his joyriding. Roger helped Lois into the passenger’s side, and then made his disapproval known to the other man.

“Come on. Where did you learn to drive? This is a fifty thousand dollar vehicle, not some beat-up wagon. And you just drive it around like you don’t give a shit!” he blasted.

The valet driver gave no response. Roger stormed to the driver’s side, purposely giving no tip.

It’s about time someone stood up to these punks
, he thought.

Lois could hear his scolding through the sound-deafening material of the SUV. She giggled, too tired to do anything, too tired even to click her seatbelt. All she wanted to do was bask. “Boys will be boys,” she mouthed under her breath.

Roger grabbed the keys from the young man and entered the tranquility of his SUV. His nose received a hint of Lois’ natural scent, which stimulated his receptive olfactory nerve. He immediately calmed down and put himself right back into the placid mood he had felt as he walked out.

“Let’s go home and I’ll make it all better,” Lois murmured.

Her words massaged his auditory nerve and further pushed him into serenity. Roger glanced at his wife; her cleavage kneaded his optic nerve. His worries subsided.

Roger pulled out and drove down the familiar downtown streets. Lois’ tipsiness heightened the mood and made him feel as if he were back in college driving home from an evening basketball game at the Bryce Jordan Center.

Lois began to sing. “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream—come on, Roger.”

 Roger laughed.

“Come on, sing,” she playfully instructed.

Roger gave in and joined in the melody. He was a horrible singer, but having an intoxicated audience allowed even the worst singer to shine. They sang in tandem, Lois a few beats ahead of Roger, “…gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream…”

Lois moved closer to Roger and slid her hand on his thigh. Her libido was raging. The fun and games continued as Roger commanded the road. Then, like flipping a light switch, buckets of rainwater attacked his vehicle. Roger immediately reached for the wipers, but the rubber was no match for the flood of water mixed with golf-ball sized hail. He looked up at the sky. While it was relatively clear when they had left, ominous clouds now filled it, stealing the moon away.

Up head, Roger saw the Pleasant Place Bridge through the shield of water. He could make out the fact that four lanes existed, but the water made it nearly impossible to see where the other cars were.

Just follow the yellow line
, he kept telling himself, remembering the driving manual he had studied as a teenager.

He couldn’t make out what the body of water was doing down below, but he knew it must have been raging.

Lois continued the song in an attempt to keep up the light-hearted mood, but sweat covered Roger’s brow. He hated driving in blinding weather, and although his SUV gave him a sense of protection, all he could think about was that yellow line.

Lois turned to look behind them, but as she did, she knocked the doggy bag from her lap onto the carpet.

“Watch the rug!” Roger instinctively yelled as he moved his eyes over to the lasagna spill.

As Roger removed his stare from the yellow line, he didn’t see what fate brought the loving couple. Because the moment he looked back at the rain-covered road, he saw an image that would forever change his and his wife’s life.

The image was two blinding headlights, but they weren’t the headlights of a compact car, which would be the contender in a bout with Roger’s champion SUV; they were the headlights of a monstrous, multi-ton tractor-trailer with a fully-weighted load. The truck was hungry as its trailer had jackknifed, which prevented an escape for its prey.

Roger looked up and had a split second of an aura, a moment where chaos met clarity. He could not think, or react, but just be in the moment. After time had bent, the tractor-trailer consumed Roger’s SUV. Like a ragdoll, Lois flew forward and smashed through the front windshield, knocking her immediately unconscious. Her body ejected into the air and soared higher and higher over the concrete bridge. Just like an afflicted bird, however, Lois quickly plummeted toward the screaming water. Her body pierced through the liquid and entered the underwater world. The diamond necklace around her neck broke free and descended toward the unknown.

The tractor-trailer continued to devour more innocent victims on the bridge. A librarian on her way home from work and a soccer mom with her three children were no match for the menacing machine. Flames erupted and metal exploded, rendering the bridge into an impassable roadblock. Cars swerved and nailed the embankment as their drivers took the lesser of two evils. As turmoil blasted everywhere, the truck finally ground to a halt, sending flames of ignited diesel fuel hundreds of feet into the air. Rain blanketed the area, but the fires were too intense even for the liquid from above.

Two bystanders in the oncoming lane had the most horrific view of the show, as they watched the hungry machine eat its victims. What mesmerized them in particular was Lois’ swan dive into the unknown below. Both slammed on their brakes and hustled toward the location of Lois’ descent.

“A woman! I think a woman’s in the water!” one of the two bystanders screamed.

The other bystander, a swimming coach named Bill, didn’t say a word, because he knew that words wouldn’t, they couldn’t, save the fallen woman. Bill dove off the twenty-foot high structure without hesitation. As he soared through the air, he knew the dive was dangerous even for a seasoned high diver, but as his face smashed into the harsh water, adrenaline quickly pushed his fears away.

A crowd watched from the bridge. All they could see was the bobbing water with no sign of Lois or her savior. Seconds seemed liked minutes as the crowd’s eyes tried to search for any sign of life. Some pondered diving in themselves, but they had to give the diver a few more seconds to succeed.

Finally, after what seemed like infinity, Bill emerged from the raging water different from the way he had entered; he had Lois on his back. Bill gasped for oxygen before he embarked on the hundred-yard swim to the south shore. Although a hundred yards would be a brisk morning workout for the veteran swimmer, he knew this would be the most important one hundred yards of not only his life, but also the life of the stranger on his back.

Meanwhile, on the chaotic bridge, Roger still sat inside his SUV. But the moment his head had bashed into the leather-wrapped steering wheel, his mind left his body. Roger was off in a distant universe, a place where even dreams failed to exist. And if he were given the choice, he would have chosen to be somewhere without thoughts rather than pinned inside his demolished vehicle. As blood trickled down his cut face, his motionless mug lay against the deflated airbag. If he had been somehow awake, the picture of him and Lois, inches from his eyes, would have filled his gaze, but the photograph would have been very different from the one he remembered. It was split down the middle, separating him from his wife.

Fortunately for Roger, more members of the crowd assessed the destroyed vehicles on the bridge. Brazen men, who naturally assumed the responsibility of hero during times of despair, had stepped up during the minutes it took for rescue workers to reach the chaos. Two brothers, who were driving together several cars behind Roger, took notice of his SUV. They ran to his side as the sound of the blaring ambulance sirens grew in strength.

“Sir, can you hear me!?” yelled the older of the brothers.

Roger failed to respond, but that didn’t stop the two men.