15 Seconds. Andrew Gross

by.

      “Asshole …” Amanda turned to cuss him out. She stared back at the oncoming traffic. “Holy shit.”

      That’s when it finally dawned on her that she’d been driving on the wrong side of the road.

      “Deborah Jean? Deborah Jean? Honey, look what you forgot …!”

      Deborah Jean Jenkins’s mom ran out of the house, holding her grandson’s “didee.” The soft, blue terry cloth that always seemed to make eight-week-old Brett smile as he clung to it with those adorable, tiny little fingers of his.

      Not that he was smiling much at all these days. In fact, the poor boy was really colicky or something, and was barely taking his formula. His dad was still two months from coming home from Afghanistan. He hadn’t even seen his own son yet. Only on Skype. He had a position waiting for him at the Walmart. Then they could get their own place. Start their lives over again.

      “Okay, Mom, thanks …” Deborah Jean said with a loud sigh, going back to pick the didee up from her by the front stairs.

      “You want me to come along, honey?” her mother asked.

      “No, Mom, I think the two of us can handle this perfectly well ourselves. It’s like, what—a fifteen-second drive right down the road … What can happen in fifteen seconds?”

      “Well, okay … Just make sure you buckle my grandson in there nice and tight.”

      “I promise, Mom,” Deborah Jean said, rolling her eyes with a tolerant smile.

      She took Brett back down the walkway to where her minivan was parked. “You’re going to be a very important person in this world one day …” she told him. “A doctor or a lawyer, maybe. You’ll make us all very proud. And when you are”—she gazed into his bright blue eyes—“I want you to promise me something. I want you to promise, dude, that if I ever go on like that when you’re all grown up, you’re just gonna tell me to shush up! Can I count on you for that, Brett? Huh, can I?”

      Deborah Jean tickled her son’s chin with her knuckles as she suddenly heard a rumble from behind her. She turned.

      To her horror, a rust-colored car had busted right through the white fence off the street and was heading up the lawn right toward the house—toward her—seemingly out of control.

      “Stop! Stop!” Deborah Jean shouted as the car careened off the large elm in the yard, barreling down on her. “Oh, Lord Jesus, no …”

      She tried to shield Brett, turning directly into the disoriented eyes of the young woman at the wheel. The last thing she ever heard was the terrified cry of her mom, who never ever stopped worrying over the oncoming engine’s roar:

      “Deborah Jean! Deborah Jean!”

      When Amanda came to, her car was resting among the hedge work of a large, white house.

      A house? She blinked foggily. How the hell did she get here …?

      A shrill voice beyond the car was shrieking, “Deborah Jean! Deborah!”

      Would you stop? You’re busting my head, lady.

      Through her haze, Amanda wasn’t sure what had happened. The car just seemed to go out of control, like it had a mind of its own. Her door was hanging open. Fuzzily, she pushed herself out of the car. She knew she’d done something really bad. The woman kept screaming, “Brett! Brett! Oh my God, someone please help!”

      Who the fuck is Brett? Amanda wondered. Her head was really killing her now.

      Suddenly people were everywhere. “Someone cut me off,” Amanda muttered to someone rushing by. No one seemed to be helping her, only the woman who was screaming.

      “Hey, I’m hurt too,” Amanda said. Blood rolled down her cheek. “Can’t you see? Whatever …”

      This was like some really bad dream. It’s time to wake up now! she told herself. But blinking, she knew that whatever was going on, it was really real. Really bad too.

      “Deborah! Deborah Jean, my daughter! Help her, please!” the bitch with the piercing shrill wouldn’t stop screaming. Then she looked squarely at Amanda: “What have you done?” Her face twisted in anguish. “What have you done?”

      “I couldn’t help it,” Amanda said, coming around the car to see.

      A woman was pinned under her car. She was kind of pretty. Her eyes were glazed and very wide and her lips moved ever so slightly, though her voice was faint.

      “Brett …” she murmured.

      That’s when Amanda saw that she was clutching something under there. Something bundled in blue. A blanket.

      A baby’s blanket. And people were standing around with their eyes filling up with tears. And there was blood everywhere.

      You’ve done it now, Amanda said to herself.

      Just like me.

PART ONE

      CHAPTER ONE

      You get ten days, someone once told me. Ten days in all of your life that qualify as truly “great.” That when you look back through the lens of time stand apart from everything else.

      All the rest is just clutter.

      And driving my rented Cadillac STS somewhere outside Jacksonville, just off the plane from Ft. Lauderdale, looking around for Bay Shore Drive and the Marriott Sun Coast Resort, I thought that today had a pretty fair shot of ending high on that list.

      First, there would be eighteen holes with my old college buddy from Amherst, Mike Dinofrio, at Atlantic Pines, the new Jack Nicklaus–designed course you pretty much had to sell your soul—or in my case, remove fifteen years of wrinkles from the face of a board member’s wife—to even get a tee time on.

      Then it was the Doctors Without Borders regional conference I was actually in town for, where I was delivering the opening address. On my experiences in the village of Boaco, in Nicaragua, where, for the past five years, instead of heading off each August on some cruise ship or to Napa like most of my colleagues, I went back to the same, dirt-poor, flood-ravaged town, doing surgeries on cleft palates and reconstructive work on local women who’d had mastectomies as a result of breast cancer. I’d even put together a fund-raising effort at my hospital to build a sorely needed school. What had begun, I’d be the first to admit, as simply a way to clear my head after a painful divorce had now become the most meaningful commitment in my life. A year ago, I’d even brought along my then-seventeen-year-old, Hallie, who freely admitted that at first it was merely a cool way to show community service for her college applications. But this year she was back again, before starting at UVA, snapping photos for a blog she was doing and teaching English. I’d even included some of her photos as a part of my presentation tonight: “Making Medicine Matter: How a Third-World Village Taught Me the Meaning of Medicine Again.” I wished she could be there tonight, but she was going through exams. Trust me, as a dad, I couldn’t have been prouder.

      Then later, after everything wound down, I had drinks lined up at the Marriott’s rooftop bar with one Jennifer H. Keegan—former Miss Jacksonville, now regional field manager for Danner Klein—whose visits to my office were always charged with as many goose bumps and as much electricity as there was product presentation. The past few months, we’d bumped into each other at cocktail parties and industry events, but tonight … hopefully basking in the afterglow of my moving and irresistible speech, with a couple of glasses of champagne in us … Well, let’s just say I was hoping that tonight could turn a day that was “really, really good” into one that would reach an all-time high on that list!

      If I could only locate the damn hotel … I fixed on the green, overhanging street sign. METCALFE … That wasn’t exactly what I was expecting to see. Where the hell was Bay Shore Springs Drive? I started thinking that maybe I should’ve waited for the Caddie with the GPS, but the girl said that could be another twenty minutes and I didn’t want