Out of Nowhere: My Angel Story
The rain started to fall harder as we traveled down the dark, two-lane road. Pete was driving. I was in the passenger seat, and our six foot three, 240-pound friend Bill was stuffed into the backseat of our two-door compact Toyota.
The only ambient light was the occasional vehicle traveling in the opposite direction. Visibility became more obscure as the rainfall increased.
We literally never saw what hit us. Another car plowed into the driver's side, sending our car into a spin. We came to a stop facing the wrong direction with our headlights knocked out. Neither of us had our seatbelts on. (The accident occurred before mandatory seatbelt laws and well before the advent of cell phones.)
I was stunned. My head slammed into the windshield, leaving a webbed crack and a convex dent. Pete’s body was thrust into the steering wheel. The driver of the car that hit us left the scene.
Bill shouted at me. “Mary, open the door! Let me out! Open the door!” I was still brushing the glass from my face, scared to open my eyes. When I finally tried to open the door, inexplicably, it would not open. The impact had been on the driver's side, not my side.
Bill continued to plead with me to get the door open. I hadn’t yet seen what he saw. There was an oncoming vehicle. The driver wouldn’t see us in time as we were stranded with no headlights. We were going to be hit again, this time head-on.
I struggled to get the door open. Bill was trying to squeeze his oversized body into the front so he could try.
Then a woman appeared out of nowhere. There were no houses in the area and no other cars. She opened the door, and Bill managed to extract himself from the backseat and escape the car.
He ran to the front of our car and frantically waved his arms so the oncoming vehicle's driver could see us in time. At the last minute, Bill jumped into the ditch along the side of the road. The driver of the vehicle, a full-sized pickup truck, saw him just in time. She slammed on her brakes. The truck swerved; its bed slammed into our car, forcing us back several feet.
The combination of the second impact and the adrenaline rush roused Pete and me. As we abandoned the car and joined Bill at the side of the road, the driver of the truck came rushing at us. She threw her cigarette at us while screaming about what we did to her daddy’s truck. It never occurred to her to ask if we were OK. Apparently, our grand scheme was to sit on an isolated road on a dark, rainy night, facing the wrong direction with no headlights so we could ruin her night.
The other driver eventually returned after calling a friend to accompany her back to the scene. The police took our statements and repeatedly asked if we wanted an ambulance to transport us to the hospital. Pete was in shock and had thrown up. I had a minor head injury. The dented, cracked windshield where my head hit had the more significant injury. The tow truck driver dropped us off at Bill‘s house, and Bill then took us to the emergency room.
We never saw the woman who opened the door again. You would’ve thought she would’ve stayed to check on us.
There’s no doubt that Bill was instrumental in saving our lives. Yet, he could have never done so without the aid of the woman who came out of nowhere to open the door.
Months later, as we sat with Bill and his wife Susan in a booth at a pizza parlor, we rehashed what happened that evening. I asked Pete what he saw. He saw a person that he couldn’t describe. I saw a woman with a plaid shirt and blonde hair. Bill saw a figure in white.
The accident was in BC times - before children and before accepting Christ. Yet, Pete and I knew then just as we know now that an angel opened the car door for us on that rainy night on an isolated road.
