We went to bed early that evening. My dad was going to drive me to Providence early Sunday morning so I could make my flight back to Lexington.
He was struggling with getting rest - little did we know that three days later doctors would discover a brain tumor the size of a plum close to my dad's brain stem. At the time, we thought he was just having bad headaches.
The house was quiet, and I wasn't sleeping well, despite being a normally sound sleeper. There I lied, tossing and turning in one of the two twin beds in my front bedroom, shivering to stay warm in the flannel sheets.
The night was still. The sky was black. I sat there with my thoughts, undisturbed, until a loud, crashing bang erupted in the dark.
Eyes wide open, I froze to get a read on the source of this shattering disruption.
I eased out of my bed and peered out of the window, discovering something glinting in our driveway. The rhododendrons blocked my view, so I stared intently and heard a bit of rustling. That's when I heard a stage whisper of our last name.
Dashing to my parents' room, I stepped softly so as to not wake the the entire household. "Mom?" I whispered. "Mom?"
Stirring from her deep sleep, my mom growled at me. "What the hell do you want, Katy?" We'd all been on edge because of my father's headaches, and my mom was beyond annoyed that I was waking them in the middle of the night.
"Mom, I think there's a car in our driveway. There was a loud crash and I heard someone whisper our last name."
She lumbered out of bed and quickly charged ahead of me, making a beeline for my bedroom window. She, too, saw the odd reflection in our driveway, and raced downstairs to the front door.
"Oh my God. Their fucking car fell off the cliff," she yelled.
As it turns out, our neighbors' daughter came home from a late night out with the rest of her high school class. Unable to drive herself home, a friend took the wheel of the old fashioned, Volvo 240 station wagon. She cruised it up the hill to their garage and pulled in the door, parking the car in neutral.
After the girls got out of the vehicle and made it inside, the silver wagon rolled out of the garage, across the driveway and down the nine foot cliff that separated their property from ours.
Crash.
Dad woke up and settled with the details outside. The wagon was trapped in our landscaped shrubbery, so it would have to stay there overnight.
The next few weeks would be even more tense than normal regarding my parents' relations with these shifty neighbors. The conversations involved crafting truth for the insurance company and struggling to get compensation for the damage to our landscaping.
But when the hell do you ever get to say a car fell off a cliff and landed in your yard?
Kate's Random Musings by Kate the Great is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
2 comments:
You've had a lot of interesting Swedish car stories! I think it's because in CT each family is mandated to own one.
My sophmore yr in high school a swarm of bees took up residence in my bedroom, but no falling car stories.
I once parked my car in front of the new DAAP building (the street on campus) walked inside to grab my friend, came out and my car (92 Saturn named Roy) was gone. After some searching we found it at the bottom of the hill, it had rolled down the hill, jumped a substantial curb, and was resting comfortably on a sapling.
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