Chapter Four - Second Chances

The sun was barely peeking through, highlighting an orange skyline, when Carol’s car pulled up to Whispering Willow. Fully rested from her day off, she carried a small bag of fast food breakfast and coffee and walked briskly into the lobby. Thankfully, the hallways remained quiet, so she could eat her breakfast in peace.  

She startled Louise, who was sitting at the staff desk beside the hallway. After the initial shock, Carol patted her on the back and greeted her as she walked by: “Hey, girl.”

“Convenient of you to be gone the day Mr. Ramsey’s new roommate arrives,” Louise said, following her into her office while wiping her sleepy eyes. “Did you plan that?”

Carol smiled and gave a “who knows?” look, while sitting down and digging into her breakfast.

“How are they getting along?”

“It’s totally caught him off guard. I think he was hoping for someone less active…and in his right mind. We heard a little bit from him last night, threatening to have us all fired or something like that. But he calmed down later. He probably exhausted himself.”

Carol took a sip of her coffee.

“Have you heard anything from Linda? She didn’t show, hasn’t called, won’t answer her phone. She didn’t even sign out when she left the other day.”

Carol rolled her eyes. Linda’s track record was spotty at best but she’d always taken up for her. She was a bit of a party girl who stayed up late and called in sick frequently – “sick” as in “tired.” For some reason, Linda reminded her of herself, although the two were hardly alike.

It wasn’t even Linda’s first disappearance. She once ditched work when her friends made a surprise trip out of town. With no one to find any information about her, Carol used Linda’s credit card information to track down her last purchase, worried she was going to have to turn her in as a missing person. When she reached a very surprised Linda in a beachside hotel room, both women were furious and exchanged harsh accusations. That was close to the end of Linda’s time at the home, but somehow Carol managed to look beyond that episode. Her generosity, however, was wearing thin.

“I’ll call her. She may be having boyfriend problems, who knows. I’ll find out. Did Tammy come in, then?”

“Yeah, she’s very dependable.”

“Any other big news? Breakups? Declarations of love? Visiting families?”

“Nah, mostly a normal day.”

Carol started looking over reports on her desk but noticed Louise hadn’t moved. She looked up to see Louis staring at a framed picture behind her desk, a frequent source of fascination for her. The black and white photograph was a picture of Carol as a 12 year-old girl cradled by a man in a uniform. It was a black and white photo, a souvenir of a moment she’d never be able to forget.

“How often do you think about that?”

Carol’s smile disappeared, briefly replaced by a stern solemn expression. Louise mentally backtracked, realizing she had touched a nerve and wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. Even so many years later, the day was never just a memory, but a life-changer, splitting her childhood in two.

“At least once a day, more if I’m around Momma,” she replied. Suddenly aware of the mood, she snapped back into her happy-go-lucky attitude. “You know how she is, she can’t tell a story too many times. Did I tell you she’s coming? Everyone in this home will know all about it.”

“Well, look at this way,” Louise responded. “Some of these folks won’t remember from one time to the next. We’ll get tired of it, but they won’t.”

               

The story of October 12, 1968 didn’t need any of Carol’s mother’s many signature exaggerations, although she provided them regardless. For a day that delivered such tragic consequence, Eunice managed to stay mostly upbeat during recollections, due either to the amount of times she’d told it or a statement on her nature itself.

Well over four decades ago, twelve year-old Carol suffered with a serious case of pneumonia so severe it required a week in the downtown children’s hospital. Her mother and father took turns putting in their own work hours and attending her beside, until her lungs had finally returned to normal and she was discharged.

The moment both of her parents marched her out of the city hospital was one of the happiest memories of her life. It was the light at the end of a long tunnel and she was finally able to let go of the fears generated by the long nights in a dark hospital room. At first, she thought of the stay as a grand adventure, with nurses being so kind to deliver soft drinks and ice cream, not to mention non-stop cartoons. A few days later, however, she begged and cried to return home every night.

On the drive home, Carol’s father, Samuel, told her about all the phone calls and letters that had been received at home. Little Carol already sat on the backseat beside plants, balloons and stuffed animals that had recently decorated her room. She asked about Poochie, the family dog, and wondered how glad he’d be to see her again. She’d really missed Poochie, since pets weren’t allowed visiting hours. She also inquired to make sure Deborah, who was currently at school, hadn’t gone snooping in her room. Even all these years later, she strongly remembers the song playing on the radio, coupled with her father’s serenade.

“I guess, you say, what can make me feel this way? My girlsss.”

He’d always turn it plural, grinning while he sang.

As the car crossed a bridge, time seemed to stop and both Carol and Eunice struggle with a coherent account of it to this day. The metal bridge beneath them buckled, catching Carol’s stomach and causing her to lose her breath. Within seconds, a fireball erupted in front of the car and Samuel reacted by instantly slamming on the brakes. The car’s tires skidded toward the firestorm but began slowing down.  

The radio blared…”I’ve got so much honey, the bees envy me…”

A few feet in front of their car, which had stopped, the bridge separated and large chunk of it fell. Nearby, other cars pummeled into the steel side walls and into each other. Screams competed with the sound of cables popping and what sounded like bombs. Having just studied the end of the world in Sunday School, Carol wondered if they were in the middle of Armageddon. Still, in her pre-teen mind and experiencing her own shock, she felt a sense of immortality, like she was watching everything unfold on a movie screen. Ultimately, she believed she’d be safe.

“I’ve got a sweeter song that the birds in the trees.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Samuel spotted in the rear view mirror a car swerving but moving full speed ahead, headed toward them. It slammed into their backside, forcing their vehicle off the edge of the bridge’s south side. The car spun, plummeting more than a hundred feet. For Carol, the drop was an eternity, occurring in slow motion. The balloons, plants and suitcase were airborne.

“I don’t need no money, fortune or fame…”

The Buick crashed into the freezing waters below, jarring their bodies. Unsecured by a seatbelt, Carol landed on the interior ceiling – broken, bruised and bloody – and surrounded by the river’s waters outside of the window. In the last few moments before things became really blurry, Carol felt the chilly waters begin rushing around her while she struggled to find air. She screamed for help, noticing her barely-aware mother and her father, hanging motionless from his seatbelt.  

“What can make me feel this way?.....”

When Eunice retells the story, she’ll elaborate on how, even in that semi-conscious state, she managed to formulate prayers for Carol and Samuel. She thought of Carol’s future – her high school graduation, falling in love, marriage…She couldn’t bear to think of it cut short, worse yet with her left to survive alone.

Today, when Eunice mentions that moment and those prayers specifically, she’ll shift more attention to the one that was answered than to the one that was not. The unanswered prayer was still between her and God, a question she’d ultimately discuss with Him face to face, not for everyone else to analyze or offer their opinions. If it was truly her turn to be Job, she’d prefer not to have sloppy advice from amateur philosophers, certainly none to tell her “curse God and die.”

October 12 was the day Eunice lost her Samuel and Carol lost her father. That alone makes it infamous to all who knew the kind-hearted, hard-working family man. For over forty years, his grave received fresh flowers on this day, mostly from Carol, Deborah and Eunice, but also from friends in his small community.

Beyond their personal loss and the lives of ten other people, October 12 captured the world’s attention for its surprising second-half, what one radio broadcaster famously dubbed “the mind-blowing rescue.”  

It could not have been more extraordinary, although Eunice and Carol would only hear the details secondhand. By the time they awakened, they were strapped to stretchers in the middle of a flurry of policemen, firemen, paramedics and reporters. While the dozens of responders worked hard to recover bodies and tend to the wounded, the mother and daughter owed their own lives to the efforts of just one man.

The picture of young Carol and her costumed savior hanging on the wall behind her desk once adorned the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Long considered a myth or media creation, it was one of his most unforgettable public appearances and the first time many people ever saw a superhuman.

Shattering the limited understanding of what a human body can accomplish, the man the public called Captain Horizon propelled himself into the chilly waters after the car a few seconds after impact. Eyewitnesses were barely able to recognize the black and red blur, which many at first assumed to be something mechanical. Once underwater, he swam underneath, pushing the car back above the surface. To onlookers, the car appeared to hover to a boat dock and they watched in disbelief as he lowered it back down onto its tires, water gushing from the door frames.  

Ripping the door off the handle as emergency vehicles arrived, the masked man reached inside and pulled the girl out. As he carried her toward the ambulance, the iconic snapshot was taken – the broken bloodied young girl in the strong arms of a soaked hero with a cape flapping in the wind. All that was missing was the Stars and Stripes in the background. He placed her in the arms of a paramedic and soon rocketed back into the waters to look for more survivors.

The young paramedic would later tell reporters that Captain Horizon was moderately out of breath with a look of urgency in his eyes. He was also embarrassed to only be able to muster up, “thank you, sir.”

The spectacle was something most had to see to believe and many did. Camera crews arrived to film the rescuer deliver more bodies, eventually receiving the help of arriving firefighters and onlookers. The most famous moment of all of Carol Leonard’s life, a day immortalized in volumes of science and history forever, and she didn’t remember a minute. It could have all been a dream, she considered, but it became painfully real at her father’s graveside.

In one of the more famous television interviews in the years following the event, a talk show host asked a teenage Carol what she might say to her rescuer if she had gotten the chance.

She had written down her statement on notebook paper, because she wanted to express herself correctly. With Eunice’s arm around her, Carol pulled out the note and gazed into the camera.

“When I think of what I lost and what I could have lost that day, I cry. We don’t know why bad things happen but I know I’m grateful when good things happen. I don’t know who you are and if you ever receive thanks in person, but you deserve more than that. When I closed my eyes, all I could see was darkness and water. When I opened my eyes, I saw the sun. Thank you, Captain Horizon, for saving our lives. You inspire us all to be heroes. I hope you’ll be proud of who I become.”

Carol held on to that note, folding it and placing it in a scrapbook of other clippings related to October 12. More than twenty years later, in the early nineties, she was compelled to dig through her storage boxes, find the scrapbook and place the note in an envelope. In more desperate times, she’d considered selling it to collectors but she was now very grateful to have kept it. She took off work, drove back into the city and stood in line for hours for her chance to present it.

When her moment came, she wiped away tears, walked up, knelt down and placed it on the grave of the man who had given her and her mother a second chance at life.