The least affected by the accident, at least physically, was the other driver. He walked away with only bruises, though his walk was short and ended at the back seat of a squad car. Thomas Thacker had been a city councilman for less than a month. At the Brookwood Country Club's Christmas party that night, he had celebrated much. The year had brought him to public office, to a corner office with his law firm, and to the manager's office at a luxury car dealership where he was handed the keys to a jet black XK. Thacker blew a point-two-three.
His mug shot was on the front page of the local newspaper that Lisa found folded on the table next to her hospital bed. Harold was asleep in a chair that didn't quite recline far enough. It was dark and quiet except for the ubiquitous beeping of medical machinery — a syncopated reminder that life is fragile. Lisa realized she was in a regular room. There were none of the curtains and gurneys and rushed voices of the ICU she remembered from the last time she was awake. And she realized that she couldn't turn her head, discouraged from moving by a faint instinctive memory and by a thick armor of bandage from chin to collar bone.
She reached for the newspaper and read the account of her near-death. Thacker hadn't seen the Meunsters until he hit them. Harold's instinctive steering had kept them on the road for another four hundred feet after the initial collision, only to be sideswiped again. The second collision had sent the Honda rolling. Thacker had been released on bail, but his future looked grim. Lisa stopped reading after the quote from the mayor.
"If you're the cause of an alcohol-related accident that nearly kills a young couple on their way home from a church Christmas party on Friday, you can't expect to sit in council chambers on Monday as if nothing ever happened."
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