A Road Untraveled and Three Inches of Grace

 I didn’t see the little girl lurking behind the row of parked cars until I was almost upon her. There was a bright flash of pink against the white ice that paved the street, and there was barely enough time to recognize the shape of pigtails. The roads were treacherous and I wasn’t going very fast but the ice fought me and the break pumped under my foot as I continued to slide forward. Groceries rolled off the back seat onto the floor, unheeded as I suddenly locked eyes with the child who had stopped in the middle of the road at her mother’s shout, staring at my car with the same sort of innocent fear one is more accustomed to seeing in the eyes of foolish fawns in the spring twilight.

This can’t be happening, I thought, please don’t let this be happening.

It didn’t.

The car slid to a reluctant halt inches away from the little girl as her mother caught up with her, grabbing her child’s hand. I could see another child, an infant, in a swaddle hanging from the mother’s chest. The mother was looking up at me with the most gut wrenching combination of fear, relief, gratitude, and shame that I had ever seen.

“I’m sorry,” she said repeatedly, her mouth exaggerating the words so I could see them even though I could not hear with the heater and defrost blaring on high, “I’m sorry.”

I could imagine how horrified she must have been when the little girl broke away from her on the sidewalk and dashed out into the street. I could imagine how I would feel if it were my child and that tiny hand wriggled out of mine and that little body slipped through the gap between two parked cars with no understanding of what danger she faced. I could imagine the soul crushing guilt if something horrible happened. That lingering terrible notion that if I had held that little hand just a small bit tighter… We blame ourselves, as humans tend to do, for things over which we have little or no control.

“It’s okay,” I mouthed backed with a little wave and a nervously apologetic smile, trying to reassure her that I understood, “It’s okay.”

I could tell from the look in her eyes that we were both thanking our respective gods that the incident turned out to be nothing more than an awkward, frightening hiccup in our otherwise normal days. It could have been an irreparable disaster that would have torn both our lives apart.  It was one of those moments that remind one of just how frail and uncertain our visions of tomorrow really are, how everything could suddenly change in one failed pump of a break on an icy road...

And because we’re human, we look to ourselves when things do. If the unthinkable had happened, there would have been guilt to go around even though there was no blame to be had. I was going as slow as I could on that slightly sloping lane. She was managing two small children on a walk back from the daycare up the street, penning in the energy of the toddler as best she knew how. The little girl, a small pink pigtailed package of endless mirth and boisterousness, just wanted to get home faster to get on with the serious toddler business of playing strange ever-changing games and slurping juice boxes. No one made any grievous mistakes. No one did anything objectively wrong.

It really isn’t always about us. Sometimes things just happen. It doesn’t mean we’re being punished. It doesn’t mean we’ve failed some cosmic test. It means we drew low cards, rolled bad dice, won the dreaded lottery of misfortune. The world isn’t always sympathetic to the wellbeing of even the best of people and our gods can’t always protect us when the stars randomly align against us. But then, sometimes they can. Sometimes a divine touch can sway the scales and give where the world would have taken. We never know for sure.

I don’t know if someone intervened to make that final pump of the break stick when the others hadn’t, or if the car was just slow to respond. I don’t know if someone spared that little girl specifically, or if those three inches of grace were there on their own. I’m just glad that her mother got to carry her home and that all I had to carry home from that icy road was a little shudder of horror at what might have been.