I was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on a rainy night when we came to one of the tunnels, and the three children in my car all at once started screaming as loud as they could. I have no idea why. The rain of course stopped though the windshield wipers didn't; suddenly I saw something so chilling I'll remember it the rest of my life.
In an oncoming, or westbound, car, greenish if I remember correctly, a man had a gun pointed at the woman driver. Someone else was in the front passenger seat, but knocked out, asleep or dead, and he had pushed himself up between the front seat to get the gun pointed at her head. SHe had a look of abject terror in her eyes but kept the car going straight; she was going highway speed. I could see it clearly but only for a split second. My concern was whether the kids had seen it but they were screaming so loud I kind of doubted they could.
When I was out of the tunnel I looked for a place to pull over and call nine-one-one, but I was shaking and almost couldn't stop when a place came up after a few miles. Still shaking, I got out of the car in the rain and put a jacket over my head and the phone so I could make the call. I told the police what I saw. The signs wouldn't tell me which tunnel it was but I figured they could deduce that from my location. All I could say was what I'd seen. I didn't remember much, as it turned out, except that the car was a greenish color. It had all flashed by pretty quickly.
The kids were all somewhat concerned that I'd bolted out of the car in the pouring down rain out in the middle of the turnpike right after we'd gone through a tunnel, so I told them everything was ok and we got started back on the road as soon as we could. Little Jummy was right behind me; he was the one who wasn't mine. We were taking him to live with his grandmother in Philadelphia as his mother had died unexpectedly back in Pittsburgh. Bobby and Jane were mine, 5 and 3 respectively; Bobby and Jimmy were kindergarten buddies. I had left my wife and a smaller baby home. I had somehow been roped into this due to association with a church that Jimmy's mother had attended for a while. Somebody had to deliver this kid to his grandmother. The father apparently was not part of the picture.
The image of what I'd seen disrupted my driving all the way into Philadelphia. It had been dark when it happened, though it was only about six, but when we got into Philadelphia it was still raining and I had a lot of trouble finding that grandmother's house even though I had GPS and all the modern ways of doing it. It just seemed like a very scary world where a guy can hijack a car right in the middle of a tunnel on a cold and rainy night, and get away with it. I somehow figured that woman would end up dead one way or the other.
The grandmother was very nice to us and insisted we stay for the night. She put all the children, plus one she had named Chloe, on one huge bed that was hers, while she insisted on sleeping in another, and put me on the living room couch but insisted on making tea first. I didn't want to burden her with the cold facts of what I'd seen and what made it such a disturbing journey. Instead we talked about Jimmy and what he'd need growing up.
She admitted she'd made mistakes bringing up her daughter, Jimmy's mother, who had had a rough life before she had just apparently committed suicide by jumping off the Warhol Bridge in Pittsburgh. This had happened in the middle of the night and poor Jimmy had been found the following day afraid and left an orphan. Poor kid, no wonder he had nightmares and even now he was babbling to his grandma about his aunt and some guy with a gun. I thought of the situation in the tunnel once again wondering if he'd seen it and thought, if the kid had seen that it would trigger all kinds of unpleasant nightmares. Grandma was soothing to him and assured him that everything would be ok.
In the morning the kids and I got packed up and ready to go on the long haul back to Pittsburgh. I didn't look forward to those tunnels but there was no easy way around; you pretty much had to shoot right through them day or night, rain or not. The grandmother got a call from her other daughter who was apparently stranded somewhere out in the boondocks of Pennsylvania, no car, no money, no nothing but a horrible story which I didn't hear because I heard only the grandmother's voice. The grandmother agreed to send her bus fare to get her back to Philly as soon as she could. After she hung up she told me she was already keeping that daughter's child, Chloe, and that was the girl, about four, who entertained her cousin Jimmy and my two, and of course they'd all had a pretty good time though Jimmy had one of his nightmares. Grandmother didn't tell Chloe what had gone bad with her mother - how much can children take?
It rained again all the way home and I practically shut my eyes in the tunnels hoping not to see anything as bad as what I'd already seen. The grandmother agreed to stay in touch as people in the church all wanted to know if she would be ok with Jimmy and if she needed anything. She was a pretty tough lady and would probably be fine, but Jimmy appeared to be somewhat damaged by the chain of events. It turns out it was his father in his aunt's car, holding the gun, and that his mother didn't just jump off the Warhol bridge. The father had just stolen the car, though, and didn't actually hurt Chloe's mother; he wrecked it out in Ohio somewhere the following day in a crash that involved a semi and a police car. By the time I heard this though I was back home safe and sound, with the baby sleeping in the main bed, and my wife worried that I would roll over on her. I now had nightmares too, but it was always the same one, what I'd seen in the tunnel, and I never did find out exactly what Jimmy had seen.
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