My heart pounding, I screamed in French in the direction of the pedestrians, “Attention!” A middle-aged woman glanced back at me, and then followed my gesture up the boulevard.
“Oh, mon Dieu!” she shrieked, and turning, she threw her arms out wide to push the man and child flanking her back toward the safety of the sidewalk. They would never make it in time. Nor would the college-age girl wearing headphones who hadn’t even heard me yell.
Running faster than seemed humanly possible, Vincent reached the truck, leapt, and landed on the running board. The impact threw him backward, threatening to jettison him off into the road. He scrabbled to hang on to the door handle, steadying himself, and then wrenched it open, grabbing the steering wheel and jerking it to the right. In a screech of skidding tires, the truck jumped off the road and flipped onto its passenger side. It careened a few feet across the sidewalk before smashing with a sickening crunch into a stone wall, only a couple of yards short of the crosswalk.
A split second of shocked silence followed, before a cacophony of shouts and cries began. The couple and their child were on the ground, just short of the sidewalk, having attempted to throw themselves off the road. Passersby rushed over and helped them to their feet. Someone else ran up to the girl with the headphones, who stood in shock in the middle of the road, mouth open and bags spilled on the ground around her feet.
A police siren split the air, as a couple of cop cars pulled off the boulevard Saint Germain into the middle of the intersection, blocking vehicles from both directions. One policeman leapt out to divert traffic, while the others rushed for the accident site.
Vincent pushed himself off the driver’s door, which was now on the top of the flipped truck, and dropped to the ground. Lying on his back on the sidewalk, he folded an arm cautiously across his rib cage, dropping the keys he had pulled from the ignition.
As I reached him, he squeezed his eyes closed in pain, and a small stream of blood oozed from a cut on his forehead. I crouched down beside him, feeling like I was the one who had been thrown to the pavement, the breath knocked out of me. “Vincent, are you okay?” I asked, blindly sticking my arm into my bag and coming back with some Kleenex. I dabbed at the blood before it could run into his eye.
“Hurt rib, but I’m fine,” he said, gasping for breath. “But the driver’s in the truck.”
I cupped his face in my hand and breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God, Vincent.” I turned to the approaching policemen. “The driver’s still in there,” I yelled, coughing and blinking as I inhaled the acrid smell of burned rubber.
One climbed up onto the truck and, after taking a look inside, pulled out a walkie-talkie and called for emergency assistance. Another knelt down next to us and began asking Vincent questions. Was he okay? Could he move his fingers? His toes? Was he having trouble breathing? Only after Vincent sat up (against the policeman’s advice) and reassured him that he had only had his breath knocked out and cut his head in the impact did the policeman turn to ask me what had happened.
By then a crowd had gathered around us, and an elderly man spoke up before I could respond. “I saw the whole thing, officer. That truck was out of control, with no driver behind the wheel, rolling steadily down the boulevard. And that boy there,” he said, pointing to Vincent, “commandeered it, steering it off the road. If he hadn’t, it would have plowed right into the people crossing the road.” He pointed to the headphones girl, who had been led to the sidewalk and was sitting with her head between her knees as someone rubbed her back.
The bystanders began buzzing excitedly with the news—the word “hero” being voiced more than once—and cell phones were pulled out as people began typing messages and making calls. Vincent closed his eyes tiredly and then, as someone tried to take a picture, pulled his sweater’s hood up over his head and asked me to help him up, wincing as he stood.
“Are you going to need me, Officer?” he asked the policeman who was mapping the truck’s path with another witness.
He saw Vincent and said, “You really shouldn’t move, sir, until the paramedics arrive.”
“I told you, I’m fine,” Vincent insisted politely. The way he held his arm carefully across his torso suggested that he was anything but.
The policeman looked conflicted. “We’ll need your testimony,” he said finally.
“Then can we wait in your car?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” the man responded, and flagged his partner to come get us. We were led away from the excited crowd and toward the privacy of the squad car. On the way I retrieved Vincent’s coat and draped it around him.
We scooted into the backseat of the squad car, and the cop shut the door behind us. We were finally alone, and I turned to Vincent, who was holding my tissue to his head. “Are you really okay?” I asked him, reaching up to gingerly pull his hand away from the wound. “You might need stitches.”