Cheryl Galante learned the virtue of being still when she lost control of her car on a rainy afternoon in May. When the vehicle came to rest, still upright, it had crossed six lanes of traffic and spun around. She was facing east in the express lanes of 78 west, staring over a spent air bag at what looked like smoke rushing from below the crumpled hood. Her thumb twitched on the seat belt latch.

She heard a voice, a man at her door, telling her, "Don’t move. Be still."

"I got to get out of here," she said. Her mouth was dry.

In a haze, she could not decipher the face except that it was kind. She made out a black T-shirt and grabbed at it.

"I’m going to be okay, yes? I’m going to be okay?"

He placed one hand, then another, on her neck, and said, "Please, you must be still."

Nothing made sense to her, except for his voice, calm and unyielding, and these sure hands, which restrained her, and cradled her. For nearly 30 minutes until an ambulance arrived, while nothing indicated a devastating injury, his hands stayed right there.

The discovery was made later at University Hospital in Newark that she had a bilateral fracture of the C2 vertebra in her neck, known as a "hangman’s break."

Had she tried to flee the car or merely been allowed to turn in her frenzy, her doctors now say, the odds are she would be a quadriplegic, or she would have died.

Cheryl Galante, 52 years old, from Maplewood, was not pulled from a burning building. No one shielded her from bullets or stepped into the path of a speeding train. She was spared by an act heroic in its simplicity.

The chances are extraordinary that a stranger with the know-how and instincts she required at just that moment happened along on just that stretch of highway.

The man who saved her is Dan Zaleski. He is 31, from Denville, and he drove convoys for the Air Force in Iraq. He wonders why he has passed scores of accidents without stopping but stopped this day. He offered a woman he did not know his hands, and she, in her worst hour, possessed the wisdom to accept them.

Vulnerability is a difficult thing to admit to, requiring the strength to surrender, Cheryl Galante says.

She is a woman of wistful features — small shoulders, a soft chin, blue-green eyes with the hint of a sparkle — framed now by a seven-pound cast aluminum structure that half-circles her head on top and in front. Designed to keep her head as one with her neck and shoulders, it is anchored by a vest and two sets of 3-inch titanium screws plied 2 millimeters into her skull, one above each eyebrow and one behind each ear.

It is appropriately named a halo brace, and she has lived inside its orbit rings since the hours after the accident, her eyes alert, her head and neck frozen in place.

First, she surrendered to the accident itself, she says, finding an odd calm as she braced for impact. In the weeks since, she has allowed her community to peer into the most private parts of her life and opened herself to its generosities. She is a producer and stylist for fashion shoots, but a divorce and sporadic work as a freelancer forced her to drop health insurance a year ago. She has barely escaped foreclosure on her home. Before the accident, she was gaining traction on her own production company.

A close circle of friends and neighbors have stepped in, holding fundraisers and providing services she never could have afforded. One friend is a nurse, another a social worker, another a teacher of somatics — emphasizing pain relief through movement and specialized breathing techniques.

Galante’s front door is opening constantly with people bearing groceries and home-cooked meals. Others have assigned themselves to weed her lawn or clean the house.

They are mindful that Galante, who grew up on the Bayou outside New Orleans, was a galvanizing point seven years ago for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Her house became operation central for the assembling of relief shipments of food, clothes, schoolbooks and other supplies.

Galante’s friends and family — including two daughters, 25 and 15, and a 21-year-old son — and Galante herself, describe her as a meditative person drawn to seek the meaning in her close call.

"I still can’t grasp the wholeness of this," said Galante. "What I was just a fraction away from. But I feel alive, strong, well, all of those amazing things.

"When I think of me going across all those lanes of highway, I felt elevated. And when I think of Dan, when I think of being in his hands, I feel elevated."

They reunited on a recent morning on her front porch, reflecting, even laughing, over their singular shared experience. It confounds them both, she the survivor feverishly trying to reconstruct events that are still blurred, and he the awkward hero who says he had no idea how seriously she was hurt, even as he remained by her side.

"If I had done what I was going to do," she told him, "if you had not been there, I just know I would be paralyzed. I was ready to run or to walk, to get away from the car.

"Somehow you knew to stay, and to be persistent. Sometimes people have thoughts, but there could have been an instant where you didn’t do it, where you didn’t act, always that chance where people don’t act on their impulse or follow through."

For each thank you she lavished on him, Zaleski twisted and turned a bit and offered a thank you in return.

"It’s a feeling I haven’t ever really had before, an awkward feeling in a sense," he told her. "I didn’t realize I made this huge impact. It’s a lot to think about, you know?"

Zaleski wore a dog tag and cross over a crisp white shirt. His 7-month-old son, Ryder, sat on his lap, and it was easy to match up the fair skin, rosy cheeks and clear-eyed look of father and son.

Galante eyed him as if he were something rare. What did you do? What did you say? What did I say?

She stopped at this question: "How hard is it to hold someone’s neck like that?"

Tentatively then, at her request, he re-enacted his movements, how he contorted himself between her and the air bag, one knee on her seat, pushing off the floorboard for leverage.

He placed his hands on her as he had done before. They are young hands, smooth, not overlarge. His thumbs overlapped on her throat and his fingers spread along her jaw line and the small of her cheeks. She did not wince.

He held her in his palms, and she closed her eyes.

A MATTER OF TIMING

The entire event of May 21 holds a trace of magic that somehow brought together two people whose lives would otherwise likely never have intersected.

About 4:30 she left a family gathering at a sister’s home in Tarrytown, N.Y. Three of her sisters had come up from Louisiana, and they laughed and cried, summoning memories and recalling songs of the South. They sang "Coal Miner’s Daughter" and "Tennessee Waltz" and the mournful gospel songs they had learned at the First Baptist Church in their hometown of Slidell, on the northeast shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

Patsy Cline’s "Walkin’ After Midnight" was still on Galante’s lips as she negotiated the ramp that winds with a sweep from the Garden State Parkway onto 78 west in Union, 3 and a half miles from home. Only a week before she had fulfilled a pet dream of owning a convertible, buying a 2004 midnight blue Sebring, and in no time, she had become comfortable with its handling.

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The road was asphalt slick when she felt a fishtail from behind. Come easy off the gas, tap the brakes, easy now, she heard herself say. Okay, I’ve got this.

She was edging onto the highway, and then she wasn’t.

The car suddenly careened across the highway. Somehow, in the heart of the rush hour, with a squadron of headlights rising out of the drizzle straight toward her, Galante did not graze even a single car over four lanes of local traffic.

Call this a small moment of grace before her car jumped a low median into the two express lanes and collided with a silver Honda Accord, which then struck a white Mitsubishi Eclipse.

A State Police report says the accident happened at 5:39 injuring three other people. The report did not describe the extent of their injuries, and inquiries with local hospitals were unsuccessful. Galante said she has attempted to get messages of concern and well wishes to the others.

Zaleski, meanwhile, driving his red Chevy pickup truck, had left his job supervising workers at the Port Elizabeth loading docks about 5:15 for what is normally a 40-minute ride home to Denville to his wife, Renee, and the baby. His work schedule is dictated by the arrival times of ships and by the currents of the ocean. Leaving at that moment normally would have placed him well past the accident on 78 west, but the rain slowed his path, and for some reason, before encountering Galante, he stopped to offer help to a couple whose car had stalled. The small delays placed him about 10 cars back in the logjam that formed after Galante’s accident, far enough removed that he did not see the crash.

Had he been, say, a few cars deeper, he might have reasoned that with others helping at the scene, there was no need for him to stop, but then, would someone else have decided not to pull Galante out of her car? Would someone else have known to hold her neck and keep her still?

LESSONS OF WAR

A staff sergeant in the Air Force and twice deployed to Iraq, Zaleski learned the techniques he administered to Galante as part of "Self-Aid Buddy Care" in training. He regularly carried out one of the most dangerous assignments of the war — driving everything from supplies of toilet paper to Hellfire missiles over the border from Kuwait into Iraq. The road his convoy traveled was a target for insurgents and pockmarked with craters made by IEDs, treacherous enough that Zaleski and his company could only travel it by night. He would sleep in day hours, in the 130-degree desert.

In 2007, two weeks after returning home from his first deployment, his replacement was killed on the same road.

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By the time his second deployment was over in 2009, the pounding delivered by the unforgiving and rugged landscape, and the sheer weight of the equipment he wore — a six-pound helmet and about 45 pounds of gear and weapons — had nearly crippled his back. A year ago, he had surgery on a vertebra in his lower back, but the pain is still so severe at times, he cannot sit up or lift his son.

Like Scrabble players hunched over their tiles unscrambling an anagram, both Galante and Zaleski said they are awestruck by the accidents of providence that united them and by the flabbergasting notion that her survival had depended on his in a war, in one of the most dangerous places in the world.

"I was asking, ‘What’s wrong, how do you feel?’ and you immediately said, "It’s on fire,’ " Zaleski told her as they sat on her porch. "I said, ‘I don’t think you should move.’ "

Zaleski said another man who stopped to help checked under the hood and reassured them there were no flames, only steam from the radiator. Besides a cut on her left elbow, he said, he could not detect an obvious injury.

"You were difficult," Zaleski recalled for her. "You wanted to get out. You wanted to do a lot of stuff."

He kept his hands on her neck until the last possible moment, he told her, sliding off only as the ambulance workers were able to slip on a brace. "That’s the miracle of it," she said. "You persisted."

Both sense their reactions to the accident are shaped by unseen currents. Zaleski’s mother, Ellie, has been a maternity nurse at Saint Clare’s Hospital in Denville for more than 30 years. She said that among her three sons, she regards Dan as "the caring one, the protective one."

When Dan was young, she wrote a poem about her children with this line: "Who will brush my hair when I get old? My Danny will."

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Galante’s father died when she was 13, leaving her mother to raise eight children on her own, a model of perseverance Galante said she leans on still. Her mother, who died three years ago, once severely injured her neck in a car accident and had to wear a collar for several months. Her sisters have told Galante that harnessed in the brace she resembles their mother, and they recognize the same serenity in her.

The double fracture to the C2 could have been catastrophic if bone fragments had caused pressure on the surrounding nerves, in other words, her doctors say, if Zaleski had relented and let her try to leave the car. Galante had expected to be in the halo into the fall, but X-rays show she is mending faster than anticipated and it may be removed at her next doctor’s visit Aug. 15.

A PERFECT CIRCLE

If a healing power is at work, it holds symmetry. Her friend who teaches somatics — a holistic approach to easing pain — has worked on Zaleski’s back, providing him, he said, with the first extended respite from agony he has had in years. As the fates would have it, he needed to play guardian angel to her in order for Cheryl to help him.

From inside her halo, she said, the world appears filled with the helter-skelter of people rushing about their lives. She is grateful for an opportunity her accident gave her, to be stilled for a time, and to watch. The universe has slowed for her, she said.

Sitting next to Zaleski and Ryder, his son, she took the baby’s feet in her hands. She is not one given to easy tears.

"I’m going to have a chance to hold my babies’ babies," she said haltingly. "Because of you …"

She broke off, and, for a time, neither spoke, letting her words sit just there.

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