He wound his fingers around Mom’s small wrist. “In . . . Raleigh.”
“In Raleigh?”
“Ye . . .”
She tilted her head. “What’s in Raleigh?”
“K . . .”
Mom frowned at me. “What’s he—”
A siren wailed in the distance. Thank God. I grabbed my phone again. “They’re here, I’m hanging up.” I punched off the call and dropped the cell into my deep pocket.
I smoothed Morton’s hair. “Hear that? Help’s almost here.”
His glassy eyes turned toward mine. The gray in his face drained to white. “
Don’t
t-t-t . . .” His jaw snapped up and down, uncontrolled, his voice sounding panicked. “Tell.”
“Don’t tell?”
His eyes closed in a
yes
. “Any . . . one.” He gripped Mom’s wrist harder, as if his fingers could force into her what he wanted to say.
I could feel the dire need flowing from him. I knew Mom felt it too. My mother and I glanced at each other, shaken to the core.
Mom began to cry. “Oh, you poor man.” She patted his cheeks, her words spilling out as they did when she was overwhelmed. “Don’t tell anyone—okay, we won’t. We’ll come see you in the hospital, and you can tell us all about it. Help him, Jesus, Jesus. Help this poor soul.”
The siren grew loud. I pushed back on my haunches and saw a fire truck round the curve. It veered off the road a little below us and ground to a stop. The siren died away as two men jumped out. A white sheriff’s department car pulled up behind it. Men from the fire truck gathered equipment kits and ran toward us.
Morton’s eyes popped open. He pierced me with a final look. “Be . . .
careful.
”
I pushed to my feet. My mother didn’t move. “Mom, you’ll need to step back now so they can work on him.”
She brushed her fingertips across the man’s forehead. His eyes were closed again, pain pinching his face. “I don’t want to leave him.”
“You’ll have to.” I moved around Morton’s head to take her elbows.
The firemen reached us. The first fell to his knees on Morton’s other side and nodded to me. “What can you tell me?” He was already reaching into his kit for equipment.
“He’s still complaining of chest pains. I don’t know much more. His name’s Morton.”
The other fireman ran around to our side.
“Come on, Mom.” I pulled her to her feet. “We have to get out of the way.”
With obvious reluctance she shuffled backward with me. We moved some distance away and huddled together to watch. A breeze picked up, whistling a dirge around the parked vehicles. Mom shivered. I put an arm around her thin shoulders. We couldn’t see Morton’s face anymore. Could only watch the back of the fireman closest to us.
A portly sheriff’s deputy hurried from his car and over to Morton and the first responders. “Ambulance is on its way,” he told them.
“Be careful.”
What did Morton mean?
The few other cars on Tunitas Road were slowing down, the drivers rubbernecking. A second sheriff’s department vehicle arrived. The deputy hopped out and waved drivers on.
Mom was sniffing. “I feel so sorry for him.”
I squeezed her shoulder. “Me too.”
“We’ll help him, won’t we.” It wasn’t a question.
“Of course we will.”
“He said Raleigh. North Carolina?”
“I guess. Maybe he’s from there.”
“What’s in Raleigh?”
He had tried to say it. A word starting with a
K.
Maybe a hard
C.
“I have no idea.”
“Someone important, he said. I think it’s his daughter.”
“His daughter?” The responders were taking vital signs. One reported findings into a radio. The sheriff’s deputy stood over them, watching. He gave me a quick nod, and I nodded back.
“Yes,” Mom said. “She’s a lost soul. He hasn’t seen her for the longest time. He wants to tell her he loves her.”
“I see.”
“So sad.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll have to go to Raleigh and find her. Bring her back to him.”
My throat tightened—for more than one reason. I gave Mom a shaky smile.
“We’ll do that, Hannah, won’t we? He wants us to.”
“Okay, Mom.”
She held onto me, her body small and vulnerable. I hugged her back, resting my chin on the top of her purple hat. The breeze blew harder, and Mom shivered more. I rubbed her arms. “You’re cold. Want to get back in the car?”
“No. Morton might need me.” She stuck her hands in her pockets.
She would be upset all evening. Perhaps pace the house, restless. In the morning she may have forgotten these events. Or not. If the latter, she’d latch on to every detail she could remember. Again and again she’d insist on going to Raleigh—all the way across the country—to find Morton’s daughter. No amount of talking would persuade her that the daughter’s existence had sprung from her own mind. That the woman may well not even exist.
Dorothy, Mom’s caretaker, would have to deal with it while I was at work. I’d face it when I got home.
I hugged Mom harder, wanting to cry for her. For me. For the man we could do so little to help. How horrible this was, to see someone struggle to survive. How fragile, our lives.
“Be careful
.”
Another siren approached. Soon an ambulance pulled up, a man and woman jumping out. Now four voices mingled over their patient, exchanging information. Equipment clinked. What was it like to be Morton, flat on his back on the ground, looking up at unknown faces, his life in their hands?
Another vehicle engine sounded behind me. I turned to see a Channel 7 news van pull off the road.
“Oh, no.” I gaped at the van. “How’d they get here so fast?” They must have been in the area already.
The sheriff’s deputy gazed at a man jumping out of the van, camera up and ready. A woman followed. Looked like a reporter. The deputy mumbled something under his breath and strode past us in their direction. He threw words at me as he walked by: “Can you stick around until they’re done here?”
“Yes.” I knew he’d want my contact information. But I did
not
want to end up on the evening news.
The deputy hurried on. “You can only film from where you are,” he called to the reporter and cameraman. “I’ll need you to stay back.”
I glanced at Mom. She hadn’t even turned around, her gaze fixed on Morton. The first responders had moved aside, the paramedics fitting a collar around his neck.
“What are they doing?” Mom sounded protective, as if she couldn’t trust them to help her new friend.
“They can’t move him around very much in case he’s got a spinal cord injury. The collar is to protect his neck.”
“He’s going to live, isn’t he?”
My throat tightened. Morton could be someone’s husband, father, grandfather. “I sure hope so.”
One of the paramedics ran to the ambulance and readied a gurney. Next he carried over a backboard and laid it on the ground. With care they moved Morton onto it. They and the firemen lifted Morton up and began carrying him toward the gurney.
I flicked a look over my shoulder. The Channel 7 camera was filming.
“I want to say good-bye.” Mom pulled away from me before I could stop her. She trundled after the paramedics. “Wait! I want to see him.”
They didn’t stop. I went after her.
“Wait! Please!”
From the corner of my eye, I saw the camera swing toward Mom.
The medics reached the gurney and laid Morton, still on the backboard, upon it. A young-looking man turned to my mother. “Ma’am, we need to go.”
She brushed past him, determined.
“Ma’am—”
Must have been something in Mom’s eyes. The female paramedic gazed at my mother, then shook her head at her colleague. “One second.”
Mom reached Morton’s side and bent over him. I could see his face. His eyes were still closed. Was he even conscious?
“I remember,” she whispered. “We won’t forget.” She patted his head.
I looked to one of the men from the fire truck. “Where are they taking him?”
“Coastside in Moss Beach. It’s the closest hospital.”
“Is he going to make it?”
He bunched his lips. “Don’t know. I don’t like how his breathing sounds.”
“Okay, let’s go.” The female paramedic nudged Mom away. I slipped to my mother’s side and eased her back from the gurney. The paramedics placed Morton into the ambulance and shut the doors.
Mom clutched her hands to her chest, watching. Trembling.
The camera turned from us to the ambulance.
One of the men from the fire truck nodded to me. “Thanks for your help.”
“Sure.”
Another breeze kicked up as the ambulance pulled onto the highway and turned back toward the coast. The heady scent of grass and dirt swept over me. I glanced back toward Morton’s small car, still on its side. How crushed it looked. The harbinger of death.
A sudden sense of doom sank talons into me. I wanted to be away from this scene of disaster and the rolling news camera. Safe and quiet in my home with my mother.
“Let’s move back a little from the road, Mom.” I took her elbow.
“Wait. I have to watch him as long as I can.”
We gazed at the back of the ambulance until it disappeared around a curve.
“Okay.” I nudged her arm.
She looked at me, her eyes still shiny with tears. “Can we go home now?” Her lips turned down, forlorn.
“Yes. Soon as we talk to the deputy.”
“What for?”
“He’ll probably want to get our names and phone number, since we were the first witnesses.”
The firemen headed for their truck. The reporter and her cameraman made a beeline for us, microphone in her hand. “Ma’am, did you see the accident?”
I cringed and shook my head.
“Wait now.” The deputy hustled toward them, his hands up. “I need to talk to these folks first.”
“But if we could just ask—”
“You’ll have to
wait
.”
Mom looked on with round eyes. “Are we gonna be on television?”
I shuddered at the thought of such attention. “Not if I can help it.”
The deputy had a few more words with the reporter, then headed our way. The camera followed him. I turned my back to it, shuffling Mom around with me.
“Remember,” Mom whispered. “Don’t tell.”
“Well, I imagine it’s okay to tell law enforcement.”
“No, it isn’t!” Her voice rose with immediate indignation. She grasped my hands. “We promised. We promised Morton!”
“I know, but—”
“Don’t you
dare
say anything!” Her expression hardened, a precursor to her episodes. My heart stilled. One of my mother’s screaming meltdowns and a rolling TV camera would be a terrible mix.
“Tell me you won’t, Hannah.
Tell
me you
won’t
!” She shook a boney finger at me.
“Okay, Mom, okay.” I grabbed her finger and lowered it. Anything to keep this from escalating.
Since she’d come to live with me, that was how I’d learned to live my life.
The deputy came around to stand in front of us. He had broad shoulders, a big neck. Mom shot me a hard look, but said no more. The deputy eyed her. How much had he heard?
He held his beefy hand out to me. “Good afternoon. I’m Deputy Harcroft from the Sheriff’s Department Coastside Patrol. I understand you were first on the scene. You called 911?”
“Yes.” Mom spoke before I could. “My daughter ran to help. His name is Morton. Like the salt.”
Deputy Harcroft’s gaze lingered on Mom’s face, as if assessing her. Then he turned back to me. “Where were you headed when you saw the accident?”
“San Carlos. Where we live.”
“San Carlos? Where were you coming from?”
“The Ritz Carlton.”
“Why didn’t you take Highway 92?”
What was this? “I decided to take a more rural drive.”
“It was lovely,” Mom said. “Until we saw poor Morton.”
Harcroft gazed at her again.
He pulled a small notebook and pen from his shirt pocket. “I need to take your information, if you don’t mind. Your names, what you saw. Won’t take long.”
Tiredness surged through me, and the chilled air scraped my skin. Where had the warmth of the day gone? “Sure. I do hope it’s quick. I’d like to get my mother home as soon as possible.”
“No problem.”
Mom shook her head at me. “I’m fine, Hannah.”
“Do you want to wait in the car, Mom? I can start the engine and turn up the heat.”
“Nothing doing.” She gave me a look that said she had to stay here and keep an eye on me.
The deputy asked our names, address, and phone numbers for home and my work. Then took down the license plate of my car. He wanted to know what we had witnessed. Did we see the crash? Any idea how it happened? I told him what we knew, which wasn’t much. Mom remained quiet. But every now and then she pinched my arm as a reminder—
don’t tell
.
The deputy frowned, his eyes shifting to Morton’s overturned car. My gaze followed. Not until that moment did it strike me—how strange, this accident. The car was on the side of the road we’d been driving yet was pointed in the opposite direction. Had he been going toward Highway 1 instead of away from it? And why had he wrecked in the first place? I saw no skid marks, nothing that would make him swerve. He hadn’t sounded drunk. Hadn’t smelled drunk. What had happened here?
An uneasy feeling slow-rolled through my limbs.
“Don’t tell anyone . . . Be careful.”
The deputy refocused on me. “Anything Morton told you that we should know? Maybe the name of a family member we can contact?”
“No!” Mom spoke the word with vehemence. The deputy’s eyebrows rose. He looked to me, as if for an explanation.
For a moment I hesitated. Shouldn’t I tell the deputy everything, regardless of my mother’s reaction? My sense of civilian duty said yes. The memory of Morton’s eyes cried no. He’d trusted us, total strangers. He’d
warned
us. What could drive a man to such desperation?
I tried to smile at the deputy. “My mother’s pretty upset about the whole thing.” I gave him a meaningful look, patting Mom’s arm.
He gazed at her again. “I understand. But I need to make sure you’ve told me everything.” The deputy locked eyes with me.