“With Elise?” I shoved the box into her car.
“Heck, I don’t know. She’s still there as far as I know. It’s his house, too. Doesn’t mean they’re knockin’ boots. A lot of people get stuck with an ex and a house and they just become roomies.” She hugged me. “It’s shitty, honey, real shitty. Call me tomorrow, and we’ll do something fun on the weekend. Go to a viewing or something, see if we can pick up guys at the funeral home.”
“Sure. Thanks.” I hugged her back and started to cry again to my disgust. Even I was getting a bit tired of it by now. “You’re my best friend. I love you so much.”
“Shit, we’ll go to a dyke bar and pick up girls if you want. Get back in that studio and talk pretty now.”
I went back inside the radio station, noticing as I did so that there was another car in the parking lot, and wondered briefly whose it was. Then I went back into the studio, blew my nose, gargled and went on air.
I chose Bruckner as background music for writing my letter of resignation. Mournful, dignified, serious stuff. Just like my letter, which I printed out, folded into an envelope and deposited in Neil’s mailbox. I didn’t have long to go now and I wanted to announce that this was to be my last night with the station, but I couldn’t. I thought of my listeners, the insomniacs and lonely and sad and worried people who’d told me the music I played made their lives a little more bearable. Would they miss me? Would they call in to find where I’d gone?
I lined up material for the next air break. Sponsors, and the weather, which I’d do live. Kimberly was right, there was a warning of freezing rain after midnight.
And then I cued up the last piece of music,
Scheherazade
by Rimsky-Korsakov, as some sort of ironic tribute to my ill deeds, and I did what I so rarely did in the studio: put my headphones on and listened to every note, every swell and sigh, and lost myself in the music’s story.
The music died away. I faded the mic up and signed off.
It’s been a pleasure. Good night and goodbye.
I shut the studio down and left my station keys in my mailbox, making sure I had all my belongings, and then I wheeled my bike outside, letting the door slam behind me.
As I swung my leg over the saddle and pushed off, I heard sounds familiar to me from my Vermont childhood—the otherworldly, delicate patter of frozen rain and the groan and sharp screech of a branch giving way under a burden of ice—and I noticed how the bare branches of the trees shone silver in the parking lot light.
But I didn’t have time to admire, or be horrified, by the effects of nature for long. A pair of headlights came on, and the lone car in the parking lot accelerated, heading straight for me, skidding out of control.
I stood on the pedals, praying the ground might be magically free of ice, and shot forward, my thigh muscles complaining, heading for the bike path and what I hoped was safety. Somehow my tires kept contact until I’d left the parking lot. I was clear of the car but I felt the bike skid beneath me, and on the path ahead of me was a branch that had succumbed to the shock and weight of ice and was directly in my way.
Curl up. Protect your head. I tried to remember everything I’d heard about how to fall correctly from a speeding bike. Don’t put your arms out. Don’t—
The bike and I parted company, branches and the sky wheeling crazily around me. My helmeted head hit the ground with a horrendously loud bang and the rest of me followed, crashing onto an unyielding hard surface. But at least I’d stopped my free fall. I was quite happy to lie still. Nearby a ticking sound slowed and stopped, the wheels of the bike revolving. In the parking lot, the offending car roared, the deep sound of a vehicle reversing, then drove away. It was very quiet now apart from the snapping of branches and the icy, high-pitched staccato of freezing rain. Just me and the ice.
Oh, shit.
As soon as I moved I knew something was wrong and bits of me were letting me know that they’d been hurt, bumped or scraped or jarred. So, I’d better figure out the damage. First, I should sit up. I tried to roll to a sitting position and found I couldn’t. One arm was holding me back, not cooperating, and then it hurt like hell and I stopped trying to sit, but the pain was here now, ripping through me.
Cell phone. I needed to call someone because it was so cold I could die here. And I was hurt. It wasn’t fair. I’d had a shitty week and now some jerk had tried to run me off the road, or off the parking lot. I started to cry, and then reached behind me for the side pocket of the backpack, where my cell was.
No, it wasn’t there. It was inside my jacket. I thought it was. Easier to get to, except I’d have to move the arm, which felt like agonizing Jell-O to reach it. I gripped my injured arm with the other and moved it and nearly threw up with the sudden, horrible pain. I’d have to get my glove off, but it was too much to do one-handed. I retrieved the cell phone and managed to flip it open, and it slithered to the ground beside me.
Oh, shit.
I lay down again. I knew I should call Kimberly—she’d offered her services and this certainly was an occasion to take her up on it—but my mind wasn’t very fond of behaving itself these days.
“Call Patrick,” I said into the phone, and blessed modern technology as it did just that.
PATRICK’S PHONE RANG FIVE TIMES BEFORE HE
answered. Those five rings were an eternity and it was a shock when he finally answered, cool and wary.
“What do you want, Jo?”
“I hurt.” It seemed a sensible thing to say. Direct, to the point. Accurate.
“It’s one-thirty in the fucking morning. Good night.”
“No. I’m
hurt.
” I made a great effort to communicate. “I think I’ve broken my wrist.”
“What?”
I had trouble making out words. “My bike.”
“You’ve had an accident?”
“Yes.”
“Jo, where the hell are you?”
“Bike path…near the station.”
“Oh, Christ.” I could hear sounds now, as though he was moving and talking. “You’re riding your bike on ice?”
“Was.” The effort of maintaining a conversation was becoming too much trouble. I wondered vaguely if I were succumbing to the cold. I could see ridges of ice on my clothes. “I fell off.”
“Hold on. I’ll be right back.”
I think I fell asleep for a minute because I could hear him yelling my name.
“Hello, Patrick.”
“I’ve called an ambulance. They’re dealing with some god-awful crash on the highway so I’m coming. Don’t move.”
“Can’t move.”
He talked and I heard him. Now and again he’d shout at me and I’d have to drag myself up from where I really wanted to go—some seductive, dark, insensible place—and tell him I was still listening.
And suddenly he was no longer on the phone but next to me, touching me, and the falling ice gleamed in the headlights of his car. “Where are you hurt? Left arm? Where else?”
“I’m tired.”
“I know you are, but I’ve got to get you in the car.” He eased me up into a sitting position, leaning against him, and the effort and pain made me cry. “Keep holding your arm. I’m going to get you to stand. And then we’ll take a few steps and you’ll be warm and safe.”
It hurt, particularly when we both slid and Patrick cursed and held me upright. Getting into the car was difficult, but we managed it, and Patrick took off his down jacket and laid it over me after he’d buckled me in. He reached into the backseat and pulled a large, bulky item over me, a down sleeping bag.
“This isn’t your car,” I said with a fine grasp of the irrelevant.
“It’s Elise’s. It has four-wheel drive.”
“Tell Elise I’m sorry if I throw up.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He took a hand off the steering wheel to tuck the sleeping bag around me. “Are you warming up?”
I closed my eyes, fighting back the nausea and the pain. Beside me he muttered and I felt the vehicle slow down. Through my closed eyelids I saw the flash of emergency vehicle lights.
“Roads are a mess,” he commented. “You’re not the only idiot, but probably the only one on a bike. Hey, Jo. Jo? Say some thing.”
“Sorry.”
His hand skimmed along my knee. “I don’t know which part of you to touch. Stay here.”
I’d decided I wasn’t going to move ever again, but I opened my eyes to see more flashing lights and the entrance to the emergency room, which looked like it was having a busy night. Patrick came through the doors with a wheelchair, and as he opened the car door a nurse ran out, telling him to wait, that he couldn’t do that.
He lifted me into the wheelchair and I cried again. I was warming up and it made everything hurt, even the few bits of me that hadn’t got scraped or bruised.
“Jo, where’s your insurance card?” I was lying down now in a bright, noisy space. Things clattered and banged. How on earth were people supposed to get better here?
“What’s your name, sir?” someone bellowed.
“She’s a girl,” Patrick said. He unbuckled my bike helmet and took off the face mask.
“Woman,” I said. “In my backpack.”
Patrick put the backpack on the gurney next to me and delved into it. He produced a couple of battered tampons, a paperback, an apple, and then stilled, the letter in his hand. “What the hell is this, Jo?”
“Nothing.”
“We’ll talk about it later.” He found the plastic folder that held my credit cards and handed over my insurance card.
Someone tugged at my sleeve and I heard the sharp snap of scissors cutting my super expensive lightweight insulated jacket off. I faded in and out as people did things, some of them quite painful and uncomfortable. Now and again I’d wake up in a different white, noisy space or find myself watching ceiling tiles fly by overhead as they wheeled me around and expensive medical equipment beeped and whirred.
Patrick sat and watched Jo sleep and knew he still loved her.
He was sure, with a shiver of fear, that if he had not answered his cell she might have died in the intense cold. His rescue of her was the act of one decent human being to another, and he thanked God (or something, not the deity of his Catholic up-bringing) that he hadn’t hung up on her. That was the sort of Good Samaritan role he didn’t mind playing. He had never seen anyone so pale, so blue around the lips, when they finally got that balaclava off her head, and they’d shoved him out of the way and put warm packs around her and put in an IV, working fast and using that medical jargon everyone recognized from TV and he was frightened then that he’d lose her.
Wasn’t there that saying that if you saved someone’s life you were then responsible for them? He yawned, scratched the stubble on his face and thought longingly of sleep, comfort, quiet, while the sounds and cries and weeping of the emergency room continued around them and she slept on.
She looked tiny on the gurney, pale and helpless, and it frightened him.
I’m hurt.
But so was he and he knew he should get out, now, finally, get away from her. What other sorts of rescues would she need from him in the future, what other dramas and late-night phone calls and lies could he expect? He’d had time to read that ludicrous letter over, the one that lay tattered in the bottom of her bag, and he wondered whether she’d suckered someone else into rescuing her from that yet. Maybe she really did owe someone ten grand. Maybe she was in trouble he couldn’t even imagine.
He should have been smarter, always an easy realization in retrospect. The night at the sex club or whatever it was should have sent him running to sanity, not climbing back into bed with her as soon as possible. But even before that, there had been plenty of hints: the strange nighttime outings in the limo, the time she’d come home after a night of rough sex; the impression he’d always had that she had secrets. But he thought about her smile, her scent, her laugh, the way she looked when she came, and none of the bad stuff mattered. None of it.
Was he out of his mind?
Jesus.
He leaned forward to touch her hand.
No question, but he was in it for the long haul.
He’d vowed he’d never rescue a woman again (unless she was freezing to death with a broken arm in an ice storm: there were some exceptions to the rule), but now he had to rescue himself.
I awoke really needing to pee.
“What are you doing?” Patrick rose from a plastic chair at the side of the bed. We were in a curtained cubicle, under that fierce fluorescent light and ugly ceiling tiles, with the smell of something peculiarly hospital-like in the air.
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
He helped me off the bed and grabbed my IV stand. My broken arm was in a sling and one knee felt sore and stiff. As I moved I noticed that almost everything hurt. “Wait,” he said. “You’re flashing your arse in that gown.” Holding me up with one arm, he rummaged in a drawer and found another gown to drape over my shoulders, and then we left the cubicle, my legs weak and sore, and staggered—I staggered, he steadied me—to a bathroom nearby.
“Don’t lock the door,” he said.
After I’d peed I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked truly awful, shadows under my eyes and very pale, and I felt about a hundred years old.
“Are you okay in there, Jo?” Patrick called.
“Coming out.” I splashed water onto my face and shuffled to the door. Patrick helped me back into the bed, where I fell asleep again.
He was still there when I woke, and I found out that I was to go home as soon as the doctor returned to sign the necessary paperwork. It was now nine in the morning and I discovered an inventory of damage in addition to my fractured arm. A knee that sported an ice pack, and strained muscles and scrapes. After another hour or so, armed with a list of instructions and a bottle of painkillers, we left.
“I told them I’d look after you,” Patrick said, helping me into the car.
“Why?”
He shrugged and didn’t say a word until we reached the house. The storm had passed and the sky was a miraculous bright blue, burning the ice away. “It’s so beautiful,” I said, overcome with happiness and relief. Across the road, my neighbors, installing a string of lights around the eaves of the house, waved. “And look, holiday decorations already!”
“Glad you’re enjoying the pain med,” Patrick said. He unlocked the front door. “Do you want to lie on the sofa or would you like to go to bed?” He looked away as he said it.
“I want a shower.”
He nodded and went into the kitchen muttering about plastic wrap.
The benefits of the shower—cleanliness, heat—were outweighed by my clumsiness and the discovery that even simple tasks were complicated and painful. By the time I’d managed to put on about the only thing I could wear—a short-sleeved cotton shirt and a pair of sweatpants (no way would I parade around in my skivvies with Patrick in the house)—I was exhausted again.
Patrick had changed the sheets, to my chagrin; the bedroom was a mess, with clothes dropped where I’d removed them that week and various plates and mugs around the room. He presented me with a bowl of oatmeal and brown sugar but all I wanted to do was sleep, my injured arm resting on its own pillow. He was reserved but kind in a way that made me think he’d much rather be elsewhere, and I woke up later in the day, horrified at how much my arm hurt, to find Kimberly there.
She handed me pain pills and a glass of water. “Why didn’t you call me for a ride home? I would have driven in the ice for you.”
“You won’t even drive in snow,” I said.
“For you, I would. You scared me half to death!”
“I’m sorry. And thanks. Thanks for everything this week.”
“When I said we should do something fun this weekend I didn’t mean this.” She gestured at my arm. “I’ll fix you something to eat.”
“You don’t have to. I’ll be real happy when the pain med kicks in, but it makes me a little nauseated and I can’t eat.”
“You must eat. Don’t be dumb. And before you ask, Patrick went home. He’ll be back tomorrow. Now you come downstairs with me and I’ll fix us dinner and we’ll watch a movie. I’ve brought us ice cream because you need the calcium for your arm.”
I obeyed. I didn’t have much choice and although I fell asleep halfway through the movie, I liked having her there.
But I was tired of hurting and being looked after and the prospect of several days of being helpless and needing assistance with such simple tasks as squeezing the toothpaste out of the tube made me feel even worse. And I hated the idea of Patrick seeing me helpless and needy and miserable; he hadn’t been Mr. Sunshine himself, and I could hardly blame him.
He arrived the next morning after Kimberly had loaded me and my arm—I was beginning to think of it as an entity in its own right—into the bathtub to wash my hair. I was appalled at my bruises, sporting all the colors of the rainbow, which I was able to see in the bright morning light coming in through the skylights. I’d never appreciated those skylights before, since I was so rarely awake at this time of day, and I suspect the pain med added to my appreciation.
I retired to bed with ginger ale and a book and Brady asleep next to me. Downstairs Kimberly and Patrick talked and then I heard the front door open and close.
Patrick came up the stairs bearing a briefcase and a bouquet of Shasta daisies. “Oh, those are pretty,” I said. “Thanks.”
“From Elise. Can I get you anything?” He put the vase of flowers down and shifted from one foot to another.
“No thanks.”
“I brought some work.” He nodded at the briefcase.
“Use my desk if you like.”
“Thanks.” He sat down and opened his laptop, putting a thumb drive in the side.
“What are you working on?”
He stopped and looked at me. “Where’s your purse?”
“Over there. Why?”
He brought the purse over to me. “Okay. Give me a dollar.”
“Why?” I asked again.
“If I’m to represent you I need a retainer.”
“Represent me?”
He pulled the Association’s letter, now battered and creased from its sojourn in the bottom of my backpack, from a manila folder. “This is total bullshit as you probably know, but you need someone who can speak their language to get them off your back. Now give me a dollar.”
I fumbled my billfold open and handed him a dollar. “Thank you.”
I should have sounded more grateful. He nodded and shoved the dollar into his jeans pocket. “I’ll be coming to that meeting tomorrow although I’ll try to get them to postpone it until you’re feeling a bit better.”
“I feel fine,” I lied.
He reached for a yellow legal pad and a pen from his briefcase and sat on the chair at my desk. “Tell me about it. Tell me everything.”
“About the Association?”
“Yes. How you got involved. Who, when, where. Everything.”
I talked. I told him what I probably should have told him when we were first involved, only now I was a client talking to her lawyer and that made me tremendously sad. At the same time I was ashamed, having to recite a list of my adventures.
Now and again he would stop me and ask a question.
With your consent? The names of the people watching? Did they warn you what would happen if you refused? How many times? Whose suggestion was that?
His pen moved across the pad, paper rustling as he flipped to another page.
He stopped writing. “The binder of rules. Do you have it here?”
“No, it’s in my locker.”