Run (7 page)

The SUV was so high up that she could get beneath it quite easily by keeping low and dragging her legs behind her. Three feet back she found one thin, stretchy glove that was absolutely her mother’s, and after brushing it off she shoved it in her pocket. Then she saw her mother’s boot lying on its side. She had forgotten to look at her mother’s feet. She took the boot by the laces and pulled herself backwards from beneath the car. If there was one boot off there could be two.

“Couldn’t you just take us all over to the hospital?” Doyle said.

“We’ve got to call an ambulance,” the offi cer said.

Kenya looked behind the trees near a high brick wall. She looked beneath two bushes and when she stood up straight she found her mother’s hat sitting neatly on top of one of them. Her mother’s favorite dark green hat, purchased two years ago at the very end of the Filene’s after-Christmas sale for three dollars! How her mother would have hated to lose that hat. Kenya brushed it off carefully and put it on top of her head. Her mother had been upset with her after they left the apartment that night because Kenya said she had put her own hat in her pocket when she hadn’t. Kenya had lied about the hat because hats looked ridiculous on her when her hair was up in ponytails. They made her head look lumpy. Her mother put a strong hand on Kenya’s shoulder while they waited for the T

and she spoke to her sharply about keeping her head dry and not a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 50

catching cold. How was she going to take off work if Kenya caught cold? There was for an instant the thought of her mother never scolding her again, of being alone in a night as dark as this one forever, but just as quickly she banished it. After all, her mother had opened her eyes. That was what she had seen herself, so that was what there was to trust. She would wear her mother’s hat. She would find whatever else was missing. Everything had been fl ung around.

That’s how hard she was hit. She saw her mother’s scarf right next to where she had been sitting, but now she couldn’t see the blood anymore and she couldn’t see the scarf either, just the shape of the scarf like a long flattened snake beneath the snow. She shook it out fast and wrapped it twice around her neck even though the wool was wet and cold and only made her colder. The snow was unstop-pable, covering everything up, sifting into the smallest open spaces: the pockets of her coat, the tiny splits in the grill of a car. That was what made Kenya stop and think about looking for things in a different way and looking for them quickly. That’s how she found her mother’s purse pressed up tight against a brick wall, just a lump in the snow. It would have been so easy to miss it altogether, and then the purse would have stayed there until spring.

“We can’t just go loading people in the cars,” another offi cer said. “Nobody likes that.”

“Look,” Doyle said, running a hand across his head. “I need to get my son out of this weather.” They were all soaked through by now, all bitter and wet. “I’m Bernard Doyle. If you could help us out here.”

“Mr. Doyle?” said the oldest of the three, a man not so much younger than Doyle himself. He smiled hugely and then remembered himself and stuck out his thick, snowy glove. “Mr. Mayor?

Of course you are. Man, I’ve been looking at you all night trying to figure out . . .”

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And then it was done. For one shining moment in history, Cambridge extended its hand to help Boston. Teddy got on one side of Tip and one of the younger officers got on the other and they lifted him up and put him in the backseat of the black and white. Suddenly it seemed hard to believe that they’d left him on the ground all that time. Tip Doyle. Teddy and Tip. They remembered them now. The black and white had been running all this time, the heater cranked up to high so that the car was tropically warm. Doyle got in beside Tip and called to Teddy. “Get the girl and let’s go,” he said.

But when Teddy looked up she was nowhere. He had her with him not two minutes ago. In every direction it was nothing more than an empty block filling up with snow. All of the people were gone, the SUV was gone. The footprints were all filled in. The street was shimmering, mirror-like. Even now the place where Tip had lain for so long was smoothing over.

“Come on,” Doyle said. He was shivering in the warm car. His hands ached.

“Just a second.”

The two younger officers got back out of the second car. It was late but the streetlights poured generously across the snow and lit up the night in resplendence. She was a skinny girl and tall, ten or eleven or twelve, with her hair in four high braids or six high braids and her coat was a dark color. Not that it mattered.

There was only one little girl on this street on this night. They couldn’t leave her out there in the cold. They couldn’t lose her, whoever she was. For an awful moment Teddy tried to remember if he had seen her since the ambulance left. Had she followed it?

Even though he saw nothing in any direction, he put his hands up to his mouth and called out as loud as he could, “Hey! Tennessee’s daughter!”

And out shot a head from beneath a snow covered Buick parked a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 52

on the side of the street fi fteen feet away. The child was underneath the car.

“What are you doing, girl?” Teddy said to her.

Kenya raised up her hand to show him. “I found her other boot!” She was trying to shinny out but the snow was making a fast wall and she struggled. He went and took her hands and pulled her up into the night air. She seemed to be an empty coat, utterly weightless, and for a moment he held her aloft in his arms. “It was all the way up here,” she said breathlessly.

“Kenya like the country?” said the officer driving the car.

“Like the country,” she said.

Kenya and Teddy sat up front with two boots, one purse, one hat, a scarf, one glove, and her mother’s cut coat. “You were smart to go looking for that stuff,” the officer said to her. “Especially the purse. That’s sharp thinking. Most people don’t think so sharp when there’s an accident.”

“It was everywhere,” she said.

“Things get thrown around, I’ll tell you. The things I’ve seen.” He whistled. “You wouldn’t want to hear it.” Everyone in the car stayed quiet because none of them wanted to hear it.

“I only found one glove,” Kenya said.

“She may still have the other one on,” Teddy told her.

“Maybe not,” Tip said. “So then I’ll know what to bring her in the hospital when I come to visit.” Tip was sitting with his back against the door and his leg up in his father’s lap. The car had the wet, woolly smell of soaking overcoats. It didn’t make any sense. A Chevy Tahoe had run over his ankle and someone else had been hit r u n

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straight on trying to push him out of the way, they were all headed to the hospital in a police car and yet he was in a much better mood than he had been earlier in the evening. He thought about saying this but it would have been disrespectful to the girl.

Kenya turned around to look at Tip over the backseat. He was shivering. It made her feel shy all of a sudden to see him hurt.

“I think she wants to know how you are,” Doyle said.

Tip smiled at her. Poor kid, she had it worse than he did any day. “I think my ankle’s broken but it can’t be too bad. I can still move my toes.” Or he could move his toes just after it happened.

He couldn’t move them now, though that was very likely because he was too damn cold to feel them.

Kenya winced in part at the thought of the pain and in part at the thought of her own ankle. A break would mean a whole sea-son out of track. All of the events that she was bound to win this year would go to someone else. Maybe, if it was very bad, it would mean no more running for years, maybe until high school even. If that were the case she didn’t know who she would be at all. The policeman’s windshield wipers made a high squeak as they slapped the wet snow back and forth. All along the front of the dashboard were radios and thick, curling cords. It wasn’t like the dashboard of any car she’d ever seen before. Every minute or so voices would come through, women’s and men’s, saying things that she didn’t understand punctuated by loud, squelching bursts of static. The officer who was driving just ignored them and went on making conversation with Doyle about past elections and city planning commissions and the chief of police. “I’m a guy who lives in the past,” the officer said. “That’s what my wife always tells me. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this guy but it’s not like it used to be, you know?” There were no other cars on Storrow a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 54

Drive, and it was usually packed at any hour of the day. They crept along carefully. And all of that seemed right to Kenya. After all, she had gone down the rabbit hole just like Alice in the book. Her mother had been hit by a giant car and taken away from her, she was in the front seat of a police car riding with the Doyle family to the hospital in a snowstorm. If there had been other cars, if the weather had been fine, if anything in the world had seemed the same, she might have just shrunk down to the size of nothing and disappeared.

People treat you nicely when you come to the emergency room in a police car. The offi cer got out fi rst and said to everybody there,

“This is Bernard Doyle. This man used to be the mayor of Boston.” There were a couple of other police officers standing around in the cold, talking with the guys who unload the ambulances. Two nurses were smoking cigarettes under the awning and they turned around from looking up at the snow to look at Doyle. They all seemed impressed, and a couple of them came over to shake his hand. It was late and they weren’t very busy because of the weather. People who were sick decided maybe they weren’t so sick that they had to go to the hospital, and people who would have been out getting into trouble that could lead them to a hospital chose to stay home as well.

They put Tip in a wheelchair and he made a sorrowful sound when they touched his leg. Tip was feeling worse now than he had in the car or out on the street in the snow.

“I’m going back with Tip,” Doyle said to Teddy, but he was looking at Kenya. Doyle had never looked at Kenya before, all the countless times she had seen him he had never so much as glanced in her direction. Her mother said that was nothing to take offense at. “He shouldn’t see you,” she said. “If he sees you then you’re doing something wrong.”

“We’ll wait for you,” Teddy said.

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“I’ll check on your mother first,” he said to her. “As soon as I find out how she’s doing I’ll come and tell you.” Kenya thanked him but once he was walking through the swinging electric doors she remembered something. “Wait,” she said.

Doyle stopped and turned around to look at her again. It was almost too much, the way he saw her now, the way he looked at her like she was someone he knew.

“You’ll need this.” She dropped to the ground and fi shed through her mother’s purse for her wallet. It was big and brown and it looked like a dog had been chewing on it though they didn’t have a dog. The zipper on the change purse and the snap on the billfold had both broken last year and her mother kept it together by putting two big rubber bands around the wallet at either end. As soon as Kenya had taken it out she was sorry because she knew that her mother wouldn’t want anybody to see the rubber bands. But it was too late. She had asked him to come back and now she had to give it to him. She held it out in her hand.

“What’s this for?”

“Her cards,” Kenya said. “They’re going to ask for her cards.” Doyle hesitated. “I think we can wait for that.”

“They won’t see you without the cards.” She stretched her hand out to him. “Don’t worry. They just copy everything and give it all right back to you.” Kenya wasn’t sure which cards they had to copy but she was certain they would be in there somewhere.

The attendant had already wheeled Tip through the door and so Doyle nodded his head and took the wallet. Then he went inside .

“I think we should go in too, get warm,” Teddy said. “There’s bound to be some hot chocolate in there somewhere.” Teddy liked children. He liked this Kenya, who surely was having the worst night of her life but still managed to think so clearly, gathering up boots, a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 56

handing out insurance cards. How old was Teddy before he understood anything at all about insurance cards? To be honest he wasn’t sure he entirely understood them now. “How old are you anyway?”

“Eleven,” she said.

“I’m twenty,” he said.

“I know that.” They were under the cover of the awning and she was looking at her toes. She used the heel of her boot to punch down a hard pile of dark gray snow that had fallen off the underside of a car.

“How do you know that?”

She looked up at him and blinked. She had said something stupid. She was stupid. She reached up beneath her hat and gave an uncomfortably hard pull on one of her braids. “I’m a good guesser.”

“How old do you guess my brother is?”

She thought about lying, saying sixteen or thirty, but her mother always said that a lie never got you anyplace in the end, that it would always double back to bite you. “Twenty-one?” she asked.

The girl looked nervous. Teddy was worried that she didn’t want to be alone with him. Who knew the best way to comfort an eleven-year-old whose mother had just been hit by a car? He reached out and took the boots she was holding. “You’re a good guesser. Most people think Tip’s older than that.”

“Because he’s serious.”

“That’s right.” He smiled at her like he was a teacher and she had just worked the math problem correctly on the board. “You know lots of things.”

Kenya shrugged. “Not really. I just thought he seemed serious.” Teddy looked out at the snow for a minute. It was still stream-ing down every bit as hard. He wondered how they would manage to get home when the time finally came to go. “I don’t know about you but I’m freezing.” Teddy had picked his coat up off the ground r u n

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after the ambulance left but it was wet all the way through now and he didn’t want to put it on.