Stay Up With Me (20 page)

Birthday Girl

A
young girl lies
on a snowy country road. Her head has fallen to the side as though she's sleeping, and her hair fans out across the snow. She is clothed in a blue parka with a white fringed hood, a red knit scarf, frayed jeans, and dark blue snow boots. She's alive, thank God (her breath warm enough to melt snow), though unmoving.

I never saw her,
you tell yourself. She'd been running in the cold night with her dog, who sprints up and down the road, barking. You were rushing a little, to score some Advil before the market at the gas station closed, but really, the girl came from nowhere. You are banged up yourself, a cut on the inside of your lip, and shaking, and the scene emerges before you in pieces: dog/girl/car/snow/scarf. You can't wait for it to settle, for now there is getting the girl to a hospital. You don't own a cell phone to call for an ambulance. You will take the girl yourself.

But loading the girl into a compact car isn't easy, as you are five foot three, and in your doctor's words,
small boned
. Straining, and chanting profanities under your breath, you manage to drag and then slide the girl—who looks to be around fourteen, but weighs as much as you—positioning her with legs bent and head ducked down, so that the door can close without hurting anything. You recall too late the rule about not moving someone when they're injured.

The dog,
you think then, because you can't just leave him out on the road like this. You yell,
Here, boy. Come here, boy,
to no effect. You grab a slice of chicken from the plastic container of your dinner leftovers and hold it out in your palm. He walks over, dragging his leash, and eats from your hand.
Thatta boy,
you say, and then wrestle him into the passenger seat of your car. He has a blue bandanna around his neck, same shade as the girl's jacket, and tan-colored fur. You try to calm yourself down.

 

In ten minutes or
so
you reach the emergency room entrance of the hospital, which lies at the eastern border of what they poignantly call downtown. You run inside and shout, “Can someone please help me? There's a girl in very bad shape. She's been hit.” An attendant with greasy blond hair tied back in a rubber band rushes out with a metal gurney. He braces the girl's neck, places her carefully on the gurney, and rushes her inside.

You follow with the dog. There is dried blood on your hand, which you rinse clean at a water fountain. A few people smile over at you when you sit down in the waiting room. They think it's
your
dog.

Eventually a young man in faded green scrubs with a chart in his hand emerges. His sentences come forth in disconnected sounds: The police dropping by . . . a report.

You give him the sequence of events. A flash of something in your headlights. Brakes. A skid. A crashing sound. It doesn't feel like you're slurring your words.

“So the dog was running ahead of the girl,” he says.

“I guess. I didn't see either of them.” If only you'd hit the dog, you think. But it's good you didn't hit the dog.

“Where were you coming from?” he asks.

You consider telling him the truth, that you were in a bar, but because you ate at a restaurant called Howell's on Montgomery Street earlier, you decide to simply say “Howell's.” You were with two friends, talking about your week of housesitting for your boss, who was on vacation in the Florida Keys. You liked staying in a place with leather couches, a nice sound system, and shelves of clever movies. Even now you're wearing her stylish red wool coat.

 

“Did you have anything
to drink?”
he asks.

“A glass of wine,” you say, and surprisingly enough that seems to satisfy him.

“One,” he says, writing this down, and you say, “Yes.”

People are rushed in, one woman crying in pain and others with small or invisible bruises and limps. A TV plays Fox News, a story about a man donating his kidney to his brother. Beneath the television, a waist-high plastic Santa stands behind a pack of small plastic reindeers. There are other Christmas decorations still up, and a small fake tree adorned with little red ribbons. A young boy asks if he can pet your dog, and you say yes.

“What's his name?” the boy asks.

“Max,” you say, the name of a hamster your father gave you when you were six.

 

You consider calling
one of the friends you'd been to dinner with, but it's late now, and they are likely both asleep. There was a lawyer you dated a few times last year, but you'd lost his number, and that had ended awkwardly.

As you wait for the doctors to evaluate the girl, you are waiting too for the blood levels in your brain to shift, though you can't tell if it's alcohol that's causing the dull ache in the front of your head, or if it's an aftereffect of the collision. There is a formula that has to do with your weight, what you've eaten, and how many hours have passed. You recall seeing a chart about this a few years ago on a bulletin board at college, with the message
A GOOD TIME TO MISPLACE YOUR KEYS
. Your mouth feels dry. It's hard to swallow. You drink a cup of weak coffee from the dispenser in the waiting room and take several long sips of cold water from the hallway water fountain.

It's no big deal to drive with a few drinks in you, not in a town without traffic, where you can down a few shots of Patrón at a place like Finnegan's or The Orchard and still make it home—people do. You've had far wilder nights and been fine, although once after a party you did scrape a curb, and after another you pulled into the wrong driveway.

On a dare when you were thirteen, you once told four separate store managers it was your birthday—though it was still months away—and that no one in your family had remembered. You were so convincing in your disappointment (your eyes were disturbingly red) that you walked home that night with a compact disc, two T-shirts, a poster, and a beautiful silver necklace with a locket, which you are wearing now. It was alarmingly easy to do. The key was tricking yourself into believing it. You think of this as you think of what you'll say to the police.

At the sink in the women's room you splash cold water on your cheeks, then pat dry your face with a paper towel. You look like you always look. You have no record of unsafe driving, not even a speeding ticket.

An image through the windshield flashes in your mind. The girl's eyes are less scared than bewildered, as though she'd seen not a car coming at her but a UFO.

“You all right?” There's a woman at the next sink; you don't remember her walking in.

“Fine,” you say. “I thought I lost a contact.”

 

After a second coffee
you feel more jittery than sleepy, and nervous, though this doesn't distinguish you from anyone else in the waiting room.

You can be whatever you need to be here, which is something you've always been good at. It was your inborn empathy, your drama teacher said. You'd starred in three plays in high school and another in college for which you'd earned a fawning write-up in a regional newspaper.

For now you focus on your role here. You locate a plastic soup bowl and fill it with water for the dog. It isn't much, but it feels good to watch him drink.

 

A couple in their
midforties
wearing heavy coats and scarves arrive and run to the desk. They have kind faces, you think, and are tightly gripping each other's hands. You recognize them from when you worked as a cashier at the Price Chopper. You realize you've seen their brown-haired daughter before, and vaguely remember slipping her a packet of gum her mother had denied her. The girl was eight or nine. Her mother had been fumbling through her purse and didn't see the exchange, but the girl's face had opened into a smile. At that thought a chill crosses your skin. You consider slipping away now, but then the nurse is pointing the parents over to you, and you rise from your chair.

“Thank you so very much for driving Eden here,” the mother says, and then glances at the dog, “and look, you brought Lemon here too.”

The parents thank you for driving their daughter to the hospital and for taking care of Lemon. They are so appreciative you realize they don't know anything more than that you might have saved their daughter's life.

You tell them how you worked at the hospital as a candy striper in high school, mostly in the pediatric ward. And then you report what little you've heard about the condition of the girl.

At some point in the conversation you tell them—because you
have
to, and because you figure you are as sober sounding as you are likely to be—“I'm the one who hit your daughter.”

Your declaration confuses them.

“I'm so sorry. She came out of nowhere. I never saw her.”

“It was
you
?” the father says.

“I'm so sorry.”

“Dear God,” the mother says, and she sits down.

“It was all ice out there. I wasn't going very fast.”

“You were going fast enough,” the mother says. “How long have you had your license?”

“I'm twenty-three,” you say.

“Then there's no excuse.”

“No, you're right. There isn't,” you say. “I wish more than anything in the world that I could do something. I wish I could go back wherever she is and do something.” You feel yourself growing upset. “I really don't want to bother you. But I'd like to stay here until Eden wakes up.”

The father studies your face, then looks over at his wife. They are registering the fact that you look quite a bit like their daughter.

“I want to make sure she's all right,” you say.

He purses his lips and nods.

“I'm just so
very, very, very,
very
sorry this happened,” you say, close to tears.

His expression softens. “I believe you,” he says.

 

A doctor emerges
with an update for the parents. The good news, he tells them, is that the CAT scan showed no skull fracture and no evidence of internal bleeding.

“She isn't awake yet,” he says, “but her pupils are reactive, which suggests she might simply have a concussion.”

“So she's going to be all right,” the father says. He's trying to read the doctor's face, which reveals only an affable competence.

“We'll have to wait and see. There could be some things the CAT scan didn't catch,” he says, and adds that they may need to take her to another hospital for an MRI. They'll have to keep watching her closely.

Eden's left kneecap is shattered, he adds, probably from the impact of the car, and her left shoulder
was
dislocated, “but we did a pretty good job of putting it back in place.”

The father nods. “We appreciate all you're doing for us,” he says, and from your seat you nod too in thanks.

 

It is a record
night
for accidents, someone at the nurses' station says. Already there have been three other serious ones in and around town, including a fatal, which is why the police are so slow in getting here. If enough terrible things happen out on the roads, they may forget about you, though you know it's wrong to hope for this, and really, all you want is for everyone to be fine and healthy and sleeping in a bed, which is where you should be right now. Your headache has eased and your buzz feels weaker now, almost not even there.

 

Over the next hour
and a half
there is a heart attack and a bar fight, more people being wheeled in, and more waiting. You talk with the girl's parents about Eden, who they tell you is an accomplished gymnast, swimmer, and amateur comedienne. She performed stand-up at a school talent competition. “She'll have some good material about this,” her father says.

He is a short sandy-haired man with the build of a wrestling coach. His eyes pucker at the corners with appealing little wrinkles. You think of your unnervingly handsome father who left when you were eight, and who'd stop in on the odd year to take you out to dinner, then ask you to pay half, or for all of it, explaining in a fatherly voice that he would pay you back next time.

“She goes out every night with that dog, for an hour or so,” Eden's father says. “She likes to get on the back roads past the edge of town and let Lemon find their way back. One time they were away until midnight. A force of nature, that one. She's going to need some rehab, I guess. Maybe a lot, but she'll be better than ever after that. One of our others I'd worry about, but not her.”

It would be nice to have someone worry about you, you think.

“I'll bet you're a great father,” you say. It feels as though you're auditioning.

“Not always,” he says. “But it's kind of you to say that.”

 

By two thirty
they still haven't heard anything, which the father says is a good sign. If it was bad news, they would have already heard by now.

“Do you think that's true?” the mother asks you, as though you know about these things.

“I think so, yes,” you say, because there's no reason not to believe it. You kneel down and rub Lemon's belly, and he makes high-pitched happy sounds in response.

It is the sweetest family moment you've had in a long while.

 

At around three
A.M.
the mother tells you you should go home and get some sleep, and come back later in the day when Eden is awake if you would like. The mood is hopeful, though no one has come out to give you an update. The police arrive, finally, and ask you questions about the accident. Their faces show the strain of a difficult night. Perhaps it is because you were talking warmly with the girl's parents when they walked in, or because the dog is resting his head on your lap. Or maybe they're bad at their jobs, but it's all quite casual. They take down your phone number and address, and they leave. Nine out of ten times they would have administered a Breathalyzer. This is the tenth time. When they're gone, you almost feel disappointed.