Dad shook me awake. “No, Dad,” I said. “It’s Sunday.”
“Get up, Abby.”
Dad darted out of my room. His body language let me know there was no time for dawdling. My room was dim. I couldn’t see the edge of the sun peeking around the drapes. A glance at my alarm told me it was three. I slipped into sweats, ran my fingers through my hair, and rushed into the hall, grabbing my backpack parked by the door. If there were vampires on the warpath, we’d need everything I had in my backpack.
“Dad?”
“Your mother is in the hospital. Let’s go.”
We went through the kitchen door into the garage. Dad punched the button and the garage door lifted with a mechanical hum. “After you went to bed, Mom went out with Mr. Christopher to find William and Coral. She found the vampire lair.” He backed out. Shadows of trees projected onto the wall in front of us, headlight beams flashing off shelves of tools. “I stayed home with you.”
He didn’t know that I knew all that. My chest tried to squeeze my heart out. Was Mom okay?
We backed out of the driveway. Dad’s square suitcase of vampire death was occupying one of the back seats.
“Lee took her to the hospital,” Dad continued. “You’ll be staying with the Coopers for a while. I’ll arrange for Fenster to take a couple of days off school to bodyguard.”
Fenster was a graduate student, one of Mom and Dad’s associates, who could operate during the day, which
Mr. Christopher and Ned both could not do. I worried as Dad attempted warp drive to get to the hospital. How badly was Mom hurt? What had happened? My heart pounded like a timpani.
Dad was all business, taking curves like a NASCAR driver, driving around other cars like a stuntman. We pulled into the hospital parking lot near the emergency room, and Dad raced off before he shut down the car and grabbed his case. I turned off the lights and pocketed the keys. Mr. Christopher intercepted him at the emergency room door. Dad, absent-minded, slung the strap of his box over his shoulder, and after some directions, raced down the bright, empty hall.
Mr. Christopher found me an empty chair. His dark eyes appraised me, probably assessing my state of shock.
“Tell me all about it,” I said. I could count on Mr. Christopher to treat me like an adult.
“Abigail, your mother has been, well, she’s lost a lot of blood.”
Nerves kicked my stomach. “Did they bite her?”
“No. If that had happened, I wouldn’t have brought her here. No. She fell from a great height. There are some broken bones and some lacerations. Possibly some cerebral damage. She is in intensive care.”
I swallowed. “Where were you?”
“Regrettably, I was elsewhere. By the time I extricated myself, the deed had been done. Getting your mother to the hospital was more important than catching the vampires who did it.”
My chest tightened. “Mom and Dad, they don’t want me hunting monsters. Well, I don’t want them doing it either.”
“Do you want to see your mother?” His jaw set and his mouth was a thin line. He held my hand with his icy one.
Mom’s accident was scarier than anything in one of Dad’s movies, and I didn’t want to see her like Mr. Christopher had described her, but I had to. Abigail Rath wasn’t a coward. I was my mother’s daughter.
Mr. Christopher and I rode an elevator to a room behind a sealed door. A nurse’s station sat in in the middle of a ring of fishbowl rooms, the entire area draped in a gauzy gray light. I could hear choking, clicking breaths as machines breathed for people who couldn’t. The nurse let me go to Mom. Mr. Christopher waited outside because Mom could only have two visitors at a time and Dad was already there.
For a moment cinema and reality blurred. Dad, eyes watering, stood by the side of Mom’s bed, his hand over hers as best he could. Plastic tubes went into her body like vines crevicing into bricks. Mom’s head was bandaged with one eye covered. I clutched the doorway to steady myself and blinked away tears. I forced myself through the barrier of fear to stand by Dad.
Dad circled his arm around my shoulders and together we cried for a good long time. After that, the doctor came in and gave us the report. While Mom had a serious concussion, the biggest problem was Mom’s ribs had broken, and one of them had punctured a lung. That meant one of her lungs had collapsed, and she had to have the help of a respirator. The doctors were worried that she would lose her left eye.
There wasn’t much else for us to do but worry. Dad settled in. I stayed until Mr. Christopher thought it was prudent to take me to the Coopers, and I found myself in the Cooper’s generic guest room, a penitent Mrs. Cooper doing everything she could to make me feel welcome. Exhaustion took me about eight a.m., and I slept until two.
Dad called Ms. Cheever to let her know I wasn’t coming to school, and I stayed out of school all week. I called Marty, because I knew between Coral and me both disappearing, she would be beside herself. She said she would come to be with me at the hospital after school. I had a hard time telling her not to come because my voice was so thick. I didn’t need Marty seeing any of this. Dad lived at the hospital, and I orbited the hospital, with anxious breaks at the Coopers.
Mom’s condition danced on a very serious edge.
