She let out a choked-up laugh, shook her head. “I-,” she started, her voice liquid and warm, like maple syrup fresh from the boiler. She cut herself off and pressed her lips together in a smile.
It took them forty-five minutes, not twenty. They leaned into each other, her arm as far around his back as it would go, his arm over her neck and shoulders, their hands clutching each other’s parkas. She would take a small step, he would hop. He kept his teeth gritted against the throbbing ache in his leg, but every fourth or fifth hop his useless left foot would hit the hard, packed snow and he’d swear loudly. He kept apologizing for his language until Clare snapped that if he didn’t stop she’d rip his tongue out and beat him with it. They didn’t talk, except for exchanges like “Do you want me to take your boot off?”
“No.”
“It might make it easier to keep your leg up.”
“I don’t want you to take my goddamn boot off.”
They fell down twice. The first time, he could feel Clare lose her footing and he wrenched his arm away from her. She let go of his parka and he was able to twist sideways, tumbling onto his good right side. The force of the impact vibrated through his broken leg like a dental drill, and he had to lie there for a few minutes, gasping for control, while Clare apologized over and over. The second time, he hopped, landed wrong, and toppled backward, dragging Clare by her neck. When he could speak, he asked her if she was okay.
“I hate snow,” she said. “I really, really hate it. Ice, too.”
He couldn’t help it. He laughed. His whole body hurt, and he laughed and laughed while she rolled over, got to her feet, and hauled him upright. He laughed until he ran out of air and he stood there, dizzy and panting, clinging to her shoulders.
“Slow. Slow,” she said. “Take a few deep breaths.” He did. “Better?” she asked. “We’re almost there.”
And they were. Although the last few yards, with the truck in sight, were an agony, as what had been a twenty-second stroll along the shoulder of the road stretched into five minutes of step-hop-step-hop-step.
“Almost there,” she said, relief lightening her voice.
“I know we’re almost there,” he snarled.
When they reached the truck, he leaned against the side of the cab while Clare wiggled the keys out of his pocket and unlocked the doors. She slid the passenger seat as far back as it would go and then, while he sat on the floor of the cab, interlaced her fingers into a stirrup. He planted his good boot in her hands and shoved up, humping himself into the seat.
“Is there anything we can use to brace your leg?” She winced as he bumped his left foot against the floor mat and swore again.
“Let’s just get out of here.” He leaned back and closed his eyes while she got in and started the truck. He felt as if he had just staggered past the finish line of a ten-mile race, slick with sweat and trembling with fatigue. He concentrated on breathing, steady and deep. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The truck jounced through a pothole and he hissed.
“Sorry,” Clare said. He didn’t answer. Just went back to his breathing, keeping the pain not at bay, because it sloshed up against him like waves slapping at the side of a boat, but riding it, staying inside the hull, not letting it swamp him.
Clare didn’t ask him how he was or try to distract him with chatter, and the part of him that was thinking about anything was grateful to her for her silence. He kept his eyes closed. He could hear the rumble of the county road give way to the whoosh and crunch of traffic. They stopped, waited, rolled, stopped, waited, rolled. They eased over a speed bump and sloped upward. “We’re here,” she said quietly, and he opened his eyes to see her nosing the truck into the emergency-room portico. “I’ll go get someone,” she said, and he closed his eyes again as her door opened and shut. He had time for four more slow breaths before his door opened and a familiar voice said, “Well, what have you done to yourself this time?”
He opened his eyes. “Hey, Alta.” He reached for the edge of the doorway and the outstretched hand of the nurse who had ruled the emergency department since before he had returned home to become chief of police.
“Easy now,” she said, and Clare was on the other side, reaching for him as well, and there was a gurney, set nice and low and easy for him to sit on, fall back on, stretch out on. An orderly helped him settle his leg and then raised the gurney to table height. Russ stared at the sky, bright and cold.
“You’ll have to move that pickup,” Alta was saying to Clare. “Back out of this drive, down the street, next hospital entrance is visitor parking.”
Clare leaned over so that her face was hanging above him, just like she had done in the moments after he had fallen. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she said.
“Call the station for me,” he said. “They’re shorthanded already with Noble and Lyle out. Tell Harlene to call in the part-time guys. Tell her to let the staties know we may need back up. Call Bob Mongue, the zone sergeant at Troop B, he’s got like a dozen kids and he always needs overtime. Tell her-”
“Russ.” She rested one hand on his chest, her mouth quirked in a smile that was half exasperation, half amusement. “Harlene’s been the dispatcher for what, twenty years? She’ll know what to do.”
Her face was replaced by Alta’s. “Let’s get you inside and give you something to take the pain away, hmm?” She grabbed the side of the gurney and they began rolling. “I thought for sure when the reverend ran in here that you musta been shot or something. The ice got you, hmm? I was hoping for something more exciting than a slip and fall. We get three-four cases a day this time of year.”
He wondered, as they shouldered their way through the double doors into the steamy, moist heat of the emergency room, if Debba had been telling the truth. If Allan Rouse had slipped and fallen just like he had? And if so, then where the hell was he?
Chapter 21
Now, her cell phone worked. She pocketed it as she crossed the parking lot toward the sidewalk that ran along the front of the hospital. She knew if she used the main entrance, there would be a lot of meaningless red tape about signing in and checking if Russ had been admitted yet. She was going back to the emergency room.
She had had a short conversation with Harlene, who became all brisk and efficient as soon as Clare had reassured her that Russ was safe and unlikely to need anything more than a cast. “Fell down at a crime scene and broke his leg, huh? The guys are never going to let him forget this.” She had promised to notify everyone in the department and directed Clare to not let Russ fret. “No fretting. Got it,” Clare said as she rang off.
She pushed through the entrance of the emergency department, the old-fashioned swinging doors whump- whumping around her, and spotted Alta manning the admissions desk at the end of the drab green hall.
“He’s already inside, getting his prelim workup done,” Alta said as Clare neared. “They’re getting him changed and starting an IV. I’ll let you know when you can go in.”
Clare thanked her and took a seat in the waiting room. Someone had thumb-tacked glossy cardboard hearts and doilies onto the institutional green walls and forgotten to take them down after Valentine’s Day. Maybe they kept them up until they could be replaced by jolly cartoon bunnies and two-foot-high chicks for Easter. Rather than cheering the place up, they emphasized the vinyl sadness of the brown-and-chrome chairs, which looked as if they had been bought secondhand from a modernistic jetport lounge in 1964. Clare settled into the slightly curved back of hers and tried to resist picking at the peeling piping. Across from her, a woman with the look of a farmer’s wife from up Cossayuharie way was resolutely leafing through a
Clare glanced at the contents of the table at the end of her row of chairs. Three
