Tucker blasted the horn, and one of the riders in the other car made a rude gesture through the back window. “I’m passing him.”
“Back off,” Cody said. “Besides, he’ll just speed up again if you try.”
Tucker pulled out to pass. “Basic physics, my man—force equals mass times acceleration.”
Trisha saw the front car’s taillights brighten as it slowed. She gripped Cody’s hand.
“No! Don’t!” Christina cried.
A sick sensation seized Trisha and for the space of a few seconds, she felt as if the car had grown wings and they were flying. Then, suddenly, the world turned upside down. Glass rained down. Metal tore. Someone screamed. The world went dark.
Five
Trisha swam in a sea of blackness, her body icy cold. From somewhere, music blared. If Charlie doesn’t turn down his CD player, Mom’s going to kill him, she thought. She tried to move, searching for her bed covers and longing to feel warm. She seemed weighted down but didn’t know why. Turn off the music, Charlie.…
She jolted awake. She lay on a blanket of snow. Her cheek felt wet, her legs numb. Light arced from behind her, throwing white spotlights on the snow in front of her face. She moaned and pulled herself upward to her knees. A wave of nausea made her gag. The music wouldn’t stop. She saw a field of snow, blue-white in the moonlight. Moisture dripped from her lip and cheek. She tried to remember what happened, but a voice interrupted her thoughts.
“Don’t move,” someone said. “Help’s coming.”
She staggered to her feet anyway. A hand reached out to steady her. She saw a boy her age, his face pale and white in the moonlight. “Who … ?” was all she could manage.
“You’ve been in a wreck. We were in the car you tried to pass. The car you were in went off the road and … and it flipped.”
She turned just enough to see that the arc of light was coming from the headlights of an overturned car. The vehicle looked like some giant’s toy, lying on its roof, its metal underbelly exposed to the cold night.
“I used my cell phone in the car—the paramedics are on their way. You should stay put,” the boy said.
She moved past him as if he hadn’t spoken, and tried to make sense of the jagged landscape. She needed to find Cody. Where was he? He wouldn’t have gone away and left her. Except for being cold, she felt nothing. The music kept blaring. Why didn’t someone turn it off?
“Here, you need a coat.” The boy moved beside her, putting his jacket around her shoulders. It didn’t make her feel any warmer.
Trisha started toward the car, but the boy turned her away. The doors were thrown open, the windshield smashed, the seats crushed, empty. Her eyes began to water. From far away, she heard the sound of a siren. It came closer, and soon eerie red lights splayed across the field of snow. She took a step. Heavy snow crunched and clung to her new boots. Trisha peered down at her boots, suddenly worried about them. If they were damaged, her mother was going to be so mad at her. Trisha remembered her mother saying, “Can’t you wear your old ones tonight? Save these for Sunday?”
She had replied, “No, Mom, I can’t. Why have new boots if I can’t wear them?”
Her tights were shredded, but the boots looked fine. She was glad they weren’t ruined, then wondered why it should matter. The car was mangled and shattered and she was worrying about her stupid boots!
“Sit down and wait for help,” the boy beside her said.
“I’m fine,” she said, surprised at how calm her voice sounded. “Do you know where my friends are? A girl and two guys. Did they go off without me?”
Out of the night, a man carrying a large white box came toward her through the snow. “Take it easy,” he said. “I’m a paramedic. I’m going to help you.”
“I’m so cold,” she said.
He got her to the door of the ambulance, where she saw Tucker sitting on the running board. He held a towel against his forehead. His shirt was ripped, and a cut ran from his shoulder to his elbow. “Are you all right?” Tucker asked.
“I—I think so.” She glanced around, confused. “Where’s Cody? And Christina?”
“Don’t know.”
A rolling stretcher had materialized, and two men lifted her onto it. “No,” she said. “I don’t need that. I’m fine.”
The paramedics ignored her, strapped her onto a backboard, and immobilized her head.
“Stop it!” she said, trying to move. She felt pinned in place, like an insect skewered to a display case.
“Lie still,” the medic said. “You’re in shock. Don’t move. You could hurt yourself more.”
She didn’t believe him. She didn’t feel a thing.
Police cars came with screaming sirens and whirling blue lights, and where their lights melded with the red lights of the emergency units, the snow looked purple. Doors opened, and more medics emerged. Someone shined a bright light into her eyes and snapped, “Responsive. Let’s get an IV in her and transport her.”
Something stung the back of her hand, and a bag was hung on a metal pole on the stretcher. “Cody. Where’s Cody?” she asked. “And where’s Christina?”
“Have you been drinking?” a paramedic asked. “Any drugs?”
“No.” How could they think such a thing?
Tucker bent over her, took her free hand. “It’s okay, Trisha.”
Tears were sliding down the sides of her face. She wanted to wipe them but couldn’t move. Tucker brushed them away for her. “I’ll be in the ambulance with you. We’re together, you hear?”
The stretcher began to move. Hands lifted it into the ambulance. As the stretcher rose, she saw shapes in a ditch, sprawled out like broken dolls. Just a glimpse, an impression, but one doll looked twisted, the other wore a ski hat. The sound of a scream filled her ears. It was a full minute before she realized it was hers.
In the ambulance, the paramedic asked her name and began to check her body. “Trisha, does anything hurt?”
“My head.”
“You’ve got a nasty cut that’ll probably need stitches,” he said, applying a bandage to the top of her head. She winced when he manipulated her right knee. Because her head was immobilized, all she could move were her eyes. She moved them in all directions. Lights glowed down from the metal top of the vehicle and rows of shelves crammed with medical equipment and paraphernalia lined the inside. She saw Tucker sitting on a bench; another medic was taking his blood pressure.
She asked, “Tucker, what happened to us?”
“Ice. We hit a patch of ice, and the car fishtailed. I tried to keep it on the road, but I couldn’t.” Tucker’s voice shook as he explained.
“What about the others?”
He shrugged. “I blacked out and when I came to, I was still inside the car. The kids that stopped … they helped me out. I—I didn’t see the others.”
Just as Trisha started to tell him she thought she had, the paramedic began to cut off her sweater with a pair of shears. “Do you have to? I—I’m cold,” she said.
“I have to check you,” he said.
She felt mortified, lying on a stretcher, unable to move, her clothing being peeled off her body in layers. “Can’t it wait?”
“The ER doc’s going to want to know as much as possible when we get there. Your clothes could be hiding an injury.”
She shut her eyes, seeing her mother’s face in her mind’s eye. All at once, she wanted her mother desperately. She wanted her mother to hold her and tell her everything was going to be all right. “My parents. They need to know. Who’s going to tell them? I want to talk to them—”
“The hospital will call them.”
Feeling sick to her stomach again, she squeezed her eyes tighter shut and prayed that she wouldn’t throw up. She couldn’t believe this was happening, this nightmare from which she couldn’t wake up. “The others in the car,” she said to the medic, “do you know what happened to them?”
“Another ambulance is bringing them in. Can you tell me where e
lse you hurt?”
“My cheek and my lip.”
He bent over, examining her mouth through narrowed eyes. “You’ve got glass imbedded in your lip. They’ll remove it in the ER. Try not to talk.”
She shuddered at the idea of glass ground into her face.
The ambulance pulled into the unloading zone for the emergency room and the doors popped open. Her stretcher was removed from the ambulance, and she was transferred to another. Blankets were thrown over her. Inside the building, she was wheeled into a large, brightly lit room and parked behind a curtain. “Hi, Trisha,” a slim, dark-haired woman said, glancing at a chart the paramedic had handed her. “I’m Dr. Joyce. Do you know what happened to you?”
“We had a car wreck.”
“What do you remember?”
“I—I’m not sure. I saw taillights. The car began flying …” She shut her eyes. The effort to remember was making her head hurt worse. “I—I woke up and I was lying in the snow. I had friends in the car too. Do you know—”
“We’re going to stitch up your head, then take some X rays,” Dr. Joyce said, cutting Trisha off. She pulled back the curtain and barked at a tech, “Let’s get this one stitched and into radiology. I want head and torso shots. Give me a look at her right knee too.”
Another doctor appeared. He tried to soothe her as he ripped open a small kit that held scissors, needles, and surgical thread. “I’m pretty good at this,” he said with a reassuring smile. “First I’ll dab on some numbing gel, then give you a shot of lidocaine. You won’t feel anything.” He picked up the scissors. “I’m going to have to cut your hair, though.”
“Don’t …” She’d been trying to grow it long because Cody liked long hair.
“I have to, miss. It’s just hair—it will grow back.” He set to work.
When he was finished, an orderly came, and as she was being wheeled down the hall, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in a convex mirror hanging in the corridor. Could that be her? Blood caked the side of her face and matted her hair. Her lip looked distorted, and one eye was almost swollen shut. She stifled the urge to scream.
In radiology, a technician instructed her to lie still while he framed up a machine that scanned her body and took X rays from various angles. The machine looked monstrous to her, not at all like the tiny cone-shaped device her dentist used to take photos of her teeth. She wanted her parents more than anything. She wanted someone to talk to her and tell her about her friends. When she was through, an ER tech took her back to triage in the emergency room. She passed Tucker, who was being wheeled on a stretcher toward radiology. His head was wrapped in a bandage. She was too scared to speak. Where was Cody? And Christina?
Dr. Joyce’s face loomed over Trisha. “Your parents are on the way,” she said, patting Trisha’s arm. “I’ll be back just as soon as your X rays are developed and I check them out.”
“I hate being tied down,” Trisha whispered hoarsely, straining against her restraints.
“It’s only a precaution. If nothing’s broken, I’ll remove the backboard. A nurse will be over in a minute to start cleaning you up. You may need stitches in that cheek; if you do, I’ll call Dr. Scanland. She’s a plastic surgeon and does good work. Your face is too young and pretty to scar.” The doctor said all this with a smile that brought Trisha no comfort. Dr. Joyce closed the curtain halfway as she left.
Suddenly, Trisha was alone with only the noise of clattering equipment and disembodied voices. The smell of antiseptic and alcohol hung in the warm air. She felt her eyelids growing heavy but fought against the urge to sleep. She heard the sound of her own blood in her ears, felt tears slide down her cheeks. Her skin stung when the warm, salty fluid hit her wounds.
She heard the noise of a stretcher being moved and darted her eyes toward the sound. Through a gap in the curtain, she saw a man dressed in hospital garb walk away from the rolling bed he had parked out of the way along a wall. A sheet covered the form of a body on the bed. A hand hung downward just under the edge of the sheet. The fingers never moved. Trisha’s breath caught. Dear God … The person on the stretcher was dead. Trisha knew it deep inside her gut. She began to shake uncontrollably.
All at once, the curtain was shoved aside and her mother’s voice cut through the void. “Trisha! Oh, my baby … my dear, sweet baby. Look at me, honey. Talk to me, please.”
Six
“Mama … oh, Mama, I’m so glad you’re here.” Trisha broke into sobs as relief flooded through her.
“Of course I’m here, baby. We got here as soon as we could.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“Here, sweetheart.”
Her father took her hand. The world righted itself, and Trisha didn’t feel so scared and alone.
“I’m here too.” Trisha looked over and saw Charlie’s pinched, white face. “Are you okay, Trisha? I mean really and truly okay?”
“I think so.”
Charlie’s eyes were wet. “The police came to our house and told us you were in an accident. I thought—I was scared you might be—” His voice cracked.
All the feelings of annoyance she’d ever held toward him vanished in a wave of tenderness. She put herself in his place and realized she would be frantic if he were on this table instead of her. “I’m all right, Charlie. Honest.”
He touched her tentatively, as if he wasn’t positive she had real form and substance. “Can you come home with us?”
She didn’t answer because a nurse appeared, and her family’s faces receded as they moved aside. “Let me clean up your daughter,” the nurse said kindly. “Take a seat in the waiting room and I’ll tell Dr. Joyce you’re here.”
To Trisha, the cleanup was long and painful. Peering through a magnifying glass, the nurse extracted pieces of broken glass from Trisha’s lip and cheek. Then she cleaned the area with an antiseptic that stung like fire, smoothed on ointment, and placed a soft dressing across the cheek. “It doesn’t look like you’ll need stitches on your face. It’s just a bad scrape—you know, like when you were a kid and fell off your bike and skinned your knee. That ever happen to you?”
Trisha sniffed.
“You’re going to have a fat lip for a few days, though. And maybe a black eye. But your face will heal nicely.”
“Do you know about the others from the accident?”
“Not yet,” the nurse said.
“I—I saw one of my friends being taken to X ray, but the others … no one will tell me about the others. Didn’t an ambulance bring them in? You see, one of them is my boyfriend and the other is my best friend.” Just asking about her friends was making Trisha cry.
The nurse patted her shoulder. “Now, now. Calm down. I’ll check with Dr. Joyce for you, all right?”
“They should be here, you know. I mean, they should be if they’re … okay.” She couldn’t bring herself to offer any other explanation.
“I’ll see if Dr. Joyce wants me to give you a little something to calm you,” the nurse said, then left.
Moments later, Dr. Joyce swung the curtain aside. “Good news, Trisha. I’ve looked at your X rays and they look good. That means we can remove the backboard. You wanted that, didn’t you?”
Trisha agreed, and when it was gone, she felt freed from a prison.
“You’re going to be very sore for a few days,” Dr. Joyce said. “You’ll need to keep your knee wrapped for a couple of weeks and you’ll need crutches to get around for a while. Your family doctor can remove the stitches from your head in a week. You’re very lucky.”
“Can I go home?”
“I want to keep you a few more hours for observation. After all, you were knocked unconscious, and we always like to keep a close eye on head injuries. However, I’ll be giving you something to relax you, and that will make the time pass faster.”
“Can my parents stay with me?” She dreaded the thought of being alone—even if she was drugged.
“I’ll send in your mother. There’s really not enough room for e
verybody.”
The nurse came and stuck a syringe into the IV line; within seconds, Trisha felt lightheaded and fuzzy. By the time her mother materialized, Trisha felt as if she were floating off the table. “Mom …,” she mumbled.
“Don’t talk,” her mother said. “Dr. Joyce has explained everything to us and said that right now, you need your rest.”
“What … time …?”
“It’s two A.M. I sent your dad home with Charlie.” Her mother pulled a chair alongside the bed and circled Trisha’s head with her arm. “Trisha, we were all so scared. Thank God you weren’t injured any worse. We talked to the police who were at the scene. They said that it didn’t look like you were wearing your seat belt. Is that true? Didn’t you have it on?”
She flipped through mental pictures. She remembered getting into the car in the Henderson High School parking lot. She’d been upset and angry at Tucker. She remembered sliding into the seat next to Cody. She recalled him putting his arm around her and settling the blanket across their laps. She didn’t remember snapping her seat belt into place. “I—I don’t think so,” she confessed.
“Oh, Trisha, why not?” Her mother’s face had a terrible expression. “You know better.”
It was true. Trisha had taken driver’s ed in school and she’d watched the horrific videos of accident victims who hadn’t worn their seat belts. “P-please don’t be mad at me …”
Her mother sniffed hard. “I’m not mad, honey, just so scared. Tucker was wearing his belt. That’s why he wasn’t thrown from the car, according to the police. Evidently no one else was wearing a belt. No one. And all of you should have been.”
Trisha recalled being lifted into the ambulance and catching sight of two bodies lying in a ditch. She hadn’t imagined it. The bodies had been Cody’s and Christina’s. She struggled to stay awake just a little bit longer. “Tell me about Cody. Are his parents here too?”
Her mother looked straight into Trisha’s eyes and smoothed her shorn hair, careful not to touch the fresh stitches. “Cody’s been taken to a Chicago hospital.”
“Chicago? B-but why so far away?” Trisha’s thoughts drifted to Labor Day weekend, when she and Christina had ridden the train into the city to shop the department store sales. They had stayed until the stores closed and almost missed the train home. She remembered how they’d collapsed, breathless and laughing, onto the seats just as the train pulled out of the station. On the ride home, they’d played show-and-tell, each taking turns to admire their purchases.
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