by Bowes, K T
She wasn’t ready to give up yet. There was nothing to stand on or get leverage with. Despite the agony it caused, Hana tried jumping, using all of her five feet and six inches to try and reach the toggle. It left her faint with the pain in her arm. Jumping with only one arm free enough to give her lift was almost impossible. Remembering the pliers with which she destroyed her dress, Hana felt around on the floor for them back where Pete had been near the wall. It took a while to find them and then another age to remember where she was stood when she saw the toggle. The darkness chewed at the room now, devouring any decent visibility. Noises overhead continued as Hana heard drawers being turned out and cupboards opening and slamming shut, further through the house now at the bedroom end.
Holding on to the very tip of the plier handles, she moved them upwards until they contacted the runner, hearing the clink of metal on metal. She ran them along, her good arm aching, hoping to dislodge the toggle and its string. Eventually, she put her arm down, battling with the sick feeling which followed as the blood flow tried to right itself. Hana felt angry with God. “I prayed for help and is was I get. Nothing!” she hissed, a sob in her throat. Thanks for nothing, she thought, as in temper she reached up and began again. Keeping her right arm bent upwards and lying along her chest, she managed to use her numb fingers to hold onto her dress to keep the break stable.
“God please!” she whispered, knowing she couldn’t possibly do it alone. There was a quiet ‘thunk’ as the toggle fell, bringing the string with it. Hana lay the pliers down on the floor and reached up for the string. It felt shorter than she remembered, yet the toggle was there intact and she could feel the knot in the end. It must have come down on the wrong side, or wrapped itself somehow round the runner. Chances were, it wouldn’t even pull properly, let alone begin the mechanism. But Hana was done. She readied herself and then pulled as hard as she could. It was wrapped around the runner and she bounced a few times, trying to get leverage. Then she heard a click as the mechanism responded to the weak pressure of the string.
Streetlight poured in underneath the door as Hana wrestled with it, forcing it upwards. It was not easy without the electrical mechanism doing all the work and with only one arm. When it was half up Hana didn’t wait but scurried over to Pete, dragging him forwards under the door. He resisted as he got onto the rough concrete of the driveway and in desperation Hana slapped his face, feeling her nail catch across his eye. He seemed to come round a bit quicker, possibly due to the chill night air washing over him and he tried to stand.
Hana kept dragging him one-handed, dropping him to fling open the passenger door. “Get in!” she hissed through pain-wracked teeth. Pete got to his knees and then his feet, lurching forwards into the seat and Hana shot round to the driver’s side. Wrenching open the door with her left hand, she ignored the shooting pain in her other arm and flung herself onto the seat. She located the keys in the ignition, but fumbled to reach across with her left arm underneath the steering column and start the car. She persevered and it fired into life. “Oof!” Pete fell into the foot well head first but Hana didn’t stop to wrestle him back onto the seat. It had been years since she drove a manual gearbox and Hana tried to remember, clutch, brake, accelerator.
Opening the garage door manually was much quieter than if the mechanism worked, shuddering the door up in a motion which always shook the whole house. It bought Hana more time to get away, but not much. She depressed the clutch and with her left hand wrenched the gear lever into what she thought was reverse. The blonde man appeared at the front of the car as he tried to rive the garage door fully open and Hana panicked. The car was ancient and central locking a random thought in someone’s head when it was manufactured. Knowing she couldn’t lock them safely inside made Hana’s frenzy worse and she gunned the accelerator. The car roared loudly but didn’t move an inch. Handbrake!
Hana reached down with her left hand and found it, releasing it with difficulty. The car didn’t shoot backwards, but forwards. It hit the man square in the legs as Pete’s open door slammed shut with the impact and Hana watched in horror as the man went down like a skittle. At the same time, Pete ploughed nose first further into the foot well with a loud, “Urgh.”
It was all Hana could do not to drive over the blonde man, remembering just in time to take her foot off the gas and stick it onto the brake. The panicked woman deliberated getting out of the car and going to see if he was ok. Until the other man appeared in the garage, the reflective stripes on his jacket glinting in the streetlight.
Hana made a very un-Hana-like-decision to put herself first and finally finding the headlights, she blinded him with them, instantly lighting up the interior dashboard and allowing her to see she had accidentally put the car into first gear. She found reverse and gunned the car backwards down the ramp and onto the road. There was a grind and a clunk as the old car objected and a moan from Pete with his head in the foot well, and his backside in the air. Finding first gear again, Hana clumped on the gas and they moved forwards, revving for all she was worth.
Flagstaff police station was in darkness as Hana pulled into the car park. She didn’t bother with a parking slot but stuck the car directly in front of the main doors, bumper on the glass, her headlights betraying the awful realisation it was closed for the night. When did it suddenly become a nine to five satellite station? Hopelessness flowed over her. “Noooooooo!” she howled.
Hana drove the entire 2km in first gear, because if she moved up the gears, she had to take her left hand off the steering wheel and didn’t want to risk it. Her right arm hung limply in her lap. “This is too terrible to believe,” she sobbed. In desperation, she placed her hand over the centre of the steering wheel and pushed hard. The horn on the old car was impressive, booming out into the stillness of the evening like an ocean liner coming into port. When her right arm complained about the tension the action caused in her body, she stopped, using her left hand instead to support it. It didn’t feel like her arm now, the touch sensation seeming as though it belonged to someone else. Until she moved her body and then it definitely came back just to remind her it was killing her. Literally.
Hana let her head drop forwards onto the steering column and the horn gave a little ‘peep’ as her forehead depressed it one last time. She failed therefore to see the alarmed civilian face which appeared at an inner office window or the subsequent police car, which slid quietly and slowly behind Pete’s car a few minutes later to block its escape should the occupants turn out to be dangerous. Radio chatter increased, causing a static buzz in the airwaves around Pete’s shonky old vehicle as the cops were drawn to the incident like moths to a flame. By the time Hana’s door was wrenched open and she was ordered to, “Come out slowly,” which she couldn’t, there were four more cop cars blocking the exit and enough police officers to stem a small riot.
“Get out of the vehicle, Ma’am.” The policeman tried to take her right arm forcibly to help her exit from the car, it having become clear she either wasn’t able to or simply wasn’t going to. Hana let out a shriek and with a mixture of agony and relief, sank down into welcome oblivion for a well-deserved rest.
The policeman looked aghast, noticing as Hana sank back down towards the wretched horn again, that the arm he kept hold of appeared to bend oddly in his hand. Unfortunately, in his horror he let go, mentally reading the media headlines about police brutality and the nasty greenstick fracture became a complete break, even before it landed in Hana’s lap.
Hana Du Rose
Chapter 31
In the movies, people always came around from unconsciousness gradually, phasing in and out of life as though surfing the slipstream of an airplane. Hana, on the other hand, woke up as though she had been slapped, coming up for air reluctantly from a dark and comfortable place where she was pain free and happy.
She hadn’t been slapped, but she stuck with a hypodermic needle and as her pupils resized from their hugely dilated state she felt disoriented and annoyed, like a gen
ie called forth from his cosy lamp. Her eyes began to focus and she saw a shape to her right, which strangely resembled her right hand.
Suspended from a cloth sling, it swung from a hook somewhere near the ceiling. Well, not swung exactly, but sort of dangled. As Hana’s brain did a mental body check, feeling began to return to it and she wished she hadn’t bothered. Some sort of metal rod protruded from the back of her elbow, looking strange and out of place. Hana peered at it until distracted by a nurse who fiddled with a cannula on her left hand, withdrawing a needle from its central, plastic-encased hole. Hana’s hand was shifted around and squeezed as something else was plugged into its green folds and she groaned and tried to move.
The nurse was almost bundled out of the way and Logan’s face appeared at Hana’s left shoulder as his hand reached out instantly to stroke her cheek gently. “Han? Babe?” He looked as though he had been dragged through a bush backwards, his tie hanging at a jaunty angle from his rumpled collar and more than a night’s worth of stubble covering his lower face. His grey eyes sparkled with a mix of emotions, relief, fear, exhaustion. But his smile was for her and her alone.
“Kitten?” Hana asked hopefully, remembering how it bolted underneath the sofa in fright. Down in the garage she worried the men had left outside doors open and let him outside, never to be seen again, but Logan shook his head and reassured her,
“He’s absolutely fine, Hana. Henrietta’s putting the house back together today. She’s made good friends with him.”
Hana shut her eyes tightly. She couldn’t imagine what the house must look like after all the crashing and banging. “What’s that noise?” she asked abruptly, aware of a ‘plick, plick, plick,’ sound going on in the background. It became increasingly intrusive as she woke more. “Turn it off!” she grumbled.
Logan smiled and reached for her good hand. “It’s our baby,” he said gently, “we didn’t know how much you had been hurt…and…anyway, they’ve been monitoring it since the operation.”
Hana shook her groggy head, trying to clear it and understand what Logan was talking about. She had an accident, not an operation. Hadn’t she? “Is it ok?” she asked fearfully. What was wrong with her that the baby wasn’t her first thought? “I don’t deserve to have it,” she wailed. “I’m a bad mother and a terrible person.” Memories of the blonde man being hit by the bumper of the car came flooding back to her, “Oh no, I’m a killer. I am a bad person.” Wide-eyed, Hana approached hysteria and Logan kissed her forehead gently and soothed her. Hana felt his stubble graze her skin.
“Hana the baby’s absolutely fine. They say it’s a really strong heartbeat. As soon as you can move around, we’re going down for a scan, to make sure nothing else is going on. And the guy’s not dead. Yet! But five minutes with me and he will be.”
There was a story Hana’s father used to tell her after they visited the Mona Dam in Holland when she was a girl. It was about a small hole appearing in the side of the dam wall and a little boy putting his finger into it to still the flow until help arrived. He saved the whole town with his tiny digit. A small crack appeared in Hana’s armour when she fell in love with Logan, a crack which steadily increased with all the things that befell her recently. She held on to her sanity with both hands at times, plugging the gap with anything which came to hand to prevent her feeling anything more than she could handle. Even her pregnancy had been pushed behind the battle lines and secured there. As the thought of what she might have lost, might still lose, the crevice became a gaping, yawning gully in Hana’s heart and unshed tears, decades old, poured through, raging and unstoppable.
Hana cried noisily and in real distress like she hadn’t done since childhood, not even when Vik abandoned her and their children, dying selfishly and leaving her to wonder what she was going to do for the rest of her life without him. Hearing herself wail into the sheets, the prude in her willed her to stop, to, shut up and be ‘normal,’ whatever that was. But it was an involuntary reaction and she couldn’t stop it. The memory of the calf came again vividly and made things worse. What if the little sparrow was really over now? Why did she have to be so disobedient all the time? If she only said, “No” to the biology teacher, she wouldn’t have been there and would certainly not be here either.
Logan put down the side rail to her left and clambered gently onto the bed so he could hold onto her, balancing precariously on the small ledge which remained free between all the wires and tubes. He battled with his own fears in the last few hours, slaying personal emotional demons and making promises with a God he previously struggled to believe in - if Hana and the baby could just be ok, he would know God was real. He hadn’t promised to go to church, not wanting to set himself up for failure but he swore to acknowledge Hana’s Jesus existed. As he pivoted in the tiny spot on the bed, cradling the two most important people in his life, Logan Du Rose had to accept that heaven somehow responded to him and the experience left him feeling different.
Hana cried for a long, long time. And then she slept deeply, her body wracked only by the occasional memory of the sobs which were physical and dreadful to hear. Logan, exhausted after a night and half a day in the hospital dozed off too, missing the police officer who came in hoping to interview Hana and then stole out silently again.
It was the nurse, returning to do Hana’s observations who saved Logan from falling backwards off the bed and doing himself an injury. Not to mention he may have taken Hana with him. “Mr Du Rose,” she woke Logan gently, supporting his back so he couldn’t fall and waiting until he was awake enough to slide his legs down onto the floor. He was a sorry sight, scruffy with his hair stuck up all over the place. Convincing him Hana would be fine, the nurse led him to a kitchenette in the visitor’s room and encouraged him to make a drink for himself. “You’re no good to her if you don’t take care of yourself,” she reprimanded.
Logan returned quickly with black coffee, to find Hana waking up again. “How come I get my own room?” Her question was punctuated with surprise.
“I put you on my medical insurance when I changed my address,” he said softly, stirring sugar into his drink, “I didn’t expect you to use it so soon though. It’s a good job you’re worth more than the excess to me.”
He smiled, so Hana knew he was joking and she remained oblivious to the fact it was going to cost him more because she was still inside the six-month stand-down period. He was surprised to find he couldn’t care less. As long as she was all right. The nurse, who already had a crush on Logan smiled wistfully to herself, wishing the overweight, boring husband she went home to, who lived only for TV and his computer would do something as thoughtful for her. Not likely. “Why are you marrying a gamer?” her mother asked her. Why indeed?
Logan saw Hana looking wistfully at his coffee and asked if she was thirsty. She thought she might be, although she was still trying to work out what she felt, her body confused by all the painkillers and medication. He fetched her some water and helped her to drink it through a straw, so as not to move her arm. At that point, the detective returned, accompanied by an off-duty Bodie.
It seemed the man she ran over hit his head on the concrete and was found, out cold on the garage floor by a neighbour walking their dog. An ambulance was summoned and the police showed up out of curiosity. He was the only person on the property, the other man having abandoned him there. Searching the house, it was obvious to the two cops something was wrong and it was called in.
“Hearing the address over the radio, I knew something had happened,” Bodie said. “I got there just as the report came in of an unknown woman collapsing whilst being apprehended at the Flagstaff police station. Pete’s name came up in response to the car registration enquiry and I knew.” The young man gulped with emotion and he paused to collect himself. The detective continued. “The Achilles Rise house was cordoned off and the man in the process of being ambulanced to hospital was put under guard. He came round in a hospital room handcuffed to the bed rail and has been ‘helping us wi
th our enquiries.” The man in the suit wore a nice smile and he used it to reassure Hana.
“I remember it all.” Hana wept a little as she told of how she wrapped Pete’s head in her underskirt and struggled to pull the cord for the garage opener, after discovering the power was out. Bodie looked completely appalled but the other officer asked questions and took comprehensive notes without comment.
As they were just about finished, a white-coated doctor appeared, smiling through a rather sprawling beard. “Can we take you down for your scan now?” he smiled. Bodie looked at him questioningly and then back at Hana.
“What’s wrong? What’s going on?”
The other policeman snapped his pocket book closed and then motioned with his head towards the baby monitor which measured the baby’s heart rate, chugging along steadily without interruption.
“My wife’s expecting our third next month,” the detective said without preamble and leaned across to shake Logan’s hand politely. “I hope everything’s all right.”
He waved kindly at Hana, nodded to an astounded Bodie and left the room. When Hana dared to peek up at her adult son, his face held a look of complete disbelief and she found it hard to read his expression. He looked like she had betrayed him in some way, especially when he stood up and without looking at either of them, muttered, “I need to go,” and then left the room, quickly, silently and without looking back.
Hana was wheeled into a scan room, waiting in fear as the gel was put onto the probe and the machine began collecting images through her stomach wall. The technician was female with a shock of red hair and gothic make up, which looked slightly vampirish in the darkened room. Hana hardly dared to breathe as the stick poked across her belly, making the ever present need to go to the toilet even worse.