“Ah, humor. That’s usually a good sign.” The doctor cracked a smile and whipped a penlight from his pocket to shine the beam into Ethan’s eyes. “Follow my finger.”
He tried.
“Open your mouth for me as wide as you can.”
He obeyed, though it sent his headache to searing.
The doctor examined Ethan’s face. “Hmm. That nose looks broken. No other bones in the face, though, I don’t think. Feeling dizzy at all?”
“Not anymore.”
The doctor nodded. “Let’s take a look at that leg.”
Ethan looked down and cringed at the scrapes and bruises up and down the length of it.
“Can you feel all your toes?”
“Yes.”
“Wiggle them for me.”
Ethan did.
“Any pain in the other leg?”
“No.”
He glanced at the clock on the wall. Nearly seven-thirty. His throat closed up. Sometime in the next twenty-four hours, Dakota would be getting back on a plane for New Hampshire. He pushed himself up on one elbow. With her, she’d take the only part of his heart that hadn’t died with his wife. He had to find her. He had to see if there was something worth taking a chance on. The resounding pulse inside his chest made him think there was. But how the hell was he supposed to track her down in a matter of hours?
“I’d like to take an x-ray of the leg just to be sure nothing’s fractured,” the doctor finished. He wrote something on the clipboard. “And I’m ordering a CT scan. Most likely, you have a stage two concussion, which means you knocked yourself pretty good against the airbag. Test results will tell us for sure. You may be a little disoriented for a while, and you’ll have a hell of a headache for the next couple of days. I’d like to keep you here for the next few hours, under observation. You should be with someone for the next day, at least.”
You should be with someone...
“Your vision’s okay?” Doctor Cortez went on.
Ethan nodded.
“Feeling nauseous?”
Other than the sickness inside my heart, no. “A little, before. Not so much now.”
“Good. Let me know if that changes. One of the nurses will be in to take you down, and if the films check out, we’ll go from there.” The doctor cleared his throat. “I believe there’s an officer outside waiting to speak to you, too.”
“Okay.” Ethan decided to go ahead and ask. “Doc?”
“Yes?”
“I’m trying to find out about a patient that was brought in here a little while earlier.”
“Unless you’re family, I’m sure you know the hospital can’t give out confidential information.”
Not even if it’s a matter of life or death? Ethan wanted to ask. That’s how he felt, anyway. Like the key to his existence lay with finding Dakota again. “Not even to a member of the press?”
The doctor cocked his head. “You’re a reporter?”
Ethan nodded and reached for his wallet. He carried his ID from the paper everywhere.
“No, no, I can’t tell you anything.”
Ethan sank back onto the mattress. The smell of hospital disinfectant crept into his nose and hung there. He didn’t want to spend another two hours lying in this bed and waiting for a trip to radiology, not with a lousy headache and a few scratches on his leg, and not if they couldn’t help him find Dakota. But he didn’t seem to have much choice. Did Mike get my text? Maybe he’d call this time instead. But his phone was still in the pocket of his jeans, which lay on the other side of the room.
He lay back and studied the ceiling. One time, as a child, he’d spent an entire afternoon at school staring up at the panels above him, counting the dots that speckled the tiles. He still remembered the number—ninety-three—though Mrs. Foote, his fourth grade teacher at the time, had made him stay in from recess the next day, for daydreaming.
All those dots, he mused. Like that game in the coloring books where children connected them with an uneven pencil line. All those dots...
First the park, then the club, then the alley and the car wreck. Singly, each meeting would have been interesting enough. But trace all those events together, connect all those dots, and they spelled out a path that had been waiting for him all along. He hadn’t ever imagined ending up in the hospital again, but then, he hadn’t ever imagined meeting a woman like Dakota. Nor had he imagined he might spend a night fighting an armed madman or racing down the interstate at a hundred miles an hour.
That’s the thing. You never really know what’s in store for you. He shifted his head on the pillow. He wouldn’t trade a moment of what had gotten him here. Every turn in the night had changed him. Every one had made him feel something again. Good, bad, terrified, it didn’t matter. Being stuck alone in the hospital couldn’t scratch a wound deep enough to hurt the way it once had.
All those dots...
Ethan closed his eyes and started thinking. There was a way to connect them. There was a way to find her. It just hadn’t come to him yet.
8:00 a.m.
Dakota hung up with the Memphis police.
Sorry, nothing yet, the receptionist reported on the other end of the line.
Frustrated, she headed for the waiting room’s side door. They’d arrived at the ER over an hour ago, and nurses had whisked Gunnar through a maze of doors after taking one look at the open wound on his face. Sarah followed close behind, leaving Dakota to fend for herself. She didn’t really mind, but the waiting room had gotten old after about ten minutes. She found the chapel was occupied by some relatives of a dying woman, and the coffee shop wasn’t open yet, so she didn’t have many choices. Right about now, a courtyard outside looked like her best bet. The stale air inside the hospital clogged her lungs and blurred her brain, anyway.
She found a bench near the parking lot, away from the entrance and the noise of the Emergency Room. From here she could keep an eye on the main door and wait for her friends. Dakota smoothed her hair into a ponytail and checked the bandage one kind nurse had applied to her sore shoulder. I’m battered inside and out. Not exactly the way she’d planned to spend her time in Memphis.
An ambulance pulled into the emergency bay and two men in scrubs guided a stretcher from the back. With a steady, practiced motion, they hurried it along the sidewalk and through the automatic doors. She couldn’t see who lay on the stretcher. No one else jumped out of the ambulance or came running up from the parking lot, so it looked like the person was arriving alone. That’s sad. At least she, Sarah, and Gunnar had each other.
Dakota stared at her toes. Her gaze shifted to a grasshopper, which inspected her for a minute before moving to a safer blade of grass. Despite everything that had happened, her lips still burned from Ethan’s kiss; her fingers still curved as if his were inside them. Her skin still felt the warmth of his touch, and if she tried, she could still see his smile, the real one, right before he kissed her in the moonlight.
Amazing. Tonight, somehow, in the middle of a crowded bar, she had found it. It. That capitalized word, that magical moment, that intangible something that crooners sang about and poets wrote about and little girls dressed as Cinderella dreamed about. With Ethan, watching the moon rise and listening to Ronnie tickle the piano keys, she’d discovered a kinship with a man she’d only just met. Warmth at his touch, his funny stops and starts and his heartache had filled her with longing different than any other. How could she leave Memphis without finding him again, without learning the rest of the puzzle pieces that made him up? Complicated, confusing, frustrating, she didn’t care. He had a past. So did she. Maybe together they could negotiate a way through the recovery.
Dakota chewed at a fingernail. Of course, first she had to find him. God, she hoped he’d gotten away from Sean. Or rather, she hoped Ethan had pummeled Sean into the ground, into some small corner of dank city block where no one would find him until sometime next week. Then dragged him into a dumpster and left him there.
Check that.
<
br /> She didn’t really wish for Sean’s demise, not in that way. She just wanted him gone from her life forever. She hoped Ethan had flagged down someone for help and turned in the sonofabitch. Or she hoped said sonofabitch had run himself straight into the biggest police barricade the city had ever seen.
She checked her phone. Quarter past eight. She thought about looking up newspapers in Memphis, but her brain was fried. She prayed Gunnar was almost stitched up and whole again. Every atom of her vibrated with exhaustion. A cab turned into the parking lot. It pulled up to the curb and a tall guy wrestled himself from the back seat. Balancing on one foot, he pulled a pair out a pair of crutches.
“Hi there,” he said when swung his way up the sidewalk.
“Hello.” She glanced at his crutches, the rough stubble along his jaw line, the bright blue eyes winking at her in the sunlight. From the bandaged ankle, he looked as though he should be on his way out of the hospital. Not in. But he didn’t seem to be in a rush or need any immediate care.
“Do you need some help?”
“Nah.” He shifted his weight. “Did you see an ambulance come in about twenty minutes ago?”
“Um, yeah. It’s a hospital.”
He grinned and hopped forward a few steps. He leaned over one crutch and reached out a hand. “Sorry. That was a stupid question. My name’s Mike.”
“Hi.” Her gaze broke from his and dropped to the sidewalk. She had no interest in meeting anyone, in flirting with anyone, in exchanging glances filled with possibility with anyone. Not today. Not anymore.
“Basketball injury,” he said.
A funny memory slid in and out of her head, but it was gone before she could make sense of it. “Sorry?”
He waved at his ankle. “Sprained it yesterday. I’m here to check on a friend.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks. It’s been a weird night for him. I think, anyway. I got this weird text from him, couldn’t really make sense of it, but...” He rubbed his jaw and trailed off. “You here with someone?”
“My friends are inside.”
“Hope everything’s okay?”
“It is. Or it will be.” It was weird, sitting outside a hospital talking to a virtual stranger, but then again, her entire day and night in Memphis had been weird. In a minute, she expected him to ask for her number, the way he was drinking her in with those deep blue eyes.
“Take care,” was all he said. Swinging himself toward the entrance, Mike disappeared.
ETHAN SIGNED THE POLICE report and passed it back to the detective at the edge of his bed.
“Thanks.” The detective tucked the pen back into his pocket. “We’ll be in touch in a couple of days. Probably need you to testify at some point.”
Ethan nodded. He couldn’t fix his brain on anything past right now.
The detective slipped out of the room and the door fell shut behind him. Ethan tried to find a comfortable position on the hospital bed. He yawned, thankful for the painkillers the nurse had given him. Stretched out at an angle, head resting on the pillow, he could feel the tightness and the constant ache behind his eyes subside. He curled his left leg beneath him and ignored the throbbing in the right one. He wondered what had happened to the nurse or the x-ray he was supposed to have. He wondered if he would ever get out of the hospital, or if Mike would show up at some point. Mostly, though, he wondered if he could flip back through the night and be again by Dakota’s side.
What happened to her?
He was just about to roll over and try to catch some shut-eye when the door opened again.
“Jesus, you scared the living shit out of me.” There stood Mike, balancing on his crutches. He wore a wrinkled, faded red t-shirt, fraying shorts and old Nikes. Stubble covered his jaw and Ethan doubted he’d taken the time to run a comb through his hair. Still, next to the insides of his eyelids and maybe Dakota, Ethan couldn’t think of anything else he’d rather be looking at right then.
“Hey. You found me.”
“I did. No thanks to your text.” Mike’s face wrinkled in concern.
Ethan smiled. “Was it that bad?”
“Let’s just say it’s a good thing the morning news had full coverage of your accident, or I wouldn’t have had any idea what the hell you were trying to tell me.”
Ethan just shrugged.
“Man, you look like hell.”
“That’s pretty much what I feel like.”
Mike looked around at the room, taking in the machines, the white walls and sheets and floor. “Nice digs. Definitely a change from your place. So what the hell happened?”
Ethan wondered where to begin. “I met up with Howie and Paul around seven...”
“Howie make the usual fool of himself?”
“What do you think?”
Mike scratched his chest. “Don’t need to ask. But how’d you end up racing the cops down the highway at five in the morning?”
“You won’t believe it.”
“I already don’t believe it, ‘cept I saw that beat-up Toyota of yours going one-ten down the interstate before taking on a water barrier at warp speed. So tell.”
Ethan did, from Gunnar’s fight with Howie to facing down Sean in the alleyway to driving like a maniac with a gun stuck in his ribs.
“Get the fuck outta here.” Mike’s jaw slacked.
“You think I could make that up?” He tried to find a comfortable spot in the bed. His head continued to ache, though the pain had receded a lot in the last hour or so. Yesterday morning he’d woke up with a headache too. Except that one, like all the others over the past few months, had stemmed from trying to avoid life. This one, at least, reminded him he was still part of it.
Mike sat back in the chair. “So what’s her name?”
“Who?”
“C’mon.” Mike crossed his injured ankle over the opposite leg. “You’re not telling me you did all that ‘cause it was better than going home and watching Sports Center. Who’d you meet? Who’s the chick who kept you out past midnight? Who turned you into some kind of super-fuckin’-hero while the rest of Memphis was sleeping?”
“Dakota.”
“Like the state?” Mike pursed his lips. “Dakota what?”
And there’s the problem, Ethan thought. Ask me how her eyes look in moonlight, and I’ll draw you a picture. Ask me how the wind lifts her hair, how her fingers feel in mine, and I’ll write you a book. But her last name?
“I don’t know. I’m a shit. She showed up, we started talking, that was it. I didn’t even get her number. She was the girl from the park. But she’s only in town for the weekend.”
“You’re kidding me. You meet a woman who finally gets you out of your head, out of your misery, and she’s not from around here? And you don’t know how to find her?”
Ethan pulled the sheet up around his waist. “I know. I’m pathetic.”
“Nah. Just unlucky.” Mike hopped to a stand. “Listen, I need some coffee. You’re gonna be here a while, yeah?”
“Probably.”
“Lemme find some caffeine. I can’t even see straight this early. You want anything?”
Ethan wanted about a hundred things right then, but none of them had anything to do with a cup of coffee. “Nope. Thanks, though. Take your time.” He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to make conversation any longer. He had enough to think about without explaining to his best friend why he’d stayed up all night, defended a princess against her dragon, and retreated to his lonely life without so much as a phone number.
9:00 a.m.
Dakota found the hospital coffee shop. She had no idea if her hunch was correct. It was just a thought, an outside chance. But she had a few minutes before Gunnar and Sarah finished up. She might as well spend it doing some sleuth work. Bells tinkled as the door fell closed behind her. Here, far away from the rush of the ER, the morning moved at a snail’s pace. A gray-haired woman stood behind the register, wearing a nametag with Bertha spelled out in large red letters.
“Hello, dear. Would you like a table?”
“No, thanks. Just a cup of coffee, black.”
“Coffee will be a few minutes. I just put on a fresh pot.”
“That’s fine.” Dakota wandered past the racks of stuffed bears and elephants, past the get well and sympathy cards, until she reached the newspapers and magazines along the far wall. Newsweek. National Enquirer. Star. People. Woman’s World. GQ. Where were the newspapers?
Glancing back at Bertha, she willed the coffee to brew double-time. There. To her right. The New York Times. The Washington Post. Dakota flipped through them one at a time. She wasn’t sure what she sought. She didn’t even know the name of it, after all. But after a minute, she stopped at The Memphis Daily News. This had to be it. Let there be a byline. A picture. Something. Ten seconds later, she found the sports section.
“Miss? Your coffee’s ready. Cream and sugar are on the side bar, if you want them.”
Dakota barely heard her. Nothing on the front page. Well, that was okay. Ethan said he wrote editorials, not articles. There was a difference, wasn’t there? In her fatigued state, she couldn’t even be sure. Past the headlines about the Braves’ record and the Titans’ new players, she scanned each article. No name looked familiar.
“Maybe he doesn’t write for this paper.” She flipped through the final pages and replaced the paper in the rack. Disappointment shot through her. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be. The voice piped up inside her head. Or maybe you need to fight a little harder for the things you want. Dakota stared at the vases of artificial flowers that lined the wall. She’d always let the best parts of her life disappear. Her mother. Past boyfriends. The passion for design that she’d buried years ago. What good was fighting? she used to wonder. Nine times out of ten, you ended up sad and tired and without the thing you wanted anyway.
But what about the tenth time?
She examined a blurred reflection of herself in the glass of a display case. Her cheek was puffy and discolored from where Sean had hit her. Her shoulder stung. Her posture stooped. She straightened her spine and lifted her chin. I did fight. She saw again the defeat in Sean’s expression when she’d told him about the detective. She saw the surprise that darkened his face in the alley.
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