“Steff?” I quavered.
“Hey, Mags! Oh boy, am I glad you called. I ... Wait, what’s wrong? Your voice is shaking,” she said, as though my only word to her had just registered on her consciousness.
“Steff, can you come get me?”
“Where are you? Maggie, what’s wrong? Of course I can come. Tell me where you are.”
I felt the tears sting my eyes again, tears of relief. “At the hospital.”
“What are you doing at the—Never mind. Where at the hospital are you?”
“Sitting in the stairwell, across from the main elevators. I think I’m only half a flight up. I was coming down, and I missed a step and twisted my ankle.”
“Ouch! You okay? Did you fall-fall, or did you twist your ankle and sit-fall?”
“The latter. Everything else is okay. It’s just my ankle. And, maybe, my pride.”
She laughed. “Well, they do say that pride goeth before a fall.”
I groaned. “No puns! Laughing kind of hurts.”
“Sorry! I couldn’t resist. You said everything else was okay. And besides, laughter is the best medicine.”
“Obviously you are on a roll. Maybe I should have called Marcus after all.”
She gasped in mock pain. “I’m hurt!”
“Funny . . . me, too.”
“All right, all right. I’m on my way. Stay put.”
Yeah, like I was going anywhere. If I could have gone anywhere, I probably wouldn’t have needed to call for rescue.
As soon as I hung up, I noticed the low battery light blinking at me. As I watched, the phone powered down in my hand before my very eyes. I shook my head, marveling at the timing. At least I’d been able to get my message through before it had died. My angels, watching out for me.
I sat there in the semigloom beneath the flickering security light, trying not to think about my ankle or the dirty steps beneath me. But it was only minutes later that I heard the door open down below, followed by a familiar voice.
“Maggie? You in here?”
It was Dr. Dan Tucker, Steff’s paramour and monopolizer of her every spare moment. Not that I should complain—Marcus had done a fair bit of monopolizing my thoughts and schedule of late, and I’d been very happy about that. I was happy for Steff, too. It was good for her to be a little off balance over a guy.
“Up here!” I called out to him.
He came bounding up the stairs like an excited puppy. That was Dr. Dan in a nutshell. A medical resident with a heart of gold, and regarded as one of the most eligible bachelors at Stony Mill General Hospital, he’d fallen for my charismatic and equally heart-of-gold best friend. At six foot four, he was taller, leaner, and leggier than any of Steff’s previous hunk-o’-honeys—and towered a good head over her petite voluptuousness—but he was a sweetheart and seemed completely devoted to her, and as such, he had quickly won my respect and appreciation. Early on in their one-year relationship I had almost envied his time with her, but I realized now how ridiculous that had been, a sign that I needed to find a love life of my own and stop trying to live vicariously through Steff.
Dan rounded the landing and stopped short, putting his hands on his hips and shaking his head. “Well, well,” he said, “what have we here? A damsel in distress?”
“Kind of,” I said, scratching the bridge of my nose in embarrassment.
“What happened?”
Briefly I explained clumsily overstepping my bounds and the cosmic slap on the wrist that had me sitting there on the concrete stair riser babying my tender ankle and waiting for rescue.
“Let me see.” He squatted down in front of me. With gentle, long fingers, he lifted the pant leg of my thankfully short cropped pants and began to explore. “Hm,” he said. “Hm.”
“Is that all you have to say: ‘
hm
’
?
”
“Hm.”
I stopped talking and braced myself as he took my heel and my foot in his hands and very slowly, very carefully turned. In a flash, a lightning bolt of pain shot up my leg. “Ow, ow, ow,
ow
!”
“Hm. Sorry.”
Involuntary tears and a running nose were officially making a mess out of whatever makeup I had managed to keep on my face through all the night’s dramas and traumas. Not only had I missed out on an evening tryst with Marcus that I had been very much looking forward to and everything that it probably-mighta-shoulda-woulda entailed, but I had spent the entire night in a none-too-comfortable recliner after being stuck in an elevator and having to fend off the searching tendrils of goodness knows what kind of earthbound energies
in the dark
,
closed space
, not to mention overhearing something that certainly sounded to me like a sinister and questionable plot against some unidentified someone and not having a single recourse of action because the conspirators in question had left no clues as to the identities or whereabouts of themselves or their potential victim . . . and then with Mel’s uncharacteristic secrecy surrounding her pregnancy, and the argument that had awakened me in the middle of what sleep I did manage to get . . . and now this . . . Well, quite frankly, it had all been a bit much.
In short, I was done.
Against my will, a single sob erupted from all those I was holding tightly in check. With that one out, there was no help for it. It was like Mount Kilimanjaro erupting.
Dan set my foot down, a stricken expression on his face. “Oh, hey. Hey. Maggie, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was just trying to assess the damage.”
“It’s not just you,” I burbled, sniffling, involuntary sobs herky-jerking my shoulders inward. “Well, it did hurt, but it’s just . . . everything ...”
He patted my hands with his while I sniffled and sobbed into some semblance of composure. Then he said, “Stay here.”
Unnecessarily, I might add.
He ran down the steps, taking them two at a time in a way that made me cringe for his own ankles. I heard the door close pneumatically behind him and then reopen just a minute later. Faint sounds of other activity from the corridor on the other side of the door drifted up the stairs on his heels as he raced back up to me.
“Ready?” he asked. I nodded, and he leaned in, lifting me up against him as he might a child. “Watch your ankle,” he told me. “It’s kind of hard to see here in the stairwell. I don’t want to bump it.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I really didn’t want Mount Maggie-manjaro to erupt again anytime soon. Especially not with witnesses.
You know, for a lean and lanky guy, he was deceptively strong. I put my arms around his neck to help him along and looked up at him adoringly. “Dr. Dan, you are officially my hero today. Steff is a lucky girl, you know that?”
He laughed, a rosy blush making him look all of fifteen. “Keep telling her that, would you?”
“I think I’ll do that.” At the bottom of the stairs he had propped the door open with a wheelchair. I eyed it with suspicion. “Oh, I don’t have to ride in that thing, do I?”
His eyebrows rose. “You want me to carry you all the way to the ER?”
“The ER? Why would I have to go there? Can’t you just wrap my ankle with an Ace bandage or two and be done with it?”
He set me down in the chair and squatted before me again to skillfully guide my feet, injured and all, onto the foot paddles. “Not if you want it to heal properly.” He looked up at me and met my eye. “I’m fairly positive you’ve broken it, Maggie.”
“What?” I stuttered out a nervous laugh. “No. That’s impossible. I just stepped down wrong, that’s all. It’s just a sprain.” I nodded and smiled up at him, as though doing that would seal the deal and make it so.
“
Heyyyyy!
” Steff put her hands on my shoulders and leaned over the back of the wheelchair, peering down at me, upside down. “I just got here. How’s the patient?”
“I’m fine!” I told her.
“She’s going to need X-rays,” Dan countered.
“Really, it hardly even hurts,” I insisted, crossing my arms. “Honestly.”
“She burst into tears when I rotated it,” Dan told her.
I made a face at him. “Traitor. And besides, that was . . . that was just . . .” I searched for the right word. “Stress.”
“Well,” Steff said, smiling back and forth between the two of us, “I think Dan is right, Maggie. What’s it going to hurt? If you’re right and it’s not broken, it still needs tending to. The ER is the best place for that. So let’s go, huh?” To Dan she said, “I’ll take her. I’m off today and you’re not.”
He hesitated. “If you’re sure . . . I do have a meeting to go to first thing.”
She nodded, her sprightly auburn curls bouncing, meeting his eyes for the briefest of moments and then dancing away. “Thanks for doing that for me, Dan.”
“You’re welcome. Anytime.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Was that tension I sensed bouncing back and forth between them? That was as impossible as me having a broken ankle from a teeny-tiny misstep on the stairs. But there was a slight edge of formality in their last exchange that I didn’t understand. I felt guilty all of a sudden. I’d been so busy with Marcus. Had I missed something that happened between the two of them?
Looked like I had some girlfriend-to-girlfriend digging to do.
“Will I see you later?” she asked quietly.
I watched his response closely. He glanced sideways, away from her, opened his mouth, closed it, flicked his glance her way once more, then cleared his throat and said, “Well, as I said, meeting. I’ll call you?”
And Steff, true to modern woman form, straightened her shoulders and made her face a mask of neutrality as she nodded. “Okay. Talk to you later.”
I waited until she had wheeled me down the hall, away from Dan, before I spoke again. “Okay, you can let me go now.”
Steff laughed behind me. “Don’t think so.”
“Honestly, it will be fine. It is most definitely a sprain.”
“Doctor’s orders, Maggie. You’re going to the ER.”
I flopped back in the chair, wincing when it made the ankle pain flare, and mutinously crossed my arms. “It is so not broken,” I grumbled.
Chapter 10
It was most definitely broken, and I was most definitely screwed.
“Look on the bright side,” Steff chirped in her perkiest voice while I watched glumly as the ER crew prepared to outfit me with a splendiferous fiberglass cast. “You get to rest as much as you want without feeling guilty for it. What color do you want?”
“Color?”
“For the cast. I mean you can go with the plain cast, which is white. Ish. But if I were you I’d go for the gusto. I mean, you’re going to have to wear this thing for at least six weeks. Have some fun with it. Besides, the colored fiberglass won’t show dirt as quickly.”
A dirty cast. In the full heat of summer.
Sigh.
The ER nurse smiled and rummaged in a cart, pulling out a tray of fiberglass tapes in every color of the rainbow as well as some well beyond the rainbow. “Take your pick.”
Well, if I couldn’t be mobile, at least I could be vibrant. “That one.”
“Neon yellow?” Steff raised her brows. “You never wear yellow.”
“Sunshine yellow. It’s a happy color,” I said in my defense. “I think I need happy right now.”
“Yellow it is.”
When they were done, I admired their handiwork. Well, admired is probably too strong a word. Surveyed is probably more like it.
“All happied up?” Steff asked me, smiling.
“It’ll do.” We sat quietly a moment while the nurses finished filling out the paperwork. I slapped my forehead. “Oh my gosh.”
“What?”
“I forgot to call Liss. She’s going to be beside herself, wondering why I haven’t come in. My phone died after I talked to you, and—”
“No worries, I called her for you,” Steff said, a little smugly.
I gaped at her. “You did? When?”
“When I got off the phone with Danny. I figured you’d be a little too busy to think of it. I did not, however, call your mother. You’re on your own with that.”
And Marcus. I needed to call Marcus to check on Minnie and to let him know what had happened.
My face fell a little.
“What’s the matter, honey?” Steff asked, taking my hand. “You look sad all of a sudden.”
“Last night . . . with Marcus . . .”
Steff gasped, looking thrilled. “You didn’t!”
“No. I didn’t. And that would be the problem.” I explained the events of the evening to her. “And now, with this thing? He’s going to want to stay far, far away from me. Just look at it.” I knocked on the cast for good measure. “I mean, leave it to me to luck into something like this.
Steff shook her head, her gaze stern. “Now you listen here, Maggie O’Neill. Don’t you sell yourself short. Bad luck is bad luck is bad luck. It’s coincidence. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I guess.” But I wasn’t convinced. Sometimes bad luck was more than coincidence. What if I had been unconsciously inviting it into my life? Not in a biblical sense, although I’m sure my mother would be more than happy to blame it all on my boss, my friends, and my forays into “the Dark Side.” (Cue very scary music.) More in a cumulative, unwitting sense brought on by years of shoving my awareness of the truth about the world surrounding me into the broom closet. Deny, deny, deny . . . and close your eyes when it comes knocking. That’s what I had done for far too long. Did I accidentally leave open cosmic doorways or portals that I should have been learning how to close, and now I was paying the price?
After handing me a prescription for painkillers, notations for care, and a recommendation that I obtain crutches to get around with ASAP, the nurses were done with me, so Steff wheeled me out into the hall.
“Speaking of man trouble . . .” I said as soon as I could be certain no one who might know Steff or Dr. Dan could overhear.
“Were we?”
“Well,
I
was. What’s up with you and Dr. Danny?”