What We Saw at Night (10 page)

So I jumped.

Without preparing, I hurtled into the air and became a part of it, twenty feet straight down. Tried to roll but only
hit.
Snap
. A thunderbolt in my right forearm, a lightning flash behind my eyes. My arm felt heavy and numb.
It’s broken
, I realized with curious detachment. The kind of break that would tear skin. Not my head. Not my neck. But it was hard, sickeningly hard.… I reached out with my left hand. No grass. This is how mistakes happen. And deaths. You can’t derive what you can’t see. I must have landed on concrete, not the lawn where Rob had beamed up at me only minutes ago.

Rob.…
Was he hurt?

I tried to sit up. No, no, no.

The car. I heard it. It was coming. I could see it. Lights down around the back of the garage … then appearing again—bearing straight towards me down the exit ramp. I squinted in the glare of the headlights. The driver aimed that car like a gun.

Roll
, I commanded myself. Roll over that useless, limp, pain-shriek arm.
Hide
. Where? The fountain nearby? The one we’d passed on the way back from sushi? Jerking up to my knees, I crept behind the lip of the giant stone bowl. The light grew brighter, the engine louder. This was the end. Not by the sun. By the night. By some maniac.

The car revved and roared. I begged my brain to go black. And then—

Another screech. And a shout: “Allie!”

I peered over the lip of the fountain. Rob seemed to be sprinting toward me in slow motion, like some cheesy old film of runners on a beach. “Allie! Allie!” The car was speeding away now. I could see the silhouette of the driver: a shadow puppet. Shouting to himself? Or talking to someone beside him.… My brain began to slip pieces of information back in, like cards into a deck.

The car was small and sleek, a dark metallic convertible
with the top up. Too dark to see color. But it was the same:
Blondie’s
. His car. Here. But how? Why? Trying to scare me into silence? No. Trying to
silence
me into silence. For good.

Another card: a vague mental picture as the convertible vanished into the night. There was someone else, hunched over in the passenger seat—someone small, who sat up as they cleared the turn onto Canal Street.

The final card: Rob, cradling me against him.

“My arm is broken,” I gasped. My voice sounded funny. I realized I was whistling through gritted teeth. “Don’t move me.”

Rob laid his windbreaker over my shoulders, more a gesture of gallantry than utility, since I was drenched in sweat and his jacket was filthy. Then he used his shirt to tie my arm to my rib cage.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he said. “I saw it in a movie.”

As I lay there, he forgot there was an elevator and sprinted up five flights to get the Jeep. “Hold on, Allie,” he shouted over his shoulder, and despite the agony that was now rolling through me with the immensity and intensity of a cement drill, there was a spurt of satisfaction. My boyfriend was taking care of me.

IN THE ER at Duluth Summit Hospital, a woman doctor and the trauma nurses took a quick look at my arm, then shuttled Rob and me into an X-ray room. There we waited with a guy who was so drunk that he clearly felt no pain at all despite a head wound the size and shape of golf ball, and a little kid who either had a 104-degree fever or was under sedation. I wouldn’t have minded some sedation.

“Do you have any nausea? Did you hit your head?” the
doctor asked. She wasn’t that old—mid-thirties, maybe—very slender with thick blond hair like Juliet’s in one of those pretty, no-nonsense bobs like mine was attempting. She wore big red-framed glasses that should have looked absurd but didn’t. She could have stepped right out of an ad for the young professional woman. She peered into my pupils with a little penlight.

“My arm,” I said. “I didn’t hit my head at all. The only nausea I have is from the pain. And somebody tried to kill me, incidentally. The tire tracks are right there.”

“Dilaudid,” the doctor replied. “Two milligrams.”

“If this is a police matter,” the nurse said. “Then—”

“We have time,” the doctor interrupted.

The room was dark, which was a comfort, and the staff moved fast, which also was a comfort. They led me into a little curtained cubicle.

Rob sat down next to me on the bed and turned the lights off. The doctor left. Then she came back in and turned on every light there was.

“Please leave the lights low,” Rob pleaded.

“I need to examine Miss.…” She glanced at her clipboard. “Kim. Allison Kim, is that right?”

“Yes,” I said. “More or less. Alexis.”

The doctor flipped on a huge new control panel of lights, the size and intensity of a space station. She shot Rob a cold glare. “You need to leave.”

The syrup of the Dilaudid was beginning to distance me from the throbbing bawl in my forearm.

“I’m her friend.” Given what had happened earlier in the car, the description stung. I’d already moved to the boyfriend-girlfriend stage. Though technically, Rob still was only my friend, nothing else.

“Young man, just step outside for a moment. I don’t want to have to ask for security.” Rob—dirty, scraped, and practically hyperventilating— must have looked to her like a Yeti.

When Rob stepped outside the curtain, the doctor said, “Sweetheart, tell me how this really happened. Nobody has a right to hurt you.”

“Wait,” I said, as she turned the lights on again. “Please turn the lights off first.”

“You have other, older bruises—”

“I have Xeroderma Pigmentosum. The bruises are the least of my worries.”

At the mention of XP, the doctor blinked, then stood up and snapped off the lights. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Rob is my best friend. We were doing Parkour stunts on a building and this crazy person came along in a car and Rob dropped the rope. I fell off a wall. That’s all.”

“He didn’t hit you?”

“He’d rather break his
own
arm. We’ve been friends since we were babies.”

The doctor hooked a piece of her blond hair behind one ear. “It must have been a big wall.”

“It was. I fell from the third level of that circular garage, you know, about a block from Orchestra Hall. Near Shimata, the Japanese restaurant.”

“That’s quite a fall. Why did you say someone tried to kill you?”

“Did I say that?”

“You did say that.”

“Because after I fell, a car drove up over the sidewalk and drove straight at me, and then turned away. But not until the last minute.” I licked my dry lips. The air around me
seemed fuzzy. A police officer had arrived. He leaned against the wall of the cubicle. Even though he was wearing a light linen jacket, a black T-shirt, and cowboy boots, you could tell he was a cop. Maybe I could tell because I was so used to seeing Tommy Sirocco try to act like a regular person and look just silly at it.

“Did you see a license plate, Miss Kim?” he asked, without bothering to introduce himself.

“No. But I’ve seen the car before. I think I have. Up in Iron Harbor, where I live.” I told him about Red Beach and the sports car.

The cop smirked. “Guy probably lives here in the cities. Gets his thrills playing games with his car.” He tapped his notebook. “Can’t be too many Italian sports cars around here. I’ll run it.”

“You go to the Tabor Clinic, for XP,” The doctor said to me. It wasn’t a question; it sounded like an accusation. “Why are you down here then?”

“The bigger the building, the better the trace. Don’t you do anything for fun?”

I could see the doctor’s smile in the faint glow from her penlight. “I knit,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Joking. I surf.”

“On Lake Superior? Dude!” The drugs were sillyficating my already loopy brain.

“Yes, but I come from San Diego. We aren’t talking about me.” She tried to stop smiling, but she was having a hard time. So was I. “So you’ve been doing this a while. Hence the other bruises. I’ll apologize to your boyfriend.”

“We wiped out a lot last spring. And yes, it is harder at night.”

“It’s borderline,” she said. “No, it’s clinically insane to do it at night.”

“We use headlamps.” I tried to point to my head with my right hand but the pain made me breathless. “Now, I wish you would call my mother, Jacqueline Kim, who is a nurse. Although
she’s
going to need the ER when she hears this.”

“Do you have a permission to treat?” the doctor asked.

“In the outside pocket of my front pack,” I said.

You don’t leave home without it, in case you fall down in the street and wake up lying on Miami Beach at high noon.

“Both bones are broken, the radius and the ulna, Allie. You need a screw in there. I am a reconstructive and hand surgeon, which is good luck. Everything else is bad luck. We need to act before there’s more swelling, and that’s part of the bad luck. And I have to do it in a situation that won’t hurt you, and quickly, and with your whole body draped in … I’m thinking out loud now … Helen!” A nurse appeared, as though she had been waiting to read her lines. She was chewing gum, and her red hair, unlike my own, came directly out of a box. I liked her immediately. “Let’s get Brent and Martina to find out which OR is open stat. We need to repair this girl’s arm and get her and her boyfriend home before daylight.”

“Is she a vampire?” the nurse said.

“Yes,” the doctor said. “So don’t piss her off. I need the OR with low light and a microsurgical headlamp.… Allie, would you like us to call your mother right now? Or afterward? You aren’t seventeen yet.”

“Please, afterward. My sister is asleep. Might as well let her sleep. Because she won’t be … won’t be.…”

“Be sleeping for a while. I get it. This will hurt worse later than now. We’ll med-flight you to Divine Savior, so I need to warn the doctors there.”

“They have rooms for us. Darkrooms. As though we’re developing.…”

The doctor patted my thigh. “I’ll see you upstairs. But you’ll be out of it by then. You’ll have a tiny scar. And no jumping off any more buildings.” She stopped and peered back through the curtain. “For a while.”

I heard her stop and say, “I’m very sorry, Rob. Most times, when you hear hoof beats, it’s horses. But sometimes, it’s zebras. You can stay right there and we’ll bring some pillows and blankets to make you comfortable. You did good work getting her here and immobilizing her arm. She should be ready to leave by four, four-thirty. I’ll go with you in the helicopter.”

I BECAME PROBABLY the only patient in the history of Duluth Summit Hospital to be medevac’d in order to beat the dawn. I had never seen the sunrise from high in the sky, and of course, I’d never been in a helicopter. From the way they appear to move, so fleet and graceful, you imagine they’d feel swift and weightless as a dragonfly. But the experience was like being shaken in a soup can, hot and noisy and bumpy, each voice echoing and the chuffing of the blades deafening, infernal.

Except for the patient, everyone’s issued big rubber ear muffs. They all end up shouting, straining to be heard over the sound of the rotors. The ride was also weirdly unstable, scary, not the flying carpet of efficient medical reassurance you expect for those in the worst case. In the worst case, though, most of the injured are probably zonked.

After an eternity, we landed. The rosy pink glow of morning filled the air as the door opened. The doctor said, “Give her … 
blur of numbers
 … Dilaudid … 
blur of words
 … push. No, right now. Before you move her again.”

I went flying again, but without leaving the bed. My mother’s stern, sweet face loomed over me, then Dr. Andrew’s … and then nothingness. My last thought was that this was the closest I’d been to sunlight in a long, long time.

I SLEPT AND woke. There was Rob: cleaned up and childlike, with little-boy comb marks in his wet hair. He sat in the chair beside my bed, in a dark room where a small lamp was softly shaded. Only after smiling at him did I notice the dark circles under his eyes.

“What time is it?” I sounded like a frog. My throat had never been so parched.

“Seven.”

“All this time, just two hours?”

“It’s seven at night, Allie.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Juliet just left,” he said. “She said to give you a kiss from her.” He kissed me, on the forehead.

I wanted to say, what about us? What about last night? I’m sure that about a billion girls everywhere on earth were saying just that, in those precise terms, at that exact moment. Rob added, “Now, I want to give you a kiss from me. But I don’t know if I should.”

“Well, I think you should at least give me some ice chips.” At that moment, I realized that I had already been chewing ice chips. The drugs created a very weird set of feelings, as though I were remembering my present, instead of my past.

He chewed his dry lips.

“Maybe it was a sign. Your getting hurt,” he said.

“A sign of what?”

“That we weren’t supposed to be together. Like that.”

“You don’t believe in signs,” I croaked. “Maybe that was
a sign that you should believe in signs.” Abruptly I felt weary and nauseated and dizzy, as though the doctor had somehow misconnected some of my strings so that I had a pulse on the front of my elbow instead of my wrist. “I don’t feel like kissing or debating kissing, Rob. I feel like sleeping.”

“Go ahead.”

“Okay.” I shut my eyes. Then I opened them. “Did you see your film?”

Rob smiled, and I had to reconsider the kissing.

“It was awesome. That was sweet of you, Allie.” His smile flickered. “I had my phone on to film you, too, and when you fell, I was running to you but I tried to get the license plate. I didn’t. But it’s an Alfa Romeo. There are only three Alfa Romeos in Iron County. One belongs to Warwick Quinn, you know, the anchor.…”

I thought I had said something wrong, something that I wouldn’t remember I’d said until he left the room. “I know who he is.”

“And the other two belong to Stephen Tabor.”

“So that was
Dr. Steve
who tried to wipe me out?” I tried to sit up, and moaned so loudly that a nurse hurried into the room and pushed my pain medicine button. I collapsed back against the pillows and winced. “That would be funny if it wasn’t so nuts. The country coroner is trying to kill me? For what, body parts? And that girl in the apartment, too? The only problem being, of course, that the guy wasn’t Dr. Stephen?”