we strapped it down to the bed.” He raised the sheet so she could see the cast—purple—and the white strap holding it down. “Can you wiggle your fingers for me—just the fingers? Good. Now the thumb.”
“Why’s it strapped down?”
“So you didn’t whack it against something in your sleep, like your head.” He pulled at the strap and there was the rip of Velcro, and her arm was free. She raised the cast and looked at it, turning it this way and that. It encased her forearm from the elbow to the middle of her palm, with a neat thick eyelet for the thumb. Now that she could see it she felt its weight and its pressure and its prickly heat, as if her eyes were all at once undoing the work her body had done to get used to it while she slept. She felt an itch she knew she would never get to and she remembered a blackened wooden backscratcher—phoenix, arizona—and she remembered the filthy old piss smell of a bathroom and the greasy stink of a hand over her face.
“Do you remember breaking your arm, Audrey?”
It was the deputy who spoke.
“Ed,” said her father, and put his hand on her good forearm. “Audrey, you remember Ed Moran.”
Audrey lowered the cast and looked from her father to the deputy.
“Sure I do,” she said. “How are you, Deputy Moran?”
Moran was about to speak again but her father was quicker: “It’s Sheriff Moran now, Audrey. Remember?”
“Right. I remember. And there’s the badge and everything. I’m sorry,” she said. She was not ready to call the man Sheriff. Her father was Sheriff.
Moran shifted his weight and smiled at her. When she was young she’d thought him handsome in some manly, gum-chewing way. Now she wondered why. His lips were thin and his eyes were too far apart and a little bulgy, like a frog’s. Her head was clearing and she remembered that he was not the new sheriff here, he was not her father’s replacement, but had gone down to Iowa, just over the border, and after a few years down there had been elected sheriff. And now he’d come back up to his old turf to stand in his sheriff’s uniform next to her father, who was now a common civilian, and conduct his interview.
As if confirming these thoughts her father said, “Your accident was down in Iowa, sweetheart. Pawnee County. That’s Sheriff Moran’s county, and I asked him to come up here just by himself for now. Dr. Breece said he thought you could handle a few questions—just a few,” he said pointedly. “But if you don’t want to right now, if you don’t feel up to it, you just say the word and the sheriff will come back another day.”
She could see by Moran’s thin-lipped smile that he’d have liked to tell her father to stand down and let him handle this. And she could tell by her father’s voice, and the way he kept close to her, and the pressure of his hand on her forearm, that he’d rather not have his old deputy in the room at all; that it was too soon. Or maybe it was that he’d rather be asking the questions himself. In any case, she knew she could send the deputy away with one sentence, chomping his gum all the way back to Iowa, but he would only be more thin-lipped and more determined when he returned. And so she told him everything she remembered, from the boy who grabbed her at the gas station to the spinout on the road to the car behind them that failed to stop, that bumped the RAV4, to the fast ride down the riverbank and the spinning out onto the ice and the first sounds of the ice cracking.
And then she told him what she didn’t know she remembered until she heard herself saying it, and even then she couldn’t be certain it wasn’t some dream from the time that she was underwater, from the days and nights of swimming underwater—she told him that the ice had cracked and the car had tilted and she’d let go of Caroline’s hand so they could open their doors, but the driver’s side went under first and Caroline couldn’t get out that way, and she herself was climbing out of her door right up onto the ice, but the ice was breaking under her hands, under her knees, and she knew how cold the water was but she didn’t