The Dark Side - Danielle Steel Page 0,41
hospital, the now all too familiar emergency entrance. They got there ten minutes later, and after paying the cab fare, she rushed straight to the nursing desk.
“What are you doing here again?” a familiar-looking nurse asked them.
“I fell off the big girl swing,” Jaime said between sobs and gulps of air. Zoe was relieved that it wasn’t the arm she had previously broken, and this time it seemed to be her hand that had gotten hurt. A nurse they didn’t know walked Zoe into an exam room, where she gently set Jaime down on the table, and carefully took Jaime’s down jacket off, which made her cry harder.
They waited fifteen minutes for the doctor, while several nurses they knew came to say hi to Jaime. Zoe hadn’t called Austin yet, and decided to wait until she knew what the doctor would say about Jaime’s hand. The doctor took one look at it when he walked into the room, and said he was fairly sure her wrist was broken, and ordered an X-ray to confirm it. A nurse’s aide put Jaime in a child-size wheelchair and rolled her down the hall to the X-ray lab. Zoe and Jaime knew where everything was now.
The X-ray showed that her wrist was broken. It was a clean break like the last one, and the doctor met them back in the exam room. He was looking at a computer screen and glanced up at Zoe, taking in her sleek looks and well-kept appearance even in jeans, a sweater, and a black down jacket.
“Your daughter’s had quite a list of injuries in the past year. Broken arm, dislocated elbow twice, now her wrist. And I see she was admitted for a severe case of the flu. She must be a pretty rambunctious kid. Have you had her checked for ADHD? That’s quite a list for a two-year-old.” Zoe stared at him with relief. For a minute, she thought they were going to accuse her of child abuse, instead he thought Jaime might be hyperactive, which Zoe knew she wasn’t. Cathy Clark would have picked it up if she were but had never suggested it.
“I’ll mention it to our pediatrician,” she said soberly, and he asked Jaime what color cast she wanted. They had just added fluorescent pink to the options.
“Pink,” she said, still holding her hand, but she had stopped crying. He put it on without calling the orthopedist on duty, he said it was a simple break, and the cast could come off in four weeks. They knew the drill now. They left the ER an hour later, with the nurses waving at them, and Zoe called Austin from the street and told him what had happened.
“She what?” he said in a tone of disbelief.
“She fell off the swing and broke her wrist.” The first thought that ran through Austin’s mind was how he was going to explain it to his mother.
“How could she break her wrist? They have sand under the swings, and they can’t fall out of the basket once they’re in it. Did she climb out when the swing was moving?”
“She wasn’t in the baby swings,” Zoe explained with a sigh, her stomach was churning having to admit it to him but she knew Jaime would tell him. “They were all full, and there was a line of kids waiting for them. She was on the big girl swings and she slipped off. They have rubber mats under them, but she must have fallen wrong on her wrist.”
“Is it the same arm she broke before?” He sounded discouraged.
“No, the other one. She has to wear the cast for four weeks.”
“Did they question you about it? By now, they must think we’re child abusers. We’ll have to start going to another hospital if she gets hurt again.” He was only half joking.
“No, I thought of that too. But the doctor asked me if she had ADHD. Maybe she does.”
“She’s not hyperactive, Zoe. We’re not supervising her properly, or this wouldn’t be happening. She should never have been on the big kid swings.” The reproach in his voice was clear.
“I know,” Zoe said in a small voice. “I didn’t think this would happen.”
“We never do, and then it does. Where are you now?”
“Outside the hospital. We just finished. We’ve been here for an hour.”
“I’ll pick you up in ten or fifteen minutes and take you to lunch. I’m almost finished what I came in to do. I’ll take care of the rest