The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,46
I gave my trust too easily. As I race across the desert, the knowledge I’ve tried to push away all afternoon—the other explanation for Philip’s card among my mother’s papers and for the letter from Carl Logan in his file—worms into my mind: Barbara was living as Kay Devereaux in Colorado Springs. Philip found out, and he told Mama and Papa. And they all kept it from me!
“No!” I scream in the privacy of the car, the night, the desert.
It’s no more than a second’s inattention, but the Jag swerves, and I’m bumping over rough terrain, seeing nothing but shadows ahead of me. I pump the brakes. The car slows but continues to lurch forward. There’s a scraping metallic shriek, and I sail over the edge of something.
I get walloped in the chest and rammed back against the seat. Then everything stops.
WHAT COMES NEXT IS a blur of pain and people in uniforms, first the Highway Patrol and paramedics, then white-coated doctors and nurses at the Barstow hospital.
I’m lucky, the emergency room doctor tells me; it looks like my worst injury is a cracked rib from the airbag slamming into me. Beyond that, “you’re going to get some colorful bruises.” They’ll keep me overnight for observation, but I should be able to go home in the morning. He leaves, and a nurse who’s been standing by says she’ll take care of moving me into a hospital room.
Groggily, as I’m wheeled on a gurney, I wonder about the damage to my car. And hell, I’ll have to call Ronnie to come here tomorrow and pick me up. But before I get out the words, the nurse says, “I hope you don’t mind. Your cell phone rang while the doctor was treating you, and I answered. It was your grandson. He’s on his way here. Hope that was okay,” she says again.
“Fine,” I mumble, my voice thick with whatever they gave me for pain. My grandson? But Ronnie’s son, Brian, is in Argentina, working as a photojournalist. Then I remember that Dylan, Carol’s son, moved to Los Angeles a few months ago; a former minor-league baseball player, he got a job coaching at Culver City High School.
It must be Dylan who called.
Still, the last thing the nurse says, as the drugs and shock drag me into sleep, mystifies me. “Your grandson must have ESP. He called because he was worried about you.” ESP, indeed. What else would make Dylan worry about me?
HE’S THERE IN THE morning. The nurse who wakes me says, “Okay if your grandson comes in? He spent the night in the lounge.”
“Sure.” I’m touched—and so shaken up and vulnerable, in the wake of the accident, that tears spring to my eyes. I reach to brush them away, and flinch. Ow! I must have gotten a shiner.
A moment later, a young man—well, a blurry shape in the doorway, I don’t know what they did with my glasses—enters the room and calls out loudly, “Grandma!”
But it’s not my grandson. It’s Josh. He hurries over to my bedside, whispers, “I had to say I was related, or they wouldn’t have told me anything. And I didn’t know how to reach anyone in your family.” Once he’s gotten that out, he takes a good look at me and adds, with real alarm, “Elaine, are you all right?”
“Better than I look. Really. Damn airbag.” I try to laugh, but it hurts.
“Guess I oughta see the other guy, right?” he says.
“The Sierra Club will probably revoke my membership for what I did to the desert.”
And my poor Jag! I ask Josh if he can find out what happened to it, if it was towed somewhere or is still sitting amid rocks and cacti. He rushes off, clearly grateful to have a task, and returns in fifteen minutes with the news that the car was taken to a Highway Patrol lot. I have no doubt the Jag is going to need extensive body work, but I’m hoping it suffered no serious internal damage. That turns out to be the case for me, I learn from the doctor, who comes by a few minutes later.
This morning’s doctor, a soft-voiced blond woman, explains the difference between a broken rib and one that’s merely cracked; I’m fortunate to have gotten the latter. She advises me not to stint on the Aleve because the biggest danger is that if it hurts too much to breathe and I avoid taking deep breaths, I can develop pneumonia.