I shouted out and hoped she heard me.
“I’m coming,” I said.
The more I ran the farther away she became. I tried to run faster, but when I looked down it was as if I was running in place. I motioned with my arms for her to come to me.
“Please Gabrielle,” I said, “I can’t reach you.”
In a single moment, she was before me. Her entire frame radiated with light and when I looked upon her, I felt a sense of calm and happiness. She reached out her hands and we embraced. I closed my eyes and when I opened them she was far away again. She raised her hand into the air and waved at me and then turned and walked through the trees.
“Wait!” I said. “Don’t go, please. I don’t want to be here without you.”
But she didn’t turn back, and after a moment the faint outline of her dress was all that remained.
CHAPTER 25
“Sloane, can you hear me?”
I opened my eyes. Everything was blurry like I was looking at objects through my dad’s old horn-rimmed glasses. A woman hovered over me. She reached out her hand and shook me, and I couldn’t figure out why she was so close. I tried to back up, but my head throbbed when I moved.
“Talk to me,” she said. “What happened?”
The woman’s blond pigtails hung in my face. I tried to swat them out of the way, but I couldn’t lift my hand off the ground.
“Do I know you?”
“Sloane, come on, it’s Maddie.”
Maddie? And who’s Sloane?
“Let me help you up,” she said.
“What happened?”
“Do you know where you are?”
I tried to speak but nothing came out.
“We better get you to the hospital,” she said.
Hospital? What for?
The woman lifted me off the floor. She wrapped a piece of fabric around my head and slung her arm around me. I tried to move my legs forward, but it felt like they were all flesh and no bone.
“I’m cold,” I said. “Why is it so freezing out here?”
The girl who called herself Maddie laughed.
“I see you haven’t lost your sense of hatred for zero degree temperatures,” she said. “Maybe if you wore boots instead of flip-flops all the time, you wouldn’t be cold.”
“Where are we going?”
“To my car. Don’t worry, it’s right over there.”
I looked right over there and didn’t see anything except a big blue blob with two bright circles on the front of it. The woman reached out and touched the side and it opened.
“Okay, here you go. Let’s get you in,” she said. “Do you know who did this to you?”
“Did what?”
“Whacked you over the head, silly.”
The tires rolled over the bumps on the road, dutt doom, dutt doom.
“Do you have your phone on you?” she said.
“For what?”
“I need Nick’s number,” she said.
The sound of his name made me feel good inside, but I didn’t know why.
“Can you call her?”
“Who?” she said.
“Gabrielle.”
“Gabrielle’s not here sweetie,” she said. “You’re starting to scare me.”
She stretched across me and rifled through my jacket pocket.
“Oh, I wanted to get one of these touch phone thingies,” she said. “Very cool.”
“I saw Gabrielle.”
“Of all the times to talk about Gabrielle, you choose now.”
She grabbed my hand and squeezed it tight.
“It’s going to be alright,” she said.
She pressed some numbers into the phone.
“Hey Nick?” she said. “What’s up, it’s Maddie.”
She paused.
“Listen, I’m not calling to talk about your relationship problems.”
Another pause.
“Nick, for Pete’s sake, shut up and listen. I went to meet Sloane at that dead chicks house and when I got there I found her slumped on the ground in the doorway. She’s going on and on about Gabrielle, and I’m totally freaked out.”
It was silent for a moment and then she said, “To be honest with you, I don’t know. She didn’t know who I was when I found her. And she’s hurt, her head is bleeding. I think someone tried to take her out.”
I heard a man shout a bunch of words. His voice was loud and he sounded agitated.
“What I’ve told you is all I know right now,” she said.
She whispered something into the phone that I couldn’t hear and then looked over at me.
“Good, good,” she said, “see you in ten.”
I tried to talk, but all I could get out was mmmp mmy heaaad isss. I felt like I’d been bulldozed with a steamroller.
The woman turned toward me.
“Stay with me Sloane, we’re almost there.”
CHAPTER 26
“Sloane, are you alright?”
“Nick?”
“I’m so glad you’re awake,” he said.
He had a grip on my hand so tight it drained most of the circulation out of it.
“Where’s Maddie?”
“She’s on a mission to find you some real food,” he said.
“What happened?”
“You tell me, do you remember?” he said.
I examined the room and then the bed I rested on and it dawned on me that I wasn’t at home or in my own bed, and I was dressed in a fashion repressed hospital gown. On a bedside table next to me was a tray with a bowl of jello. I wondered why it always had to be jello, and why green.
“I remember going to Charlotte’s,” I said. “I messed around with her computer, but I didn’t find anything so I looked though the drawers and one needed a key.”
“I want to know about when you left,” he said.
“That part is a little hazy.”
“Try to remember, it’s important.”
“I locked the door and when I started to turn around I got this feeling like someone was behind me. I don’t know what happened after that.”
“Did you see anyone?” he said.
“A figure, maybe in grey or black. I don’t know. It all happened so fast. And then I opened my eyes and Maddie was there.”
“And that’s all you remember?”
I nodded.
“Are you still mad at me?” I said. “Because I’m sorry about what I––”
The door opened.
“Ah, you’re awake.”
A man in a white coat flashing a shiny pair of dentures and hair the color of tinsel approached my bed.
“You gave this one a scare little lady,” he said, and thumbed in Nick’s direction.
“I’m fine now though, right?”
“It looks like it,” the doctor said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
I nodded.
“What’s your name?”
“I don’t mean to question your judgment, but is that necessary?” I said. “I know who I am.”
“Just answer the question please.”
“Sloane Alice Monroe.”
“And do you know where you are, Sloane?” he said.
“A hospital I guess, although I can’t tell you which one.”
“Good, very good. Who is the current president of the United States?”
“How about my favorite president?”
He made a face that displayed his many wrinkles and sighed.
“Alright, fine,” he said.
“That would be the guy who freed the slaves in 1863 and goes by the name of Abraham Lincoln. Did you know he was the first president to ever be assassinated and the first president to have a beard?”
He shook his head.
“I did not know that.”
“Would you like me to recite the Emancipation Proclamation too, because I can.”
Nick stood off to the side with a wide grin on his face.