“No, I’ll call my husband.” The doctor helped her off the table and onto the crutches. He walked back out to the waiting room and punched buttons on the phone so she could make an outside call.
She dialed her own number and told the ringing to come pick her up. “He’ll be over in a minute,” she told the receptionist. “I’ll wait outside for him.”
The receptionist helped her through the door and down the steps. She went back inside, and Elizabeth went out and stood on the curb, looking up at the middle window.
After Tupper took Tib to the Angel Flight dance, he had come and thrown things at her window. She would see them in the mornings when she went to class, plastic jar openers and grapefruit slicers and kitchen scrubber holders, scattered on the lawn and the sidewalk. She had never opened the window, and after a while he had stopped coming.
Elizabeth looked down at the grass. At first she couldn’t find the worm. She parted the grass with the tip of her crutch, standing on her good foot. It was there, where she had put it, shrivelled now and darker red, almost black. It was covered with ice crystals.
Elizabeth looked in the front window at the receptionist. When she got up to go file Elizabeth’s chart, Elizabeth crossed the street and walked home.
The walk home had made Elizabeth’s ankle swell so badly, she could hardly move by the time Paul came home.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said angrily. “Why didn’t you call me?” He looked at his watch. “Now it’s too late to call Brubaker. He and his wife were going to dinner. I suppose you don’t feel like going to the concert.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “I’ll go.”
He turned down the thermostat without looking at it. “What in the hell were you doing anyway?”
“I thought I saw a boy I used to know. I was trying to catch up to him.”
“A boy you used to know?” Paul said disbelievingly. “In college? What’s he doing here? Still waiting to graduate?”
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. She wondered if Sandy ever saw herself on the campus, dressed in the winter-white sweater and pearls, standing in front of her sorority house talking to Chuck Pagano. She’s not there, Elizabeth thought. Sandy had not said, “Tell him I’m not here.” She had not said, “Maybe you’d better just do that,” and because of that and a flat tire, Sondra Dickeson isn’t trapped on the campus, waiting to be rescued. Like they are.
“You don’t even realize what this little move of yours has cost, do you?” Paul said. “Brubaker told me this afternoon he’d gotten you the job in the dean’s office.”
He took off the Ace bandage and looked at her ankle. She had gotten the bandage wet walking home. He went to look for another one. He came back carrying the wrinkled job application. “I found this in the bureau drawer. You told me you turned your application in.”
“It fell in the gutter,” she said.
“Why didn’t you throw it away?”
“I thought it might be important,” she said, and hobbled over on her crutches and took it away from him.
They were late to the concert because of her ankle, so they didn’t get to sit with the Brubakers, but afterward they came over. Dr. Brubaker introduced his wife.
“I’m so sorry about this,” Janice Brubaker said. “Ron’s been telling them for years they should get that central walk fixed. It used to be heated.” She was the woman Sandy had pointed at at the Tupperware party and said was Janice who loved Jesus. She was wearing a dark-red suit and had her hair teased into a bouffant, the way girls had worn their hair when Elizabeth was in college. “It was so nice of you to ask us over, but of course now with your ankle we understand.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “We want you to come. I’m doing great, really. It’s just a little sprain.”
The Brubakers had to go to talk to someone backstage. Paul told the Brubakers how to get to their house and took Elizabeth outside. Because they were late, there hadn’t been anyplace to park Paul had had to park up by the infirmary. Elizabeth said she thought she could walk as far as the car, but it took them fifteen minutes to make it three fourths of the way up the walk.
“This is ridiculous,” Paul said angrily, and strode off up the walk to get the car.
She hobbled slowly on up to the end of the walk and sat down on one of the cement benches that had been vents for the heating system. Elizabeth had worn a wool dress and her warmest coat, but she was still cold. She laid her crutches against the bench and looked across at her old dorm.
Someone was standing in front of the dorm, looking up at the middle window. He looked cold. He had his hands jammed in his jean-jacket pockets, and after a few minutes he pulled something out of one of the pockets and threw it at the window.
It’s no good, Elizabeth thought, she won’t come.
He had made one last attempt to talk to her. It was spring quarter. It had been raining again. The walk was covered with worms. Tib was wearing her Angel Flight uniform, and she looked cold.
Tib had stopped Elizabeth after she came out of the dorm and said, “I saw Tupper the other day. He asked about you, and I told him you were living in the Alpha Phi house.”
“Oh,” Elizabeth had said, and tried to walk past her, but Tib had kept her there, talking as if nothing had happened, as if they were still roommates. “I’m dating this guy in ROTC. Jim Scates. He’s gorgeous!” she had said, as if they were still friends.
“I’m going to be late for class,” she said. Tib glanced nervously down the walk, and Elizabeth looked, too, and saw Tupper bearing down on them on his bike. “Thanks a lot,” she said angrily.
“He just wants to talk to you.”
“About what? How he’s taking you to the Alpha Sig dinner dance?” she had said, and turned and walked back into the dorm before he could catch up to her. He had called her on the dorm phone for nearly half an hour, but she hadn’t answered, and after a while he had given up.
But he hadn’t given up. He was still there, under her windows, throwing grapefruit slicers and egg separators at her, and she still, after all these years, wouldn’t come to the window. He would stand there forever, and she would never, never come.
She stood up. The rubber tip of one of her crutches skidded on the ice under the bench, and she almost fell. She steadied herself against the hard cement bench.
Paul honked and pulled over beside the curb, his turn lights flashing. He got out of the car. “The Brubakers are already going to be there, for God’s sake,” he said. He took the crutches away from her and hurried her to the car, his hand jammed under her armpit. When they pulled away, the boy was still there, looking up at the window, waiting.
The Brubakers were there, waiting in the driveway. Paul left her in the car while he unlocked the door. Dr. Brubaker opened the car door for her and tried to help her with her crutches. Janice kept saying, “Oh, really, we would have understood.” They both stood back, looking helpless, while Elizabeth hobbled into the house.
Janice offered to make the coffee, and Elizabeth let her, sitting at the kitchen table, her coat still on. Paul had set out the cups and saucers and the plate of cookies before they left.
“You were at the Tupperware party, weren’t you?” Janice said, opening the cupboards to look for the coffee filters. “I never really got a chance to meet you. I saw Sandy Konkel had her hooks in you.”
“At the party you said you like Jesus,” Elizabeth said. “Are you a Christian?”
Janice had been peeling off a paper filter. She stopped and looked hard at Elizabeth. “Yes,” she said. “I am. You know, Sandy Konkel told me a Tupperware party was no place for religion, and I told her that any place was the place for a Christian witness. And I was right, because that witness spoke to you, didn’t it, Elizabeth?”