But when she reaches the damp sand, where the waves have come in and retreated rhythmically, she does not see her father.
“Daddy!” she cries.
She looks left and then right. There is no one else in the water. As she glances back, she sees no one on the beach. No one is spread out on a towel. There are no umbrellas, no folding chairs. Not even her mother is there.
Now Katie is very frightened. She scans the ocean, hoping her father will bob up someplace, playfully, and laugh at how he has tricked her. But when she does not see him, she wades in farther until the water — and oh, it is so, so cold — is up to her waist.
That is when she feels something brush up against her leg. At first, she thinks it’s a fish, or maybe seaweed, but when she looks down into the water she sees her father, stretched out, looking up.
Not moving.
Katie screams, “Daddy! Daddy!”
But then she notices his lips are moving. He’s trying to tell her something. Bubbles rise from his mouth as he speaks. Like in a cartoon, when the bubbles break the surface, his words emerge.
“Hi, honey bunch,” says the first bubble.
“Daddy!”
“It looks to me like...” says the second bubble.
Katie is trying to grab hold of her father, to pull him up, but every time she tries to reach for him, he slips from her grasp.
The third bubble pops to the surface.
Her father says, “...Bruce is dead.”
Katie says, “What? What did you say?”
But then, suddenly, her father is gone, as if he were made of salt and had instantly dissolved.
“Daddy, Daddy!”
“Daddy!”
That last scream was real, and loud enough that Katie woke herself up. The first thing she noticed as she opened her eyes was that she was pressed up against the passenger door of the Cadillac. The car was seriously listing to the right. As she turned her head to look out the window, she found herself looking down into the ditch.
She was also quickly aware that she was in pain. Her left temple was throbbing, and when she touched it, it was wet. She was bleeding.
Slowly, she turned her head toward the driver’s side of the vehicle.
“Bruce! Oh God, Bruce!”
He should have slid across the seat and been resting against her, given the rules of gravity, but somehow Bruce’s left arm had gotten hung up on the steering wheel, so his body had only shifted slightly toward the center of the car. His head hung limply on his neck, his chin on his chest. The right side of his face looked fine, but there was still a lot of blood, which was easily attributable to the shattered driver’s side window. Katie couldn’t see the other side of Bruce’s face from where she sat, but she was guessing it had endured a thousand cuts, given all the glass scattered across the seat, his lap, and the floor.
The entire length of the massive driver’s door was smashed in, but the Arrival that had rammed them was not there. Katie looked out the rear window, saw the Arrival sitting in the middle of the road, about a hundred yards back, its front end completely caved in, airbags inside deployed even though there were no passengers. What must have happened was, the Arrival came out of the side street, T-boned them, bounced back, and the Caddy kept going until it ran off into the ditch. Katie didn’t remember that part. She remembered seeing the car coming at them, thought that maybe she remembered the crash, but after that, nothing. She touched her temple again, wondering how she’d hit that part of her head, then figured that at the moment of impact, she was thrown toward the driver’s side, and whomped her head on the edge of the steering wheel.
She tentatively touched Bruce’s shoulder, gave him a mild nudge.
“Bruce? Bruce? Can you hear me? Bruce?”
Bruce said nothing.
Tears welled up in Katie’s eyes. “Come on! Bruce! Wake up!”
Bruce did not wake up.
Katie crawled, upward, across the seat, and hung onto the steering wheel so she wouldn’t slide back. She put her ear to Bruce’s chest, held her own breath so she could listen better for a heartbeat.
Thump thump. Thump thump.
“Yes!” Katie said, taking her head away. “Okay, Bruce, you’re still with me. Right? You’re alive. I don’t know if you can hear me or not, but I’m going to get help. I am. I’m going to call an ambulance.”
She dug into her pocket for her phone, punched in 911, and put the phone to her ear.
And listened to it ring, And ring. And ring.
Finally, the ringing stopped.
“Hello?” Katie said. “Hello?”
But she hadn’t been connected. The call had died. She muttered an obscenity, put the phone back into her pocket, and said to Bruce, “So, I don’t think we can get an ambulance out here right now. We need another plan.”
She pondered whether she could slide Bruce out from behind the wheel, get into the driver’s seat, and then drive the car to GGH, Garrett General Hospital. There were two problems with that. The first was, she didn’t know whether Bruce could be moved safely, and second, she didn’t know whether the car was driveable.
“Can you move, Bruce?” she asked.
When he failed to respond, she tucked one arm in between his back and the seat, and looped her other arm around his right leg. If she could tug him out from under the wheel—
“Aw!” Bruce shouted.
“Sorry! Sorry!” Katie said, slipping her arm out from behind his back and letting go of his leg.
Bruce didn’t show any more signs of being conscious now than he had twenty seconds earlier, but he’d sure felt the pain.
“Okay, I won’t try to move you,” Katie said. “I’ll get help.”
She looked out through the windshield, turned around, and checked where they’d come from. Getting her bearings.
“Bruce, Bruce, listen to me,” she said, bracing her feet against the passenger door to keep her close to him. “I’m going to go. If more of those cars come, I think they’ll leave you alone because you look like, well, you kind of look dead and the other Arrival is totally wrecked.” She sniffed, worked to hold back tears. “I’m heading for home. Maybe my mom is there and she’ll know what to do. And if I see a police car or an ambulance on the way I’ll flag them down.”
Bruce said nothing.
Katie, now unable to hold back the tears, leaned in closer and kissed him on the cheek, his stubble like sandpaper to her lips.
“Please don’t die, Bruce. Please, please don’t die.”
She allowed herself to slide back over to the passenger side. When she opened her door, she hung on to it, not wanting it to snap off the hinges. No sense doing any more damage to Bruce’s car than had already been done. Think positively, she told herself. Bruce is going to be okay. He’s going to recover.
And so will his beloved Cadillac.
She dropped into the ditch and, putting her shoulders into it, pushed the door shut. She scrabbled back up onto the highway. But before she started to trek into town, there was one thing she had to do first.
She walked over to the smashed Arrival and, with chin quivering, looked at it and said two words:
“Fuck you.”
Katie started heading for home.
Thirty-Eight
Sandra entered the administrator’s office carrying a small blue nylon bag with a Red Cross symbol on the side. “Found this,” she said to Joe, who was behind the desk, looking at the laptop. “There’s all kinds of stuff in here. Bandages, cold compresses, gauze, those antiseptic wipes. I know you’re not a paramedic, but you’ve probably had more experience with this kind of thing than I have, so—”
But then she looked at Ruskin and said, “Oh, shit, he doesn’t look good.”