This startled me so much that I staggered back and fell onto the asphalt with her phone in my hand. She was trying to adjust her body to get it into its natural position, but with every spasm and jerk of her body, I could hear the cracking and grinding of her bones. Without thinking, I scrambled over to her and put my face over hers and pleaded,
“Veronica, don’t move. Don’t move, okay? Just stay still. Don’t move. Veronica, please just don’t move.”
I kept saying it, but the words started to fall apart as tears came streaming down my face. I opened her phone. It still worked. It was still on the screen where she had saved my number, and when I saw that, I felt my heart break a little. I called 911 and waited with her, telling her that she would be okay, and feeling guilty for lying to her every time I said it.
When the sound of sirens tore through the air, she seemed to become more alert. She had remained conscious since first coming to, but now more of the light was coming back into her eyes. She was breathing steadily, but it was a gurgling, labored breathing. Her brain was still protecting her from pain, though it looked as if it was finally allowing her to become aware that something was terribly wrong with her. Her eyes rolled over to mine, and her lips moved. She was struggling, but I heard her.
“Hhh… he… p… pi… picture. M… my pictu… he took it.”
I didn’t understand what she meant, so I said the only thing I could. “I’m so sorry, Veronica.”
I rode with her in the ambulance where she finally, and mercifully, lost consciousness. The paramedics asked me several times what happened, but I could only mumble the word “car.” I was staring so vacantly that one of the paramedics shined a light in my eyes in an attempt to determine if I had been injured as well. When he returned his attention to Veronica, I felt guilty that he had even had to waste his time on me.
When we arrived at the hospital, the nurses wheeled Veronica through a set of double-doors. As the paramedics rushed by me, one of them put Veronica’s purse in my lap; I fidgeted with the leather strap and sat anxiously yet absently in the waiting room. The blank stare had returned to my eyes as my mind swam in every direction with no guidance or trajectory. The shouts, coughs, cries, and talking of the emergency room waiting area became a dull buzzing in my ear as I went completely numb to all things. All things but one.
A phone was vibrating in my pocket.
My pulse quickened and my throat dried as I reached my hand into my pants pocket to fish out the phone. My mother was trying to check in on me again. I had no idea how I was going to explain this to her. I wasn’t worried about getting in trouble — those consequences seemed so remote and insignificant to everything now — but what combination of words could I possibly cobble together to explain all this? Between vibrations, I clasped my hand around my phone and pulled it out.
It was off.
For just a moment, I thought the call had simply stopped, or perhaps my phone had died just then somehow. But this moment of confusion ended as soon as the vibrations began again — still in my pocket. I still had Veronica’s phone, and someone was calling it. I felt my eyes begin to water, and I reached into my pocket to retrieve Veronica’s phone. I looked at the screen and could see that her dad was calling her. I needed to answer it. I needed to tell him what had happened. Veronica’s mom was a nurse; maybe she could help. I needed to let someone know what was going on. But every time I tried to imagine even a fragment of what I might say, my thoughts would splinter into pieces too small to reassemble.
I kept hoping the phone would just stop ringing — that the insistence that I answer it would be over. But I knew from what Veronica had told me earlier that as long as her dad kept his phone to his ear, her phone would never stop ringing. With a burning in my chest, I moved my thumb over the phone and pressed “Ignore.” Relief, guilt, and shame boiled within me, and I collapsed my head onto my knees and cried.
Collecting myself, I went to the counter to see if there was any information on Veronica’s condition, but not enough time had passed for there to be any news that would be good news. Before leaving the counter, I asked if I could make a call. I dialed my mom’s number into the hospital phone. Looking at the clock on the wall, I saw that it was about 4:00 A.M., and I held my breath as the line sought a connection. She answered. I told her that I was fine, but that Veronica was not. She cursed at me and said she’d be right there, but I told her I wasn’t leaving until Veronica was out of surgery. She said she’d come anyway.
The police entered the hospital just a little after I hung up the phone with my mother. They didn’t have many questions for me, and the ones that they did have weren’t met with very helpful answers. I hadn’t seen the driver. I didn’t get the license plate. I could only tell them that I thought that it was a brown car, but I couldn’t even tell them how many doors were on it. As the police officers were walking away, I yelled to them, and they walked back over to where I was sitting. I told them that the car I was talking about had a big crack in the back window. Sensing how impotent I was feeling, one of the officers said that would be a huge help. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him.”
My mom and I didn’t speak that much when she got to the hospital. After verifying that I was unharmed, her relief transitioned into anger. I told her I was sorry for lying, and she said that we’d talk about it later. For the majority of the time that we sat together in the waiting room, there was silence between us. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. I think that had we talked more in that room — if I had just told her about Boxes or the night with the raft; if she had just told me more of what she knew — I think that things would have changed. But I didn’t know that any of those things mattered; they were just distant memories of strange adventures to me. So we sat there in silence, and she looked at me while I looked at the floor. She told me that she loved me and that I could call her whenever I wanted her to come get me.
As my mom was leaving, Veronica’s parents rushed in with the wide eyes of people who are attempting to see what is important in a room as quickly as possible. My mom must have called them after I had spoken with her. Veronica’s dad and my mom exchanged a few words that appeared to be quite serious, while Veronica’s mother talked to the person at the desk. Her mother was a nurse, but didn’t work at this hospital. I’m sure that she had tried to get Veronica transferred, but her condition was prohibitive.
While all of these conversations were taking place, I slipped Veronica’s phone back in her purse to hide the evidence of the conversation that I was too much of a coward to have. The police talked to each of us, including me for a second time — I told them what happened again, they made some more notes, and then they left.
Veronica came out of surgery several hours later with a thick, white cast covering 90% of her body. Her right arm was free, but the rest of her was cocooned in plaster. Her parents and I walked to Veronica’s room; they never asked me for her purse, so I just set it on the table to the right of her bed. She was still under the anesthetic, but I remembered how I felt when I had my cast before kindergarten. I asked a nurse for a marker, but I couldn’t think of anything to write. I slept in a chair in the corner, and went home the next day.
I came back every afternoon for several days. At some point, they had moved another patient into her room and set up a screen around both beds to act as a partition. The divider was always closed, so I could never tell if the person in the adjacent bed was sleeping; however, I once caught a glimpse and saw that in addition to the cast on his left wrist, the occupant’s face was completely covered in bandages, so I decided to always speak in hushed tones just in case.