Another swoosh and a small tan doctor appeared, girlishly boned with crow-black hair. Around his neck he wore a plastic Backstage Pass that featured, beneath a pixilated picture of himself with the skin tone of a jalapeño, a barcode, as well as his name: THOMAS C. SMART, SENIOR ER RESIDENT. As he walked over to me, his considerable white lab coat whimsically floated out behind him.
“How’re we doing?” he asked. I tried to speak — my okay came out like a knife spreading jelly on burnt toast — and he nodded understandingly, as if he spoke the language. He jotted something down on his clipboard, and then asked me to sit up and take slow, deep breaths as he pressed the icy stethoscope into my back in different places.
“Looking good,” he said with a tired, fake smile.
In a gust of white, a swoosh — he disappeared. Once again, I stared at the glum spearmint curtain. It trembled whenever someone rushed past it on the opposite side, as if it were afraid. A phone rang, was hastily answered. A stretcher rolled down the halclass="underline" chick peeps of wobbly wheels.
“I understand, sir. Fatigue, exposure, no hypothermia, but dehydration, the cut to her knee, other minor cuts and scrapes. Evident shock too. I’d like to keep her here a few more hours, have her eat something. Then we’ll see. We’ll give her a prescription for the knee pain. A mild sedative too. The stitches will come out in a week.”
“You’re not following me. I’m not talking about stitches. I want to know what she’s been through.”
“We don’t know. We notified the park. There are rescue personnel—”
“I don’t give a flying fuck about rescue personnel—”
“Sir, I—”
“Do not sir me. I want to see my daughter. I want you to get her something to eat. I want you to find her a decent nurse, not one of these guinea pigs who’d unwittingly kill any kid with an ear infection. She needs to go home and rest, not relive whatever ordeal she’s been through with some bozo, some clown who couldn’t even graduate from high school, who wouldn’t know a motive if it bit him on the ass, all because some chicken-’n-biscuits police force doesn’t have the proficiency to figure it out themselves.”
“It’s standard, sir, with these sorts of mishaps—”
“Mishaps?”
“I mean—”
“A mishap is spilling Kool-Aid on a white carpet. A mishap is losing a fucking earring.”
“She — she’ll only speak to him if she’s up to it. You have my word.”
“You’re going to have to do a lot better than your word, Doctor what does that thing say, Dr. Thomas, Tom Smarts?”
“Actually, it’s without the s.”
“What is that, your stage name?”
I rolled off the bed and, making sure my arm and the other plastic cords to which my chest was attached did not fully tear out of whatever machine I was rigged to, I walked the few feet to the curtain, the bed reluctantly trolleying after me. I peered out.
Standing next to the large white administrative hexagon in the middle of the Emergency Room was Dad, in corduroy. His gray-blond hair flopped across his forehead — something that happened during lectures — his face was red. In front of him stood White Lab Coat, clasping his hands and nodding. To his left, behind the counter, sat Fuzzy Hair and, faithfully at her side, Mars Orange Lipstick, both of them gazing at Dad, one pressing a phone receiver to her pink neck, the other pretending to scrutinize a clipboard but eavesdropping.
“Dad,” I scraped.
He heard me immediately. His eyes widened.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
As it turned out, although I had no recollection of it whatsoever, I’d apparently been quite the Talk Show Host with John Richards and his son, when they carried me, their limp bride, half a mile to their pickup truck. (White Lab Coat was very informative when he explained, where memory was concerned, I could “expect anything and everything”—as if I’d only bumped my head, as if I’d merely had a head-on collision.)
With what I imagine to be the energized yet charred voice of someone recently struck by lightning (over 100 million volts of direct current) with dilated pupils and splinter sentences I told them my name, address, telephone number, that I’d been on a camping trip in the Great Smoky Mountains, that something bad had happened. (I actually used the word bad.) I didn’t respond to their direct questions — I was unable to tell them specifically what I’d seen — but apparently I repeated the words “She’s departed” throughout the forty-five minute ride to Sluder County Hospital.
This detail was particularly unsettling. “She’s Departed” was a grim nursery song Dad and I used to sing on the highways when I was five, learned in Ms. Jetty’s kindergarten in Oxford, Mississippi. It followed the generic melody of “Oh, My Darlin’ Clementine”: “She’s departed, she’s a nowhere, she’s my girl and she’s a-gone / She went drownin’ in the river, washed up somewhere in Babylon.”
(Dad learned most of this after bonding with my two knights in shining armor in the Emergency waiting room, and though they left well before I was awake, Dad and I later sent them a thank-you note and three hundred dollars’ worth of new fly-fishing equipment blindly purchased from Bull’s-eye Bait and Tackle.)
Due to my bizarre lucidity, Sluder County Hospital had been able to contact Dad immediately, also alert the Park Ranger on duty, a man by the name of Roy Withers, who began a search of the area. It was also why the Burns County Police dispatched an officer from their Patrol Unit, Officer Gerard Coxley, to the hospital, so he could talk to me.
“I’ve already made arrangements,” Dad said. “You’re not talking to anyone.”
Once again I was behind the spearmint curtain in the spongy bed, mummified by heated flannel blankets, trying to eat with one pipe cleaner arm the turkey sandwich and chocolate chip cookie Mars Orange Lipstick had brought me from the cafeteria. My head felt like that colorful balloon they used in the classic film Around the World in80Days. I seemed to be able only to stare at the curtain, chew and swallow, and sip the coffee Fuzzy Hair had brought according to Dad’s specific instructions (“Blue likes her coffee with skim milk, no sugar. I like mine black.”): stare, chew, swallow, stare, chew, swallow. Dad was on the left side of the bed.
“You’re going to be fine,” he said. “My girl’s a champion. Not afraid of anything. We’ll get you home in an hour. You’ll rest. Soon be right as rain.”
I was aware Dad, all Trumanish voice and Kennedyesque grin, was repeating these cheerleader phrases to inspire team spirit in himself, not me. I didn’t mind. I’d been given some sedative via the IV and hence felt too balmy to grasp the full extent of his anxiety. To explain: I’d never actually told Dad about the camping trip. I’d told him I’d be spending the weekend at Jade’s. I didn’t mean to be deceitful, especially in lieu of his newfound McDonald’s-styled approach to parenting (Always Open and Ready to Serve), but Dad despised outdoor activities such as camping, skiing, mountain biking, para-sailing, base jumping and, even more, the “dimwitted dulls” who did them. Dad had not even the remotest desire to take on the Forest, the Ocean, the Mountain or the Thin Air, as he detailed extensively in “Man’s Hubris and the National World,” published in 1982 in the now-obsolete Sound Opinions Press.