Paul started to move, then stopped. He looked very pissed. “I’m not calling the ambulance.”
“What?”
“You call them. You explain it. I’ve had enough of this bullshit.” He came down the stairs, grabbed his backpack as he went by, stepped over my outstretched legs, and went downstairs to play video games.
“Way to go, Dad,” Angie said, getting up to go into the kitchen.
In the distance I could hear a siren. I jumped up, ran into the kitchen, and dialed Sarah’s number. I got one of the other editors on the desk.
“She just flew out of here,” he said. “Her husband was in an accident or something.”
“This is her husband.”
“It’s Zack, right? It’s Dan. We sat together at the Christmas party? Jeez, how are you? Are you okay? You at the hospital or something?”
“I’m fine. Do you think you could find Sarah, catch her in the parking lot before she heads home?”
“I don’t know, she left here a couple of minutes ago and she was really moving, you know?”
I wondered whether Sarah had her cell phone with her. Of course, even if she did, there was no guarantee she had it turned on. I’d talked to her about this in the past. What good is having a cell phone with you if you don’t have it on, I told her. If we need to reach you in an emergency, and your phone is down at the bottom of your purse, where you can’t hear it even if it is on, well-
There was loud banging at the door. “Hang on, Dan,” I said. “I think that’s the ambulance.”
“So somebody else got hurt? One of the kids?”
“Just hang on.” I set down the receiver and ran to the front door, where I saw two uniformed attendants, a man and a woman. They were carrying leather bags and had radios that crackled clipped to their chests. I put on my friendliest smile.
“Hey,” I said. Like maybe they’d dropped by to ask for a donation to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Where was my checkbook?
The woman said, “Hello, sir. We have a report that someone’s fallen? Down the stairs?”
I laughed. “That was me. But I’m okay, really.”
The man said, “We should still have a look at you, just the same, make sure that you didn’t suffer any injuries.”
What I didn’t know until later was that Sarah did, in fact, have her cell phone with her, and was frantically trying to call the house from her car. She’d tried once in the parking lot at the paper, then again on Lakeshore as she headed for the ramp to the expressway. Trying to keep one eye on the road, one eye on the phone, pushing the “send” button, repeatedly getting busy signals, trying again. I’d left the phone off the hook, of course, expecting to get back on the line with Dan.
“No, no, really,” I protested to the ambulance attendants. “I’m okay. I wasn’t hurt.”
“The dispatcher said a young man, your son, called to say his father had fallen down the stairs.”
“Not fallen, exactly. More like arranged, I guess you’d say.”
The attendants glanced at each other. The man said, “Perhaps we could have a word with your son.”
“He’s downstairs playing video games,” I offered. They exchanged glances again. As if playing video games was not typical behavior from a boy who supposedly had just found his father dead at the bottom of the stairs. Maybe they didn’t have kids, couldn’t understand.
“You see, I was just goofing around,” I said. “It’s about their backpacks. They leave them at the top of the stairs-”
“You tripped on a backpack?” the woman attendant asked.
“No, but I could have. That was the point I was trying to make.”
Angie was watching from the door to the kitchen, smiling while she ate a small bowl of ice cream. The ambulance attendants were finally persuaded that I had not been injured, nor had anyone else at this address. They returned to their vehicle, but not before warning me that if something like this ever happened again, they’d report it to the police and have me charged with mischief or making a fake call to 911 or something along those lines.
I went back to the kitchen and picked up the receiver. “Dan?”
“Yeah?”
“I guess it’s too late to catch her. Listen, sorry, really, it’s just a big mix-up.” The receiver was back in its cradle only a second before the phone rang. I snatched it up.
“Yeah?”
“Zack! Oh my God! Zack! I’ve called a hundred times. What’s happened?”
“Sarah, everything’s okay. Just calm down. Absolutely everything is okay. I’m fine, the kids are fine, everybody’s fine.”
“But Paul called, said you’d fallen down the stairs, that you weren’t moving-”
“I know, I know, but it was really just a misunderstanding. I was just lying there, that’s all.”
“Just lying there?”
“Basically.”
Sarah was quiet at the other end of the line for a moment. “You’re telling me there’s no emergency whatsoever.”
“That’s right!” I tried to be cheerful.
“So I’m getting written up right now for running a red light for no good reason.”
Angie, who wasn’t able to hear everything her mother was saying to me but knew from my expression that it wasn’t good, whispered, “You want me to ask the ambulance guys to come back in half an hour? You might need them after Mom gets home.”
I TOLD TRIXIE THAT WAS the end of my story. She had another cookie and looked at her watch. “I really should get going. I’ve got to get changed.”
“You look great,” I told her. I waved my hands in front of me, drawing attention to my own jeans and six-year-old souvenir T-shirt from a trip to Walt Disney World when the kids were much younger. “That’s the bonus of working from home. It doesn’t matter how you look.”
“But you don’t have clients coming to the house,” Trixie said. “I do.”
“Hey, thanks for those tax tips. I write off some of the kitchen now, too, in addition to my study, since I make my meals here. And my model kits. If I’m writing sci-fi, I should be able to deduct a model of the Jupiter 2 from Lost in Space, right?”
“Absolutely.” She was on her feet now.
“So what should I do?” I asked her. “To make it right with Sarah?”
“You could start by not acting like such a jerk,” Trixie said. “It’s a wonder Sarah didn’t give you a spanking.”
I chuckled. “She’d probably be afraid it wouldn’t be an appropriate punishment, that I’d like it too much.”
And there was the tiniest twinkle in Trixie’s eye.
THERE WAS ONE SMALL PART of the story I didn’t tell Trixie. After The Backpack Incident, when Sarah got home and showed me her ticket (a fine plus points), we had to go to Mindy’s, a grocery store about five minutes from our place, to pick up some things for dinner. She was going to go alone-I think she actually wanted to go alone-but I thought it would be better if I tagged along and attempted to be helpful. Try to smooth things over a little bit. Maybe explain why I did what I did. That my motives were honorable, even if things didn’t quite work out the way I’d planned.
Sarah dropped some bananas in the cart’s child seat, next to her purse. “You do this kind of thing all the time,” she said. “You’re always telling us what to do. Don’t leave the stove on, check the batteries on the smoke alarm, don’t drink the milk after the expiration date, don’t leave the front door unlocked, make sure the car’s locked, make sure you put the steak knives in the dishwasher with the points down so no one slits their wrists when they reach in-”