“I got some young hotshot here. Some lawyer, he says. Didn’t believe you could really be down here, so he waited at the car. When her royal highness came back from the lake without you, I got kinda worried. Then this snot-nose shows up, says you was going to meet with him at nine and where was you, he can’t wait all day. I know you don’t want me breathing down your neck, doll, but I was there when the guy called, I heard that little friend of yours say they was going to dump you in the marsh, so I made him drive us down here. Me and her highness, you know, I figured we could find the place after you showed it to me on the map and all.”
He went over and over it on the way to the road. Ron Kappelman stood there, leaning on his beat-up Rabbit, whistling lightly, looking at nothing. When he saw the three of us coming he leapt upright and sprinted across the road. He helped Mr. Contreras lift me over the fence and into the backseat of the car. Peppy gave a little bark and shoved past them to push her heavy body next to mine.
“Damn, Warshawski. You miss an appointment, you do it in a big way. What the hell happened to you?”
“You leave her alone, young man, and don’t go talking dirty like that. There’s plenty other words in the English language without going around swearing all the time. I don’t know what your mother would think if she could hear you, but what we gotta do is get this lady to a doctor, get her patched up, then you want to butt your nose in and find out how she got where she was, maybe she’ll feel like talking to you.”
Kappelman stiffened as if to fight back, then realized the futility of it and got into the driver’s seat. I was unconscious before he had the car turned around.
I don’t remember anything of the rest of the day. How Kappelman flagged down a state patrol car and got us an eighty-mile-an-hour escort to Lotty’s clinic, Mr. Contreras stubbornly insisting he wouldn’t let them take me to a hospital without her say-so. Or how Lotty, taking one look at me in the back of the car, summoned an ambulance to take me to Beth Israel at top speed. Or even how Peppy wouldn’t relinquish me to the paramedics. She apparently seized a wrist in her strong jaw and refused to let go. They tell me they woke me up long enough to make her drop the guy’s arm, but I don’t have any memory of it, not even as a dream fragment
I finally resurfaced around six Thursday morning. After a few puzzled minutes I realized I was in a hospital bed, but I couldn’t imagine what I was doing there or how I’d come to be there. As soon as I tried sitting up, though, my shoulders sent out so severe a message of pain that memory came flooding back.
Dead Stick Pond. That horrible cocoon of death. I held my arms out in front of me, despite the agony moving them brought. My wrists and hands were wrapped in gauze; my fingers looked like bright red sausages emerging from the white bandages. An IV needle was taped to my left forearm above the gauze. I followed it to a series of bags overhead and squinted at the labels. D5.45NS. That told me a lot.
I touched my fingertips gently together. They were swollen, but I could feel. I lay back again, filled with a peaceful satisfaction. I had survived. My hands were all right. They had tried to kill me, tried to humiliate me at the moment of my death, but I was alive. I fell back into sleep.
When I woke again it was to the full bustle of morning hospital routine-blood pressure, temperature, rounds-and no questions answered: doctor will tell you. After the nurses came a brisk intern who looked at my eyes and stuck pins into my feet. The pin seems to be neuroscience’s most advanced piece of technology. Another intern was busy with my roommate, a woman my age who’d just had cosmetic surgery. After they’d finished Lotty herself swept in, dark eyes bright with nonclinical feeling. My intern hovered at her elbow, anxious to tell her his findings on my body. She listened for a minute, then dismissed him with an imperious wave.
“I’m sure your reflexes are all in perfect order, but let me see for myself First let’s have your chest. Breathe. Hold it. Exhale. Yes.” She listened to me fore and aft, then had me shut my eyes and touch my hands together, get out of bed-a slow, lurching process-and walk on my heels, then my toes. It wasn’t much compared to my usual workout, but it left me panting.
“You really should have children, Victoria-you could produce a whole new breed of superheroes. Why you are even alive at this point is a medical miracle, let alone that you can walk.”
“Thank you, Lotty. I’m pretty pleased myself Tell me how I got here and when I can leave.”
She gave me the details of Peppy and the ambulance men. “And your friend Mr. Contreras is waiting anxiously down the hall. He stayed here all night, with the dog, totally against hospital policy, but the two of you are well matched -stubborn, pigheaded, with only one allowable way to do things-your own.”
“Pot calling the kettle black, Lotty,” I said unrepentantly, lying down. “And don’t tell me the dog didn’t stay here with your connivance. Or at least Max’s.”
I frowned and bit off my words, remembering my last conversation with the hospital’s executive director. Lotty looked at me sympathetically.
“Yes, Max also wants to talk to you. He is feeling a bit remorseful. And that is no doubt why the dog spent the night in the hospital. But she must go home now, so if you will tell your tiresome neighbor you’re going to live to tilt at more windmills, we’ll get them to leave. Meanwhile, since your brain is no worse than usual, I’ll get someone to take that needle out of you.”
She whirled off at her usual forty knots. Mr. Contreras came in a minute or two later, his eyes filled with tears, his hands shaking a little. I swung my feet over the side of the bed and held out my arms to him.
“Oh, cookie, I’m never gonna forget the way we found you yesterday. More dead than alive, you was. And that young snot not believing you could be down there and me having to practically knock him out before he’d drive us. And then I couldn’t get the nurses here to tell me anything about how you was doing, I kept asking and asking and they wouldn’t say because I wasn’t family. Me, not your family. Who has more right, I’d like to know, I says to them, some cousin in Melrose Park who don’t even send her a Christmas card, or me who saved her life. But Dr. Lotty showed up and straightened it all out, her and Mr. Loewenthal between them, and put me and the dog in an empty room down the hall from you, but we had to promise not to disturb you.”
He pulled a giant red handkerchief from a back pocket and blew his nose loudly. “Well, all’s well that ends well, and I gotta take her highness home and feed her, but don’t go telling me to mind my own business anymore, cookie, not when you got guys like this on your case.”
I thanked him as best I could, giving him a tight hug and a kiss. After he left I lay back down again, cursing my lack of stamina. Lotty wanted me to stay here another day-she said I wouldn’t rest if I went off on my own. She was right: I was already in a pretty fretful state, made more irritable by my sore shoulder muscles. But she’d thrown out all my clothes and wasn’t going to bring me any more until Friday morning.
As it turned out, most of the people I would have tried to see came to visit me, along with a few I could just as well have done without, such as the police. Lieutenant Mallory arrived in person, a sign not of my importance but of his angry concern-angry because I should have stayed clear of police business, concern because he’d been close to both my parents.
“Vicki, put yourself in my place for a change. One of your oldest friends dies and every time you turn around his only kid is thumbing her nose at you. How do you think I feel?”
“I know how you feel; you’ve told me six billion times,” I said churlishly. I hate having to talk to people in a hospital gown-it’s like you’re a kid in bed and they’re tucking you in for the night.