Slowly thoughts emerged, one by one. What happened? Was it bad? How had I fallen? Where was I? Had I tripped over Sambo?
No, I hadn’t. I’d stood, and my leg had given out below me.
With meticulous and tiny movements, I crawled across the wooden floor.
You can do this.
Slowly.
You have to get help.
Don’t panic.
Flames licked the inside of my thigh. I took long, deep breaths, but they caught in my throat and escaped as sobs against my will. I battled the mental fog of pain, struggling to think whom to call. I needed someone near, someone to come get me.
Kay. She was close by, only a block away. I finally reached the edge of the table. I couldn’t stand for the phone, so I grabbed its dark, hairy cord and yanked it to the floor. It banged and clattered, scaring Sambo to lurch across the room with a loud meow. In what seemed like slow motion, I dialed Kay’s number and waited through four long desperate rings for her to answer.
“Help me,” was all I said.
CHAPTER 50
What will come of me
After the fern has feathered from my brain
“YET ONE MORE SPRING,” JOY DAVIDMAN
My eyelids felt as heavy as granite, and I lifted them as if pushing a rock up Shotover Hill. In blurred vision I saw white curtains and glimmering steel, and I squinted against the glare. Where was I? The bed was hard and small, the pillow flat beneath my head as I lay supine. Somewhere far off, or was it close by? There was metal clanging against metal and the whispered voices of the serious. Cotton gauze covered my thoughts, and my brain wouldn’t fire. Had I drunk too much? Was this a hangover?
Polished tile floors.
Fluorescent lights too bright.
I attempted to move, only slightly, when the pain arrowed from my hip in both directions—down my leg and across to my groin. An involuntary cry erupted, and I remembered everything in one flash: Kay and Austin squealing onto High Street to carry me to bed. Kay whispering that it was she who had been calling when I fell—a premonition that something was amiss. I’d had a fitful and harrowing night swallowing the leftover codeine from my dental work and never dulling the pain. At sunrise the ambulance was called and roared in to transport me to Wingfield Orthopaedic Hospital. The X-rays and needles, the crying out, and the blessed and blissful absence of pain when the medicine soared through my veins.
With my cry a nurse appeared, her white cap a swan in flight at Jack’s pond.
“Mrs. Gresham,” the nurse said quietly. “I see you’re awake.”
“Where is the doctor? I need to know what’s wrong.” My logical mind burst like a flash through the fog: Diagnose. Solve. Fix.
“You have a broken leg,” she said in the weirdly placid voice of one trying to keep a hysterical person calm.
“I know that part.” My voice was shattered, fragile as the remainder of me. Someone had plaited my hair into two braids, and they fell over my shoulders with white ribbons at the ends. I had never worn my hair this way, and the omen seemed morbid—I was no longer myself. The blanket over my left leg was tented, a metal cage below to keep the fabric from resting on the broken bones.
“Did I have surgery?” I asked.
“No, but the doctor will be in soon to speak with you.”
She inserted a syringe filled with golden fluid into my upper arm, and I did nothing but watch her push in the needle, a distracted observer waiting only for the relief. What did Jack say about pain? God’s megaphone to the world.
Well, God, I’m listening.
Then their names roared through my mind like twin lions: Davy. Douglas.
They were thirteen and eleven by then. Had anyone called them? Did they know I’d broken my leg? Where was Jack? Didn’t Kay call him at Cambridge?
I turned my head to the window that ran the full length of the wall. Outside shimmered the glorious idyllic autumn of England. The views weren’t any less beautiful than those from Jack’s rooms, as the hospital was on Oxford’s campus. The expansive green lawn, flowers crowding one another for attention, and roses so pink they seemed painted. But inside the room—metal and plastic, poles and sterile chairs of steel with the lingering stench of alcohol and vomit.
A great rustling came from the doorway, and my muddled thoughts wondered if they were bringing me a roommate. I turned my head slowly to see Jack rush through the door. He wore a wrinkled black suit; his tie was askew; his face was slack with fear.
“Jack!” My voice broke. I’d known it all along, but seeing him run through that door, his hair windblown, his eyes on me, I loved him as deeply as any man I’d known.