I insisted on trying to stand, and so Sebastian got on one side with Pallace on the other and together they lifted me like a marionette whose string had been cut. My leg was rubbery, almost liquid. “I need to rest it for a minute,” I said.
Sebastian shook his head. “You need to go to the hospital.”
“She doesn’t need to go to the hospital,” Duke said, his voice clearer now. “She just tripped on her tiny feet. Give her a minute.”
He had vomited and I had fallen and in just a minute, everything would be fine.
A minute, a minute, a minute. I could feel Pallace shifting beneath my arm. “Let’s put her down,” she said to Sebastian.
And so they sat me down again and Pallace sat beside me. She looked at me hard but kept hold of my hand. “I wish we had more time,” she said. “But we don’t so I’m just going to say it: You’re not going on tonight, and I’m going to have to go get ready.”
Emily. I had forgotten her.
Duke was sitting up now. “What?”
“She can’t walk.” Pallace looked at Duke like maybe I had been shot and maybe he was the one who’d shot me. “She’s not going to be able to walk. I’ve seen this happen.” She looked at Sebastian. “Have you seen this happen?”
He nodded, the sun behind his head lighting up his black hair.
Pallace touched her finger to my ankle so lightly I couldn’t feel it. “It doesn’t matter if you go to the hospital right this minute or if you wait three days, I’m telling you the truth. You’re going to go to the hospital and they’re going to sew your tendon back on. Like it or not, I can pretty much promise you that’s the way this is going to go.”
Now Duke was on his feet, leaning noticeably to the left as he came towards us. I expected him to make a joke, to say that Pallace was scheming for my part, but instead he leaned over and patted my head. He asked his brother if he could drive me to the hospital. Duke and Pallace wouldn’t be able to come with us, of course. They had to get cleaned up. They had to be onstage in a couple of hours, the two of them, Editor Webb and his daughter Emily.
Sebastian leaned over and picked me up like a towel, a tennis bag, and again, I waited for Duke to make a joke but he didn’t. Maybe he was already Editor Webb, maybe he was going over his notebooks in his mind, or maybe he was worried about me, I guess it was possible, maybe he didn’t know what to say. The parking lot where Sebastian left his car was nowhere near the tennis courts and so he carried me, past the path that went down to the lake and past the path that would have taken us back to the theater. He carried me all the way to the company housing. Would Duke have carried me under different circumstances? No, Duke would have gone and gotten the car. That was the difference: One brother would take the girl to the car while the other would bring the car to the girl. It was such a strange sensation to be carried, to be so high up. I looped my arms around Sebastian’s neck and gripped my wrist, trying to somehow make myself lighter. I could smell my own sweat. Pallace went ahead to get my purse and came back with the nightgown I hadn’t worn all summer, two pairs of underpants, socks, a clean T--shirt and shorts, hairbrush, toothbrush, all in a plastic bag.
“Don’t worry about anything, okay? It’s going to be fine,” she said once I was settled in the passenger seat of the Plymouth.
I nodded, though I didn’t know if she was talking about my leg or the play. I knew she was anxious to get away from us. She had so much to do, and if she was excited—-and she would have been excited, wouldn’t she? after so much waiting around—-she wouldn’t have wanted me to see it. Duke and Pallace stood beside one another and waved as we drove off, like they were my parents sending me into the world.
I rolled down the window, my mind remarkably blank. I understood what was happening but not that it was happening to me. The cherry trees at Tom Lake were shaggy and didn’t have much fruit; feral cherry trees left over from some other time. No one bothered to pick them, much less prune them. “What do you know about the Achilles tendon?” I asked Sebastian.
“Can you flex your foot back then point your toe?”
I could not.
He nodded as if that were the entire conversation. “I played mixed doubles once with a woman who swore I’d sliced the back of her calf with my racquet even though I was nowhere near her. From what I’ve been told, it feels like something exploded inside your leg.”
“That’s it.”
“So they’ll reattach the tendon, and after a while you’ll walk again, and a while after that you’ll play tennis again.” He looked over at me. “If you ever want to play tennis again. I’ll tell you, you were killing it today.”
“Damn it,” I said, closing my eyes.
“What?”
“I forgot to tell Pallace good luck for tonight. I don’t mean good luck. I mean ‘break a leg.’？”
“You mean, ‘rupture your Achilles’，” he said, and we both laughed because what else was there to do?
16
“Daddy would have taken you to the hospital,” Nell says that night at dinner. She will not let this new turn go.
“Daddy would most certainly have taken you to the hospital,” Joe says. He is tired. He is grateful for the deviled eggs and green beans and the whitefish. Every year since we first came to the farm he’s wondered how we’ll get the cherries off the trees in time, and now it seems all of his previous fears were in preparation for this year when we’re down dozens of picking crew, which of course means we’ll be down dozens to shake the tarts off the trees in a few weeks.
“Maybe you passed each other on the road,” Emily says. “Dad coming down from Traverse City, Mom on her way to the hospital. You might have. You would have been going north on 196.”
“We did pass you!” I say, flush with memory. “I told you that.”
“You most certainly did not.” Joe pops half an egg in his mouth.
“I said it to Sebastian. I said, ‘Look, there goes the Stage Manager on his way to ‘work.’？” I remember how much I wanted to tell him to turn around. My leg was just a dull ache by then. Sitting on the wide bench seat of the Plymouth it was easy to believe it had all been a silly bit of drama on my part.
“How did anyone survive without cellphones?” Maisie asks.
“We survived very nicely.”
Joe nods. “I can believe it. Our entire relationship was like that back in the day.”
“Two cars passing in the late afternoon,” I say.
“Did you go see her in the hospital?” Nell asks.
“I was only there two nights,” I say.
“I came,” he says.
“No you didn’t.” I turn to him. “Did you?”
“After the play, on my way back here.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember because you were asleep. You’d just gotten out of surgery.”
“You came after the play? It must have been too late for visitors. They let you in?”
“I told them I was your brother and that I’d come as fast as I could. The nurse let me sit by your bed.”