The Forgotten Hours(89)
David was there when Katie woke up. He was sitting in the corner, in a chair by a large window, leafing through a paperback. The reading light struck him at an angle, dividing his face into knife edges. “Davey,” she whispered. He jumped up and tapped furiously into his cell phone.
“Katie, Katie!” he said, leaning over her. His cheeks were sunken, bearded. He looked ten years older. “Promise me you’ll never do that crazy-ass shit ever again.”
“What did I do?” she said, but he only shook his head.
Her mother came rushing in, a gauzy scarf unraveling from her neck. She took Katie’s head gently in her hands and brought her face close. Pale ginger freckles softened the wrinkles that crisscrossed her skin. “Sweetheart, we were so worried,” she said. “How do you feel? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Katie said. “I think.”
“Honey, do you know . . .” Her mother looked at David, and he shrugged.
Katie screwed her eyes shut. The baby! She had been pregnant. Now she was in a hospital, and everyone’s face was racked with pain. “Is Zev here?” she whispered. “I want Zev.”
“He’s coming,” David said. “He’s just showering. He’s been here four days straight.”
She opened her eyes and gazed, stunned, around the hospital room. “Where am I?”
“Mount Sinai,” Charlie said. “We’re in New York.”
“Mum,” she said, hot tears spilling onto her cheeks. “What happened?”
“You were in an accident,” David said. “Your leg was . . . you got run over.”
“Oh God . . .”
“Honey, I’m so sorry about everything. I want to tell you—David and I’ve been talking. I thought I was doing the right thing! Protecting you. It’s how I was brought up, to keep quiet, you see? To keep moving. And . . . and I thought—I just really couldn’t see how talking about it would help.”
Katie’s head hurt. “I don’t understand.”
“He wasn’t a bad man, not really,” her mother said.
A shot of alarm buzzed through Katie’s clouded brain. “What are you saying?”
“Did anyone tell you about your father, darling?” Charlie asked.
“No,” Katie said. “What?” One leg was in a cast from her ankle to above her knee. Her right hand was purple and red, the skin of her palm shredded, covered in a glistening ointment. Her head was pounding from the drugs.
“Do you remember being at the cabin?” her mother asked.
The cabin . . . the car. Her father getting into the Falcon. “Where is Dad?” Katie asked, struggling to sit up, her heart galloping.
The New York State troopers chased John Gregory from Blackbrooke up toward 209 North and then onto the highway. Their lights were flashing, but he didn’t appear to notice them. He wove in and out of the traffic in a way that would not have raised suspicion had they not been notified about the accident. Around mile marker 47 at exit 19, the Ford Falcon was in the middle lane, and just as he was about to pass the exit, he swerved violently to the right and took the off-ramp, bumping over the grass. The troopers were going too fast to take the turn and were forced to take the next exit instead. It was still raining heavily. They called in that they had lost him; another unit was on its way.
The second cruiser came up from the south and took the exit. It drove carefully because of the poor conditions. The sumac at the side of the highway was towering, and the first time the police drove along the bend, which merged rather sharply with the local road, they did not see anything amiss. The second police vehicle lost him too; it drove aimlessly until a call came in from dispatch. A local resident said she’d seen smoke ten minutes earlier as she was driving to pick up groceries.
They scoured the area. Visibility was poor, and the rain would not let up. There were no brake marks along the road and no visible signs that they could detect from their vehicles. Now there were three cruisers on scene. They parked, lights flashing like a carnival, and six officers began walking along the curling edge of the road. Up close like that you could more easily see the tire dent in the sodden grass, the split in the wall of feathery sumac that had opened and closed and now provided a shield hiding the woods beyond from view. Officer Latcham flicked on his flashlight and saw instantly the broken twigs and branches.
About ten feet farther on had lain the Falcon, trunk high in the air on a berm of pine needles and rocks, nose accordioned into the trunk of a midsize pine tree, shearing off the left door, crumpling the body. The car made a faint hissing noise as water from the radiator leaked and evaporated on the warm metal. Inside the car was a man, badly injured. It was suspected he had been driving in excess of eighty-five miles an hour as he took the curve. Later they discovered that his alcohol level was three times the legal limit. It took considerable time for the emergency vehicles to reach the site, and the paramedics had trouble accessing the injured party. He was still alive but not responsive as they strapped him onto the gurney and wheeled him toward the waiting ambulance. It was a twenty-minute drive to the nearest trauma unit. The man had serious intra-abdominal injuries.
They did everything in their power to save him, but they were not successful.
What she remembered best months later, when she was finally fully healed, was that when Zev came into the hospital room, the world seemed to slow down—not as though it were stuck or stuttering but as though it had found its own unique rhythm and was slipping into a groove it could sustain. Life was chaotic, and there was pain and anger, but with Zev there, regarding her with the vastness of his pale, oceanic eyes, it seemed she could survive it. “The baby? What happened to the baby?” she breathed in his ear.