Where You Once Belonged(39)

“What’s wrong? Is it Toni?”

“It doesn’t look very good.”

“You mean she’s badly hurt?”

Willard didn’t say anything.

“Tell me,” I said. “Is she badly hurt?”

“You better come down to the hospital. I don’t know how to tell you this.”

“You mean it’s worse than that.”

Willard looked at me quickly. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then there wasn’t anything more to say. He turned and walked off the porch. But he stopped again and turned back. “I’ll wait for you in the car. If you want me to.”

I stood watching him a moment. He walked on out to the county’s blue police car where it was parked at the curb and got in and closed the door quietly and then sat waiting with his hands on the steering wheel, looking straight ahead out through the windshield. I couldn’t move yet. It was cool outside on the porch. There was a slight breeze blowing. The stars were very high and clear overhead. Oh, god. Finally I went back upstairs to tell Nora.

She was awake, sitting up in the bed in her nightgown. Her hair appeared very black against her nightgown and her pale shoulders. “Who was it?” she said.

“Dale Willard.”

“What did he want? Doesn’t he have something to do with the police?”

“He’s the deputy sheriff.”

“What did he want?”

“It’s about Toni,” I said. “She’s at the hospital. He said Toni’s been hurt.”

“No,” Nora said. “Oh no. No.”

She didn’t say anything more. Her eyes widened and then narrowed, and her lips moved, but there was no other sound now. She seemed to be holding herself from any further display of emotion. She got dressed and we went downstairs.

Outside Dale Willard was still sitting in the county police car in front of our house.

“Do you want to ride with him?” I said. “He’s waiting for us.”

Nora shook her head.

So I walked over to the car and told him we would drive ourselves. We got into our own car and drove to the hospital. The streets were empty and quiet and the houses were all dark, but Dale Willard followed us anyway. I believe he felt responsible for seeing that we got there safely.

At the hospital one of the nurses met us at the back entrance and showed us into a waiting room. Then she left. In a moment Dr. Martin came in and we stood up while he told us about it. One of the other kids in a car driving home from the party half an hour later had discovered them. Toni and the Pohlmeier boy had left the party together, at about two-thirty, and apparently he was driving too fast and he had gotten over too far onto the loose sand at the side of the country road. Then he must have tried too quickly to correct it—the car had rolled over four or five times. They couldn’t be sure how many times it had rolled over, but when it had stopped it was in the barrow ditch, upside down. There was glass everywhere and the roof was smashed down level with the hood and trunk.

“Where is Toni now?” I said.

Dr. Martin ignored that for the moment. He went on. He said he thought that Danny Pohlmeier was going to live. There was a good chance of it, he said. He was a healthy young boy. It was too soon to tell, though. They were making arrangements to fly him to Denver.

“Where is Toni?” I said.

Dr. Martin looked at Nora. “We have your daughter in a room just down the hall here. But I don’t think she suffered. It was too sudden. I feel certain she didn’t suffer.”

“Where is she? We want to see her.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“Yes,” I said. “We want to see her.”

He looked at Nora again. She was standing very rigidly, watching him. “Very well,” he said.

I took Nora’s arm and we followed Dr. Martin down the hallway to one of the rooms in the emergency area. Inside on an examining table there was a small figure with a white sheet pulled over it.

“We want to be alone now,” I said.

Dr. Martin took my hand and pressed it and put his arm around Nora’s shoulders. He was going to say something more but evidently thought better of it. He went out and shut the door.

After he was gone Nora lifted the sheet. We could see Toni’s poor face then. Her black hair was matted at the side of her head and her face was swollen and discolored. Her eyes were only half-shut. Her face had been badly cut up and she had bled from the nose and mouth. There was dried blood in her nostrils and there was more blood at the corners of her mouth.

“Oh god,” I said. “That’s enough, Nora. Put it back now. Jesus god.”

But Nora lifted the sheet so that she could see all of Toni’s body. They had cut her clothes off. Our daughter looked very small and broken. Nora moved her fingers gently over the bruised arms and then she walked over to the counter and pulled a Kleenex from a box and moistened it with her tongue so she could removed the dried blood from Toni’s mouth. She bent and kissed the forehead and put the sheet back.

After that we went home again. It was beginning to be daylight now. And later in the morning John Baker, who owned the mortuary, came to the house and we made the arrangements for the funeral. A couple of days later Toni was buried in the Holt County Cemetery northeast of town.

It was a large funeral; all of her friends from school were there and many of their parents and various townspeople. There were a great many flowers at the altar of the church. The minister spoke and there was some music, I remember, and afterward, at the cemetery, after the brief prayers and rites, people filed past us to shake our hands while we stood in the shade under the green awning at the gravesite. For the funeral John Baker had done what he could with Toni’s face, but it was not recognizable. It was merely the mask of a dead child, caked with powder and waxen-looking. So we had not permitted the casket to be opened and we had not allowed anyone to view her at the mortuary in the evenings before the funeral. When it was all finished and everyone had driven away, Nora and I went home again to a house that seemed utterly quiet. None of the public ceremonies had helped.