The Light Through the Leaves(121)

“Who told you this?”

“Dad called me. He said Raven told the hospital to call him.”

“Is River okay?”

“I think it’s bad. He’s in the emergency room.”

Keith insisted on driving. When they arrived at the stretch of Route 441 that crossed the prairie, they saw flashing lights on the other side of the road. Squad cars and a tow truck, police directing people around the scene of an accident.

“Is that where they crashed?” Ellis asked.

“I don’t know,” Jasper said. “I don’t see our car over there.”

Keith dropped them off at the emergency room entrance and went to park the car.

A doctor met Ellis and Jasper at the emergency room desk. “You’re the mother of River Bauhammer and Raven Lind?” she asked.

“Yes. And this is their brother, Jasper. Did they both survive the accident?”

“So far, yes. River’s situation is critical, but he’s stabilized.”

“I want to see him!” Jasper said.

“I know. But we’re working on him.”

“Doing what?” Ellis asked.

“The collision caused the car to roll over. It landed in water deep enough to submerge it.”

Paynes Prairie. The accident they’d passed. Since the last big hurricane came inland, the water in the prairie had been deep.

“Your daughter probably saved River’s life. He was unconscious, and she pulled him out of the car as it sank. But he wasn’t breathing. He was under for at least a minute, and he has a head injury.”

“Oh my god,” Jasper said. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

“Two bystanders were able to resuscitate him at the scene,” the doctor said. “That’s good. We don’t think he was without oxygen for more than a few minutes.”

“Is he awake?” Ellis asked.

“He’s in a coma. We’re trying to determine the extent of the brain injury.”

“He’s breathing on his own?”

“He is. Does he have substance abuse problems that you know of?”

Ellis suspected he did, and Jasper confirmed.

“His blood has a high percentage of alcohol. Also narcotics. Raven verified he’d drunk whiskey and used cocaine before the accident.”

“Where is she?” Ellis asked. “Is she okay?”

“I can’t say for sure. She’s a bit banged up, but she refuses to let us touch her. Literally. She says we’re going to put drugs in her and hook her up to machines that will kill her. Were you aware that she has this phobia?”

“No, but I know where it came from,” Ellis said.

“Some of that can come from shock,” the doctor said. “Maybe you two can convince her to let us give her a sedative and examine her injuries.”

Ellis doubted that. Raven was one to hold fast to her beliefs. She’d gotten a double dose of that trait, one from nature, the other from nurture.

The doctor took them to a room down the hall. Ellis hadn’t expected her daughter to look so bad. She was curled in a ball on the floor, leaning against a wall in the corner. She was barefoot, her damp hair and dress streaked with mud. Drying wetland plants hung all over her. She looked like a pitiful aquatic creature that had been hauled up in a net and thrown ashore.

Raven removed her arms from her head when she heard them come in. She almost cried when she looked at Ellis, but her relief was overshadowed by her apparent mistrust of the doctor.

“We’d like privacy,” Ellis told the doctor.

The doctor nodded, closing the door as she left.

Ellis couldn’t help it. A profound ache of maternal love she hadn’t known was still there propelled her toward this girl who would never call her Mother. She took Raven in her arms and pressed her to her chest. Raven sobbed against her.

Jasper wrapped his arms around his sister from behind. “Thank you for saving River,” he said. “Thank you.”

Jasper’s crying prompted Ellis’s tears. What a strange weeping lump of a family they were. Abbey, Lind, Bauhammer. Not one name in common. Not one experience shared for sixteen years. Suddenly knotted together more by pain than blood.

“I want to see River!” Raven wept. “They won’t let me.”

Ellis held her out in her arms. “They have to do tests.”

“We have to watch what they do. They might kill him.”

“We have to trust them. I know you were raised to be afraid of hospitals, but River needs treatment right now. We’ll see him soon.”

“I’m so scared he’s going to die!” she said. “I tried to keep his head out of the water. I tried. But he went under. He wasn’t breathing when they took him out.”

“You saved him,” Jasper said. “The doctor said you did.”

“The people who breathed into him saved him,” she said.

“They couldn’t have done that if he’d gone down with the car,” Jasper said.

“I shouldn’t have let him drive,” she wept. “He was drinking. He used cocaine. I could tell he wasn’t right. But I thought if I watched him drive, nothing bad would happen.”

Ellis thought of those many times she’d driven while under the influence of drugs. What a terrible risk she’d taken, and not only with her own life.