Crazy for Cornelia (23 page)

“I’m going to drive you home,” she yelled, deciding to take Fifth Avenue against the traffic. She might get into trouble if
a cop stopped her. But this was an emergency.

“Peggy, turn,” she shouted. The horse balked at first, but Roni yanked the reins, a battle of wills.

Peggy started the wrong way up Fifth. Roni imagined how troubled Peggy would be to see the long stone wall of Central Park
now on his left, when he knew it was supposed to be on his right. He would perform this senseless duty for her, but might
pay her back with a nip delivered days later when she didn’t expect it. When they returned to the stable, she would make amends
and give Peggy a sugar treat as well as a hug around the strong muscles of his neck. He would deserve it.

Lifting his ears peevishly, Peggy worked up to a steady trot.

The Panda limousine spun out a few feet at the corner of 67th Street, heading downtown on Fifth.

“Slow down, Mike,” Chester shouted, the glass partition muffling his voice. The Panda drove atrociously in snow, bucking from
side to side like a covered wagon. Fifth Avenue seemed especially treacherous.

Chester stewed in misery. Thanks to him, Cornelia had broken down in a way he could not have believed possible. He tormented
himself with her display of anger and, well, insanity. No other word described it. His little girl broke his heart as, clearly,
he had broken hers.

His chest suddenly heaved with difficult breaths. An anxiety attack? No. His brain signaled a physical danger ahead.

Through the windshield covered with sticky white frosting, a black apparition came at them, something from another time. Chester
pressed his face against the glass. A horse trotted toward them and, behind the horse, a crazy woman stood on the prow of
a hansom carriage. Yes. A woman with curly hair that flew out from under a top hat. She steered the horse directly at them.

“Mike, for God’s sake, watch out.”

“Yes, sir.” He slowed down. Then headlights lit up Chester’s back window.

They veered over as a yellow taxi, driving much too fast, barreled past them.

Mike hunched over the wheel honking the horn. He flashed his brights, trying to warn the cab driver about the horse carriage.
Then Chester saw the taxi’s red taillights brighten, the driver obviously jamming on the brakes as the yellow cab lunged toward
the horse.

Chester’s heart banged in his rib cage as he saw the horse rear up, front legs windmilling, trapped in the taxi’s headlights.
The driver of the carriage seemed unable to control him.

The Panda limousine swayed. Chester tried to grip on to something, sliding across the rear seat as the car weaved on the ice.
He saw the taxi barely miss the body of the carriage, but its steel, bull-bar bumper tore through both of the wooden wheels.

He heard the terrible shrieking of metal splintering wood. The tearing of the fragile wooden wheels sent kindling-sized pieces
flying into the windshield of Chester’s limousine.

They had sped past the accident now, Mike trying to brake in the slush, while Chester looked back to see the carriage tumble
on its side, throwing up a massive wave of white like a snowplow. The driver’s gangly black frame fell off into the snow and
seemed to somersault, like a paratrooper landing.

As the carriage scraped along the ground spraying sparks in the haze of flying snow, Chester could make out a bundle of horse
blanket rolling onto the street from the carriage.

“Shit,” Mike yelled. He stuck his head out the window. Ahead, the taxi stopped and its driver threw open his door and ran
back to the scene.

Chester grabbed at the car door, something awful overcoming him. The hansom driver struggled onto her feet and looked at her
broken carriage. He focused, for a reason that he could not explain, on the
odd bundle in the street that looked like an old Scottish plaid blanket, like one he used to share on the beach with Elizabeth
and Cornelia, those comfortable old picnic blankets covered with sand and smelling faintly of tuna sandwiches. But this, he
felt with a vile tug on his chest, was a very bad blanket indeed. He needed desperately to see what was inside it.

“Mike, go back.”

As Mike obediently shifted into reverse and gunned the engine, the car began fishtailing.

“Oh, God, be careful.” Chester stared out the rear window, transfixed at the bundle in the snow that now glowed in his limousine’s
backup lights.

Time slowed for Chester, unbearably so, as the bundle began kicking like a giant beanbag. His limousine was skidding backward
toward it. Whoever struggled inside would be run over by his vehicle.

Then an arm stuck out of the blanket.

“Cornelia!” Chester yelled.

K
evin held the big black umbrella to protect Mrs. Stern while he helped her out of the back seat of her Rolls.

The car smelled musty, a curvy black-over-burgundy sort of antique with cloth seats and bud vases. Mrs. Stern’s chauffeur
held the car door while Kevin gave the scowling matriarch his arm, so he could drag her up and out like a heavy sack of sable
and diamonds. Her fingers were strong, a wrinkled condor’s claw seizing his arm. He lifted her up onto the patch of sidewalk
he’d swept free of snow, then escorted her toward the lobby, angling the umbrella to keep the blizzard from knocking her down.

He heard a horse snort, a car horn. Then brutal sounds of destruction, metal on wood, from Fifth Avenue. He gaped out through
the snow. Taillights lit up a horse in red. It reared up before an old carriage lying on its side.

Then his eyes came to rest on a bundle lying on the street. His heart skipped as a woman’s arm shot out, grasping to find
purchase in the slush. He sensed that it would be Cornelia Lord. The flaky Cinderella had smashed her own pumpkin. Then he
saw a limousine careen through the slush, ready to back up over her.

He shook off Mrs. Stern’s claw and began running toward the body in Fifth Avenue. Hitting a patch of ice, he took a skipping
dive
on the curb, landing on the icy street scraping his hands. A face stuck out from the bundle only nine feet away, and it was
Cornelia’s tiny nose and straw-colored hair. The backup lights from the limousine sickeningly lit her face and the snow around
her. She tried to pull herself out of the heavy blanket twisted around her and inch toward the curb.

“Stop,” Kevin yelled at the limousine. He tried to stand up but couldn’t, and began scuttling toward her on his knees in the
slushy street.

Cornelia’s eyes bulged like a trapped puppy’s, terrified but unable to act.

He hauled his body up off his knees and lunged for her outstretched arm, felt the cold flesh of her fingers, pulled her forward.
Her bare legs kicked back at the tangled blanket. But not fast enough. The limousine, out of control, plowed directly toward
her. He could actually see the tread of the spinning tire that would crush the leg now flailing helplessly from the blanket.

Kevin’s lungs exploded as he bent way forward, grasped the blanket that held her, and lunged backward.

He’d done it.

Not exactly a heroic save, Kevin thought, seeing her body lying in a jumble beside the car lumbering past, but it worked.

Then something cold and hard as a steel hammer whacked Kevin from behind. He heard the sound of slapping meat, and his ear
and shoulder suddenly felt as detached from his body as if they’d moved to some other borough. He saw the limousine’s side-mirror
rip off on his shoulder and go flying over his head, landing in the snow. Blood roared and pounded in the artery in his neck.

His shoulder might have come off, too. He wasn’t sure. He stayed on his knees, looking for his arm, and found it right where
it belonged, but with pins and needles jabbing through. He saw Cornelia Lord wriggle out of the blanket. It dragged behind
her like a bridal train as she ran toward him.

Everything seemed otherworldly now. The limousine swung away after sideswiping him, and plowed broadside into the street sign
on the corner of 65th Street. When it hit, the center of the stretched-out
sedan cracked on impact. He watched the limousine snap exactly in half against the pole, like a child’s toy.

The front end of the limousine threw sparks and stopped first, with its hood jacked up and headlights turned up illuminating
the snowflakes. The rear half kept running, like a detached nervous system. Then it dug into a mound of slush and stopped
dead.

Kevin heard cursing, astonishing in its venom. He turned to watch the carriage driver yelling and banging on the front half
of the limousine.

Cornelia Lord’s fingers clutched at his sleeve. She was trying to help him. Her velvet dress looked grubby like a refugee’s,
her pantyhose torn on her legs. She cried as she touched him, her hands frozen and her lips open and fearful. But not for
her, for him. Kevin struggled up and they helped each other to the sidewalk. He tasted his own blood. She seemed to move well,
not limping.

He wondered if she would walk inside and leave him bleeding.

He saw Philip Grace and, in the totally irrational way of accident victims, focused on the reporter’s new coat of pewter leather.
It zipped across his mind that Cornelia Lord had bought it for him, in an indirect way. Philip led three other stalkarazzi
on a charge toward them. Camera lights went pop, pop, pop. Flashes and floating blobs filled his eyes from the white explosions.

“You guys okay?” he heard Philip shout.

Kevin squeezed Cornelia’s hand tightly and led her toward the front door. They held each other up, panting. Philip and the
stalkarazzi followed. Now under the awning of 840 Fifth, Vlad the Self-Impaler appeared. He gently took Cornelia’s arm and
tried to draw her inside the lobby door.

“Wait,” she told Vlad.

She squirmed away from Vlad’s grip and turned to Kevin. “Are you all right?”

His ear throbbed mercilessly; it felt like a searing knife tearing through his rib cage and right arm.

“Yeah,” he said. “What about you?”

She looked at his ear and tears appeared on her cheeks. She reached down and scooped up a handful of fresh snow from the side-walk,
rolled it into a snowball. Then she touched his ear with it, very gently.

“Kevin Doyle,” she spoke softly.

The pain and shock gripped him. “I used to be.”

He stared at the girl’s liquid eyes and his heart skipped. The tender way she treated his wound made his chest feel full,
until he felt the pain very little. He wanted to put his arm around Cornelia Lord, deb escapee, and try to protect her some
more.

“Miss Lord, come inside and get warm,” Vlad the Self-Impaler begged. He took her arm again with his white glove.

She shrugged it off. “No, thank you.”

Kevin used only his right arm, which didn’t seem hurt, to slip his doorman coat off and wrap it around Cornelia, now trembling
violently in her skimpy wet dress.

Life began to turn red and blue, with sirens.

The first police car swerved into the curb and some officers jumped out in a hurry. Then more blue and white cruisers slid
in behind them. He heard whoop-whoops and hi-lo bleats, saw grim-looking men and women in uniform.

“Where’s the woman you called about?” a police officer asked Vlad.

“Here,” he pointed.

“I’m fine, but this man’s hurt,” Cornelia told the officer, still holding the melting snowball to Kevin’s ear. “He needs a
doctor.”

Kevin felt as remote as a spectator in the very last row. His vision had turned into a single wobbly lens thrown out of whack
and unfocused. A red film formed over the circle. He began to see people around him as more horizontal than vertical. Philip
Grace grabbed him before he could fall down, then Philip and Cornelia held him up between them and moved him toward the police
car.

“Officers,” Philip spoke like the police were derelict. “Get these people to a hospital. This here’s Cornelia Lord. And this
young man just threw himself in harm’s way to save her life.”

“Okay,” the older cop said, “get in the car.”

The back seat of the police car released a blast of previous-perp body odor, strong as animal fear. The police officer packed
Cornelia
and Kevin carefully inside. Then Grace hopped in, closing the door behind him.

“All accounted for,” Grace announced.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Kevin asked him.

Grace banged on the Plexiglas partition. “Our hero’s rantin’ and losin’ consciousness back here.”

The officer behind the wheel whipped the car out of the nest of blue and white police cruisers onto Fifth Avenue, siren wailing.
As they sped down the avenue, weaving around the hulking remains of the carriage and the limousine like some war-torn city,
Kevin saw Tucker Fisk jogging in a tuxedo, his face and hair dripping wet.

“There’s your boyfriend,” he weakly told Cornelia. “Looks like he missed the carriage. You want to tell him you’re okay?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Thank you so much for what you did, Kevin.”

She took his hand in both of her palms, now warm, and smiled directly into his eyes, only glancing occasionally at the top
of his head while they sped to the hospital.

He wondered why, jogging through the storm in a tuxedo to find his runaway girlfriend, Tucker Fisk had been grinning.

In his traumatized funk, Chester clung with both hands to the hand grip in the rear half of the broken Panda. He looked out
the ragged cave mouth made by the destruction of his car, which had torn away the facing seat along with the driver’s compartment.

“Jeez, I’m sorry, Mr. Lord.” Mike the driver stood just outside the cave looking in, trying to coax him out. Then police officers
pushed Mike aside, bending down to throw their flashlight beams in to see Chester. The lights blinded him. The carcass of
the half-limousine shook as two officers climbed in to help him out.

“Where’s Cornelia?”

“She’s on her way to the hospital,” a young cop told him.

He let go of the hand grip, and began sliding down, until the officers grabbed him and frog-walked him out so he wouldn’t
bump his head.