The Survivors (18 page)

Sarah's hands are shaking, vibrating; maybe it's from the cold, maybe it's from clenching the snowmobile grips for twenty minutes. Then her whole body starts to shiver.

“Come,” her mother says, leading her into the waiting room. Sarah plops down into a soft chair and lets out a long breath. Her dad sits with her, one arm tightly around her, while her mother goes to an office behind them to fill out paperwork.

“What about the Travelers thing?” Sarah whispers suddenly.

“Don't worry, your mother will take care of it. She's good at that kind of stuff,” her father says.

After several minutes a doctor comes out. “Miles Newell family?”

They all hurry over.

“He's going to be fine,” the doctor says. “But he has a broken ankle and probably a mild concussion. I'm waiting on the X-rays, but it's pretty clear that we'll need to operate on that ankle and put in a pin or two.”

Sarah and her parents all look at one another.

“You said a concussion?” Nat asks.

“Maybe. We want to be on guard for a closed-head injury. They're subtle and tricky, so we want to watch him closely for a couple of days.”

Sarah and her parents look at one another again.

“Any questions?” the doctor says.

“When will you operate on the ankle?” Art asks.

The doctor glances at his watch. “It'll have to be tomorrow morning. Right now we'll reposition the bones and get his pain under control. He'll be first up for the orthopod in the morning.”

“Thanks,” Nat says, but the doctor has already turned away.

They look around the waiting room.

“So what do we do now?” Sarah asks.

Artie's cheeks are red from the cold. “One of us should stay with Miles,” he says.

“We all should stay—tonight, I mean,” Sarah says. “We can camp out here in the waiting room, then in the morning after surgery decide what to do.”

“What about Emily? And Brush?” Nat asks. Her mother has taken a liking to the old dog and has been feeding him on the sly.

“They'll be all right for one night alone,” Sarah says.

“Okay, we'll stay,” her mother says.

They sink onto the couches. Stare at one another. Sarah leans closer to her mother. “Did you have any trouble with”—she lowers her voice—“our ‘address' thing?”

“None,” her mother says. “I brought it up right away, but they didn't care as long as we had an insurance policy number.”

“Do we?” Sarah asks dumbly.

“Yes, dear,” her mother says, smoothing Sarah's hair. “That's what parents do.”

“I know, I have helmet hair,” Sarah says, and leans away from her mother's touch.

“It's not that bad,” her mother says.

In the women's room she draws up with a jerk before the mirror. “Helmet hair” is an understatement. Some of her hair is wet and matted; some of it sticks out as if she has a giant tumor. It could use washing, too. With nothing else to do, she decides to take advantage of the hot water, liquid soap, and a hand dryer on the wall. She washes her hair in the sink, scrubs her face, and douses her armpits. When she returns to the lobby, her parents are tipped against each other on a couch and look half asleep. For some reason Sarah is not tired. She settles in with a
Celeb
magazine and catches up on entertainment gossip. Once she glances up at the soft
whirk-whirk-whirk
of a squeaky wheel on a janitor's cart, then returns to the magazine. Her main thought is how insane most women's magazines really are: All they do is make girls and women feel bad about themselves so they'll go out and buy beauty products.

“Sarah?” a boy's voice asks.

She looks up, startled. Pushing a sweeper, which he has paused in midstroke, is a dark-haired kid in white hospital pants and shirt. It's Ray.

ALL HAIL KING MORPHINE, OR
whatever the injection was. After the doctor pokes the inside of Miles's right arm, the pain in his ankle recedes. Leg grows longer and longer—carries his ankle away with it. Ten, twenty, fifty feet long—one amazing leg that stretches off the bed, down the hall, and through the door outside, where it disappears into the falling snow.

He's suddenly warm all over. Warm from the inside out. Floaty. He hears snatches of songs, trippy psychedelic bands from the 1960s … great time to have been alive … annoyed that he missed it. But he'd be like, a hundred years old right now. No, not one hundred. More like … He can't do the math. Concentrates, but he can't make the numbers stay still. Can't make them stay in columns that he can add and subtract. The numbers float around like lazy black flies—he grabs at them.

“Try to stay still,” a woman's voice says; her hands press his arms back down to the blankets.

“Headache,” he mumbles.

“I would think,” she says. “You cracked your helmet. You need to buy a better one next time.”

“Where am I?” Miles asks.

“The hospital. You had a snowmobile crash.”

He squints from side to side. Something about the room—maybe it's the smell—reminds him of Mr. Kurz's little room at Buena Vista Convalescent Home. The nurse leans over him and shines a penlight in his eyes. “Can you follow the little light for me one more time?”

“Sure,” Miles says, as if it's no big deal; but it takes all his energy to keep up with the slowly moving light. So easy to lose interest. Think of other things. He tries to focus and jerks his eyeballs back to the light.

“Concussed for sure,” the nurse murmurs to someone else.

“Let's get some more X-rays,” a man's voice says.

Miles can't see much of anything after the light beam clicks off; he closes his eyes. Floats in the warm bath of the painkiller. He can smell himself—he's overheated and suddenly wringing wet under the blanket. The same odor as Mr. Kurz's overly warm room at Buena Vista: old wool, sweat, woodsmoke.

“Hi again,” a cheerful voice says above Miles, and the spotlight shines in his eyes. “Could you tell me your name and date of birth?”

He shakes his head to clear it, but the fog doesn't go away. He works his lips to bring up the right words. “Name and birthday?”

“Yes.”

“Miles Kurz. February 29, 1920.”

“SARAH! WHAT ARE YOU DOING
here?” Ray asks.

“My brother!” she says. A sob rises halfway in her throat.

Ray is silent. It's as if he knows better than to ask certain questions in a hospital emergency room.

“Snowmobile accident. He has a broken ankle. Concussion maybe—but he's going to be all right,” she says quickly.

“That's great,” Ray answers just as quickly, with a glance around the emergency room lobby. “I mean, not great that it happened.”

Sarah nods and manages a small smile.

“But great that he's going to be okay. And great to see you! Jeez—,” he begins with a pained looked on his face.

Sarah glances over to her parents, both of whom are watching. “This is Ray. From school.”

They wave wearily.

Ray quickly steps over and shakes hands with them. “Ray O'Keefe. Sorry about the accident, but the doctors here are really good.”

“Thanks,” Nat and Artie say.

Ray returns and doesn't make a big deal about meeting her parents, which reminds Sarah of why she likes him: He doesn't think twice (or ten times) about things. He is not, like most eighth graders, terminally self-conscious.

“How long have you been here?” he asks.

“A couple of hours.”

He glances to the far side, then tilts his head that way; Sarah follows his squeaky sweeper. There's a corner where they're sort of alone—at least out of sight of her parents.

“So,” he begins with his killer smile.

Sarah can only smile back. He always makes her warm all over; her skin glows as if she's in the sauna. “So why'd I disappear from school?” she asks.

“Mackenzie said you were a Traveler,” Ray says. “She blabbed it all over school.”

“Great,” Sarah mutters.

Ray waits. “Well, are you?” he asks. “I mean, not that I care.”

Sarah hesitates—and then in a rush she tells him everything. Well, not everything, but the big things: about being from Minneapolis, about living in a cabin outside of town.

“I knew there was something interesting—something different about you.” Ray says.

“I'm going to finish eighth grade through the Alternative Education Center. I pick up my packets once a week, take them home, turn them in the next week. It's pretty boring, but at least I don't have to put up with Mackenzie and her friends.”

“I knew that, too,” Ray says.

“Knew what?”

“That she and her gang were not your crowd.”

“Yeah, well, now I don't have any crowd,” Sarah replies.

“Except me,” Ray says. He leans closer and touches her clean hair; he lifts it as if to feel its weight.

She swallows; her throat starts to close up.

“So Miles is going to be here a few days?” Ray asks.

“Looks that way.”

“How are you and your family going to do this? I mean, will you commute to your cabin? Stay in town?”

“I don't know,” she answers.

“How about tonight? Are you hanging here?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Rays says. “I get off at ten.”

“So?” Sarah says. She regains her wits now that Ray has stopped playing with her hair.

“So, I don't know,” Rays says. “Maybe we could hang out.”

“Here?” Sarah says.

“No,” Rays answers quickly. “There are places. Like Dave's Pizza. It's not that far away. You're probably hungry; we could bring some pizza back to your parents.”

“Do you always pick up hungry, vulnerable girls in the emergency room lobby?”

“It's my speciality,” Rays says.

“Okay. I'll talk to my parents,” she says.

“But I need to keep working right now,” Ray adds. “I'll see you back here in a couple of hours?”

She returns to her parents, says nothing for a while, and pretends to read a magazine while Ray sweeps the floor. When no adults are looking, he plants the sweeper with one hand, then pirouettes around it as if it's a prop in a cheesy dance musical. Sarah giggles.

Her mother blinks. “What?”

“Nothing,” Sarah answers. Across the lobby, Ray now works the sweeper in routine strokes, though with a glance toward Sarah.

“Tell me about this Ray,” Nat says.

Sarah colors slightly; her mother has great radar. Sarah gives her the full story—about school, how they met on her first day. “And he wants to get a pizza with me when he gets off work,” she finishes in a blurt. “We'd bring some back to you....”

“Pizza sounds great,” her dad says; she didn't think he was awake.

The two hours until ten
P.M
. are longer than any day at the cabin. She goes into the bathroom twice to check her hair, and when she comes out the second time, Ray has appeared—with his father, and the two of them are talking to her parents.

“Oh God,” Sarah murmurs.

Ray's dad is a normal-looking guy—tall and brown eyed like Ray—and wears the standard nurse's outfit: loose blue pants and top, a stethoscope draped around his neck, a pager clipped to his waistband. “And this must be the mystery girl!” he says as she arrives.
HERB O'KEEFE
, his name tag reads.

“Mystery girl?” Sarah asks. Ray rolls his eyes in embarrassment.

“Well, Ray told me about this new girl in school—how she was there and made this, how shall I say, big impression on Ray, and then disappeared.”

“Big impression?” Sarah asks Ray.

“I have no idea what my dad's talking about,” Ray says, which gets a smile from the adults.

“Anyway,” Herb says to them all, “if you need anything, have me paged; you've got a friend here at the hospital.”

“Actually, Sarah and I are going to go pick up a pizza for the Newells,” Ray says with perfect timing.

“Good idea,” Herb says. He shakes hands once more all the way around. “I work until midnight, so I'll stop back and see you folks then.”

There's a long moment of dead air.

“Well, I guess we'll go, then,” Ray says.

Outside, the snow is falling heavier now.

“How far is it?” Sarah asks, her breath fogging in the chilly air.