THE WHOLE FAMILY was assembled in the waiting room when Annie burst through the entrance doors with Paul a step behind her. “What happened?” she asked. “Where is he?”
CJ was the first to jump up and meet her with an embrace. “He’ll be okay, Annie. The doctor is checking him out now.”
Emily appeared on her other side, hugging her as close as her expanding belly allowed. “Isaac’s going to be all right. Dad’s in there with him.”
“What about Rose?”
“They have her in another room,” CJ said.
“She’s a little more banged up but she’s going to be okay, too,” Emily said. “Isaac was wearing a seat belt but Rose wasn’t.”
Not wearing a seat belt? What on earth had she been thinking? “My poor little boy. He must be terrified. Where is he? I need to see him.”
Stacey McGregor, dressed in crisp green scrubs, came into the waiting room from the small ER at the back of the health center. Relieved to see someone she knew and trusted was here to look after her son, Annie rushed up to her. “How is he? Can you take me to him?”
“Of course.” Stacey put her arm around Annie’s shoulders, led her away. “He’s been asking for you. You, too, Dr. Woodward.”
Annie turned back, extended a hand. “Please come with us?” She knew his colleague, Alyssa Cameron, was an excellent physician, but right now she needed someone she would trust with her life, and Paul was that someone.
“Do you know what happened?” Annie asked. None of this made any sense. “Did my sister say why she took Isaac out in her car?”
Stacey shook her head. “I haven’t spoken to her. All I know is that they were on River Road on their way back to the farm. I guess they hit an icy patch and her car slid off the road.”
Annie’s breath caught in her chest and it took some effort for her to exhale. Paul squeezed her hand. Stacey led them into an examining room.
“Mom! Look! I got a new stuffy.” Isaac lay in a hospital bed clutching a fuzzy brown teddy bear that had its arm in a gauzy white sling. Annie’s father sat next to him. “An’ I’m getting a cast on my arm.”
“A cast?” Annie rushed to him.
“He’s a brave little boy,” Thomas said.
His arm was broken? Rose had taken her son out in that broken-down car of hers, driven off the road and broken Isaac’s arm? “Oh, baby. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have left you. I should have stayed home today. Does your arm hurt?”
Isaac shook his head against the pillow. “Melissa’s mom gave me some medicine to make the hurting go away, an’ Dr. Cameron says my cast can be whatever color I want so I’m going to have a blue one.”
Thomas wheeled himself out of the way to give Annie more room. “I’ll head on back to the waiting room.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
Annie gently ran her hand over her son’s curls, noticed the bandage on his forehead as she did. “What happened here? Did you bump your head?|
“It’s just a scrape,” Stacey said. “Isn’t that right, Isaac?”
“Yup. I’m going to call this bear Henry.”
Stacey patted his curls. “That’s a good name.”
Paul joined Alyssa Cameron in front of a light panel on the wall, quietly discussing the X-ray clipped there.
Annie swayed a little, her panic almost getting the best of her. Her son had been in a car accident and brought here to the hospital. Had he come in an ambulance? He had been X-rayed and who knew what else, and she hadn’t been here for him. No, she had been in the city, flattering herself into believing she might actually be a photographer, daring to imagine having another man in her life, fantasizing about a life beyond her family. What was she thinking? Her family was her life. Isaac was the most important person in her world, the one person who fully depended on her…and she had let him down.
“I’m so sorry, honey. I shouldn’t have left you on your own.”
“I wasn’t by myself. Auntie Rose was there. She’s funny. This morning she put the music on real loud and we danced in the living room and then we ate lunch and then she broke one of your dishes—” He clamped the hand of his good arm over his mouth. “Oops. I promised I wouldn’t tell.”
“It’s okay. I don’t care about the dish.” She wanted to mean what she said, but she knew herself well enough to know that when she went home she would check the trash can and inspect the cupboards to figure out what was missing. “I only care about you.”
Paul and Dr. Cameron crossed the small space and stood together on the opposite side of Isaac’s bed. Annie looked up at them, fearing the worst.
“Isaac, you are one lucky little boy,” Alyssa said. “Paul, Dr. Woodward, has looked at the picture we took of your arm and he agrees you have a tiny, and I mean the tiniest, hairline fracture in your radius.”
“What’s a radius?”
“It’s one of the two long bones in your arm that extend between your wrist and your elbow,” she said.
Paul stroked Isaac’s head, and Annie thought he leaned a little closer as he detected the bandage on his forehead. “The good thing about a kid’s bones…”
Annie was pretty sure this last bit was aimed at her.
Paul moved his hand to Annie’s shoulder, gave it a squeeze. “Kids’ bones are soft, so they fracture easily, but it also means they heal very quickly and with few to no complications.”
Dr. Cameron nodded in agreement. “So we’re going to get Nurse Stacey to take you to the cast room.”
Isaac held up his teddy bear. “Can Henry come, too?”
“He sure can. Henry knows all about casts.”
While sitting in the cast room, Annie fretted with the strap of her handbag while a technician distracted Isaac with idle chitchat about teddy bears and digging up dinosaurs and building snow forts now that winter appeared to be here. Half an hour later, she led her son into the waiting room, his bear securely tucked under his good arm, his newly blue-casted arm supported by a matching sling and his pain medication tucked in Annie’s purse.
Everyone rushed to gather around him—her father and Libby, Emily and CJ, and Paul. For the first time since she’d arrived at the clinic, Annie realized she hadn’t seen her half sister.
“What about Rose?” she asked. “How is she doing?”
Everyone looked at everyone else while they avoided looking at Annie.
“She’s going to be fine, but there’s a chance she’ll need surgery we’re not equipped to perform here,” Paul said. “We had an ambulance take her to the hospital in Rochester.”
“Surgery? So this accident…” It must have been bad. She glanced at her precious boy, smoothed his hair. She needed more details, but she didn’t want him to have to relive the nightmare. The details would have to wait. “I think it’s time we went home, don’t you? I’ll fix some dinner.”
“I’m going to stay here and give Alyssa a hand,” Paul said. “Then I need to get home and check on my father. I’ll call you later to see how Isaac’s doing. Call me if you need anything, okay?”
“I will.” She watched him walk away and wished she could ask him to stay.
“I’ll run Libby home and meet you all at the house.”
“You and Isaac can ride home with me,” CJ said. “Emily’s coming with us. Jack had to swing by the police station and then he’ll come and pick her up.”
“Sounds good.” Annie let her sisters shepherd her to the parking lot. The snow had stopped and as dusk dimmed the sky, the blanket of white made everything seem a little brighter.
Settled in the backseat with Isaac, Annie was suddenly overcome with bone-deep exhaustion. “I don’t know if I’ll have enough energy to make dinner.”
Emily glanced into the backseat. “CJ and I will fix something while you get Isaac settled in.”
Annie yawned. Her sisters’ idea of fixing something ran along the lines of canned soup, maybe hot dogs. Tonight she was too tired to care.
* * *
ANNIE WAS STARTLED awake when CJ stuck her head into Isaac’s room and quietly called her name. She had lain down next to her son, thinking she would close her eyes for a few minutes until he fell asleep.
“I’m sorry, I must have dozed off.” She blinked and rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?”
“Dinnertime.”
She looked at Isaac, saw his eyes were closed, his long lashes fanned adorably across his cheekbones, the rise and fall of his chest slow and even.
Her sweet little man. She decided not to wake him.
“How long was I asleep?”
“Forty-five minutes, maybe?”
She stood, stretched and followed CJ downstairs to the kitchen.
Her father, Emily and Jack were already seated at the table. To her surprise, they had made a salad, defrosted a container of meatballs in tomato sauce, cooked pasta, set out a basket with thick slabs of the sourdough bread she’d baked yesterday, along with tall glasses of water with ice and sliced lemon.
“We made one of Isaac’s favorites in case he decided to get up for dinner,” Emily said.
“He’s worn out and the meds made him sleepy. I think it’s best he get some rest.” She and CJ joined the others and everyone dug in. Annie filled her plate, surprised to find herself famished.
For a few minutes they ate in companionable silence. She had questions, plenty of them, but it was easier to eat and pretend this was like any other dinner. Normal.
“How was your date with Libby, Dad?”
Thomas grinned. “We had a fine time. The folks at the retirement home loved her. How was yours?”
“It wasn’t a…” Who was she kidding? The outing with Paul had most definitely been a date. “He took me to an art gallery in the city. And a bookstore, and then we had lunch.” She realized the photograph he’d bought for her and the books she’d chosen were still in his car.
“What did you think of the exhibit?” Emily asked.
“I loved it. But I wish I had stayed home.”
CJ slathered herbed garlic butter onto a slice of bread. “The accident wasn’t your fault.”
“Of course it was. If I had stayed home, Isaac wouldn’t have been in Rose’s car and none of this would have happened.” But it had. “I need to know the details,” she said. “And I need to know how Rose is doing.”
Her sisters both looked to Jack. “The call came in just before two o’clock,” he said. “Isaac used Rose’s phone to call 911.”
“He…what?”
“As close as we can tell, they went into town right after lunch. Rose did a little…shopping. It started snowing around one, and by the time they were headed home, the conditions were already getting bad. The snow was freezing as soon as it hit the pavement and Rose was driving on bald tires.”
Anger roiled in Annie’s gut. “What was she thinking? And what was so important she needed to risk my son’s life by driving into town in a blizzard in that old junker?”
“In all fairness, it wasn’t snowing when they left.”
“My point is, she had no business leaving. What was she shopping for?”
Everyone at the table exchanged looks. Jack answered her question.
“Rose had been drinking. We think she ran out of booze around lunchtime and decided to risk the drive into town to get more. She had an unopened bottle of vodka in her trunk with a receipt showing she had just purchased it.”
Annie covered her face with her hands. Rose had been drinking, in the morning, while she was supposed to be looking after Isaac. She didn’t have a drinking problem. She was an alcoholic. Everyone had tried to tell Annie, and she had refused to listen. She had felt sorry for Rose, had even convinced herself that as soon as the girl realized someone believed in her, she would turn her life around. Instead she had turned Annie’s upside down. She lowered her hands and immediately picked up on everyone’s concern.
“I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not.” Emily squeezed her hand.
“And no one expects you to be,” CJ said.
Annie looked to her father, who so far was keeping quiet.
“The important thing is to keep everything in perspective,” he said. “Isaac is okay.”
Annie wished she could be sure. Eric had broken his leg on a ski trip and seemed to be doing fine. But then he had developed a blood clot as a result, and six weeks after the accident he was gone. What if…?
“Don’t go there,” her father said. “You heard what the doctors said. It’s a hairline fracture and they don’t anticipate any complications.”
“What about Rose?” Annie still didn’t know the full extent of her injuries.
“If she’d been wearing her seat belt, her injuries would have been minimal,” Emily said. “Apparently, she hit the steering wheel pretty hard, and then hit her head on the side window when the car veered into the ditch.”
Annie closed her eyes, trying not to picture it, trying not to think about how terrified Isaac must have been.
Emily helped herself to another slice of bread. “She has a couple of fractured ribs and Dr. Cameron was worried about the possibility of a collapsed lung. That’s why the decision was made to send her to a bigger hospital.”
Just as well, Annie decided. If Rose had been kept at the health center in Riverton, Annie might have felt obliged to see her. Now was not a good time. Like her dad said, she needed some perspective. For that to happen, she needed some distance, too.
She sipped her water, sighing as she set the glass on the table. “Here’s what I don’t understand. I trusted her. I tried to help her. And this is the thanks I get? There are stretches of River Road where her car could have ended up in the river. They could both be—” Her voice broke but it wouldn’t have mattered. She couldn’t have said the unthinkable out loud.
There was no missing the looks exchanged around the table.
“What?” she asked. “This could have been a lot worse.”
Jack pushed his plate away and rested his forearms on the table. “Annie, I wish I could say cops seldom see this sort of thing but the truth is, it happens far too often.”
“And we’ve tried to tell you what’s been going on with Rose,” CJ said. “I guess you weren’t ready to hear it.”
Emily shot their younger sister a look and reached for Annie’s hand again. “But we understand why you wanted to help her.”
“It takes a professional to treat alcoholism,” Jack said. “It’s a disease and like any disease, it requires professional treatment. Counseling, detox, maybe even a stint in residential rehab. But unlike a lot of other diseases, treatment is rarely successful if the patient isn’t cooperative. Rose has been to the clinic a few times and I’m sure Paul has encouraged her to get professional help. Rose probably hasn’t been willing to listen.”
“Wait…what?” A sick feeling pooled in her gut. “You’re saying Paul knew about this? He’s her doctor and he’s known about this problem all along? He let me leave her here to look after Isaac?”
Jack ran a hand through his hair, blew out a breath. “Okay, I was out of line. Paul didn’t tell me this in so many words. He couldn’t.”
Emily was quick to defend her husband and his friend. “There’s a little thing called doctor-patient confidentiality, Annie. Paul could lose his license to practice if he ran around town talking about his patients. We’re just speculating.”
“But we’re not just anyone. We’re family.” Even as she said it, she knew she was being unreasonable. But seriously, how could he have let this happen?
CJ chimed in. “Annie, you’re not being reasonable. Would you want your doctor to discuss your medical appointments with one of us?”
“Of course not.” She pushed away from the table and carried her dishes to the counter, started loading the dishwasher. “But Paul was here this morning. He knew Rose would be on her own with Isaac. He could have done something. He could have changed our plans, made up an excuse to stay in town, or better yet stay at home. He had no right to risk my son’s well-being.”
Emily and CJ looked at each other, shrugged and started to clear the table. Their father backed his chair away.
“Dad?” Annie always valued his opinion, and he’d been awfully quiet through this. “What do you think?”
“I still say you need some perspective, and I can see you’re not going to get any tonight. For now I think we should count our blessings our little boy is okay and Rose is going to make a full recovery. We can save the rest of this discussion for tomorrow, when calmer, cooler heads will prevail.”
He rolled out of the room without giving her a chance to say there was nothing wrong with her perspective. Nothing. Nothing at all.