Three

THE OLD BLUE NISSAN slewed into the forecourt of Massachusetts General, and came to a halt in the road. Grace got out, and began to run up the ramp, past the orange-and-white ambulances.

After the storm, Boston was sweltering in ninety-degree heat and eighty-percent humidity. The journey had been hell. Boston’s traffic, even to a native, was a nightmare; in the throes of major reconstruction, the city was a mass of temporary road junctions and crossings; turnpikes strung on box girders like a giant Erector set; great gaping holes in the ground shearing away from the side of every car on every snarled route. Grace, after spending almost two hours helplessly stuck in this mess, ran now with the clothes plastered to her back and sweat streaming from her face.

“Hey!” called the security guard. “You can’t leave that car there!”

She stopped, stared at him, and dug the keys from her pocket. She was gasping for breath. She threw the keychain at him.

“You think this is a valet service?” he shouted back at her, as the keys fell at his feet. “You gonna get towed!”

“Do what you want with it,” she yelled back, over her shoulder.

“Park it down the street!”

“Park it in the river, I don’t give a shit,” she muttered, pushing through the entrance doors.

The man behind the desk looked up at her.

“Accident,” she told him, one hand to her chest. She winced at the stitch of pain there. “Accident out on ninety-three. Russell.”

“Russell…” he said.

“You called me, for Chrissake. You called me!”

He was leafing through a directory. “I didn’t call you, ma’am.”

“Jesus Christ!” she said. “Someone did. An accident on ninety-three, two hours ago…”

He gave her the directions.

She hadn’t run like this since high school. By the time she reached the ward, she could hardly breathe. She grabbed the first nurse she saw. “Anna Russell,” she gasped. “Rachel Russell.”

The nurse looked hard at her. “You OK?” she said.

“It’s my daughter. My granddaughter.” And then, without warning, an asphyxiating wave swept over her: a shoal of flickering lights.

“Sit down,” the nurse said. “Sit down here.”

“No. My daughter…”

“In a minute,” the nurse coaxed. “Take a breath now.”

Grace began to sob.

“You have an inhaler?”

She shook her head.

“You don’t have an inhaler?”

The older woman’s fingers fumbled at the catch of her bag.

“In here?”

“Glycerin.”

The nurse squatted down at her side, took the bag, and looked in it. “You take nitro for your heart?”

The nurse found the bottle. She tipped the little white tablet into her hand. Gray in the face now, Grace took it and put it under her tongue. The corridor rolled and rebounded on her. She closed her eyes.

“Breathe,” the nurse instructed. “Slow now. Slow.”

“I am breathing,” Grace muttered. “Oh, shit. Shit.” Grace opened her eyes and grabbed the nurse’s wrist. “Anna Russell,” she said. “You tell me. You tell me now.”

The woman looked into her eyes, and nodded. “Hold on,” she said. “I’ll check.”

Sensation slowly came back to her. Grace sat with one hand pressed to her throat. She was in a corridor painted a soft gray, she realized. She was sitting opposite a picture of a snow-covered hill. Somewhere up the corridor, someone was laughing, softly. Softly.

She tried to focus on the picture. Snow. Snow.

Snow like the winter snow that surrounded the house near Shelburne Falls, her parents’ home. It stood on a rise at the edge of woodland, with a view clear toward the Mohawk Trail. They had painted it white, with green shutters; it stood with its back to the long drop toward the valley, and its face to the trees. The years fell away. Her father was standing by the shed and the lumber room. The old house had once been a school, and, if you looked carefully among the piles of logs, through the pine-scented gloom, you could see children’s drawings on the wall. Horses and cows. Cats. A bull. A giraffe with the longest legs. And Anna had brought the sled from out of this sweet-smelling darkness, and run it to the top of the hill, and bounced down what was, in summer, the track with a broad pasture on each side, full of knee-high self-seeded saplings and poison ivy. And Grace and her father had stood at the side of the track, their hearts in their mouths, calling, “Go careful, go careful,” as Anna sped past the curve of the gate, into the woods, those dark woods, the last outlying spur of the Appalachians.

“Mrs. Russell,” the nurse said.

She looked up. The hospital corridor washed back.

“Will you come with me?”

Grace got to her feet, and followed.

She walked with her head slightly bowed, staring at the white shoes of the woman ahead of her. She would give anything, she realized in that moment, anything at all, to find them both sitting in some waiting room. Waiting for her. With maybe a scratch. Maybe some sort of slight, acceptable injury. Maybe with a card in their hands, an outpatient appointment. Anna with her car keys in her lap, and an apologetic look on her face, as if she had caused her mother trouble. Rachel curled in the next seat, thumb stuck in her mouth, looking acutely at her in that startling, unblinking way.

A door was opened.

They went through to the unit.

She saw Rachel almost at once, lying flat, with her arm in a splint, and tubes attached to her. Her granddaughter’s eyes were open.

“Oh, honey,” Grace said.

Rachel looked at her.

“How are you feeling, sweetie? How are you?”

To her surprise, Rachel held out her hand. As Grace bent down, Rachel’s free arm locked around her neck. She pressed her lips to her grandmother’s face, and to Grace’s complete distress, the little girl began to whimper. It was like holding a small and frightened animal.

“It was a multiple fracture,” the nurse murmured, in Grace’s ear.

“It’s OK,” Grace murmured to her granddaughter. “You hurt your arm. They pinned your arm, I guess.” She glanced up at the nurse, who nodded. “You feel sleepy? You went to sleep when they mended your arm.…”

But Rachel didn’t look as if she were just out from under anesthetic. Her face looked hollow, bruised and shadowed; but the eyes were coldly alive and so green, the color of the irises flat and startling, as if someone had dropped a watercolor onto them. Viridian, viridian. Grace pulled back a little, and tried to uncurl the arm. Rachel tightened her grip.

“Dog,” Rachel said, suddenly.

Grace blinked. “A dog?” she repeated. There was only the stare by way of reply. “There was a dog?” Grace guessed. “On the road?”

Rachel’s gaze flew upward, then back. “A car killed the dog.”

“He ran out on the highway?”

“No,” Rachel said. Her mouth turned down in an acute, clown-like bow of despair.

Grace kissed her face and ran her hand softly over her forehead. “You hurt anywhere else?” she whispered. “Anywhere?”

“The dog,” Rachel said.

“OK, honey,” Grace replied, soothing. “OK.”

The nurse laid a hand on Grace’s arm.

“Wait a minute,” Grace told Rachel. “I’ll be right back.”

They went out into the corridor.

“Can we have something for our records?” the nurse asked. “A few details…”

“Sure.”

They sat on two chairs by the nurses’ station. Grace realized that she was trembling, faintly but steadily shaking, from head to foot.

“Rachel is how old?”

“Ten. Just ten.”

“And she lives at…”

Grace gave the Boston address, and her own name and address as next of kin.

“And Anna Russell is Rachel’s mother.”

“Yes.” Grace gripped the woman’s arm. “Where is she? Anna?”

“I’ll check again in just a second.”

“But she’s here?”

“In surgery.”

“Oh, God,” Grace gasped.

“I’ll go back again in just a moment.”

“But how long has she been in there?”

“About an hour and a half.”

“An hour!” Grace plunged her head in her hands. “Jesus, oh, Jesus…”

The nurse paused, resting her hand on Grace’s shoulder, until the older woman straightened up.

“I can see her?”

“Of course. If we could just finish Rachel’s records…”

“What’s the matter with her? Why are they operating?”

“I’ll find out.” The nurse smiled gently. “OK? I promise. In just a second.”

“All right. OK.” Grace looked at the form, tried to concentrate on it.

“And Rachel’s father…?”

“She doesn’t have one.”

“I see.”

“They’ve never lived together.”

“But he’s alive?” the nurse asked.

“Yes.”

“And his address would be?”

“I don’t know. None of us knows.”

“OK,” the nurse said quietly.

“He’s never seen her,” Grace said, her voice little louder than a breath.

The pen scrawled across the page.

“Anna has a partner,” Grace said. “James Garrett.” She spelled the surname. She looked away, back toward the door of Rachel’s room. “I guess he thinks of himself as her father,” she murmured.

Down the corridor, she saw someone else come out from a patient’s room: a couple, a man and his wife, holding on to each other. They walked very slowly toward the exit.

Grace looked back at the nurse. “There’s something you should know about Rachel,” she said. “She’s an Asperger child.”

“I see.” The nurse nodded, writing. “Autistic.”

Grace put her hand on the clipboard. “No,” she said. “Not autistic.”

“Asperger isn’t a form of autism?”

Grace felt her heart skip. She waited, swallowing her irritation. Here it came again, all the things that she and Anna tried to avoid. The categories. The convenient boxes. “OK,” she said finally, “you want to write autism, write it. But it isn’t Rachel.”

“I understand,” the nurse said.

“I doubt it,” Grace retorted. “But you write down autism, for your label.”

The nurse held her glance for a second, but said nothing. She wrote Autistic spectrum disorder slowly on the page.

“I want to see my daughter now,” Grace told her.