The call came late that night. I was almost asleep when I heard my cell phone ringing. It jolted me upright and I dug it out of my purse. The numbers glowed from the digital clock on the nightstand. One-thirty.
“Yes, who am I speaking to?” A female voice was on the other end of the phone.
“You called me.” I mumbled into the phone.
“This is Chestnut Hill Hospital emergency department calling. We have a Samantha Cameron here and this is the first number we found in her cell phone.”
I was wide-awake. “What?”
“Are you related to her?”
“I’m her friend.” I was confused. There was momentary silence.
“What’s your name?”
“Mackenzie Carlisle.” I answered.
“Are you alone?” I pulled the phone from my ear, almost ready to hang up. “I only ask because this isn’t good news. She was hit by a car, a hit and run, apparently. She was brought in by ambulance an hour ago.”
“What?” It was all that came out of my mouth.
“She was hit by a car and is here in the ER. The doctor is with her now.” The reality of the situation became apparent to me and I thought I might be sick. “In Chestnut Hill. It’s on the outskirts of Philadelphia.”
“I’m here in Chestnut Hill.”
“I assumed because of the number that you were in…” She hesitated. “Maine. 207 is Maine?”
“It’s a cell phone. I’ll be right there.” I hung up and stood up. I ran in circles for a minute, I needed to get dressed. I couldn’t find my clothes. I had on white T-shirt and drawstring pajama bottoms. I grabbed a pair of jeans, pushed my feet into sneakers, threw my purse over my shoulder and ran out into the yard. I had to get to Dylan’s. I just kept thinking if I got to Dylan’s everything would be okay. Samantha would be there and everything would be okay. This would all have been some horrible mistake. I ran the six blocks without stopping.
The house was dark. The front door was locked. I rang the bell repeatedly and banged on the door with my fists as hard as I could. It hurt each time they hit the wood but I couldn’t stop. I was about to run around to the back of the house and see if the sliding door was open when the front door flew open. Dylan squinted at me in the darkness. He wore only boxer shorts and a gray T-shirt. His hair was flattened to his head on one side.
“Where’s Samantha?”
He took a step back and turned around. “I don’t know. I have to go to work tomorrow.” He started back into the living room.
“I got a call from the hospital. They said she’s in the emergency room. Where is she?” I was screaming. He took two steps at a time and opened her door. I was right behind him. Her bed was empty. “Oh my God. Oh my God.” I leaned against the wall.
“What hospital?” I didn’t answer him. ‘Mackenzie, what hospital?” He was shaking me. My stomach lurched and I started to dry heave on the carpet. Nothing came out. Air wouldn’t go into my lungs and I started to hyperventilate.
“Chestnut Hill.” I said finally.
“Get dressed, let’s go. Hurry.” I kicked off my sneakers and dropped my pajama bottoms in the hallway. Dylan went back into his room to change. He came back as I was pulling my jeans up over my hips. I pushed my feet back into my sneakers and followed him down the stairs.
The emergency room lights were bright and nauseating. All I could see was Nick lying on a stretcher with a sheet pulled up to his neck. The doctor, a middle aged woman, came to me in the waiting room.
“You’re Samantha Cameron’s nearest relative?” she asked.
“I’m the only one here. Her parents are in Maine.”
“She’s stabilized, but I want to prepare you, she doesn’t look good. Her right leg was shattered in several places. She’s lucky that it didn’t hit her hip or we may be looking at a replacement.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
“Sit down.” She pointed to a seat.
“I don’t want to sit down. I asked you if she was going to be okay,” I yelled. I wasn’t going to just sit down and try to be calm to appease anyone.
“She has a severe concussion and a hairline fracture of the skull. That’s the worst of her injuries. We’re admitting her and we need to monitor her to make sure there’s no brain swelling. That’s our main concern. If she gets through the next few days, we should be okay. The rest of it is relatively minor. Her leg was shattered in several places, as I already told you and she has a laceration on her left cheek. It’s been sutured.”
“Can I see her?”
“She’s sleeping. We medicated her but you can go in until we take her to her room.”
She pointed to a room and I went in alone. Dylan had taken a seat in the waiting room.
Samantha was stretched out on the bed in a hospital gown. Her head was bandaged on the left side and she had another one across her left cheek. Her right leg was bound in a fiberglass cast. Her eyes were closed. I sat down and the tears started coming. They fell down my face one after the other. My life lately seemed to revolve around hospitals. What the hell had she been doing? Where was she going when she was hit?
I remembered back to the night of Nick’s accident, of waiting for hours when he was in surgery. The look on the doctor’s face when he came out of the OR. The feelings of disbelief. I had to see his body. I couldn’t accept it otherwise. When I saw his body, it was almost too much. Samantha and my Aunt Rose came to the hospital because I didn’t want to call my father. They almost had to drag me away. The week after that was nothing but a blur. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. I remember crying until my pillow was soaked through. My doctor prescribed Xanax and Samantha forced the pills down my throat.
I was reliving it only it was Samantha lying on the bed. I held her hand and just let myself cry. She came down here to see me. It was my fault that she was in Philadelphia. If I hadn’t insisted that we go to Boston that weekend Nick would still be alive. If I’d just tried a little harder to convince my mother to go one more round of chemo maybe things would have turned out differently. For her, for my whole family. Everyone that got close to me seemed to get hurt. When they came to move Samantha to her room I wouldn’t let go. I felt Dylan’s hand on my arm. He pulled my fingers off her and took me almost by force down the hallway.
Three police officers were near the entrance to the emergency room, waiting for me. They’d been patient but they wanted information. I gave them my name and the address at Cora’s house.
“Do you know where she was going?” one asked. He was short and balding and was taking notes while we spoke.
I looked at Dylan. “I left her around eleven. I thought she was going to bed.”
“I didn’t hear her go out. I went to sleep around midnight,” he added. The policeman nodded and jotted it in on his small pad.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She was run down crossing Highland Avenue. No eye witnesses. A woman heard the noise of the impact and the screeching of wheels and looked out the window. Lucky she did because she saw your friend laid out on the ground and called an ambulance. But she didn’t see the car. So we don’t have much to go on. The driver didn’t hit anything, like a telephone poll so we can’t even take paint scrapings. The only thing we can do is wait for her to wake up and see if she remembers anything that might give us a lead.”
“Oh, God.” The image of a car slamming into Samantha appeared before my eyes and wouldn’t go away. I heard the screeching of tires and I saw her body fly through the air.
Dylan put his hand on my back. “If you hear anything at all, please call her,” he said. He gave the officer my cell phone number. The officer wrote it down and nodded.
“We’ll keep talking to people in the neighborhood on the off chance that somebody saw something.” With that they turned and left.
I was exhausted. My lips trembled and I had sobbed so much my eyes were nearly swollen shut. I don’t remember the drive back to Dylan’s. The next thing I knew I was sitting on his couch.
“Mackenzie, let me call your family. Your father.” He handed me a tissue.
“I don’t have a family.” I said, wiping at my face. I doubled over and put my head in my knees. I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t start throwing up again. “It’s like Nick all over again.” I continued to cry and the noises coming from me sounded almost like a train engine. I felt Dylan get up but I didn’t pay any attention. He came back a few minutes later and sat right next to me. He put his arm around my shoulder.
“Mackenzie. I don’t know what to do for you. Come here.” He pulled me close. “You can’t go through this alone. I want you to stay here tonight.”
I shook my head. “No, I’m going back to the hospital.”
“There’s nothing you can do. You need to sleep, at least a little. Here, I want you to take one of these.” He tipped a prescription bottle over onto the coffee table. Pills scattered across the top. “These were part of Pete’s stash that we confiscated from him one time. Let’s see, you have your choice of Xanax, he pointed to a blue oval pill, Klonopin, or your run of the mill Valium. None of them are a high dosage and it might help you sleep a little. Take your pick.”
I looked at the table. “I guess I need something.” I reached for the Xanax and put it in my mouth. He handed me a glass of water.
“When you get up, you can go back to the hospital.” I took a tiny sip and felt my stomach lurch but I kept it down. He took the glass from me and put it on the coffee table. “Come on.” He pulled my arm gently and I followed him upstairs to Samantha’s room and sat on her bed. “It’s almost three-thirty. Why don’t you try and sleep a little bit.”
“I want to take a shower.” I said woodenly. It was like someone had put a straw in the top of my head and sucked all of my insides out.
He squatted in front of me. “Are you sure you don’t want me to call someone for you? Your brother, or maybe another friend?”
“No. I’m not dragging anyone else into this mess.” He just nodded and stood up. “Take a shower. I’ll be right downstairs if you need anything.”
I started to cry again. “This was all my fault.” I wiped my face with the edge of my shirt. “Ginny told me to leave it alone.”
“You think someone did this on purpose? Like Cora?” He looked incredulous.
“I don’t know. Maybe. What if she’s not okay, Dylan? What am I going to do?”
“She’s got some broken bones, some cuts and a concussion. That’s all.”
“They said brain swelling. Brain swelling.”
He squatted again in front of me. “No, they said maybe she has brain swelling. She has a concussion, a hairline fracture of the skull. They just need to watch her for few days.” He pushed my hair back off my face and looked at me. “Take a shower and try to lie down.” He got up and left the room.
I took a long shower, barely moving under the stream of hot water. It numbed me and the Xanax was starting to take effect. I felt calmer, less emotional. I looked through Samantha’s things and put on a sweat shirt and a pair of huge shorts made out of sweat shirt material she’d had for so long, I’d forgotten where she’d gotten them. One of her old boyfriends probably. The sewn elastic waistband fell down around my hips. I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned, but my thoughts kept me awake until finally I got up and went downstairs. Dylan was sitting on the couch.
“You’re not sleeping.”
“Neither are you.” He was looking at some legal papers. His eyes were all bloodshot. He took a sip from a coffee cup and looked at me. “I’ll try and take a nap a little later, before I go in to work. Now is probably not the best time, but I wanted to tell you, I looked into the Jim Durham thing for you.”
“And?” My head felt heavy, gritty.
“I talked to my father and some other people. Jim was finishing kindergarten at Chestnut Hill Academy. His father was a real estate developer. They lived in Bryn Athens. His cousin, who was fifteen, and some of his cousin’s friends went to the park that day. Kids love Devil’s pool. You can jump from these rocks into a deep spot in the water. It’s a lot of fun.
But from everything I heard it was just an accident that Jim died. The other boys were at the top, on the rocks. Jim was down in the water and got in over his head. I only found one real connection to Nick or Cora.”
“What?”
“Even though Jim was only five, he was a ball buster. A clown. Nick was odd and became his target for teasing from the very beginning of school.”
“He picked on Nick?”
“Phillip said it was relentless. Jim liked an audience and he’d tease him in front of all the other kids for fun. Calling him names, taking his stuff, pushing him. It got so bad, they had to call his parents in for a meeting. Jim had to sit out recess.”
I put my head toward my knees. I felt a bit sick. “Do you think maybe Cora went and got revenge?”
“How? The drowning happened with a bunch of teenagers around.”
“They were right there? Are you sure? Or were they a distance away?”
”Little detective, I’ll keep digging, see if there’s more to the story or if I can find one of the boys that was there.”
I glanced up. Dylan looked horrible. “You don’t have to baby-sit me. I feel bad for you. Your life’s been invaded and it’s like you’re stuck with me.”
He put his papers down and looked at me. “I just don’t know what to do for you to make any of this better. I know how close you and Samantha are.”
I chewed on my lip and nodded. “If anything happens to her, I’ll never forgive myself.”
“How long have you two been…” he stopped and I looked up at him.
When something really awful happens to you, first you go into shock. You don’t feel anything. Then all the emotions come over you in a huge uncontrollable rush. But it subsides, I guess, to give you time to recoup. And this is where I was. The horrible emotions had subsided for a little bit and I could breathe.
“Have we been what?”
He gave me his full attention. “Together. What do you want me to just come out and say it?”
I pushed back on the sofa. I could feel the big shorts slide down on me a little and I pulled at them. “Dylan. I’m not sure how to tell you this, so I’m just going to come out and say it. Regardless of what you think, Samantha and I have never been together. Sexually, I mean. We’ve never experimented that way, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
He looked confused. “Oh, come on, Mackenzie. I walked in on you. I was going to say something to you before but it was a little awkward.”
I laughed. It felt good to laugh. “No, you didn’t. We were just lying there, talking. She’s like my sister. Women can share a bed, or do each other’s hair and it doesn’t mean anything.”
He looked crestfallen. “No, no don’t lie, your shirt was all undone when you came out of the room.”
“One button, Dylan. One button. We were lying there laughing after you walked in because we knew what you were thinking and I guess it came undone. My right hand to God.” I raised my hand. “Get me the epistle of James and I’ll swear on it.”
“You never…”
“No, I’m sorry. Never happened. But admit it, you kind of liked the idea a little”
“I wouldn’t say that.” He was embarrassed. “But, I have to say it was interesting. I mean, you’re both attractive. So, your telling me that, ….not even once?”
I thought about it. I wanted to give him something, he seemed so disappointed. “Well, I’ve seen her naked a hundred times or so, does that count? And I think we’ve been naked together, in the same room before.”
He was interested. “When?”
I thought about it. “In the Macy’s dressing room trying on swim suits. Oh, but we weren’t completely naked so that doesn’t count. And in high school, we played on the softball team and afterwards we had to take showers and it was just one big shower. We took them together. No clothes.” I smiled, he was listening intently. “And another time, right after college a bunch of us rented a cabin in Maine and we went skinny dipping after dark. There were six of us. None of us had any clothes on at all. Is all of this going to help you when you’re alone later on tonight?”
“I’ll let you know.” His face was flushed a little.
I looked over at him and smiled. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Making me laugh.” I got up and went into the kitchen to get coffee.
“Mackenzie? Pull up your shorts or they’re going to fall to your ankles and it’ll give me something else to think about when I’m alone tonight.” I yanked at them without looking back.
I’d give it another hour and then I’d go back to the hospital.