49.

The twentieth of September was a Sunday and she woke early with a headache. Cole was asleep next to her, his body curved around hers, his hand flat on her stomach above her scar. She got out of bed and swallowed two aspirin in the bathroom. Then she sat on the window seat, pulling the afghan around her shoulders. It was a sparkling morning. The sun glittered off the water and a crisp breeze blew against her from the open window. But the beauty of the day was offensive.

Today had been her due date. If everything had gone as it should have, she’d be delivering Alison right about now. A different Alison than the baby she saw in her hospital room. This baby would be seven pounds, maybe more, with a healthy set of lungs and a cry that would shake the rafters.

“Going for a run?”

She started at the sound of his voice. “Headache,” she said without turning around. She didn’t want him to know what had her upset this morning. It would only add to his problems. He was already too harried at work, stretched too thin. Besides, she thought entirely too much about Alison, what might have been. Why did she have to hang on to the grief when she had so many good things going for her? She’d been promoted to Assistant Director of the PR department at Blair—her reward for staying. And in a few months she was getting married to the only man she could imagine marrying.

They’d picked the first of January for the wedding. It was the best way she could think of to start the new year. Cole would have been happy if they’d gotten married the night he asked her, but she needed time to put the events of this past year behind her. She wanted the year of her marriage to be unencumbered by memories of the past.

Cole got out of bed now and sat behind her on the window seat, wrapping the afghan around them both.

“I was wondering if you’d be all right today,” he said. “And you’re not, are you?”

He knew. She shook her head and leaned back against him. His chest was warm against the bare skin of her back.

“You weren’t going to tell me.” He spoke softly against her ear, but she knew he was scolding her.

“It’s about time I let go of it.”

“It hasn’t been that long.”

They were silent for a moment before he spoke again. “Please don’t keep things from me, Kit. I would have misinterpreted your sadness this morning if I hadn’t known. Can we make it a pact? No secrets?”

She nodded. She was relieved. She’d been afraid of losing that part of their relationship, that openness. She rested her head against his shoulder, wishing that he didn’t have to work today. They could sit here under the afghan and watch the day run its course on the ocean.

“Another dinner without Dr. Perelle.” Jay was the last to take his seat at the kitchen table the following night. “You can tell the month of the year by counting how many times Cole misses supper.”

“Well, one thing I’ve learned from living in this house is that I don’t ever want to be a doctor,” Rennie said.

Jay looked crushed. “How can you say that? Look at the glamorous lives Cole and I lead, sewing episiotomies and taking out gallbladders.”

Rennie wrinkled her nose. “Don’t you ever get tired of them calling you all the time?”

“You get used to it. It’s the price you pay for being able to live in luxury and eat like a king.” He held up a forkful of baked beans as the phone rang. He smiled at Rennie. “It’s probably ‘them’ calling me right now, don’t you think?”

He walked to the counter and picked up the receiver. “Hello?” He held up a hand to silence the others, a frown on his face. “Cheryl, slow down, I can’t understand you.”

Something in the tone of his voice made everyone turn to look at him. He grasped the edge of the counter and held tight, his knuckles white. “What kind of accident?”

Kit felt her pulse quicken in her throat. Jay glanced at her, then looked away.

“What was he . . . Cheryl, come on, head wounds bleed that way, you know that . . . oh, God.”

He looked directly at her, and she knew it was Cole. She stood up, scraping the tops of her thighs on the table and knocking over her water.

“How long has he been out? Yes, I’ll be right there. You calm down, okay?”

He hung up the phone and turned to her. “Cole was in an accident. He was riding in an ambulance with a patient and it was hit by a truck. The driver and an attendant were killed, and Cole has some kind of head injury.”

She struggled to keep her head clear, her voice calm. “How bad . . . ?”

Jay shook his head. “He’s unconscious. Cheryl really doesn’t know much, just that he looked bad when he came in because of the blood and . . .”

Jay seemed rooted to the floor. She grabbed his arm. “Let’s go,” she said.

For the first five minutes of the drive to Point Pleasant she and Jay said nothing to each other. She played the words dear God, let him be all right over and over in her mind. It was evidence of her helplessness, praying to a God she had little faith in.

When they turned off the ocean road, Jay took her hand and held it on his thigh. “This is bizarre,” he said. “I can see my own life passing before my eyes.”

“Do you think he’s okay?” she asked. Jay was a doctor, for heaven’s sake. He should be able to tell her something.

But he didn’t seem to hear her. “When I look back at my own life, it’s full of Cole. I’ve seen him practically every day for the last twelve and a half . . . thirteen years, except when he was in France. It’s like I’m married to him.” He laughed. She held his hand tighter, afraid of the calm in his voice, the faraway look in his eyes.

“When I look at the future,” he said, “Cole’s still there. He’s got to be.” He let go of her hand to turn the steering wheel. They were going over the canal bridge now. She felt sick when she looked down at the water. “He knows what his friendship means to me, don’t you think. Kit?”

“Of course he does,” she said, thinking how odd it was that she’d been given the role of comforter here. She’d gotten into the car fully expecting to fall apart and let Jay piece her back together again. But it was better this way. Better right now to think about Jay than Cole.

She’d expected to see a horde of physicians hovering over him but except for Cheryl and another nurse, Cole was alone in the treatment room of the ER. He was flat on his back, a cervical collar on his neck and a wide, blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his head.

Cheryl smiled at them, a damp washcloth in her hand. “He’s conscious,” she said. Kit saw his eyelashes flutter.

“Thank God,” said Jay. He walked across the room and leaned over to hug him, his lips brushing Cole’s cheek.

That’s from me too, Cole, she thought. She couldn’t move.

“I’m all right,” Cole said softly, his lips barely moving.

Her hand was still frozen on the doorknob. He didn’t look all right. His face was scratched raw in most places and the skin that was still intact was purple.

Jay turned to her. “Come over here, Kit.”

She walked toward them slowly.

“I can tell by your face that I look pretty bad,” Cole whispered. “Just a concussion.” He lifted an arm to point to his head and winced.

“And a few broken ribs,” Cheryl added. There was another bandage wrapped around the lower part of his rib cage, and EKG leads ran from his chest to a machine next to the gurney.

Kit leaned over to kiss his forehead, below the bloody gauze. “I love you,” she said.

“Mm. I’m afraid I’m going to be very sick.”

Cheryl produced a plastic basin from the counter behind his gurney and Cole swallowed hard.

“How am I going to do this, Cheryl?” he asked. “I can’t move.”

Cheryl looked at Jay. “We have to roll him,” she said. “The cracked ribs are on this side, so roll him toward you.”

“I’ll talk to Dr. Gold about a nasogastric tube,” the other nurse said, heading for the door.

Kit watched helplessly while they turned him in one gentle movement, like rolling a log. Cheryl folded the washcloth and held it on the back of his neck.

Cole moaned.

“Hang on, Cole.” Cheryl held his head in her palm and slipped the basin under his cheek just in time. He vomited violently, his whole body shaking. Then he vomited again.

Kit felt the room spin. She glanced at the sink, wondering if she was going to get sick herself.

Jay took her by the shoulder and pointed her in the direction of the door. “Go call the others,” he said. “Cheryl and I will stay with him.”

She called the house and then sat in a chair outside the room. She watched doctors and nurses go in and out, ignoring her. She heard him vomit a few more times before they got the tube down him. It had to feel like you were suffocating, having that thing stuck down your throat. She dug in her purse for a piece of gum, something to get the stale taste out of her mouth. She was useless. Too cowardly even to hold his head while he threw up. What would she have done if Alison had gotten sick in the middle of the night?

It seemed like a long time before Cheryl came out. She pulled a chair out of one of the other treatment rooms and sat next to Kit. “It’s bad,” she said, “but it could have been a lot worse. He has no memory of the accident at all. He doesn’t remember his patient or even that he was in an ambulance. He doesn’t know anyone was killed.”

“No one told him?”

“Dr. Gold said it’s better to let things proceed naturally. We answer his questions as he asks them instead of offering a lot of information. I told him his patient’s name but it meant nothing to him. She’s new.”

“I don’t understand why he was in an ambulance.”

“Neither does he. I pieced it together, though. His patient was in the ER at Shore Memorial and he wanted her transferred over here. She was in premature labor and terrified. She asked him to ride with her. You know Cole, he couldn’t say no.”

No, Kit thought, he wouldn’t.

“I’m so glad you were here,” she said to Cheryl. She hated to think of him waking to a bunch of cold, professional faces. Cheryl would have been almost like family.

“I was just about to leave for the night and the ER receptionist called and said, ‘I thought you might like to know that we’ve got Dr. Perelle down here.’ It was awful when they first brought him in. And the two who were killed. One guy’s head was attached to his shoulders by a thread of skin. I saw the two of them first and then I saw Cole and I thought for sure he was dying.” Cheryl looked away from her, toward the reception desk, and Kit saw the tears in her eyes. “I know I really upset Jay on the phone—I should have checked out Cole’s condition a little further before I called.”

“I’m glad you called right away.”

“Dr. Gold’s going to admit him to a private room. They’ll have to wake him up every hour or so. You can stay with him if you like.”

She wanted to stay. She couldn’t change his bandages or hold the basin while he threw up. Spending the night at the hospital seemed the least she could do for him.

He spoke and moved in slow motion, as if he were afraid he would break. He was bothered by his sketchy memory of what had happened, and he felt just well enough to be grumpy.

“I wish I could remember,” he said. “I never go in ambulances with patients. I feel like I’m cracking up.”

She ran her hand up his arm. It was perfect, without a scratch. “That’s to be expected after a bad conk on the head.”

“Tell me about this morning. I want to see what I remember.”

She searched her own memory. “We slept in my room and we got up too late to go for a run because of our activities during the night. You remember them, don’t you?”

He smiled weakly. “Afraid not. Don’t take it personally. I’m sure it was wonderful.”

She felt a little sad. “What’s the last thing you do remember?” she asked.

He squinted as he thought. “Did all of us go out for ice cream sundaes last night?”

“That was the night before. Do you remember that?”

“Yes,” he said, and a look of amusement crossed his face. “I have a selective memory, I guess.”

She slept most of the morning on a sofa in his office. He was groggy when she went to see him in the afternoon. They’d taken the collar off his neck and they were letting him sleep for three hours at a time.

He held her hand loosely. “I’ve never hurt so much in my life,” he said. “Everything aches. My head feels like it has a hatchet in it.”

“I know, babe.”

He suddenly brightened. “My patient came to see me and I remembered her.”

“Really?”

“Yes. She’s new in town, so I hadn’t been seeing her long. I still don’t understand how it all happened, though. She said I rode with her because she was scared.” He looked at her. “Did you know I was such a nice guy?”

She smiled. “Oh, yeah.”

“She said she felt guilty about the accident.”

“Poor thing.”

“I told her not to, that I’ll be all right. I just feel bad about her baby.”

She could see the light dawning in his eyes and knew she was on shaky ground.

“What about the driver?” he asked. “The ambulance driver. Was he hurt at all?”

How should she do this? “Yes, he was. There was a driver and two attendants.”

“Are they here at Blair?’

She tightened her grip on his hand. “One attendant is here and he’s doing very well. The driver and the other attendant—a woman—were badly hurt and they died on the way in.”

Cole turned his face toward her, his eyes huge in their blackened sockets. “Jesus, no. Why didn’t you tell me?’

“Dr. Gold said it would be better to tell you when you asked.”

“Oh my God. It’s my fault. I could have driven her in.”

“Cole, no way was it your—”

“Two people are dead. And the baby. Shit.” He let go of her hand. “I’ve been lying here complaining about my little aches and pains, and three people are dead. How could you let me do this?”

She leaned back in her chair, not saying anything. Nothing she said could make any difference.