“He means it, Helen. We need to get out of here while we still can.”
I was half-asleep in the back of our tent, but not so much that I didn’t understand that my father and mother were having another argument. They whispered, but I could hear. Four-year-olds have good ears.
“It was just talk,” she said. “Abraham’s always quoting the Bible.”
“Not like this. Listen, we’ll be in Flagstaff in another couple of hours, and he’ll have to stop for gas. That’s our chance to get away. I still have some money left, enough for bus tickets back home and enough for food until we get there. Then all I need is to play a few gigs at that tonk down the road, and Nashville, here we come. Just like we originally planned.”
“But I don’t want to get away. These people are our friends. And she’s happy here. It would break her heart if we left. She’d especially miss Abraham’s son. She adores him.”
No I don’t, I thought. I just pretended to like Golden Boy so he won’t know how much he scared me. “You should never let anyone know they scare you, because that would give them the advantage.” Whatever ‘advantage’ meant. Who’d said that? Grandma? But she said that a long, long time ago, before Mom and Dad met the man with the big white bus. Abraham. I was scared of him, too. Even more scared of him than I was of Golden Boy.
“Helen, I’m telling you we have to get away before something bad happens.”
“Oh, you silly. Nothing bad is going to happen. It’s just that wild imagination of yours, which is what I get for taking up with you.” When she laughed, it sounded like Christmas bells, but it wasn’t Christmas now. “You bluesmen, you always look on the dark side, but that’s why you’re so good, isn’t it? All those songs about doom and gloom. Even John Lee said you were right up there with the best.”
Listen to Daddy, I wanted to scream. Wherever Flagstaff was, I wanted to run away there, get away from Abraham and his Golden Boy. I didn’t want to do what they want me to do and I’d told my mother but she wouldn’t believe me and it was coming closer every day and Daddy was right and we had to get out before…
***
“I see you’re finally awake.”
The room was so bright I had to squint to see a dark blob against the glaring white. “How are you feeling?” A woman. Her voice sounded familiar but I couldn’t place her.
I closed my eyes against the glare. “Headache. Light doesn’t help.”
“You have a subdural hematoma. They had to drill a burr hole in your skull to relieve the pressure.”
I opened my eyes again. “Hole in my head?”
The dark blob leaned closer, came into focus. Black hair, amber eyes, faint scent of turpentine. Madeline.
“Just a small one, Lena. Don’t worry, your prognosis is good. Excellent, even, if you behave yourself. It’s a good thing you were at Jimmy’s. He scraped you off the floor and drove you straight to the ER, then called me.”
“Don’t remember.”
“Well, you were unconscious at the time.”
“Where is he?”
“In the cafeteria getting breakfast. He slept here last night. Night before, too, same as me. You had us scared for a while.” She sat in one of two plastic chairs next to my bedside. The painting smock she wore looked crumpled.
“I’ve been here two days?”
“Three. It’s Monday.”
“I was supposed to be someplace, I think.”
I tried to sit up, but the IVs attached to my arms made it too complicated, so I lay back down. At least my eyes worked better. What I had first experienced as a surrounding whiteness turned out to be pale peach walls lit by a high-wattage overhead light. A framed print hung on the wall next to the bathroom. Almost Disneyesque, it portrayed three deer standing in a yellow-tinted forest glade. Papa deer, Mama deer, Baby deer. They shimmered and glowed so much they looked drenched in butter. Thomas Kincade. There was no escape from him.
Madeline noticed me staring at it. “Piece of crap, huh?”
Thomas Kincade. Why did he remind me of someone? I thought hard. Dolphins, for some reason. And a mermaid. Then I remembered Ali’s uncle walking past the art galleries on Main Street.
Ali.
“I need to see someone.” Despite the IVs, I struggled to a sitting position.
Madeline pushed me back down.
“Lie still, Sweetie. You’ll have to put up with this for a couple more days to make sure you don’t develop an infection. Then you’re going home with me. At least you’ll be surrounded by better art.”
I looked around the room, noticed the bathroom, the lack of a neighboring bed. “I can’t afford a private room for five days.”
“You didn’t start off in one, but all the screaming kept waking your roommate up.”
“I was screaming?”
“Something about a gold boy and a white bus. Anyway, don’t worry about the cost. Turns out you’ve got great hospitalization insurance.”
“That must have been Jimmy. He takes care of the business side of things.”
“He’s…Speak of the devil, here he comes.” But she was smiling as Jimmy came through the door and took the seat next to her.
“Look who’s awake,” he said.
“I need to see Ali. And Juliana. I made an appointment.”
“You’re three days late. When you didn’t show at Juliana’s house Wednesday, she called and left a message on the office phone. I got back to her and told her what happened. Ali wants to see you, but I don’t think that’s a good idea right now. Oh, and here’s some advice. Don’t look in the mirror.”
“Here’s some advice for you, buddy. Don’t tell me what not to do.” There had to be a mirror in the bathroom, so I struggled up again. This time it was Jimmy who pushed me back down. “Vanity, thy name is Lena. If you really have to know, your face is the size and color of a pumpkin and just as scary. You’ve got an even bigger bald spot on the back of your head than before, not that it matters. You’re supposed to be resting, not fussing about your looks.”
He didn’t understand. “I need to get back on my feet and take care of business.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Madeline interjected. “Jimmy, explain to her what a subdural hematoma is. Maybe she’ll listen to you.”
“Lena doesn’t listen to anyone,” he growled, then proceeded to tell me that Monster Woman’s blow to my head caused bleeding in my brain, blah, blah, blah, and the consequences could have been life-threatening, blah, blah, blah, especially since I’d ignored my first doctor’s orders and continued running around town, blah, blah, blah, and all that movement resulted in complications, blah, blah, blah, and I was old enough to know better, and blah, blah, blah…
“Cut the lecture,” I snapped. “It’s making my head hurt.”
“Blame it on me, why don’t you?”
“Would you two stop bickering?” This, from Madeline. “You sound like some old married couple.”
That shut us up.
With a smile of triumph, she continued. “Here’s what we’re going to do, Lena. The minute your doctors discharge you, you’re coming home with me, and you’ll stay in bed until I say you can get up. We don’t need any more emergency trips back to the hospital, now, do we?”
Annoyed by her hospital-ese use of the royal “we,” I pointed out the flaw in her plan. “No, we don’t. But if something happens, we don’t need to be way out there in the Boonies, do we? We’ll be better off if we stay right here in Scottsdale where we’ll be right down the street from a hospital.”
“There’s a perfectly good hospital right down the road from my studio. Florence General. Excellent ratings. Jimmy checked it out.”
Jimmy added his own unwelcome opinion to the mix. “Furthermore, if you’re out there in the Boonies, as you so delicately call the Florence area, you won’t be so quick to hop in your Jeep and go back to work. And just to make sure, I’m keeping your Jeep at my place. You won’t get the keys back until the doctor clears you to drive.”
“That’s car theft. Now just you listen to me, I’m going to…”
The nurse picked that moment to come in, carrying a hypodermic on a tray.
I didn’t like the looks of it. “What’s that?”
“It’s our sleepy-bye shot,” she said, and jabbed me.
Before I could protest, we went sleepy-bye.