Run

  Kenya took hold of her mother’s hand. It was cold and bare. Her glove had fallen off. “Sleep,” Kenya said. “They’re going to be here to get you in one minute.”

  And the mother, who had no energy to do anything but listen to an eleven-year-old, closed her eyes again. If she had seen just who it was that Kenya was huddled up against, she gave no sign of it.

  Teddy sat and watched the whole thing. He had no idea if the woman whose head he now held in his hands would live or how badly she was hurt and he was sorry to think this little girl had to sit there and watch it all. Even if it had to happen, she shouldn’t have to see it. “Your loved ones were daring and brave,” Teddy said quietly, “and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, ‘Give me a challenge and I’ll meet it with joy.’”

  Kenya looked up at him. She had no idea what he was talking about but the words were beautiful.

  “‘They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths,’” Teddy said. “‘They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.’”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Teddy,” Doyle said, pushing himself up from the ground. “Not Reagan. Not now.”

  When the ambulance came it seemed like only a minute had passed and it seemed like a day. One man came straight to the mother and one man went to Tip. Tip sat up and pulled his father’s coat around him. He shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said, and pointed to the woman lying a few feet away. He didn’t look entirely fine but the man didn’t ask him again. He also went to see about the woman. Now there were three policemen on the scene and they scattered the crowd and spoke to the man who had struck Kenya’s mother with his car. He was back sitting in the driver’s seat in order to stay out of the weather. Teddy rested the woman’s head into the snow and pulled the girl back so that there was room enough for the two men from the ambulance to work. The first thing they did was slide her onto a board, a flat sled that kept her off the ground. The lights on their truck stayed on, cutting wide red circles around them.

  “Are you her family?” the ambulance driver said to Teddy.

  “His family,” he said and pointed to Tip.

  “And she’s yours?” The driver now pointed to Kenya.

  Teddy looked down at the girl who was tucked under his arm like a permanent resident and she looked back at him. He had forgotten to ask her name. “She belongs to her,” Teddy said, and motioned his head slightly to the black woman on the ground. This was how their connections were established. No one asked Doyle if he belonged anywhere in this group. In fact there was a moment when a policeman tried to shoo him away.

  “My son stepped in front of the car,” Doyle told the policeman. “It was snowing so hard, I don’t think he even saw the curb. None of us saw the car. This woman saw the car and she pushed him away.”

  “The car hit her when she pushed him?” the policeman said.

  Doyle said yes, that was the way that it happened. None of the things that had seemed so important ten minutes ago, Jesse Jackson and Lawrence Simons and the fish in their jars, none of those had any bearing on the story now.

  Kenya watched the workers like the foreman of a construction site. She kept an eye on every move they made. The ambulance driver was a black man with some island accent. Of the two men who worked on her mother, one was white and one was black. All three of the policemen were white men. The white ambulance attendant snapped a white plastic collar around her mother’s neck while the black ambulance attendant belted her legs. They worked like ants, their movements small and precise. One took his hands away and the other one’s hands were there. One put a bandage on her head, the other sliced open the sleeve of her coat and wrapped a cuff around her arm. Kenya gasped to see him cut the coat when it would have been so easy to simply slip it off of her. Her mother would go straight to the little wicker basket on the top shelf of the closet where needles and thread were kept. Kenya herself did not know how to sew but surely it could be mended. One man opened up her mother’s eyelid with a thumb and shone in a light. The other taped her head to the board with wide paper tape. They called out numbers and nodded to themselves. Every minute Kenya’s mother became stiffer and straighter, locked into the equipment until every piece of her was bundled tight.

  “What’s her name?” the black attendant said to Teddy. He had forgotten already that Teddy did not know the woman and that he had no reason to know the answer to the question.

  “Tennessee,” he said.

  “Like the state,” Kenya said.

  “Huh,” the white attendant said, and the black one said, “Tennessee? Tennessee, can you hear me?” His voice was so loud that even the policemen turned around.

  When Tennessee opened her eyes again Kenya rushed to put her face just above her mother’s face. Her mother tried to smile but the men told Kenya to step back and Teddy took her arm lightly and pulled her away. They were very busy. It was as if they had rehearsed this accident before, as if they had practiced and practiced in anticipation of exactly this night. “Tennessee,” the black man said. “Can you tell me where you’re hurting?”

  But she couldn’t tell them anything, and then her eyes were closed again. They reached beneath the board she was strapped to, counted to three, and picked her up like she was nothing more than snow. Then they slid her into the back of the truck.

  When Kenya put one foot onto the step to climb inside the men all shook their heads. “Not tonight,” the white ambulance attendant said, as if perhaps tomorrow it would be fine for her to ride along.

  “I want to go!” Kenya could hear the panic in her own voice.

  “You stay with your family, they’ll drive you over,” the ambulance driver said. “We can’t have little girls in the back of the truck.”

  Snap, snap, they locked the metal board down into place and each man leaned out and grabbed a door and pulled it shut. It was all so fast, as fast as the accident itself. There was no way to see her mother now. Once the doors were shut Kenya started to cry, though not in the keening way she had done before. She cried like a girl who was standing in a snowstorm without her mother. Her mother didn’t let her ride the T alone and so she wasn’t certain she would be able to get back home by herself. She didn’t have any money for a token. For some reason she didn’t have her keys tonight. She usually wore them on a cord around her neck. She had forgotten to ask which hospital they were taking her mother to and even if they had told her she wouldn’t have known how to get there. The men in the truck hadn’t gotten the story straight, even though Teddy had told them. They had left the black girl with the two young black men who didn’t know her. After all, they looked like they belonged together. She wasn’t hurt, she wasn’t alone. They didn’t think another thing about her.

  “I’ll call an ambulance for the boy,” a policeman said. “They should have sent two.”

  “I don’t need an ambulance,” Tip said from the ground. He had pushed a wall of snow against either side of his ankle in an attempt to freeze the swelling and the pain. He did not untie his sneaker or roll up the leg of his jeans. He didn’t want to know.

  Teddy had left her to go and see about his brother. It was much worse for Kenya now that her mother was gone. Not only did she have no idea how she was going to find her again, she could now see the size of the red mark left behind in the snow even as it was quickly being covered up. It was impossible not to try and calculate the extent of the damage. Without Kenya there to watch over things, to keep her mother safe, anything was possible. How could her mother keep herself safe when she couldn’t even stay awake? The crowd had all gone away. Now that the ambulance had left, the remaining group of them were of no interest to anyone.

  The few people who stayed behind had turned their attention to Tip. Kenya was sitting in the snow alone next to the spot where her mother had been. That’s when she happened to notice something small and dark beneath the SUV. The shape of it made her wonder because it clearly was not a leaf or a piece of paper, and because she very m
uch wanted to be thinking of anything other than her present circumstances, she crawled under the car to see what it was. The SUV was so high up that she could get beneath it quite easily by keeping low and dragging her legs behind her. Three feet back she found one thin, stretchy glove that was absolutely her mother’s, and after brushing it off she shoved it in her pocket. Then she saw her mother’s boot lying on its side. She had forgotten to look at her mother’s feet. She took the boot by the laces and pulled herself backwards from beneath the car. If there was one boot off there could be two.

  “Couldn’t you just take us all over to the hospital?” Doyle said.

  “We’ve got to call an ambulance,” the officer said.

  Kenya looked behind the trees near a high brick wall. She looked beneath two bushes and when she stood up straight she found her mother’s hat sitting neatly on top of one of them. Her mother’s favorite dark green hat, purchased two years ago at the very end of the Filene’s after-Christmas sale for three dollars! How her mother would have hated to lose that hat. Kenya brushed it off carefully and put it on top of her head. Her mother had been upset with her after they left the apartment that night because Kenya said she had put her own hat in her pocket when she hadn’t. Kenya had lied about the hat because hats looked ridiculous on her when her hair was up in ponytails. They made her head look lumpy. Her mother put a strong hand on Kenya’s shoulder while they waited for the T and she spoke to her sharply about keeping her head dry and not catching cold. How was she going to take off work if Kenya caught cold? There was for an instant the thought of her mother never scolding her again, of being alone in a night as dark as this one forever, but just as quickly she banished it. After all, her mother had opened her eyes. That was what she had seen herself, so that was what there was to trust. She would wear her mother’s hat. She would find whatever else was missing. Everything had been flung around. That’s how hard she was hit. She saw her mother’s scarf right next to where she had been sitting, but now she couldn’t see the blood anymore and she couldn’t see the scarf either, just the shape of the scarf like a long flattened snake beneath the snow. She shook it out fast and wrapped it twice around her neck even though the wool was wet and cold and only made her colder. The snow was unstoppable, covering everything up, sifting into the smallest open spaces: the pockets of her coat, the tiny splits in the grill of a car. That was what made Kenya stop and think about looking for things in a different way and looking for them quickly. That’s how she found her mother’s purse pressed up tight against a brick wall, just a lump in the snow. It would have been so easy to miss it altogether, and then the purse would have stayed there until spring.

  “We can’t just go loading people in the cars,” another officer said. “Nobody likes that.”

  “Look,” Doyle said, running a hand across his head. “I need to get my son out of this weather.” They were all soaked through by now, all bitter and wet. “I’m Bernard Doyle. If you could help us out here.”

  “Mr. Doyle?” said the oldest of the three, a man not so much younger than Doyle himself. He smiled hugely and then remembered himself and stuck out his thick, snowy glove. “Mr. Mayor? Of course you are. Man, I’ve been looking at you all night trying to figure out…”

  And then it was done. For one shining moment in history, Cambridge extended its hand to help Boston. Teddy got on one side of Tip and one of the younger officers got on the other and they lifted him up and put him in the backseat of the black and white. Suddenly it seemed hard to believe that they’d left him on the ground all that time. Tip Doyle. Teddy and Tip. They remembered them now. The black and white had been running all this time, the heater cranked up to high so that the car was tropically warm. Doyle got in beside Tip and called to Teddy. “Get the girl and let’s go,” he said.

  But when Teddy looked up she was nowhere. He had her with him not two minutes ago. In every direction it was nothing more than an empty block filling up with snow. All of the people were gone, the SUV was gone. The footprints were all filled in. The street was shimmering, mirror-like. Even now the place where Tip had lain for so long was smoothing over.

  “Come on,” Doyle said. He was shivering in the warm car. His hands ached.

  “Just a second.”

  The two younger officers got back out of the second car. It was late but the streetlights poured generously across the snow and lit up the night in resplendence. She was a skinny girl and tall, ten or eleven or twelve, with her hair in four high braids or six high braids and her coat was a dark color. Not that it mattered. There was only one little girl on this street on this night. They couldn’t leave her out there in the cold. They couldn’t lose her, whoever she was. For an awful moment Teddy tried to remember if he had seen her since the ambulance left. Had she followed it? Even though he saw nothing in any direction, he put his hands up to his mouth and called out as loud as he could, “Hey! Tennessee’s daughter!”

  And out shot a head from beneath a snow covered Buick parked on the side of the street fifteen feet away. The child was underneath the car.

  “What are you doing, girl?” Teddy said to her.

  Kenya raised up her hand to show him. “I found her other boot!” She was trying to shinny out but the snow was making a fast wall and she struggled. He went and took her hands and pulled her up into the night air. She seemed to be an empty coat, utterly weightless, and for a moment he held her aloft in his arms. “It was all the way up here,” she said breathlessly.

  “Kenya like the country?” said the officer driving the car.

  “Like the country,” she said.

  Kenya and Teddy sat up front with two boots, one purse, one hat, a scarf, one glove, and her mother’s cut coat. “You were smart to go looking for that stuff,” the officer said to her. “Especially the purse. That’s sharp thinking. Most people don’t think so sharp when there’s an accident.”

  “It was everywhere,” she said.

  “Things get thrown around, I’ll tell you. The things I’ve seen.” He whistled. “You wouldn’t want to hear it.”

  Everyone in the car stayed quiet because none of them wanted to hear it.

  “I only found one glove,” Kenya said.

  “She may still have the other one on,” Teddy told her.

  “Maybe not,” Tip said. “So then I’ll know what to bring her in the hospital when I come to visit.” Tip was sitting with his back against the door and his leg up in his father’s lap. The car had the wet, woolly smell of soaking overcoats. It didn’t make any sense. A Chevy Tahoe had run over his ankle and someone else had been hit straight on trying to push him out of the way, they were all headed to the hospital in a police car and yet he was in a much better mood than he had been earlier in the evening. He thought about saying this but it would have been disrespectful to the girl.

  Kenya turned around to look at Tip over the backseat. He was shivering. It made her feel shy all of a sudden to see him hurt.

  “I think she wants to know how you are,” Doyle said.

  Tip smiled at her. Poor kid, she had it worse than he did any day. “I think my ankle’s broken but it can’t be too bad. I can still move my toes.” Or he could move his toes just after it happened. He couldn’t move them now, though that was very likely because he was too damn cold to feel them.

  Kenya winced in part at the thought of the pain and in part at the thought of her own ankle. A break would mean a whole season out of track. All of the events that she was bound to win this year would go to someone else. Maybe, if it was very bad, it would mean no more running for years, maybe until high school even. If that were the case she didn’t know who she would be at all. The policeman’s windshield wipers made a high squeak as they slapped the wet snow back and forth. All along the front of the dashboard were radios and thick, curling cords. It wasn’t like the dashboard of any car she’d ever seen before. Every minute or so voices would come through, women’s and men’s, saying things that she didn’t understand punctuated by loud, squelching bu
rsts of static. The officer who was driving just ignored them and went on making conversation with Doyle about past elections and city planning commissions and the chief of police. “I’m a guy who lives in the past,” the officer said. “That’s what my wife always tells me. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this guy but it’s not like it used to be, you know?” There were no other cars on Storrow Drive, and it was usually packed at any hour of the day. They crept along carefully. And all of that seemed right to Kenya. After all, she had gone down the rabbit hole just like Alice in the book. Her mother had been hit by a giant car and taken away from her, she was in the front seat of a police car riding with the Doyle family to the hospital in a snowstorm. If there had been other cars, if the weather had been fine, if anything in the world had seemed the same, she might have just shrunk down to the size of nothing and disappeared.

  People treat you nicely when you come to the emergency room in a police car. The officer got out first and said to everybody there, “This is Bernard Doyle. This man used to be the mayor of Boston.” There were a couple of other police officers standing around in the cold, talking with the guys who unload the ambulances. Two nurses were smoking cigarettes under the awning and they turned around from looking up at the snow to look at Doyle. They all seemed impressed, and a couple of them came over to shake his hand. It was late and they weren’t very busy because of the weather. People who were sick decided maybe they weren’t so sick that they had to go to the hospital, and people who would have been out getting into trouble that could lead them to a hospital chose to stay home as well. They put Tip in a wheelchair and he made a sorrowful sound when they touched his leg. Tip was feeling worse now than he had in the car or out on the street in the snow.