Zigzag

  “Ow!” Marshall entered the fray. “Iris kicked the vase right into my knee!”

  “Well, I can’t stand it anymore!” Iris said. She kicked the vase so hard I could feel it hitting the back of my seat.

  “Iris, if you break that pot . . .”

  “I hope I do break it. It would serve you right!”

  Dory unbuckled her seat belt so she could turn far enough around in the seat to see her daughter. “Iris! Get hold of yourself. What is wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with me is you! Why did Daddy have to die? He wouldn’t make me do things I don’t want to do!”

  “Shut up, Iris!” Marshall demanded. And then he lifted his foot and smashed it into her thigh.

  Dory turned back to look at the road, and then turned around again, trying—with one arm—to keep Iris from kicking the pot, to keep Marsh from kicking Iris. I think what she wanted to do was pull the car over to the side of the road, but we were going too fast, and everything was so loud and crazy. When we came around the curve, we were too near the edge, and then everything went into slow motion. The tires went off the road and bumped over the rocky dirt. Dory swore and tried to wrench the steering wheel in the other direction, but suddenly the van didn’t seem to be under her control anymore.

  “Mom, stop!” Iris screamed, but this time there was nothing Dory could do. Marshall was just yelling, without words.

  The van leaped sideways, heading down the slope of the hill. Dory kept stomping on the brake, but it was useless. As the van tipped, I braced myself against the dashboard and looked over at her. She was staring through the windshield with wide, terrified eyes; she’d given up trying to stop the inevitable.

  Oh, my God, is what I was thinking. This can’t be happening. Make this not be happening. The screaming from the backseat continued as the van rolled over once, twice, three times, and finally landed on its side like a wounded elephant.

  Then everything was quiet.

  For a minute I thought I must be paralyzed—I couldn’t seem to move. But then I realized that the van was lying flat on the passenger side and something had fallen on top of me and was pushing me against the door. I craned my neck to the side to see what it was. And there was Dory, not caught behind the inflated air bag in the driver’s seat, but lying heavily against my side, her head almost on top of mine.

  “Mommy!” I recognized Marshall’s voice.

  “Are you guys all right?” I yelled back.

  “She’s bleeding!” Marshall said.

  “I think I’m okay,” Iris said. “What’s wrong with Mom?”

  I heard someone else then, someone outside the car, coming down the hill toward us, yelling, “I called for help! Don’t worry, we’ll get you out!” The voice sounded familiar.

  “Are you okay in there? It’s Savannah, from the restaurant—I saw you go off the road!”

  “I think we’re okay,” I called back. I wasn’t actually sure that was true, especially since Dory hadn’t said anything yet, but I didn’t want to get Iris and Marsh more scared than they already were.

  “Can you get the front door open? That’s the only door on this side,” Savannah said. “The car won’t roll any farther—there are trees stopping it.”

  I was afraid to move since Dory was lying against me and I didn’t want her to fall. “Iris, can you climb up front and get the door open?”

  The air bag had deflated by then so Iris was able to hang on to the seat back and step over her mother. She grabbed the steering wheel and crouched with her feet on the gear shift box. “Should I turn the car off?” she asked in a shaky voice.

  “Yes, good idea,” I said.

  She did, then turned to look at her mother. “Mom? Are you okay?”

  Dory groaned then, and tried to shift her weight.

  “There’s blood on her head,” Iris said. In the backseat Marshall started to cry.

  “We need to get her out of here. See if you can open the door.”

  Iris tried the handle, but it was stuck. “Maybe I can kick it open.” With one hand on the headrest and the other on the steering wheel, she raised up her body and kicked both feet out against the door. The third kick knocked the door back and the cool, pine-scented air reminded me where we were—in the middle of nowhere.

  “Great!” Savannah said. “Can you jump?”

  “I don’t know. My ankle hurts now,” Iris said, then looked back at me. “Should I get out?”

  Obviously I was now in charge whether I liked it or not. “Help Marsh climb over the seat, too. Then both of you get out of the car.”

  Marsh did as he was told, sobbing as he climbed past his mother. “Mommy!” he screamed at her.

  Dory stirred again and this time lifted her head.

  “What . . . ?” she managed, then laid her head back against mine.

  “We had an accident, but we’re all okay, Dory. We’re getting out of the car,” I said, although I couldn’t imagine how the two of us were going to get out.

  Iris lowered her weeping brother out of the front door, down to Savannah, then jumped down herself.

  “My mommy’s hurt!” Marsh reported to Savannah.

  “She’s bleeding from her head,” Iris said. “And she’s lying on top of Robin so she can’t get out either.”

  “Don’t worry!” Savannah called in to me. “People are coming to help. I called the local emergency squad and the Santa Fe ambulance both.”

  “They’re coming to help us,” I said to Dory, but she didn’t move a muscle. There was a terrible thought rising in my head. I tried to push it down, but it kept bubbling back up. Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die, please don’t die, I told her, though not out loud. You can’t die because your children need you, and I could never find a way to help them if you died, too.

  And then I heard the siren, and the voices, and I hoped it meant we were safe. All of us. I could hear a ladder being hoisted up to the open car door.

  “The Madrid Emergency Squad is here,” Savannah called in to us. “They’ll be able to get you out and help you until the ambulance arrives.”

  My God, I thought, what would have happened if Savannah hadn’t been driving behind us? If nobody had seen us go off the road? We could have been here until morning before anybody noticed us.

  Within minutes a man had climbed up a ladder and inside the van. He put a thick white collar around Dory’s neck, then he and a second man carefully turned her so her back rested on a board. She groaned as the two of them slowly lifted her out the door and lowered her down to the ground. A woman showed up next and helped me up from the bottom of the van, then down the ladder. My head was buzzing like crazy and I felt dizzy, especially after I got outside and saw what a wreck the car was.

  Marsh and Iris were trying to get a look at their mother, but the emergency crew was busy checking her over and they were pushed back. She moaned when they touched her right shoulder and then opened her eyes. “Where are my children? Iris? Marshall?”

  “We’re here, Mom,” Iris said. “We’re okay. We’re fine. Robin’s okay, too.”

  “Robin! Oh, my God. What have I done?” Tears spilled from the corners of her eyes.

  “You just had an accident,” Savannah told her. “You’ll be fine.”

  It wasn’t long before the ambulance from Santa Fe came careening up the road. The Madrid people gave them a shorthand account of what had happened.

  “Looks like she didn’t have a belt on. Arm fractures, maybe collarbone. Head contusions. Possible internal injuries.”

  It all sounded awful. Marsh was huddled against Iris’s side and Iris stood so close to me our hips banged together. It occurred to me again that I was in charge now; I was the surrogate mother for these two even if I was only seventeen and scared witless. Thank God, Savannah had more sense than I did.

  “Tell me your names,” she said, and we did.

  “Okay, Robin, the hatch is sprung open just enough to pull your suitcases and stuff out. I’ll put your things i
n my car, okay? I’ll follow you to the hospital.”

  “What about the stuff inside the car? Dory’s purse and mine . . .”

  “And my drawings,” Marsh said quietly.

  “The vase!” Iris said. “What about the vase!”

  “It’s probably broken anyway,” I said.

  “No! We should get it out!”

  Savannah put a hand on Iris’s shoulder. “Let me see what they’re going to do with the car.” She went to talk to a policeman, then returned.

  “They’ll tow the car to a Santa Fe repair shop to see if it’s worth fixing. Once they get it turned upright the police will take all your stuff out for you and bring it to the hospital. Okay?”

  I nodded. It kept hitting me over and over that we’d been in a very bad accident, that nothing was the same now as it had been an hour ago. My head was throbbing. “I think I have to . . .” was all I got out before I turned around and threw up in the dirt.

  “Okay, her on the other stretcher,” the EMT called, pointing to me.

  “No, I’m okay,” I said. “You should look at the kids.”

  “All of you, then. In here with your mother.”

  Instead of making any of us lie down, they put us in seats with shoulder belts next to Dory’s stretcher, and then turned on that awful screaming siren. Every time the ambulance careened around a corner the three of us hung onto the belts and the sides of the chairs. It wasn’t fun. I was beginning to realize I must be bruised from the seat belt in the minivan because my chest ached. Marshall had stopped crying and sat quietly, staring at his mother whose face was as white as the collar around her neck.

  “She’ll be all right,” I told him.

  He looked at me, then curled his lip as if he was speaking to an idiot. “How do you know? Did you ever see anybody die?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “She isn’t going to die!” Iris said. “She isn’t!”

  “You hope,” Marshall said, the last word on the subject.

  Once we got to the hospital, we were all taken into separate curtained-off rooms in emergency. My curtain wasn’t closed all the way and I could see doctors and nurses running in and out of Dory’s room, bringing all kinds of equipment and looking very serious. I hoped Marshall couldn’t see it from his room.

  As I lay there waiting for someone to come in, it dawned on me that I probably wouldn’t make it to Phoenix, Arizona. Not on this trip, anyway. I tried not to feel too sorry for myself, since the Tewksburys were obviously more hurt by the accident than I was, but still I thought, why couldn’t this have worked out for me?

  Finally a nurse came in and asked me a bunch of questions. Some of them I didn’t know about: insurance and who everybody’s doctor was. I said Dory would be able to tell them all that once she felt better. I took it as good news that the nurse didn’t say, “Her? She’ll never get any better.” Then I had to sign some papers. A policeman came in and asked me how the accident happened. I told him about the argument, how Dory had taken off her seat belt to deal with the kids in the backseat, how all of a sudden the car had run off the road.

  He shook his head. “Kids,” he said, in a way that sounded like he’d do away with the whole species if he could. “By the way, I left your belongings that were in the car at the front desk. I can’t believe that big pot didn’t break getting flipped over like that.” Great, I thought. It was the damn pot’s fault to begin with.

  Finally the nurse came back and took my blood pressure. “So, you doing okay? Anything hurt you?”

  “I’m kind of sore where the seat belt was,” I said, “and my head hurts,” I said, pointing to the spot. “I think I bumped it on the door.”

  She unbuttoned my shirt and felt around my rib cage. “That hurt?” she asked.

  I twisted away from her touch. “A little.”

  “Yeah, you’re bruised but not broken.” Then she looked into my eyes with a little flashlight. “Not dizzy, are you?”

  “Not anymore. I was right after the accident.”

  “You got a goose egg up there, but I think you’re okay. I’ll get you an icepack to hold on it. Otherwise, you look fine. Soon as I tape your sister up . . .”

  “My cousin. Is she hurt?”

  “Not much. Sprained ankle. She’ll be on crutches for a few days.”

  “And the little boy? Marshall?”

  “Not a scratch on him! Lucky kid. Oh, there’s somebody in the waiting room who said to tell you she’s here—Suzanna, I think she said.”

  “Savannah?”

  “That’s it.”

  They let Marsh come and sit in my room with me while they explained the physics of crutches to Iris.

  “Your head hurt?” Marsh asked.

  “A little. The nurse said you’re fine, though. Not a scratch!”

  “Yeah.” He looked at me. “What do we do now?”

  What I felt like saying was, I don’t know! How am I supposed to know? But I didn’t think it would be right to let a worried ten-year-old know I was scared, too. “I guess we wait until we find out how your mom’s doing. That’s the first thing.”

  He nodded.

  When Iris could maneuver around on the crutches, they sent the three of us out to the waiting room where Savannah was sitting reading a battered-up book called Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Which sounded like the biography of my life this summer. She jumped up when she saw us.

  “You guys don’t look too bad, considering what the car looks like. Is your ankle badly hurt?” She helped Iris into a chair, then took the crutches and leaned them against the wall.

  “No. I guess I sprained it when I kicked the door open.”

  “And Robin has a bump on the head,” Marshall told her, “but I’m fine. I didn’t even get hurt.”

  “Well, that’s one good thing, huh?” Savannah put an arm around Marshall, and, to my surprise, he allowed it. “Listen, I’m going to stay with you until you hear about your mom, and then I’ll take you all back to the motel. I called home and my mom said there are several vacant rooms, so there’s no problem.”

  Marshall looked worried. “I want to stay here with Mom.”

  “I know you do,” Savannah said, “and we will stay here until we know she’s okay, but there’s no place to sleep here, and there’s plenty of room at the Black Mesa Motel. You’ll like it there. Really.”

  “Thanks,” I said, sinking into a chair. It was nice to have somebody else make a decision for us. I leaned back and let the ice numb my brain. There was a big television mounted on the wall which was turned to the late news—most of it sounded bad, something about rising oil prices and a falling stock market. “Can we turn that off?” I asked.

  Savannah shook her head. “I already tried. It seems to be on permanently. Do you want me to read you a story? Maybe I can drown it out.”

  She had a good reading voice, and I think I would have liked the story if I’d been able to concentrate on it. I closed my eyes and let her voice run over me like water.

  It was almost midnight before a doctor came out to talk to us. Marsh had fallen asleep with his head on my lap and Iris was stretched out across four chairs.

  “Are you the Tewksbury family?” Everybody sat up immediately, and all of us, Savannah included, said yes.

  “My name is Dr. Ellis.” She shook Savannah’s hand, then mine.

  “Is Mom all right?” Iris asked, getting right up in her face.

  “Your mother will be fine, but she has to stay here for a while. A week or so. There are two broken bones in her upper arm and her collarbone is pretty bruised. Two ribs are broken. She has a concussion, which I think is mild, but we want to keep an eye on that for a few days, too. She’s pretty banged up, but she’ll be good as new before you know it.”

  It was funny, how the kids reacted. Marsh was so relieved, he started jumping up and down. But Iris, who’d been her usual tightly wound self up until now, suddenly fell apart. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “Can we see her??
?? she asked.

  “For a minute, yes. But she needs to rest. Do you have a place to go tonight?”

  “They’re staying with me,” Savannah said firmly. “I’m a friend of the family.”

  I was glad to hear it. We needed a friend right now.

  Dory was too dopey to even know who was in her room. She opened her eyes and smiled at us, but then went right back into dreamland. Still it was good to see her looking relatively normal again. Her arm and shoulder were in a plaster cast that was held up by a pulley of some kind, but her face was the right color and, wherever she thought she was, she seemed happy there. Marshall gave her a kiss on the cheek and Iris, who’d stopped crying, twirled her mother’s wedding ring around her limp finger.

  “She never took it off,” Iris said.

  We tiptoed out and followed Savannah downstairs.

  I remembered as we passed the front desk that our things from the car were there, and we stopped to get them: a garbage bag full of purses, books, CDs, and drawing supplies. And an enormous Acoma vase, unbroken.

  “What a beautiful pot. I can’t believe it didn’t break,” Savannah said as she handed it to me to hold in the front seat.

  “I grabbed it between my knees,” Iris said.

  “You did?” I said. “When?”

  “When the car started to roll. I don’t know why. It was just something to hold on to, I guess. I protected it.”

  “Or maybe the pot protected you,” Savannah said. “You never know.”

  “Maybe it protected all of us,” I said.

  “Me and the vase were the luckiest ones,” Marshall said. “We didn’t get a scratch.”

  I can’t believe this! Are you sure Dory’s going to be all right? Are you sure you’re all right? How could this happen?” “Mom, we’re okay, really. Don’t worry.” I could just imagine her pacing up and down the kitchen, twisting the phone cord into complicated knots.

  “Well, you’re not okay. Dory’s in the hospital with broken bones and the rest of you . . . where are you, anyway?”