Claire frantically scanned the crowd for sight of Kathy. She had to get down, she decided, sitting clumsily on the sled and pushing off with her feet. The sled started to go immediately and with speed. This was a bad idea too, Claire realized immediately. She needed to slow the sled and jump off. Get to the bottom of the hill and to her daughter’s side before anything happened. But when she stuck her foot out to slow down, it forced the sled off its course and sent it in a different direction without slowing at all.
Claire pulled on the rope to steer, but she was moving too fast. The sled had taken on a life of its own. She glanced over her shoulder, and when she looked forward again she saw the sled heading for a giant tree. Digging both of her feet into the snow, Claire stopped the sled finally but not the momentum of her body. She flew off the sled. For a moment, she was airborne, tumbling.
Then she hit the tree. Hard.
When she opened her eyes, Claire was on her back, gazing up at that clear blue sky. Already a crowd had gathered, and a man was bending over her asking something.
Claire blinked. Her hand went instinctively to the back of her head where she felt something warm.
“Do you know what your name is?” the man asked her.
“Claire,” she said, her voice sounding like someone else’s. The fingers that had touched her head were covered in blood.
“Do you know what year it is?” he asked.
His face was very close to hers, so close that she could see the stubble on his cheeks and chin and smell the cocoa on his breath.
“Do you know who the president is?” the man asked as if her life depended on getting these right.
“Kennedy,” Claire said.
“Whoa,” someone towering above her said. “That’s a lot of blood.”
She could feel it, pooling around her head and neck.
“Has anyone called an ambulance?” someone else shouted.
The man peering at her said his wife was doing that very thing.
“Ma’am?” Another man kneeled at her side, his face creased with worry. “Are you pregnant?”
Claire’s hands went to her belly.
“She is,” the new man said. “She’s pregnant.”
In the distance Claire could hear a siren.
“What kind of fool would go sledding when she was pregnant?” a woman in the crowd said.
Claire thought about Kathy at the bottom of the hill in that red snowsuit that was too big for her.
“I needed to find my daughter,” she said.
She tried to sit up, but as soon as she lifted her head everything around her started to spin.
“Whoa,” the first man said, pushing her back down lightly. “Hold on, Claire.”
The siren grew nearer.
Peter’s voice rose above the others. “Let me through,” he was saying. “That’s my wife there.”
He appeared before her, Kathy tucked under one arm and Little Jimmy under the other. Carefully he set the children down. They stared at her, wide-eyed. Little Jimmy sucked his thumb.
“Jesus, Claire,” Peter muttered.
“You have Kathy,” Claire managed to say, relief washing over her. “Thank God.”
“The ambulance is here!” someone called.
“My head,” Claire said, touching it again and feeling fresh blood.
Peter took her bloody hand and held it lightly. Two emergency technicians arrived with a stretcher.
“Do you know your name?” one of them asked.
They both looked about twelve years old. One of them had acne and glasses and skinny arms.
“Claire.”
He looked at Peter, who nodded.
“Okay, Claire,” the one with acne said, slapping a blood pressure cuff on her, “what day is today?”
“Inauguration day,” Claire said.
“BP is sky-high,” he said.
“She’s pregnant,” Peter told him.
Something passed across the technician’s eyes. “How’s that baby?” he asked Claire.
She closed her eyes, willing the baby to move.
“Still,” she said finally.
One of them lifted her head gently and let out a low whistle. “You’ll be getting some stitches,” he said.
Claire kept her eyes closed.
“On my three,” one of them said. He counted to three, then Claire was lifted from the cold snow and onto the stretcher.
“Make way now,” the one with acne ordered the crowd.
Like Moses and the Red Sea, the crowd parted. Claire smiled to herself. She might not remember who Sisyphus was, but she knew her Bible stories. Every Sunday as a girl she’d gone to Sunday school in the church basement. They used to draw pictures of Moses as a baby in the basket among the bulrushes, and Noah loading all of the animals two by two onto the ark. Her drawings always had lots of details, rain pelting Noah and the animals, a frog guarding baby Moses.
“Does anything besides your head hurt?” the technician asked her.
“My back,” Claire said.
“Do you have a bad back anyway?”
“No.”
But she had felt back pain like this. When she went into labor with Kathy, she’d had these same low sharp pains. She remembered being surprised labor hurt there instead of in the front.