“Oh, you know those vows we swore—till death parted us—those old feelings die hard.”
“If you’d cared about my affairs fourteen years ago, we’d still be married. Keep that in mind while you’re scrambling for your rent.”
He hung up without giving me a chance at the last word. So it still rankled, my lack of doelike devotion. Old feelings do indeed die hard.
Chapter 19 - Throwing a Friend to the Wolves
I got to the restaurant ahead of Lotty. A light, bright seafood place on Lincoln, I Popoli has a small garden where I like to sit in summer. During the afternoon, though, heavy storm clouds had moved into the city. It looked as though the unnaturally hot weather might be going to break. I took a table inside.
When I’d waited half an hour I figured Lotty’d been held up by a late-breaking emergency. I ordered a rum-and-tonic to tide me over and settled at the end of the bar, next to the window, where I could watch the street. Rain had started to fall, fat heavy drops that spattered on the pavement like broken eggs. By the time I finished my rum, the drops had built to a heavy curtain of water.
I started wondering if Lotty had crashed the Trans Am and was too chicken to tell me about it. Of course, that wasn’t in Lotty’s character: she had‘ no fear of confrontation. Besides, she saw herself as a constant victim of other reckless maniacs. When I tried to ask her why my cars never suffered the damage hers did, she would pierce me with a stare and change the subject.
I went to the phone in the back of the restaurant to try calling her. I didn’t get an answer, either at the clinic or her apartment, but when I left the booth she was standing in the middle of the room, water dripping around her, looking for me. It was only when I came up to her that I
saw she was hurt. She had a graze and a purple lump on her forehead and I could see a stream of blood mixing with the rainwater on her left arm.
“Lotty!” I pulled her to me. “What happened to you?”
“Someone hit me.” Her voice was dull and she held herself stiffly in my embrace.
“Hit you? Hit the car, you mean?”
“You know, Victoria, I think I would like to lie down.” The precision of her speech and her frozen posture frightened me as much as her wounds. I wondered if I should get her to a hospital, but decided to take her home and try to find someone to come look at her there. Maybe she needed her head X rayed, but hospital emergency rooms are cold comfort for someone in shock; I’d rather get her warm before a doctor decided on the next move. I fumbled in my purse for the bills to pay my tab, couldn’t find any and ended up just tossing a twenty on the bar.
I got an arm around Lotty and half lifted her to get her outside. She’d left the Trans Am parked rakishly against the curb. Despite the rain, which had darkened the sky, I could tell that the windshield was cracked. I couldn’t help inspecting the left fender as I ushered Lotty into her own car. The headlamp had sprung, and the grille and the body had inverted their normal positions. I suppressed a twinge of anger: Lotty was badly hurt. The car was only a chunk of glass and metal, repairable after all.
My place is just around the corner from the restaurant, but Lotty would be more comfortable in her own home. Cursing the Cressida’s slippery gears I made my way through the downpour to her building on Sheffield. She didn’t say anything during the fifteen-minute drive, just stared in front of her, occasionally pressing her left arm, the arm that had been bleeding.
As soon as I got her undressed and tucked into bed with a cup of hot milk I called Max. When I described her injuries he demanded to know why I hadn’t taken her to a hospital.
“Because—I don’t know—I don’t like hospitals. I’ve sat in emergency rooms with bruises and cuts like hers and they only make me feel worse. Can you find someone to look at her here? Let them decide whether she needs to be fed into the machine?”
Max didn’t like it. As a hospital administrator he sees the places differently than I do. But he agreed that since she was home it would be a mistake to move her again right now. He was coming over himself, but said he would first roust out Arthur Gioia, an internist at Beth Israel.
“You don’t know what happened?”
“She hasn’t been talking. I wanted to get her into bed first.”
When he finally hung up I went back to Lotty. I brought in a sponge and a bowl of warm water to clean the blood from her forehead and left arm. She had finished drinking the milk and was lying with her eyes closed, but I didn’t think she was asleep.
I sat down next to her and started bathing her wounds. “Max is going to come over—he’s pretty worried. And he’s hunting up a doctor to take a look at you.”
“I don’t need a doctor. I am a doctor. I can tell there’s nothing serious the matter with me.”