We tried a half dozen maneuvers to loosen the stuck piece, but failed. “Brute force,” Drew said. “We’re just going to have to push it out the way it came in. You push down on your side to pivot it, and I’ll push up and try to bend it a little at the same time. It’ll pop right out.”
The reasoning was sound. I pushed down with everything I had. He pushed up. I felt the wood bend under his pressure, but I never felt the instant it gave way. We hadn’t planned that far ahead. The top spun around and slammed into my head, just above my left eye. Following the basic rules of physics, my head slammed into the rafter behind me. The pain was impressive, and so was the blood. I couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from at first, because my entire head throbbed from the hit.
Drew wiggled the plywood down into place, yelling while he did it. “Hope! Mommy’s hurt! I need your help!”
Hope came up the ladder while I turned to walk toward it. Rafters were spinning, but I was pretty sure it was just an immediate response to the hit, not a symptom of a serious head injury. Blood dripped onto the plywood and the tops of the ceiling joists we’d worked so hard to straighten after leaving them out in the rain. It soaked into the insulation, dropping like bread crumbs to mark my path to the ladder, down it, and to my bedroom, where I sat on the floor.
“Get me some ice and a washcloth,” I said, as though those were things we would actually have. Jada started taking her sock off but I waved for her to stop. Hope brought a roll of paper towels, and I shook the Sheetrock dust off them before pressing a handful to my left eyebrow, which had become the focal point of the head pain.
“You need to go to the doctor,” she said.
Drew swung down from the attic opening without using the ladder. “Definitely. That’s a lot of blood,” he said. “How bad is it?”
“Head wounds bleed a lot. It might not be that bad. I need a mirror.” I didn’t want to go to the doctor. I was too tired to sit in an ER. Not only that, I hated the idea of stitches. Yuck.
Drew disappeared and we sat quietly, mopping up blood. When he came back, he was carrying a four-foot-long wall mirror for my bathroom. I laughed. “I’m not getting ready for a cocktail party!”
“All I could find.” He laughed, too, and propped the mirror in front of where I sat cross-legged in a little cloud of crumpled red paper towels.
It took me a minute to work up the courage to lift the pressure off and look. A long cut under my left eyebrow gaped open and started bleeding again. But it wasn’t the cut that caught my attention, it was my hand. The entire back of my left hand and my middle and ring fingers were purple and bruised. The fingers were obviously swollen. How I hadn’t noticed that injury, I’d never know. I flexed the hand and winced. The fingers wouldn’t bend all the way. Typing was my livelihood. Whether the eyebrow cut needed stitching or not, my hand needed an X-ray. Damn it. I didn’t have time for injuries.
“Ewww,” Drew said, looking away. “It’s going to need stitches for sure.” He hadn’t noticed my hand and I kept quiet.
“I probably should have it looked at. Let’s get everyone home and Hope can drive me to the hospital. No hurry. It’s just a precaution.” I stood up, marveling at how little my calf hurt compared with my head and hand.
Roman and Jada didn’t even know I’d been hurt until we called them to leave. Jada had lost her shoes somewhere in the house, and we finally gave up and left them there. When we got back to the house, Roman cried, wanting to go with me, but Drew finally lured him away with popcorn and a bad ninja movie. “Cookies, too?” Roman asked, milking the bribe for all he could.
Hope packed my hand in ice while I held a second pack on my head. It was strange to have my kids taking care of me. And it was also frustrating to have accomplished so much with the house and feel weak and broken instead of strong. I thought of runners at the end of a marathon. They looked a lot more beaten than bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. But this was not what I had imagined when I was standing outside the tornado-broken house, and it wasn’t what I felt that Caroline expected of me.
I wanted winning to hurt a lot less.
In the waiting room, I read a book on my Kindle, and Hope pinned room-decorating ideas on Pinterest. The usual cast of crying babies and tired elderly sat around us, worrying through their own pain with little interest in their neighbors. Hope had brought a bag of almonds, and a bottle of water for each of us. If I didn’t feel like an ice pick was protruding from my brow, I would have enjoyed the reading break.
When I was finally called into the back, everything went as expected at first. They took me to Radiology for an X-ray of my hand and surprised me by taking one of my face in case of a fracture to the orbital socket. I hadn’t thought of that. They followed the painless radiation blasts with a very painful wound irrigation. The male nurse was a newbie and managed to drench my shoulder, back, and then the entire bed with saline solution and had to change the sheets and bring towels to mop my clothes dry. By the time I resettled, we were moved from our curtained room to an examining room with a door. I worried that it meant my hand was broken. I could not build the rest of the house with a cast on. Instantly, I was depressed.
A sturdy woman with bright red glasses and white hair so thin she was almost bald came in and sat down beside the bed. Hope ignored her, still decorating the house through Pinterest.
“I’m Pamela,” she said, patting my leg. “And I just wanted to come in and chat with you for a while, hon.”
I nodded, wondering who had told her I was a writer. It wasn’t as though I was well known enough to have fans seeking me out, but every time someone learned I wrote novels, they either had a novel they wanted to write, or they wanted me to write the story of their life into one of my novels. I closed my eyes, trying to summon the energy to show interest in her story and give her solid information about a career versus a hobby as an author.
“Good news is the hand isn’t broken, and neither is your skull. Just banged up. Now tell me about this cut here, and how you got it. Okay, hon?” She patted my leg again. “And what did you hit with that hand? It’s really banged up, now, isn’t it.”
I told the story again, wishing she would write it down so I didn’t have to repeat myself. She had asked a half dozen more questions and pointed at the network of nasty bruises and scrapes covering my legs and arms before I figured out what was going on. I laughed, first a little chuckle and then for real. Hope and Pamela sat up straight, eyes wide and on me, then darting to the door, wondering if they should go for help, call someone to scan my brain.
I waved them down. “It’s just ironic. You think this is evidence of domestic violence, right? And after all those years of sporting my husband’s bruises on my neck and hips, when not a single person asked about them, now I get hurt in an attic and alarm bells sound.”
Pamela smiled, tight-lipped and noncommittal.