“I think I’m frozen,” I said. My head had continued to bleed, to flood my collar, which had begun to stiffen.
Incredibly, I did begin to see lights ahead through the trees, and then mailboxes appeared along the side of the road, and Anne stopped. Maybe she’d been leading me to safety after all. We’d arrived at a long set of steps descending to a house below. Beyond the house was a lake, its surface vast and frozen and ringed with lights, a cold wind coming off it. The house at the bottom of the stairs, a wood-shingled cottage, was partially lit by a streetlight. The windows were dark, reflecting the sheen of the snow. Certainly, Anne couldn’t have meant to bring me here—to this dark house at the bottom of the long set of treacherous, snow-covered steps?
I kept walking to the next mailbox, this one on the opposite side of the road. The paved driveway rose up, and the house at the end of it was brightly lit. People moved about—a man passing by with an armful of plates, a table in another room filled with people holding glasses of wine, the women’s heads tipped back in laughter. I regretted having to interrupt their gaiety, but I went to the door anyway. I would call the phone in Del’s apartment and have her find Geoff to come get me.
A woman answered after I rang the bell, her dark hair framing a blurred face. She smiled at me, as if from a distance, and then her expression grew alarmed. She took my arm and led me into the house—brightly painted, filled with books and photographs, rugs and lights. I wondered if I could use her phone, and I was taken to a warm bench by a table and a phone was placed into my hands. The woman hovered over me, and then word must have spread, because a group formed around me, their faces peering at me. Someone brought a damp cloth that she pressed to my head. When it was removed it held a bloom of bright blood.
I managed to dial Del’s number and she answered, her voice far off and small. I told her to come get me or to send Geoff. I asked the dark-haired woman where I was, and she took the phone from me and gave an address to Del, who must have written it down.
The woman said I should get my head looked at. “You’ve got a nasty cut,” she said, applying the cloth to my forehead. “Were you in an accident?”
Anne was back in her car in the ravine, and I needed to tell someone, even though in the warmth of this happy house the accident felt unreal. The details of the evening had begun to fade—the martinis that tasted like snow, the beautiful car, Anne herself, her bare head. I might have doubted any of it had happened at all if my coat hadn’t smelled of wood smoke, the beef Wellington.
“Yes,” I said. “I was.”
The woman’s eyes darkened with concern. She told someone to call an ambulance. She offered me a change of clothes, and I was led up to a softly carpeted room and helped into a warm shirt, a pair of jeans. Downstairs I was given a glass of water, a plate with a piece of chocolate cake.
“You can’t say no to cake on someone’s birthday,” she said. “It’s just not right.”
I felt awful I had brought this tragedy to someone’s birthday. I took a bite of the cake and the sugar made me queasy. The sea of faces around me shifted and receded. I wanted to lie my head down, and another woman, this one smelling of sandalwood, lifted me onto my feet.
“Are you one of my past lives?” I asked her.
“Don’t go to sleep,” she said. “Stay awake now.”
She walked me up and down the hall and I looked at the photographs—groups of smiling people posing on sloping lawns, on a rock jetty with the sea behind them, on the porch of a large house surrounded by pines.
“Someone needs to get Anne’s car out,” I said. “And Anne.”
This was when the EMTs arrived, a police car. I was asked questions that I couldn’t answer. “Where is the car?” a police officer said, his face marked by a growth of beard, his eyes filled with sympathy.
“It’s up the road,” I said. “I walked here.”
I was given a temporary bandage for my head, and I got into the officer’s cruiser and we set off to look for the place where Anne’s car went off the road. But nothing seemed familiar to me, and the dark, wooded roadside revealed nothing.
“I don’t know the area,” I said, and I sensed the man was frustrated with me.
It was decided I would be transported to the hospital for assessment, even though I protested that my ride would be arriving. As I was taken off in the ambulance, the group of people gathered at the door, like a send-off. At some point, on a stiff-sheeted gurney, I did fall asleep, and then Del was there. She stood beside me, her face white, her rounded belly protruding from the folds of her sweater.
“What happened?” she asked me.
Beside Del stood Alice, and beside Alice was Randy, the three of them smelling of cigarettes, their eyes dark with worry. “Where’s Anne?” Alice asked.
My head had begun to throb, and I closed my eyes.
“She has stitches,” Del said to Alice. “She has a concussion.”