American Boy - Larry Watson [17]
The people standing around the rink parted to allow the doctor and me to pass. The twins hurried over to check out my injury. Julia turned away at the sight of my blood, while Janet tried to get closer and said, “Ooh, Matt, your eye!”
“He’ll be all right,” said the doctor. “We’ll just take him inside and put a Band-Aid on it.”
It seemed clear that he was minimizing my injury for the sake of his daughters’ peace of mind, but the doctor’s words still calmed me.
Dr. Dunbar and I stopped on the porch to take off our skates. He removed his first, then squatted down to unlace mine, enabling me to tilt my head back and keep the heel of my hand pressed to my eye.
“You wait here, Matt,” Dr. Dunbar said. “I’ll go find a towel or something so we can walk through the house without you bleeding on Mrs. Dunbar’s carpet. And if you feel thirsty, help yourself.” He pointed to a galvanized washtub packed with snow and bottles of Miller High Life and Coca Cola, the after-hockey refreshments he always provided. “But even if you don’t want anything to drink,” he added, “grab a handful of snow and hold it over your eye. It’ll slow the bleeding.”
I could hear the familiar sounds of the game behind me—the clack clack of wooden sticks colliding, and the skrrk skrrk of sharpened steel on ice. Would I ever hear those again without remembering the taste of blood? I shivered as my sweat cooled beneath the layers of clothes.
Just as Dr. Dunbar reached for the door, it opened from the inside, and I inhaled sharply when I saw who was standing there. “I was watching,” said Louisa Lindahl. “I saw what happened.” She held out a rag she’d brought for my wound.
Not long after the doctor stitched her up that fateful Thanksgiving Day, Louisa Lindahl was back on her feet, though they didn’t take her far. Once it became apparent that the young woman had no resources and no place to go, the Dunbars told her she could move in with them. She could work in the clinic, handling some of the clerical work, thereby freeing Betty Schaeffer to concentrate on nursing. Louisa accepted the offer, and she had been helping Mrs. Dunbar with household chores as well as working in the clinic. She was staying in the back bedroom upstairs, the same one Dr. Dunbar had carried her to after treating her for the bullet wound.
But I knew all this already, and so I was not surprised to see her. No, my sharp intake of breath was caused by something else.
Since that day when I’d stood over her in the clinic, I’d been completely taken with Louisa Lindahl. It was too soon to call it love and too simple to call it lust, but I felt something powerful, and whatever it was would have had me following her from room to wainscoted room in the Dunbar house if I could have done so without attracting the wrong kind of attention. She, on the other hand, had given no sign of noticing me. Except once.
A week earlier Louisa was alone in the kitchen, putting away dishes, when I came in looking for glue for a science project Johnny and I were working on upstairs. I generally had no trouble making conversation with girls who interested me, but I lost all courage in Louisa Lindahl’s presence. Her haughty beauty was as intimidating as it was alluring, and she was in her twenties. And then there was the fact that I’d seen her unconscious and unclothed, a delicious secret knowledge that nonetheless put an even tighter clamp on my mouth. Finally, there was that matter of the gunshot wound. I had no idea how that factored into the whole equation, but it could hardly be ignored.
I said hello that night, but received no greeting in return, which was exactly what usually happened when our paths crossed in the presence of others in the Dunbar home. Then, as I was on my way out of the room with the bottle of Elmer’s, Louisa Lindahl said, “Nice of the Dunbars to take in strays and give them the run of the place,