Dark Water - Laura McNeal [36]
“What’s wrong with your voice, son?” Dr. Woolcott asked as he washed his hands afterward.
“Accidente,” Amiel whispered, using the Spanish form.
“What kind?”
“Esteering wheel,” Amiel whispered, holding an invisible one with his good hand and showing how it had struck his neck.
“Laryngeal fracture,” the doctor said, nodding to himself. “Where’re you from?”
“México,” Amiel said, the x that becomes h in Spanish softening further in his voice.
“Well, your hand should work okay when it heals,” the doctor said. “Keep it clean. You’ll need antibiotics and something for the pain.”
My aunt, crisp and efficient in white linen, stood up when we approached the waiting room. She wrote a check from her beautiful wallet and smiled at the receptionist, the doctor, Amiel, and me.
“I pay for,” Amiel told Agnès in the car. “How much?”
My aunt said it wasn’t necesario.
Amiel insisted in English, and she refused in Spanish, and then they stopped talking.
We drove through downtown in silence, stopping only at the pharmacy to collect his prescriptions, and I tried to imagine Amiel gripping his handlebars with that swollen, stitch-filled finger as he rode his bicycle home. I was worried, too, about how he would keep a wound clean when he lived without a faucet. I knew I couldn’t tell my aunt Agnès, or anyone else, that we needed to deliver Amiel to his camp on the river, but I couldn’t stop myself from interfering, either.
“Aunt Agnès?” I said. “Doctor Woolcott said that Amiel shouldn’t be alone for the first forty-eight hours. In case something goes wrong. Also, I don’t think he can ride his bicycle.”
My aunt Agnès trained her elegant eyes on Amiel’s reflection in the mirror.
“¿Vives solo?” she asked.
Amiel lied. “No,” he rasped. “Estoy bien.”
“¿Dónde vives?” she asked, so he told her part of the truth, and when we came to Willow Glen, she guided the smooth ginger car down through the narrow corkscrew of the canyon, gliding to the oak-dappled river, down, down, down, as the air-conditioning softly buffeted my face. She told Amiel, in her Spanish, something about her esposo, which even I knew to be “husband,” and his bicicleta. Hoyt would bring the bicycle, I assumed, but where would he leave it? I didn’t know.
We reached the bright emptiness of the dead end, where the aloe field lay in pale green stripes. Seven rusty mailboxes stood openmouthed in the heat. I couldn’t help seeing them as Agnès did: she believed American mailboxes were disgraceful, worse even than our clothes. At the far eastern edge of the aloe field, you could see a little blue house, quaintly square like a playhouse or a shed, and beyond that, on a ridge, a trim yellow cottage.
My aunt was driving very slowly now, uncertain where to turn.
“¿Dónde?” she asked again, and Amiel clicked open his seat belt.
“Aquí,” he whispered.
Agnès stopped the car, and the engine ticked expensively at our feet. The sky was the color of birds’ eggs and the river trees were green ink.
“Gracias,” I could barely hear him say, and I wondered if it hurt to speak or if he just found it difficult.
“De nada,” my aunt said, her expression confused. “I could take you all ways to your house,” she said, bending her head slightly so that she could look through the windshield at the yellow house on the ridge.
Amiel shook his head, and when he closed the back door, he stood waiting for us to drive away, so Agnès made a careful circuit through the dirt circle where people parked when they came to hike the river. I kept watching him, and he watched us, long-limbed and silent, and the last thing I saw him do as my aunt pointed her car up the asphalt road was to remove from his back pocket a plastic bag, in which lay folded the white square of my letter. He didn’t hold it up or smile or wave or wink. He didn’t make any gesture at all besides holding the plastic envelope of my feelings so that I could