Sudden Impact - Lesley Choyce [12]
But Mr. Richards nodded his head without speaking. I knew then that it was all too real.
“We don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said, choking back his own tears.
The phone rang. I looked at it just so that I didn’t have to look at them. But I let it ring nine times before I moved to answer it.
“Hello?”
“Tina. It’s Dr. Bennington at the hospital. Do you know where Kurt is? Is he with you?”
“I don’t understand. No, of course he’s not here.”
“He’s not in his room. He’s just …well— he’s gone. I tried his parents’ house, but there was no answer. We had your name and address from the blood clinic. I thought maybe you had concocted some scheme with Kurt…”
I cut him off. “I didn’t concoct some scheme,” I told him. But I thought about what Kurt had said the other day. He said he felt it was the hospital that was keeping him down, that if he left, he’d get better. I thought maybe he was trying to prove something to himself. “What will happen to him without …without all the tubes and stuff?” I didn’t have the right words, but I knew that without the bottles and the equipment, he could be in trouble.
“I don’t know. He might pass out, go into shock. He might die.”
I slammed down the phone. Kurt’s parents knew immediately what had happened. “He said yesterday that he had to get out of the hospital,” Mr. Richards said. “It was driving him crazy. I didn’t think he’d do it like this.”
Mrs. Richards said nothing. She didn’t have to. Her expression said it for her: It’s all your fault, Tina.
chapter twelve
Mr. Richards drove like a maniac to the hospital. I insisted on going with them. Kurt’s mother couldn’t stop me. She lectured me all the way to the hospital about what a bad influence I’d been on her son and how he used to be such a good boy.
“Nothing like this ever happened to us before,” she whimpered.
Mr. Richards had just gone through a red light and had come within inches of picking off two little old ladies with shopping bags. He swerved to avoid them, then squealed the tires as he raced on toward the hospital.
“Kurt was never like this!” she went on. “He always did as he was told. He was a good boy. Nothing bad ever happened to him.”
I could see that Kurt’s father was as fed up with her complaining as I was. I should have just kept my mouth shut, but I couldn’t.
“Would you just stop feeling sorry for yourself and think about your son!” I shouted at her. “All I ever did to Kurt was suggest he’d be better off if he thought for himself and stopped accepting your rules all the time.” There, I’d said it. That’s the sort of bad influence I was.
She turned around and gave me an icy stare. “And if he wasn’t always trying to think for himself, he might still be in the hospital bed and not out in the street somewhere.”
Mr. Richards slowed down to make the turn into the hospital parking lot. I’d taken all I could stand. I threw open the door and jumped out just as he made the turn. I landed on the grass, rolled once and got up running. Let them do what they could to find Kurt. I know him better than anyone, I thought, and I’ll know where to find him.
It felt good to be running. I knew that every minute counted. It was like my legs already knew which direction to go. I was afraid to stop, but I asked myself, why south? Why this way? I was headed down Tower Road. Why would he go this way?
Then my brain told me what my legs already knew. I was running toward Point Pleasant Park. It was the part of the city closest to the ocean. Kurt always said he felt more alive when he was near the sea. We had gone there on our bicycles dozens of times.
Kurt had it in his head that the hospital was the reason he wasn’t getting better. And now he thought he needed to get outside, to get to the ocean. I ran until my lungs ached from overwork.
I ran through the big iron gates and down the wide forest path. I passed a cop on a horse and a bunch of rowdy kids my own age who were throwing pine cones at each other. Seeing them made me realize how much things had changed for Kurt and me. They were kids,