The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [49]
Her helmet hit the pavement. She landed on her side, her foot still on the pedal. The sound she made was not a sob, not a scream, more like a roar.
Of pain? Anger? Or some unthinkable damage inside her brain?
At such a moment, you think the liquor will burn right out of you.
It doesn’t.
“Brynne? Brynne!” I knelt at her side, lifted her head. She was crying now, unmistakably weeping. “Let me see your leg.”
It was a bloody mess, scraped up and down. At such a moment, do you stay with the child, or run inside for the phone? My cell was sitting on the kitchen counter. The baby monitor was still in my hand. Melody was screaming.
Even sober, I might not have thought clearly. But this . . . this was paralysis. We sat there, doing nothing.
Ordinarily, someone else might come out of their house. But not today, this gray, grim afternoon.
“We need to call 911,” I finally said.
“No.” That quickly, she grew calm. Her face was streaked with tears, but her expression was entirely composed, as if she’d realized, irrefutably, that she needed to take care of me.
She was eight years old.
Pulling away from me, she took off her helmet and began to stand up. I offered my arm. “Let me help you.”
“No.”
On the monitor, Melody howled. “You need to get her,” Brynne said.
“I’ll drive you to the doctor’s office. They can clean you up.”
“You shouldn’t drive.”
“I’m okay.”
“No. You should call Dad.”
Even if we’d lived twenty miles out in the country with no phone, I don’t believe she would have gotten in the car with me at the wheel that day.
Brynne didn’t have a concussion. Even with the helmet, the doctor said it was a piece of luck. She had a scar just below her knee from where a piece of gravel had lodged in.
That night, I found my glass on the front step. I threw out the liquid.
I hadn’t known Brynne was standing there. “Don’t drink anymore, Mom,” she said. “It’s making you sick.”
“I won’t.”
“You can’t just say it. You have to promise.”
She was only eight. She took my hand.
“I promise I won’t drink anymore.”
I never did.
Chapter 13
November 5
Two days after Courtney’s tests all come back negative, Andrea insists on a family celebration featuring hot fudge sundaes with whipped cream, the treat Courtney most coveted when she was a child and which today she terms “an orgy of empty calories” but eats. They would have celebrated earlier, but John made a quick trip to California and returned with the final, revised copy of his job offer in his briefcase. Andrea supposes tonight’s festivities are for more than Courtney’s health—though to Andrea’s shame, Courtney knows nothing about the job offer or the ongoing discussions John and Andrea have been having about whether to accept it.
Andrea thinks she might have told her if Courtney had shown the least bit of interest in her father’s comings and goings. John rarely travels as much as he has this fall. Courtney hardly seems aware of this. She lumps his trips together as “business” and never asks a single question. Perhaps all adolescents are this way at fourteen. Perhaps she’s been preoccupied with the hard task of waiting for her medical results, especially in the light of Paisley’s far-more-dire condition, and all it portends. Whatever the reason, Andrea has welcomed her daughter’s indifference. Breaking news to Courtney about anything unexpected is like risking a volcanic eruption. No point standing in its path unless you have to.
After what seems like several centuries, Courtney finally goes up to bed. Ten minutes later, John and Andrea are in their own room, Andrea sitting on the bed with a yellow legal pad in hand, listing the pros and cons of his job offer, John pacing the carpet in boxer shorts and a half-unbuttoned shirt, looking like some long-legged wading bird making its way slowly through the shallows. He rubs the bald top of his head, then lowers his hand, then lifts it again to tug at the fine fringe of black hair above his ears.
“Only two things in the ‘No’ column,” Andrea says. “That can’t be right.”