who was driving Karin’s car? It was Karin’s car, the deputy said. But she was a passenger? Why?
The hospital parking lot, with a glaze of ice over the parked cars and security lights, looked as eerie as a Hitchcock film. He guessed where the lines of demarcation defined parking spaces. His foot slipped as he stepped out of his Camry. The lot was worse off than the highway.
Sliding the last few feet into the emergency room entrance, his breath heavy and inefficient, Josiah bit back a fist of fear. He ripped the boiled wool cap off his head and, twisting it in his hands, asked the woman at the “All visitors please check in here” desk where he could find his wife.
A question he’d asked himself all night.
“Please take a seat in one of the green chairs,” she said. “I’ll let them know you’re here.”
Was that sadness he read in her eyes? Sympathy? Had she recognized him as the face she’d seen on the back cover of innumerable books? That might explain the added layer of concern. Or did the thick slabs of eye shadow weigh her eyes down at the corners?
Green chairs. Retaining imprints of past sitters. He’d stand, thank you. A bearded guy slumped in one of the chairs in the corner brought Rip Van Winkle to mind. How many years had the man slept stretched out like that—legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded over his chest, hat brim low to shield him from fluorescence—waiting for the answer to his emergency room question?
He woke Karin’s mom and dad before he left for the hospital. His phone call said little more than, “I don’t know anything.” A call to Morris could wait until he got some answers.
Josiah smelled coffee. Harsh, aged coffee. Better than nothing. Complimentary, the sign said. He took a waxed cup from a tilting stack and poured coffee from a quarter-full glass carafe. The cup warmed his stiff hands. In his hurry to leave the house, he’d forgotten gloves. His Columbia jacket hung open. Expelling breath and emotion through dry lips, he pressed the coffee cup to the frozen tundra around his heart.
What was he supposed to feel? Besides numb. In the whole long trip, he’d mastered one thing: numb.
Josiah made a living off his creative imagination. Tonight it was not his friend. What-ifs stung him like fire ants. Sting, pain, itch.
What if Karin didn’t make it? How could he live with himself for not taking her absence more seriously, for not going out to look for her, or calling the authorities right away? He’d been miffed that she hadn’t been waiting for him when he finished his project. She’d tried to hint that he’d become self-absorbed. He’d jotted a note to consider a section on the subject for an upcoming seminar.
The deputy said Karin and another person were in the accident. He said person, not woman. What did that mean? It was a man? A man was driving her car? That made no more sense than anything else in this muddle.
Karin must have had a flat. The guy—a good Samaritan—stopped to help her and then got behind the wheel to drive her home? No. No, that didn’t add up. She ran out of gas and—No. It was her car. With some man other than Josiah behind the wheel. An unsent text message? What? The person had been texting and driving? In an ice storm?
Josiah needed answers. Right after he found out that Karin was going to be okay. She’d be okay. She had to.
What was taking so long? The deputy insinuated he’d had to sort through who to call, since the natural assumption would have been that she and the driver were friends. Or related. Involved. Together on purpose. Crazy talk. Maybe the staff was confused. He could clear it up if someone would let him speak.
His mind drafted the imaginary conversation going on somewhere beyond the visitor’s desk:
Her husband’s here.
Isn’t that her husband? The one she came in with?
Uh, no. Must be boyfriend.
Ooh. Sticky.
Yup. Now what?
We ask one of them to leave?
Which one?
Flip a coin.
He shook the false assumption dialogue from his head. The first sip of coffee burned the taste buds off the front of his tongue and stripped the lining of his throat. The pain felt good.
The phone again. Worship song he’d once found soothing. He’d have to invest in a different ringtone.
“Josiah?” The female voice on the phone trembled with more than old age’s vibrato.
“Mom.” He sighed. This must be killing her.
“How’s my daughter?”
Josiah flared his nostrils in search of a deep enough breath to support his words. “Still don’t know yet.”
“Where are you? At the hospital?”
“I got here a few minutes ago. They haven’t told me anything.” Saying it cemented it.
“What was Karin doing out alone on a night like this?”
Alone. If only. Josiah rubbed the back of his neck. “There’ll be time for all that later. Right now, we just need to—”
“Did you say Woodlands Regional, dear?”
“Yes, Mom. But don’t you and Dad try to make it tonight. The roads are slick as a hockey rink.”
“No, I know we can’t come tonight. They’ve closed the interstate, we heard. We’re so grateful you made it.” The woman’s voice disappeared into the abyss of distress with which Josiah was already familiar.
“Josiah, you’ll call us when you hear something? Anything?”
“Of course. Don’t worry.” Fat chance. “Maybe I’ll have her call you herself when they let me in to see her.”
In the silence, Josiah heard the sound of Karin’s mom’s courage wrestling with fright. He pictured her bent in half over the phone. “I pray it’s that simple.”
Oh, this is so much more complicated than you’d ever imagine. “Try to get some rest.”
“You know better than that.”
Josiah allowed himself a faux chuckle. “Yes, I certainly do. Love you.”
“Love you, too, dear. Give my daughter a kiss when you see her.”
A kiss? What would Josiah see in Karin’s eyes if he tried? The idea lay crosswise in his throat, a fish bone of uncertainty. Too many unanswered questions.
The second hand on the emergency room wall clock ticked in spasms. The minute and hour hands seemed not to move at all. Twenty-four hour days. Double dark forty-eight hour nights. The math didn’t work, but the truth of an unmoving clock overrides math.
Josiah
