It’s Rusty, and she’s wailing, the sound agonizing and pain-filled and it strikes terror deeper into me than I knew terror could go and oh fuck where is she, is she drowning is she stuck did she hit her head and get a concussion—
I spot her. On the rocks, halfway down, and half a second later I’m scrambling up to her, more terrified than I’ve ever been in my life, more terrified than the time Daniel impaled himself on a branch and even more terrified than the night I woke up to the garage on fire.
“Rusty!” I shout, even as my foot slips and my knee slams into a rock, slides along a sharp edge, but I get up and keep moving toward her.
She’s sitting, legs akimbo, one half in the rushing water, her face bright red and her mouth open, her cheeks already soaked as she screams and sobs and then screams again.
Her left arm is out, held stiffly away from her body, and it’s wrong. I don’t even know how it’s wrong — not bent backwards, not snapped in half — but there’s something wrong about it and it’s swelling up like a pufferfish.
“What happened?” I ask, uselessly, when I reach her.
She just sobs and holds out her arm, still swelling.
Strangely, I’m relieved. Even as I scoop her up in my arms, crying, even as I make my way carefully down the rocks and people gather around us and someone hands me our towels and my bag, I’m relieved that she’s not bleeding to death, that she didn’t hit her head, that it’s just an arm.
I’ve never hiked faster than I hike back to Daniel’s car, half-running even with a sobbing seven-year-old over one shoulder, breathlessly telling her that she’ll be okay. I get her into her booster seat, I wrap her arm in a towel, I kiss her and tell her we’re going to the hospital and it’ll be over soon, and then I drive like hell to Sprucevale General.
It’s not until she’s in a room, a nurse and a doctor hovering over her, looking so small in that hospital bed, that I realize my hands are shaking.Chapter Thirty-FourDanielI feel like someone’s driven a stake through my gut as I powerwalk through the emergency room at Sprucevale General, heart pounding, hands clammy. I feel like someone’s reached down my throat and is trying to pull my heart up through my mouth, and I swallow again and again like it’ll keep all my organs in place.
“Sign says this way to 132,” Seth calls, and I follow him.
Charlie’s voice was shaking on the phone, even though I hung up on her after a dozen words — hey it’s me, Rusty’s okay but she broke her arm, we’re at the emergency room — and bolted out of the brewery, Seth practically chasing me down.
He took the keys out of my hand and drove here. He navigated the stupid parking lot, talked to the front desk, charmed the nurses, and got her room number all while I stood by, unable to think anything but it must hurt so much, I hope she’s okay, I’m glad Charlie’s with her, and now he’s pushing me down the hall to the right room, and I shove back the curtain and there they are.
“Hi, Dad,” Rusty says softly when I come in. “Hi, Uncle Seth.”
She looks so small in her hospital bed that it knocks the air from my lungs. I swear she outgrows all her clothes every six months and I’m so used to looking at her and thinking that she’s so big now, so tall, so grownup, that seeing her like this spears me with pity.
“Hi, sweetheart,” I say, coming over, sitting next to her hospital bed, right on the edge of the chair. “How are you feeling?”
“It hurts,” she says, her voice small, her eyes big. “It hurts less, though.”
Her forearm is propped up, wrapped in bandages, looking too big for the rest of her.
“They gave her ibuprofen,” Charlie says, sitting opposite me, on the other side of the hospital bed. “The ER doctor already looked at it and thinks it’s a spiral fracture, so they probably won’t have to do anything but put a cast on, but we’re waiting for X-rays.”
I just nod. I feel like a can of soda that’s just been shaken, fizzing and ready to blow.
“It’s pretty boring,” Rusty says, sighing.
“What happened?” I finally ask. “Did you fall?”
Last year a nine-year-old at the playground told Rusty that he didn’t think she could jump off a swing high enough to land on the grass, a good seven feet away.
The phrase you can’t is like catnip to my daughter. There’s no better way to make her do something. She sprained her ankle and had to wear a brace for a week.