Thank you to everyone who reviewed my last chapter. This is the second chapter and I hope you all enjoy it. Remember to review!
CHAPTER 2
When the phone rang at three in the morning, Sandy Cohen was instantly awake. He tried to imagine what could have possibly gone wrong in the Greenblatt's case. He groped across the bed, where his wife should have been, answering the phone. 'Yes?'
'Is this Sandy said. this is Officer Stanley of the Newport police. Your son has been injured, and he's being taken to HOAG.'
Sandy felt his throat working up sentences that tangled around each other. 'Is he...was there a car accident?'
There was a brief pause. 'No, sir,' the officer said.
Sandy's heart twisted. 'Thank you,' he said, hanging up, although he did not know why he was thinking someone who had brought him such horrible news. The moment the reviever was back in place, he had a thousand questions to ask. Where was Seth hurt? Critically or superficially? Was Summer still with him? What had happened? Sandy dressed in the clothes he'd already thrown into the hamper and made his way downstairs in a matter of minutes. The hospial, he knew, would take him seventeen minutes to reach. He was already speeding down the road when he picked up the car phone and dialed Kirsten.
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'What did they say?' Maya asked for the tenth time. 'What did they say exactly?'
Neil buttoned the fly of his jeans and stuffed his feet into tennis shoes. He remembered, too late, that he didn't have socks on. Fuck the socks.
'Neil.'
He glanced up. 'That Sum was injured, and that she'd been taken to the hospital.' His hands were shaking, yet he was amazed to find himself able to do what was necessary: push Maya towards the door, find his car keys, plot the fasest route to HOAG.'
He had hypothetically wondered, what would happen if a phone call came in the middle of the night, a phone call that had the power to render one speechless and disbelieving. He had expected deep down that he'd be a basket case. And yet here he was, backing carefully out of his driveway, holding up well, the only sign betraying panic a tiny tic in his cheek.
'Sweetheart," Neil said, noticing the worry on his wife's face. 'We don't know anything yet.' But as he drove pas the Cohen's house he took in the absolute quiet of the scene, the peaceable lack of light in the windows, and he could not help feeling a stab of jealosy at the normality of it all. Why us? he thought, and did not notice the brake lights of a car at the end of the road, already turning toward town.
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Kirsten lay on the sidewalk between a trio of teenagers with spiked green hair and a couple that was coming as close to sex as possible in a public venue. If Seth ever does that to his hair, she though, we would...Would what? It had never been an issue because, for as long as Kirsten could remember, Seth had had the same jew-fro as he would call it hairstyle. And as for Romeo and Juliet here, on her right-well, that was a no-brainer also. As ssoon as it had begun to matter, Seth and Summer had started dating, which is what everyone had been rooting for in the first place.
Four and a half hours from now, her client's sons would have prime seats at a metallica concert. She'd go home and sleep. By the time she got back there, Sandy would have returned from surfing, Ryan would be gearing up for a soccer game, and Seth might just be rollng out of bed. Then Kirsten would do what she did every other Saturday that she didn't have plans or an invasion of relatives: She'd go to Maya's, or have Maya come over, and they'd talk about work and teenagers, and husbands. She had several good female friends, but Maya was the only one for whom the house didn't have to be cleaned, for whom she didn't have to wear her makeup, and around whom she could say anything without fear of repercussions, or of looking truly stupid.
'Lady,' one of the green-haired kids said. 'You got a smoke?'
It came out in a rush, yagottasmoke, so that as first Kirsten was stunned at the audacity of the statement. No, she wanted to say, I do not gotta, and you shouldn't either. Then she realized he was wagging a cigarette- at least she hoped it was a cigaette-in front of her face. 'Sorry,' She said, shaking her head.
It was impossible to believe that teenagers such as this existed, not when she had ones like Seth and Ryan, who seemed another breed entirely. Perhaps these children, with their stegosaurus hair and leather vests, only happened to look this way on the off hours, transforming themselves into scrubbed, well mannered adolescents during the time they spent with their parents. Ridiculous, she told herself. Even the thought of Seth and Ryan having an alter ego was out of the question. You couldn't give birth to someone and not sense that something so dramatic was going on.
She felt a humming agaisnt her hip and shifted, that the amorous couple had gotten a little too close. But the buzzing didn't stop, and when she reached down to find the source she remembered her beeper, which she'd carried in her purse ever since she'd started up Other People's Time. It was Sandy who insisted; what if he had to go back to the office and one of the kids needed something?
Of course, in the way that most preventative medicines work, just having the beeped had managed to ward off emergencies. It had only beeped twice in five years: once, when Ryan called to ask where she kept the rug-cleaning supplies, and once when the batteries were low. She fished it out of the bottomg of her purse and pushed the button that identified the caller. Her car phone. But who would be in her car at this time of night?
Sandy had driven it home from the restaurant. After crawling out of her sleeping bag, Kirsten walked across the street to the nearest phone booth, graffitied with sausagelike initials. As soon as Sandy picked up, she heard the hum of the road beneath the tires.
'Kirsten,' Sandy said, his voice catching. 'You've got to come,'
And a moment later, leaving her sleeping bag behind, she started to run.
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They wouldn't take the lights out of his eyes. The fixtures hung over him, bright silver saucers that made him wince. He felt at least three people touching him-laying hands, shouting directions, cutting off his clothes. He could not move his arms or legs, and when he tried, he felt straps lacing across them, a collar anchoring his head.
'BP's falling,' said the woman. 'It's only seventy over palp.'
'Pupils dilated but unresponsive. Seth? Seth? Can you hear me?'
'He's tachycardic. Get me two large-bore IV's, either fourteen or sixteen gauge, stat. Give him D-5 normal saline, wide open for a liter to start with, please. And I want to draw some bloods...get a CBC with diff, platelets, coags, chem-20, UA, tox screen, and send a type and screen to the blood bank.'
Then there was a stabbing pain in the crook of his arm and the sharp sound of ripping adhesive tape. 'What have we got?' asked a new voice, and the woman spoke again. 'A holy mess,' she said. Seth felt a sharp prick near his forehead, which had him arcing agaisnt his restraints and floating back to the soft, warm hands of a nurse. 'It's okay, Seth,' she soothed. How did they know his name?
'There's some visible cranium. Call radiology, we need them to clear the C-spine.'
There was a scurry of noise, of yelling. Seth slid his eyes to the slit in the curtain off to his right and saw his father. This was the hospital. He was standing with Summer's parents, trying to get past a bunch of nurses who wouldn't let him by,
Seth flailed so suddenly he managed to rip the IV out of his arm. He looked directly at Neil Robert's and screamed, but there was no sound, no noise, just wave after wave of fear.
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'I don't give a fuck about procedure,' Sandy Cohen said, and then there was a crash of instruments and a scuffle of footsteps that diverted the attention of the nurses enough to let him duck behind the stained curtain. His son was fighting backboard restraints and a Philadelphia collar. There was blood everywhere, all over his face and shirt and neck. 'I'm Sandy Cohen' he said to the ER physician who was barreling towards them. He reached out and firmly grasped Seth's hand. 'What's going on?'
'EMT's brought him in with a girl,' the doctor said quietly. 'From what we can see, he's got a scalp laceration. We were about to send him to radiology to check skull cervical ceterbral fractures, and if they report back negative, we'll get him down to CT scan.'
Sandy felt Seth squeeze his hand so tightly his wedding band dug into the skin. Surely, he though, he's all right if he has this strength. 'Summer,' Seth whispered hoarsely. 'Where'd they take Sum?'
'Sandy?' a tentative voice asked. He turned around to see Maya and Neil hovering at the edge of the curtain, horrified, no doubt, by all that blood. God only knew how they'd gotten pas the dragons at triage. 'Is Seth all right?'
'He's fine,' Sandy said, more for himself than for anyone else in the room. 'He's going to be just fine.'
A resident hung up a telephone reciever. 'Radiology's waiting,' she said. The ER doctor nodded towards Sandy. 'You can go with him,' he said. 'Keep him calm.'
Sandy walked beside the gurney, but he did not let go of his son's hand. He began trotting as the ER staff wheeled it more quickly past the Roberts'. 'How's Summer?' he remembered to ask, and disappeared before they could answer.
The doctor who'd been attending Seth turned around. 'You're Mr. and Mrs. Roberts?' he asked.
The came forward simultaneously.
'Can you step outside with me?'
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The doctor led them to a small alcove behind the coffee machines, decorated with nubby blue couches and ugly Formica end tabels, and Maya immeadiatly relaxed. If they weren't being led to an examination room on the double, the danger must have passed. Maybe Summer was already up on a patient ward, or off to radiology as Seth was. Maybe she was being brought out to meet them.
'Please,' the doctor said. 'Sit down.'
Maya had every intention of standing, but her knees gave out from beneath her. Neil remained upright, frozen.
'I'm very sorry,' the doctor began, the only words that Maya could not rework into anything but what they signified. She crumpled further, her body folding into itself, until her head was so deeply buring beneath her shaking arms that she could not hear what the man was saying.
'Your daugheter was pronounced dead on arrival. There was a gunshot wound to the head. It was instantaneous; she didn't suffer.' He paused. 'I'm going to need one of you to identify the body.'
Neil tried to remember to blink his eyes. Before, it had always been an involuntary act, but right now everything-breathing, standing, being-was stricly tied to his own self-control. 'I don't understand,' he said, in a voice too high to be his own. 'She was with Seth Cohen.'
'Yes,' the doctor said. 'They were brought in together.'
'I don't understand,' Neil repeated, when what he really meant was How can she be dead if he's alive?
'Who did it?' Maya forced out, her teeth clenched around the question as if it were a bone she had to keep possession of. 'Who shot her?'
The doctor shoot his head. 'I don't know, Mrs. Roberts. I'm sure the police who were at the scene will be here to talk to you shortly.'
Police?
'Are you ready to go?'
Neil stared at the doctor, wondering why on earth this man thought he ought to be leaving. Then he remembered. Summer. Her body.
He followed the doctor back into the ER. Was it his imagination or did the nurses look at him differently now? He passed cubicles with moaning, damaged, living people and finally stopped in front of a curtain with no noise, no bustle, no activity behind it. The doctor waitied until Neil inclined his head, then drew back the blind.
Summer was lying on her back on a table. Neil took a step forward, resting his hand on her hair. Her forehead was smooth, still warm. The doctor was wrong; that was all. She was not dead, she could not be dead, she...He shifted his hand, and her head lolled toward him, allowing him to see the hole above her right ear, the size of a silver dollar, ragged on the edges and mattered with dried blood. But no new blood was trickling.
'Mr.Roberts?' the doctor said.
Neil nodded and ran out of the examination room. He ran past the man on the stretched cluthching his heart, four times older than Summer would even be. He ran pas the resident carrying a cup of coffee. He ran pas Kirsten Cohen, breathless and reaching for him. He picked up speed. Then he turned the corner, sank to his knees, and retched.