Oh, fuck!” he said.
Clare smashed down onto her knees beside him, gabbling something, reaching for him, and he was bellowing about his glasses, don’t step on his glasses, as if the goddamn glasses mattered with his goddamn leg in a goddamn hole, except that they had cost three hundred bucks and weren’t covered by his insurance.
“Ssh! Ssh!” Clare was saying. “I’ve got them, Russ, they’re right here. Right here.” And she slipped his glasses on, her hands stroking his face, rubbing his chest. He shut his eyes for a second while chills swept through him, surging like snowmelt waters, shaking his whole body. The pain in his leg was so bad he wanted to weep and howl. He opened his eyes. Clare filled his whole range of vision, hanging over him, her hazel eyes wide and bright with fear. Her voice was steady, though. “I want you to move your head slowly if you can.”
“I broke my leg,” he said.
“I know.” She brushed a shock of his hair off his forehead. “But before I try to move you, I want to make sure you didn’t injure your spine as well.”
That sent another icy wave washing through him, leaving him trembling. He lifted his head from the ground and stared down the length of his body to where his left foot was half in, half out of a snow-rimmed hole. His shin above his boot top was bent backward, and the sight of it, the wrongness of it, made his stomach lurch with nausea.
Clare leaned back, giving him more space. “Can you sit up?”
“I think so.” He tightened his gut and curled up, working hard because he was lying downslope, his head lower than his feet. He got high enough to prop himself on his elbows, then stopped, exhausted. The effort of it made him sweat, and another chill, weaker than the last, shook him. The pain in his leg was receding, replaced by an intense heat. He was panting for breath. Everything his eye fell on was supernaturally sharp, the glint of sunlight on the ice, the rough crumbled edge of a gravestone, the reddened tip of Clare’s nose. “Okay,” he said. “I think I’m going into shock.”
She reached behind his neck and pulled his parka hood over his head, tugging on the strings to keep it close. “Lie back down,” she said, taking him by the shoulders and guiding him back onto the snow. She slapped her parka until she felt whatever she was looking for. She unsnapped her coat, dug into an inside pocket, and pulled out a cell phone. “We’re going to get you some help fast,” she said, jamming her thumbnail against the power button.
He rolled his head away from her and stared at the pine boughs overhead. Their color, a green so dark it was almost black, reminded him of his friend Shaun, of Shaun’s dad’s boat, of hours rocking on the surface of the reservoir when he was a kid, the pines and the dark water and the mountains rising around them.
“You’re probably not going to get a-,” he said, just as Clare snarled, “God damn!”
“-signal,” he concluded. “Because of the mountains.” He closed his eyes again. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that before.”
“I’ve never been stuck in a snowbank with you and a broken leg before,” she said. She looked at her cell phone with loathing. “Useless machine! I can never get a signal when I need one. Why do I even have this?”
His leg still felt hot, but the pain was coming back, not sharp, like before, but a deep ache, like a tooth gone bad. He could feel it all the way up to his groin. “Forget about it,” he said. “You’re gonna walk me out of here. You can drive me to the hospital.”
Her face was a mixture of anger and frustration. “I can’t carry you out of here, Russ, don’t you get it? You must weigh close to two hundred pounds. Maybe on a dry, flat surface I could get you in a fireman’s carry and stagger a dozen steps with you, but there’s no way I can make it all the way up that trail with you, not with all that slippery snow and ice. I can’t do it.”
She looked close to tears. “Hey,” he said. He caught her bare hand in his gloved one and squeezed hard. He focused on making his voice as close to normal as possible. “It’s just a broken leg. It’s broad daylight and I got a perfectly good truck less than a half mile away. If you can’t get me all the way there, you can drag me over underneath a tree and I’ll wait while you go get help. It wouldn’t be more than”-he calculated the walk, the drive, scrambling the EMTs, the time it would take an ambulance to get here-“an hour and a half. Two hours, tops.”
“But it’s freezing out here! And your jeans aren’t going to keep you warm.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll survive.”
She worried her lower lip. She was still gripping his gloved hand. “Is that what you want me to do? Leave you here and go get help?”
“Hell, no. I’m not going to freeze my ass off for two hours when it’ll take us twenty minutes to walk back to the road.”
She let out a choked-up laugh, shook her head. “I-,” she started, her voice liquid and warm, like maple syrup fresh from the boiler. She cut herself off and pressed her lips together in a smile.
Love you. He could hear it as clearly as if she’d spoken it. She dropped his hand, stuffed her mittens in her pocket, and stood up. “Let’s do it,” she said.
It took them forty-five minutes, not twenty. They leaned into each other, her arm as far around his back as it would go, his arm over her neck and shoulders, their hands clutching each other’s parkas. She would take a small step, he would hop. He kept his teeth gritted against the throbbing ache in his leg, but every fourth or fifth hop his useless left foot would hit the hard, packed snow and he’d swear loudly. He kept apologizing for his language until Clare snapped that if he didn’t stop she’d rip his tongue out and beat him with it. They didn’t talk, except for exchanges like “Do you want me to take your boot off?”
“No.”
“It might make it easier to keep your leg up.”
“I don’t want you to take my goddamn boot off.”
They fell down twice. The first time, he could feel Clare lose her footing and he wrenched his arm away from her. She let go of his parka and he was able to twist sideways, tumbling onto his good right side. The force of the impact vibrated through his broken leg like a dental drill, and he had to lie there for a few minutes, gasping for control, while Clare apologized over and over. The second time, he hopped, landed wrong, and toppled backward, dragging Clare by her neck. When he could speak, he asked her if she was okay.
“I hate snow,” she said. “I really, really hate it. Ice, too.”
He couldn’t help it. He laughed. His whole body hurt, and he laughed and laughed while she rolled over, got to her feet, and hauled him upright. He laughed until he ran out of air and he stood there, dizzy and panting, clinging to her shoulders.
“Slow. Slow,” she said. “Take a few deep breaths.” He did. “Better?” she asked. “We’re almost there.”
And they were. Although the last few yards, with the truck in sight, were an agony, as what had been a twenty-second stroll along the shoulder of the road stretched into five minutes of step-hop-step-hop-step.
“Almost there,” she said, relief lightening her voice.
“I know we’re almost there,” he snarled.
When they reached the truck, he leaned against the side of the cab while Clare wiggled the keys out of his pocket and unlocked the doors. She slid the passenger seat as far back as it would go and then, while he sat on the floor of the cab, interlaced her fingers into a stirrup. He planted his good boot in her hands and shoved up, humping himself into the seat.
“Is there anything we can use to brace your leg?” She winced as he bumped his left foot against the floor mat and swore again.
“Let’s just get out of here.” He leaned back and closed his eyes while she got in and started the truck. He felt as if he had just staggered past the finish line of a ten-mile race, slick with sweat and trembling with fatigue. He concentrated on breathing, steady and deep. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The truck jounced through a pothole and he hissed.
“Sorry,” Clare said. He didn’t answer. Just went back to his breathing, keeping the pain not at bay, because it sloshed up against him like waves slapping at the side of a boat, but riding it, staying inside the hull, not letting it swamp him.
Clare didn’t ask him how he was or try to distract him with chatter, and the part of him that was thinking about anything was grateful to her for her silence. He kept his eyes closed. He could hear the rumble of the county road give way to the whoosh and crunch of traffic. They stopped, waited, rolled, stopped, waited, rolled. They eased over a speed bump and sloped upward. “We’re here,” she said quietly, and he opened his eyes to see her nosing the truck into the emergency-room portico. “I’ll go get someone,” she said, and he closed his eyes again as her door opened and shut. He had time for four more slow breaths before his door opened and a familiar voice said, “Well, what have you done to yourself this time?”
He opened his eyes. “Hey, Alta.” He reached for the edge of the doorway and the outstretched hand of the nurse who had ruled the emergency department since before he had returned home to become chief of police.
“Easy now,” she said, and Clare was on the other side, reaching for him as well, and there was a gurney, set nice and low and easy for him to sit on, fall back on, stretch out on. An orderly helped him settle his leg and then raised the gurney to table height. Russ stared at the sky, bright and cold.
“You’ll have to move that pickup,” Alta was saying to Clare. “Back out of this drive, down the street, next hospital entrance is visitor parking.”
Clare leaned over so that her face was hanging above him, just like she had done in the moments after he had fallen. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she said.
“Call the station for me,” he said. “They’re shorthanded already with Noble and Lyle out. Tell Harlene to call in the part-time guys. Tell her to let the staties know we may need back up. Call Bob Mongue, the zone sergeant at Troop B, he’s got like a dozen kids and he always needs overtime. Tell her-”
“Russ.” She rested one hand on his chest, her mouth quirked in a smile that was half exasperation, half amusement. “Harlene’s been the dispatcher for what, twenty years? She’ll know what to do.”
Her face was replaced by Alta’s. “Let’s get you inside and give you something to take the pain away, hmm?” She grabbed the side of the gurney and they began rolling. “I thought for sure when the reverend ran in here that you musta been shot or something. The ice got you, hmm? I was hoping for something more exciting than a slip and fall. We get three-four cases a day this time of year.”
He wondered, as they shouldered their way through the double doors into the steamy, moist heat of the emergency room, if Debba had been telling the truth. If Allan Rouse had slipped and fallen just like he had? And if so, then where the hell was he?