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Talking to myself again. People who lived alone often did. I should probably stop, but I doubted I could.
“Never mind,” I said. “How’d you find me?”
“Nine-one-one call from a cell. Probably the guy who hit you.”
“Jerk,” I muttered, although I was grateful someone had called. “I guess you’ll have to take me home.”
“I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“There’s blood all over you!”
“Which is why I want to change my uniform before I go back out.”
“You’re not going back out. Not tonight.”
“You seem to be under the impression that you’re the boss of me,” I said.
Cal’s lips tightened, but when he spoke his voice was nothing but calm. Talk about the patience of a saint. “You can’t drive around, especially in this mess, when you’re dizzy. At least take the rest of the night off.” He jerked a thumb toward my ruined vehicle. “You’re going to have a hard time getting that thing to run anyway.”
“I have a car of my own, Cal.”
He mumbled something that I probably didn’t want to hear. Cal was just trying to look after me, but I wasn’t very good at being looked after.
“Take me home,” I ordered.
The short drive to my house was accomplished in silence. When I tried to get out of the car, my head ached so badly my stomach rolled.
“You win. I’ll go to bed, but call me if anything serious happens.”
From his somewhat sarcastic salute, there was nothing Cal would consider serious enough to wake me for tonight.
I hesitated. My father had rarely delegated authority. If he were here now he’d sneer and call me a girl. In my family, the ultimate insult.
“You need help getting inside?” Cal asked.
“Not since the mayor and I split a box of cheap wine when we were sixteen and I puked for three days.”
“You two must have been a real treat.”
“Oh yeah, we were swell.”
I made it to the porch, then lifted my hand as Cal turned his car and went back to work.
I was mud splattered, blood spattered; my uniform had been soaked and partially dried so many times it was stiff and uncomfortable. My hair had come loose from its braid and slapped against my neck like wiry hanks of hay.
A long, hot shower eased the stiffness, the mud, and the blood from my body and face. I took a bag of ice to bed. It wasn’t the first time.
I set my alarm for 3:00 a.m., happy that I woke easily when it rang. The ice bag was water. I tossed it to the floor and went back to sleep.
I dreamed of lightning and of birds trapped in a glass box so that the beat of their terrified wings sounded like distant thunder. My eyes snapped open as I realized what that odd sound had been in the woods last night.
“The wings of a really big bird.” I shook my head and was rewarded with a dull ache behind my puffy eyes.
I was more concussed than I thought. I’d heard the wind, maybe thunder. There was no bird big enough to create the sound that had seemed to make the earth, the trees, the very air shudder.
Of course there weren’t any wolves in Georgia, either, but last summer we’d had some. We might have some again, considering what I’d seen in the storm.
