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“Where did she come from?”
“My house.” Her voice was a faraway thread. “My house!”
“You hear that? She says she came from her house.”
“What’s the address?”
She mumbled it, and the woman repeated it loudly into the speakerphone.
The neighbor reentered with a first aid kit, towels, and a steaming mug. He snatched the phone from his wife.
“Look,” he said. “It’s hard to understand what she’s saying. But it sounds like she thinks someone’s in her house, that whoever it is is after her kids, who’re still there.” He listened. Asked, “How old are they?”
She told him, and the neighbor told the phone.
He’d put the first aid kit, the towels, and the mug on the floor next to her. She gingerly wrapped a towel around her cut left hand. Its fingers were thick and unbendable. She couldn’t work the zipper on the first aid kit.
The neighbor looked so tall standing there, talking on the phone. The woman was staring out into the night again, wringing her hands and peering through different windowpanes as if the view might change from one to the other.
She put her uncut hand on the mug the neighbor had put beside her, its warmth miraculous. She took a sip that burned down her throat, and she felt a wave of gratefulness to feel anything warm, to feel anything at all comforting again.
“I still don’t see anyone,” the woman said.
She forced herself to enunciate.
“Let. Me. Talk. To. Them.”
“She wants to talk to you,” the neighbor told the phone. “I’m gonna set the phone down next to her so you can hear her better.”
“My kids,” she rasped. “Five and eight. I hid them from him. He said he was going to start a fire. Smoke us out. You need to get to my house. Help them.”
“Ma’am? Hello?”
“Five and eight. He’s going to light a fire. Help them.”
“Do you feel safe where you are now, ma’am?”
Through a wave of dizziness she said to the phone, “He’s going to smoke them out, the Corner.”
She floated, distant from the room. The neighbors were silly, running this way and that. She took a sip of the hot drink, then another. The taste was so present. So warm.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t understand what you said. Are you feeling all right?”
No.I’m broken and blinded and my feet are going to have to be amputated, and I can’t breathe right and the Corner’s waiting to eat them alive and my skin is going to fall off and my heart isn’t beating evenly and my brain is stuffed with cotton balls and I’m dying.
But when has that mattered? You know this song, you’ve been here before. On the airplane’s the only place they say, “Put your oxygen mask on before assisting others.” Mostly you’re on that bed and they’ve got a scalpel and the right answer always is, do what’s best for the baby. And if you say, “Hey, maybe spare me a minute, spare me a little pain, I have a few questions,” there are frowns and “Reallys?” and finally “That’s not advisable for the baby, baby, baby.”
“Get my kids,” she said.
The burning liquid was the only warm thing in the entire world. The only source of comfort. She closed her eye for a little rest.
Delicious.
The neighbor snatched up the phone.
“You better send an ambulance, too. She looks like she’s been out wandering in the snow after being used as a punching bag.”
Wandering. Just a little stroll, a little jaunt. Red Riding Hood following the forest path, tra-la-la.
