Page 12 of The Wrong Track
“What?”
“A phone call,” she repeated. Selma clearly thought it was weird that I was getting a call at work and so did I, because that had never happened before. Who was there to call me? My heart started to pound and I immediately felt a wheeze in my chest.
“Take it!” she prodded, so I stood and reached for the receiver she held out to me.
“Hello?” I asked cautiously into the phone. I heard the whistle from my lungs.
“Oh, Remy,” Hazel answered. Hazel! Of course, she knew where to find me. No one else did, right?
“We can’t meet later,” she told me. “Tobin got hurt and I’m here with him.”
“What?”
“Someone hit their car. They were stopped to help a stranded motorcycle and some idiot, pardon me for saying so, some idiot hit the patrol car and Tobin broke his leg, I think. And maybe something with his knee, we don’t know yet. And his partner was hurt too and he broke his wrist and got a concussion, and the motorcyclist is in surgery, the poor guy.” She sniffed. “We’re at the hospital.”
“Oh. Do you need…” Of course she didn’t need me to come there. How could I possibly help the situation?
“We’re fine,” she said, and then blurted, “Oh, there’s his mom! I’ll talk to you later, Remy.” She hung up.
“Everything ok?” Selma asked, and I nodded. “You still don’t have a phone? Why the heck not?”
I shrugged. “I don’t have anyone to talk to.”
“It seems like you do, if they have to call you here. Go get yourself one of those cheap ones. For emergencies,” she told me. “You live alone, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“What if something happened? How would you call the police?”
“I wouldn’t,” I told her. I sat again on my stool and thought about Tobin in the hospital. Tobin, the guy who’d held my elbow so I wouldn’t fall on the ice and had carried my bag in case it was too heavy for me, the one who’d gone out of his way to try to prove that Kilian was dead. And his partner was there too, the one who’d stood and watched to make sure that everything was all right in the library. They were both in that hospital, the loud, smelly place where each time another patient screamed or moaned, I’d jumped and shook on the thin mattress. Tobin had sat there with me and had told me that it was ok.
Maybe I would go over there after work, I thought, but then I considered that I would just be in the way. And I really didn’t want to go back to that hospital or go to any hospital, not ever again. But when I got home and sat in the brown chair and tried to read, I couldn’t. I got up and went back to the car and drove out again. The next time I got home, I called Hazel.
“This is Remy,” I said when she answered. “Yes, I got a phone.” She had given me a slew of numbers I could call and been pestering me to get a phone to use them. Or, she’d wanted to give me a phone herself and also, inexplicably, she’d tried to teach me Morse code for “just in case.”
“I’m so surprised to hear from you,” she answered, and I guessed that yes, she was usually the one reaching out to me. She’d knocked on my door and asked me to go for walks. She’d even asked me to go to a football game, but when Kilian had found out about that, I’d been in trouble.
I didn’t know how to continue the conversation now so I just said, “I’m calling about the accident.”
“About Tobin and his partner? Well, they stabilized Bill’s arm and the motorcycle rider is out of surgery and stabilized too, so that’s great. And Tobin’s knee is ok but his lower leg is messed up. But it will be just fine. He’s going to be fine.” She said it like she meant it, like she was reassuring herself. “He’s already home and I’m here with him now,” she went on. “Did you want to talk to him?” And before I could say no, I didn’t need to do that, I heard her announce, “It’s Remy. She was worried about you.” The phone passed to someone new.
“Hi.”
He didn’t sound like he usually did, because even that “hi” had been kind of groggy, weak. He was in pain, then.
“Hi,” I answered. “What happened to you?”
“Dumb kid wasn’t watching and couldn’t stop fast enough,” he said. “My leg’s broken.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him, and there was a silence.
“I’m giving this back to Haze,” he announced, and then she was talking in my ear again.
“Thanks for calling, Remy. I’m sorry we couldn’t meet you for dinner. You did eat, right?” She paused slightly but went ahead to tell me what she was making for Tobin, how his mom was there and a few other relatives too, and how he was going to be just fine. She repeated that again like she needed to hear it, and I guessed that I believed her.
My new phone didn’t have anything like internet access, just numbers and a little screen, so I went back to the library the next morning. Beth Ellen wasn’t there and the other librarian only nodded when I returned ten of the books I’d already read, so there was no one that I had to talk to. First I went to look in the classics section and chose some of the other ones that Beth Ellen had recommended to me. Then I went to the media room and signed up for a computer.
I looked for anything new about my sister and the website of the high school she attended was full of name drops for her, because she was such a good student and a standout athlete, too. She’d made the Dean’s List again for the fall semester. I smiled at the screen as pride bubbled in my chest. Lily was so smart and she didn’t let anything keep her down or hold her back. She was still running, too, because I saw that she’d already been named a captain of the team even though she was only a junior. She must have been looking at colleges, planning where to go and how to pay for it, and I wondered what she was thinking.