“Breathe, Issie. I’m okay.” I smile and squeeze her hand for a second before I let go. “No hips broken. No massive concussions.”
“Thank God for small miracles,” Betty mutters as they lift me into the back. She slides in next to me. Everything is tight space and instruments, drawers full of medicine and needles, just enough supplies to keep people alive and stabilized until they get to a hospital. Nick hauls himself inside too. He bends his head so he can fit.
The moment Keith gets into the driver’s seat Betty mumbles so only I can hear, “You are going to tell me exactly what happened, right?”
I try to nod but it’s hard with the silly neck brace thing. “I’m sorry about the car, Gram.”
“The car, my dear, is the least of my worries,” she says. Then she does a very un-Betty thing. She leans over and kisses my cheek. Her lips are soft and dry. “You are going to be the death of me.”
She chuckles. I’m on my back, staring up at their faces. The light is so fluorescent bright that I can make out their pores, Nick’s individual eyebrow hairs. So many people have been in this ambulance dying. Some of them Betty has saved. She is a hero. So is Nick, taking down so many pixies all by himself and never complaining, just trying to keep everyone safe. A hero can be anyone, but I have two right here, and they love me. Tears seep out of my eyes.
Nick leans down and kisses my eyelids. “Loving you, Zara, is a full-time job. It’s a great job, don’t get me wrong. It’s the best job in the universe. But it is not easy, because you tend to . . .”
“Get hurt?” Betty suggests. “Find trouble? Pass out? Break arms?”
“All of the above.” Nick laughs.
My hand finds Nick’s wrist and I grab onto its thickness. “You know, I’m the patient here. Where’s the bedside manner? Where’s the sympathy?”
“Zara, sympathy is just a good excuse to buy greeting cards and make sorry eyes and secretly gloat over how glad you are that you aren’t the person whose crap is hanging out there for the world to see,” Betty says.
A check at the hospital reveals:
• one sprained wrist,
• a couple of minorly bruised but unbroken ribs, and
• one small neck strain that does not require a neck brace.
Gram changes into her civilian gear at the hospital, putting on a flannel shirt and L. L. Bean cords, and then drives us home in her truck. I’m in the middle seat leaning against Nick.
I push my thigh against his. “Well, thank God.”
“Thank God what?” he asks. His hand slowly rubs up and down the place where my shoulder meets my arm. It makes me good shiver.
“That I don’t have a neck brace. It’s hard to rock a neck brace, especially if we’re still going to that dance.”
He leans in and kisses my nose. “If anyone could do it, you could.”
I tilt my head so our lips meet.
“Hormonal ones, I am right here. Me. The old lady otherwise known as your grandmother,” Betty says.
“Sorry. He’s just irresistible,” I say, settling back against him.
“Well, try to resist the irresistible,” Betty says knowingly as the truck bumps over a pothole. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to jostle you.”
“Wait,” Nick says. “What did that mean?”
“She said to resist the irresistible,” I explain.
“But that means me.”
Betty starts laughing again. “You have a high opinion of yourself, don’t you, Mr. Colt?”
He starts stuttering. “But Zara said and then . . . and you said . . .”
“I didn’t just mean you, Nick,” she says, her voice softening for a second. Then it hardens up and I know what’s coming. We told her about the pixie guy I freed. The voice hardening means Official Grandmother Lecture Time. “For Zara the irresistible isn’t just you, it’s justice. It’s being noble. It’s being the martyr. It’s about ending pain for others and forgetting about herself or the big picture.”
“That’s harsh, Betty,” Nick defends me.
“Harsh? I’ll tell you what’s harsh. Her little do-gooderness set a pixie free, possibly a king, judging from how quickly he healed, and she almost died because of it.” She takes a corner and even though she’s mad at me she takes it slow so I don’t bounce around too much. “You get that, don’t you, Zara? You could’ve died today.”
My bruised ribs hammer home her point. We pull into our driveway. All the windows in the Cape are dark. The sky is dark. Everything is dark. The woods are just pieces of shadow. You can’t tell what’s back there. You can’t tell who might be watching.
Pixie Tip
A pixie’s true skin color is blue. Cookie Monster, Grover, and other lovable Muppets are also blue. Do not confuse the two. Muppets don’t kill you. Usually.
“Wake up. Zara! Honey! Wake the hell up.” Betty shakes me.
I swat at her, hit her flannel pajama top. The soft plushness of it is so different from Betty’s hardness. The lights are on in my room. Huh? My eyelids flutter, but I manage to open them, sit up. My voice is a frantic mess. “What? What is it? Pixies?”
She holds my arms up by the shoulders, but her grip loosens. “You were having another nightmare.”
I flop back onto the pillows. My chest aches from all the movement. “Again?”
I’ve had one every night since the accident. That makes a week’s worth of nightmares.
“You remember it?” Her hand touches my forehead, soothes away some hair.
“Yeah.”
“You want to tell me?”
“Gram, nobody likes to hear about other people’s dreams. It’s like watching PowerPoint presentations of somebody else’s vacation in St. Croix or something. You hear about the beach but you aren’t really experiencing the beach, so it’s just not that interesting.”
Her eyes close a little bit as she examines me. Her hands work at soothing out her pj top, which features frolicking lions and lollipops. Then she stills herself. She is so solid and good and tough, the best kind of grandmother. “I’m sorry I woke you up,” I finish.
“Not a big deal, sweetie. I’m up all the time.” She leans over and kisses my forehead. She straightens up and walks stiffly across the hardwood floor to the open door of my bedroom and hesitates by the light switch. “You want me to switch this off?”