Part 8
The drafty apartment smelled of boiling starch and old heating pipes. Daniel stood over the stove, draining a box of generic elbow macaroni into a dented aluminum colander. The steam rose in the cold kitchen air, fogging the window above the sink. He was just reaching for a jar of cheap pasta sauce when his cell phone vibrated violently against the laminate counter, buzzing its way toward the edge.
He wiped his hands on a dish towel and picked it up. It was Doris McCarthy.
“Dan, grab Clara and get downstairs right now,” Doris said. Her voice was pitched high, stripped of its usual grandmotherly warmth. “I’ve got the Buick running out front.”
Daniel froze, the towel still in his hand. “Doris, what’s wrong? Is there a fire?”
“It’s not the building. It’s the judge. Judge Caldwell,” Doris said, her words rushing together. “My nephew works dispatch for the county. He just texted me. They dispatched a bus to the Oakhaven park pond ten minutes ago. Her wheelchair hit a patch of black ice near the embankment. She went over. They said she hit the retaining wall hard, Dan. They’re taking her to Mercy Medical Center.”
Daniel dropped the dish towel. The cheap prepaid phone felt suddenly heavy in his hand. If Evelyn Caldwell was incapacitated, or worse, their thirty-day continuance vanished. A new judge would take over the docket. A new judge wouldn’t care about a five-year-old’s promise. They would look at the police report, see the retail theft, and enforce the maximum sentence. Clara would be back in emergency foster care before the week was out.
But beneath that immediate, terrifying flash of self-preservation, Daniel felt a sharp, heavy twist of genuine sickness. He pictured the woman in the thick wool peacoat, sitting in the freezing wind just an hour ago, finally closing her eyes and moving her arms to the rhythm of a song only she could hear.
“I’m coming,” Daniel said, and hung up.
He turned around. Clara was sitting at the kitchen table. She hadn’t looked up when the phone rang, but now she was carefully placing her green crayon back into its cardboard box. She didn’t look frightened. She looked intensely focused.
“Clara, put your coat back on,” Daniel said, moving quickly to the closet and pulling down her heavy yellow jacket. “Judge Evelyn got hurt at the park. Doris is driving us to the hospital.”
Clara stood up and slid her arms into the puffy sleeves. “I know she fell, Daddy. She got too close to the edge and her brain got scared again.”
Daniel zipped her coat up to her chin, his hands shaking slightly. “Clara, this is serious. If she’s badly hurt…” He couldn’t finish the sentence.
“She’s just lost in the dark again,” Clara said, looking up at him as he threw his canvas jacket over his shoulders. “When people get really scared, they hide. But we have to go find her.”
Three minutes later, Daniel was shoving Clara into the backseat of Doris’s idling Buick sedan. The heater was blasting, but Daniel couldn’t feel his fingers. Doris threw the car into drive the second Daniel slammed his door, tires spinning briefly on the salted asphalt before catching traction.
As they sped toward downtown Pittsburgh, the streetlights reflecting off the dirty snowbanks, Daniel gripped the door handle until his knuckles turned white. He looked back at Clara in the rearview mirror. She was staring out the window, watching the city blur past, her small jaw set. Daniel prayed to a God he hadn’t spoken to since his wife died that his daughter’s stubborn, impossible logic was right. Because if the doctors at Mercy couldn’t wake Evelyn Caldwell up, Daniel was entirely out of time.