Chapter 16: Stitches

"No," I said. "No, it didn't touch me. You pushed me."

"Good."

He let go of my sleeve and put his head down on the gravel.

"Kendrick. Kendrick, look at me."

"I'm looking."

His eyes were shut.

I called 911 with my hands shaking so hard I dialed it wrong twice.

Then I took off my sweater and pressed it to his head and kept talking to him so he wouldn't stop answering.

He answered every time.

Mostly he said, "I'm fine."

He wasn't.

The ambulance took twenty minutes to come up the hill.

They wouldn't let me ride in the back, so I drove behind it in his black car.

I'd never driven his car.

The seat was too far back and it smelled like him.

The hospital in Pittsfield was bright and nearly empty at two in the morning.

A drunk man was singing somewhere down the hall.

I sat in a plastic chair outside the curtain with his blood drying on my hands.

At three, a nurse came out and told me.

A broken forearm, both bones, set and splinted.

A dozen stitches at the hairline.

A concussion they wanted to watch.

"He keeps asking where you are," she said. "You can go in."

A state trooper got to me first.

She was a tall woman in a grey uniform with a notebook.

She asked me what I saw.

I told her.

No headlights. Dark car. Fast. Straight up the middle of the drive.

"Plate?"

"I didn't see one."

"Make? Color?"

"Dark. That's all."

She wrote it down.

"Hit-and-run," she said. "Probably kids, or somebody drunk who took a wrong turn up the hill."

"It didn't take a wrong turn," I said. "It went out the service road behind the cottages. You'd have to know the service road was there."

She looked at me for a second longer than she had to.