Page 15 of Between Hello and Goodbye

Either Roy was the silent type, or he couldn’t hear me from inside his helmet, but he wasn’t talking. I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for the ordeal to be over. Three minutes later, it was. We landed the basket in the playground of an elementary school, mercifully empty on a Sunday.

“So that happened,” I said to the sky.

As promised, an ambulance was waiting. Two more EMTs—neither of them Asher, I noticed—rushed out with a stretcher.

“I’m fine, guys,” I protested. “A hospital seems like overkill.”

“Might be broken. Better to have an X-ray.”

I sighed. It wasn’t like I had anywhere else to be.

For four hours, I waited on a gurney in the ER of Wilcox Hospital, shivering with cold. The thin blanket they’d given me was purely decorative, and the ice pack on my ankle felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. An X-ray determined nothing was broken. A young dark-haired doctor named Dr. Akana gave me the news.

“X-ray shows no broken bones. Ultrasound shows no ligament tears,” she said. “Without an MRI we can’t be one hundred percent certain, but in my experience, it looks like a bad sprain. You’re lucky.”

“Yep, lucky. That’s me.” I brushed a tangle of hair out of my eyes. “What happens now?”

“We’ll give you a boot to stabilize your foot, a pair of crutches, more ice packs to take home. Is there someone we can call to come get you?”

“If I had a dollar…” I forced a fresh round of tears back down. “No. I’m here by myself.”

Dr. Akana frowned and nodded toward my mud-splattered legs. “I can have the nurses clean you up if you’d like.”

“And wait another four hours in this Arctic enclosure? No, thanks. Someone lessluckyprobably needs this bed anyway. I’ll call an Uber.”

“Suit yourself.” She patted my arm gently. “I’ll have them bring your paperwork.”

The doc left, and a nurse appeared nearly thirty minutes later to wrap my ankle and put it in a black boot that came to mid-shin. I signed some papers, and they rolled me in a wheelchair to the front of the hospital. The orderly waited with me until the Uber arrived. A young guy jumped out of a small white Kia.

“Faith?”

“That’s me.”

I hauled myself out of the wheelchair, and the orderly handed me crutches. Twelve of my nearly thirty years had been spent in high heels and I’d never needed crutches. Letting go of the chair and taking my first wobbly steps made me feel like an astronaut being cast out of the space station.

Don’t be dramatic. Just get back to the condo.

And then what? I had no clue how I’d be able to maneuver into a bath to clean myself up. I could change my flight and get the hell out of here, but I had three pieces of luggage to somehow get to the airport. Just the thought of packing made me tired. And my rental car? How would I return it? I couldn’t drive.

The condo,I thought again.Get to the condo and figure out the rest later.

I slowly crutched three steps to the Kia. The Uber driver eyed my muddy clothes dubiously.

“Um, is there a towel we can put down? For my back seat?”

“Seriously?”

My ankle throbbed and ached in the heavy boot.

The driver gave me an apologetic smile and ran after the orderly who was already taking the wheelchair back, leaving me standing on the curb. Alone.

The dam finally broke, and I burst into tears.