Jake Read Free

even from up front. The pilot—the driver, that is—tried to take my mind off Mom.
    He asked, “What’s your favorite sport?”
    I couldn’t think of any sports. I stared at him. He was wearing this knit cap with a pom-pom dangling down his neck. I’d get beaten up in the school yard wearing a hat like that.
    He ran the siren through a busy part of town. Green ropes of tinsel and little Christmas flags werestrung between the streetlights. Cars pulled over to the side of the road so we could rush past them.
    While all this noise was filling our heads, the driver looked over and grinned like a crazy person in a scary movie I saw once at Matthew’s house. He even had the same pointy eyebrows.
    He definitely didn’t look like somebody Mom would let drive us anywhere. I almost wished
he
were the one riding in the back. Except Mom had enough problems without him sitting next to her.
    When he stopped at the hospital, he said, “Great ride, huh?”
    I knew he’d been trying to make me feel better. It didn’t work, that’s all. I climbed out and hurried around the ambulance.
    There was no ice in this parking area, so it was easy for them to lift Mom out of there and push her inside on this bed with wheels. A gurney, they called it.
    More noise came at me in the hospital. Squeaky wheels. A doctor yelling questions at us. The ambulance guys yelling back. Somebody crying. Was that Mom crying?
    People moved fast. I ran behind the gurney till somebody pulled a curtain closed right in front of myface. The ambulance driver said, “She’s gotta do this by herself.”
    I didn’t like the sound of that.
    He walked me to a desk where he said, “I’ve gotta move the truck.”
    He put some woman in charge of me. She barked questions at me like a seal. “Can you call your dad? Where do you live? How old is your mother? What’s her insurance company? Who’s her doctor? Which relative do you call in an emergency?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. That felt wrong. I was sure I knew the name of the doctor Mom went to. Probably I knew everywhere she sent checks because she usually talked to herself while she wrote them. No names came to mind. My mind went blue, like a computer waiting for someone to choose a screen saver.
    The other guy from the ambulance came and said, “You should follow the gurney upstairs.”
    He put me on an elevator. “Get off on ten,” he said, and pushed ten like I was too young to know.
    Other people got on and off at the third floor, and the fourth, and the seventh and ninth. Because they were patients, none of them looked like anybody I usually saw on elevators. I tried not to stare at theones with plastic tubes taped to their arms or sitting in wheelchairs.
    In the end, I was glad he told me to get off on ten and pushed the button to be sure I would.
    At the desk, I said, “Can I see my mom? She just got here.”
    A nurse said, “Sit over there.”
    There was Christmas music playing. It sounded sort of too slow, like the tape player needed batteries.
    I could have looked out the windows, I guess. I sat there, thinking my butt still hurt, like that should matter, and bit all my fingernails down. Mom hates nail biting. I figured she wouldn’t care much that I was doing it right now.
    After a while, another woman came to talk to me. Not a nurse; she wore a skirt and sweater like she worked in an office. She said I should call her Miss Sahara, like the desert. I think this was supposed to be funny, only I couldn’t smile. Besides, she was smiling hard enough for both of us.
    Miss Sahara told me the insurance stuff could wait, but she needed to know what relative to call. Did my mom have any allergies or illnesses they ought to know about? “Can’t Mom answer any of this?”
    “The doctor gave her a sedative.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “They put her to sleep.”
    “To sleep?” I stood straight out of my chair.
    Mom had our cat put to sleep last year because she was old and sick. Mom wasn’t