Gail Godwin - Flora

“But shouldn’t we go and look first? We don’t even know how badly—”

“Christ almighty, Helen, is it your morbid curiosity we must satisfy before we get help?”

“I need to see!” I screamed. “It might be my father. He’s coming for my birthday! What if he decided to come tonight? You can’t keep me from my father.”

I was already running ahead of him toward the trees broken by the crash. Finn had hurt and insulted me, and I had screamed what I did in order to punish him and win my point, but when I got closer to the wreck it seemed that I had wreaked a hideous magic. The crumpled, steaming car, whose innocent headlights still beamed reliably ahead into the woods, was my father’s Chevy coupe and the numbers on the license plate were the ones I knew by heart.

Annie Rickets’s claim that her parents were privy to secret information because they worked for the telephone company was not a total fabrication.

My grandfather had installed one of the earliest phone lines in town for Anstruther’s Lodge, and our three-digit number had remained the same, though most people had five-digit numbers by this time. In 1945, you still took the receiver off the hook and an operator, often one whose voice you’d heard before, said, “Number, please.” You said the number—Annie’s was 34598—and the operator said, “Thank you” or “I’ll connect you” (and sometimes both) and she would plug you into the right hole on her switchboard and the number you wanted would ring. If someone didn’t pick up after a certain number of rings, the operator would say, “I’m sorry, but your party doesn’t answer, will you try again later?” Annie’s family was on a party line, and sometimes when we were talking a petulant woman’s voice would break in with “Are you little chatterboxes ever going to get off?” “Oh, dry up, you old bag,” Annie once shot back, and the party complained to the operator, who told Annie’s parents. They made her phone the old bag and apologize. Until the dial system came in, the voice of the operator was an integral part of all telephone intercourse. Talking to callers, the operator could learn about things that were happening and make further calls on her own and thus contribute to the outcome of events.

In an emergency, it was enough to tell the operator what it was and she would plug you into the proper service, or you could just tell her what was the matter and she would contact the service and relay your message.

I had been preparing my message as I ran uphill, a stitch in my side: Operator, you’ve got to help me, my father’s had a bad wreck on Sunset Drive and we need an ambulance quick. She connected me and stayed on the line while the hospital took down the information. Hairpin curve, near the top. Thrown through the windshield. The person with him said a severed artery in the neck.

The ambulance was on its way, but the operator kept talking to me until I told her I really had to go. How old was I? Was there anyone with me? I told her I was eleven and that my father had been one of the people at Oak Ridge helping make the bomb, only we hadn’t known what he was doing, he himself hadn’t known, it was so secret. He had been driving home to be with me on my birthday tomorrow.

Where was Flora? I had yelled for her as I ran into the house. She must have gone out looking for me some more. I was glad she hadn’t been there to make the phone call. She would have included who knew what unnecessary digressions.

(“For God’s sake—run!” croaked a bare-chested Finn, spotlit by the faithful headlights that hadn’t seemed to register that the rest of the car was smashed. I had left him kneeling over my father’s crumpled form, stuffing his own shirt, already blood-soaked, against the side of my father’s neck. “And stay in the house with Flora. You’re under orders!”)

Quickly I circled the downstairs—no Flora, though at some point she had found time to work on the milk damage. Wet kitchen towels had been carefully laid across the sofa cushion, and the assaulted sketch pads placed facedown on a dry towel. I stopped by my room long enough to change into my Keds, which were better for running up and down hills, and then galloped upstairs to check out all the rooms so I could truthfully say I’d looked everywhere. If someone wasn’t in the house, you could hardly be under orders to stay in it with them.

There were two hospitals in town, St. Benedict’s on the south side, and Mission on our side. Mission was only twelve blocks from the entrance to Sunset Drive, and as I skidded down our driveway—this descent less effortless than the one when the cognac was fresher—I could already hear the approaching ambulance.

My father could not die because Finn had been on the spot to save him. And why had he been on the spot? Because he had been out looking for me. My mind raced ahead, binding up the wounds and preparing a desirable outcome. I had worried that my father would find fault with Finn, but how could you find fault with the person who had saved your life? They would become fast friends, the Starling Peake room would be the Devlin Patrick Finn room, Finn would help repair Old One Thousand and drive me to school and attend the local junior college. Even if he didn’t get his status revised and be eligible for the GI Bill, my father would pay the tuition. If only there was more money! But we would manage somehow. In five years, when I turned sixteen, I’d have my driver’s license and could get an after-school job.

When I rounded the first curve I saw the parked ambulance below with its front spotlight trained on the woods. There was a police car, as well, and a fire truck was just arriving. Men tumbled out of vehicles and shouted back and forth and carried handheld searchlights toward the spot where my father lay. From my invisible vantage point above the activity, I seemed to split in half. One half could not suppress the thrill of elation rising in my throat at the enthralling spectacle of human beings organizing themselves to save a life, while the other recoiled from the possibility that my father might die, or indeed was already dead, and that my life would be completely changed.

Now they were carrying him out of the woods. Bare-chested Finn, holding one of the searchlights, followed, directing the high-powered beam on them loading the stretcher into the back of the ambulance. Unable to make out whether they had covered up my father’s face (which I knew from the movies was a bad sign), I edged closer. Still invisible in the dark on the other side of the road, I risked another couple of yards until I could make sure that I really did see the oxygen mask over the face and white wrappings around the neck.

Now that they were getting ready to close the doors, I felt it would be all right to declare myself. Finn couldn’t begrudge me speaking to the men who were carrying away my own father.

I stepped forward to cross to their side of the road, tripped over something substantial, and fell down with a cry. Now the light was on me as I picked myself up from the pavement.

“Another one!” a man cried as the light moved away from my face and shone on the crumpled body of a woman in a blue dress.

“I let you sleep as long as you could,” Mrs. Jones said, opening the blinds in Nonie’s room to let in the bright, sunny day.

“What time is it?”

“Almost ten.”

“Where is Finn?”

“He left last night. After I came. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes, but tell me again.”

“Well, he phoned and said for me to come—you’d said where to find my number—and I got here as quick as I could. You were here on the bed, with the blanket over you. He said you had refused to get undressed in case you were needed. Do you remember me helping you get into your pajamas and washing your face?”