Page 43 of Love Bound

I did.

He's quiet for a minute or two and then he's done. A man with fast hands. "Okay, here," he says, snapping the gloves off, and I move to sit up. "Take it easy this week. Your urine may be bloody with that bruised kidney. Sometimes problems don't show for a couple of days."

"I gotta close that hole in my roof."

"Hire someone. You're not getting back up there. Ask Claire who can do that work. She knows everyone. You're lucky, too, that the roads thawed enough for her to drive you here. Echo Bay can be a long, half-day drive in an ice storm."

"How long ago were they killed?” I ask. “Her parents and her sister."

"It's been about eight years. Claire was maybe nineteen or so. Quit school for a semester to take care of the younger kids. Geo made her go back and made sure she stayed there, but it was hard on all of them. A real tragedy."

"Drunk driver?"

"He should've had a suspended license, but instead he was out on the road." He helps me with my shirt. "The worst is that he got off."

I move off the ER bed, and he helps me with a clean shirt that Claire had packed. I can feel my face grow hot. "What? What do you mean he 'got off'?’"

Peterson shrugs. "He's a judge."

"You mean he's still around here?" I ask.

Peterson nods and jerks a finger to his left. "Right over in the county seat."

I couldn't believe it. Camden. Claire and her family have to live here with this guy at their back door. "I don’t understand. He killed three people. Mom Dad and sister."

"Listen, it was a long time ago. The chief of police went to school with the judge. This is the dirty underbelly of small-town politics. Lot's of people rallied behind him and it got nasty." Then he shifts back into doctor mode and starts giving me all the information some nurse printed off at the station that explains in fading toner about infection, dissolving sutures, and what to look for with internal injuries.

It’s not until I'm up—one hand on the doorknob and on my way out the door—that he decides to correct a misconception.

"One thing, though. Chloe Russo didn't die in that crash."

***

Though Claire drove my truck to the ER, I insist on driving back, but we do it in fits and starts. Now that she's not driving, she's noticing things in the truck. The Red Sox sticker on the glove compartment. The round blue stone she found that first morning we met, wrapped in a strip of leather, hanging from the rearview mirror. I can tell she doesn’t know what to say, and she immediately turns her attention to the two-way radio mounted on the dash, the one that used to link me to my business. I used to use the truck for surveillance. It may look like a half-ton beater, but it's sweet and sleek and can do a hundred and ten miles an hour without a shimmy.

On the way home, Claire needs to stop for supplies for both humans and animals. First, there's the big feed store, where I wait until she comes out with grain, which she throws in the back of my truck. Then we stop at the Hannaford's in Rockland and I decide, despite her wagging finger, to join her on a minor mission. The store is packed with people post-storm and though all we pick up is coffee, maple syrup, rice, goat cheese, root vegetables, and a roasting chicken, it takes forever to check out.

She frowns at me when I toss blueberries from Chile in the cart.

"Sacrilege," is all she says.

Apparently, buying blueberries from anywhere else is a social crime.

I point out that the self-checkout is free, but she stubbornly refuses to move from our place in line.

"I am not doing their job for them," she offers by way of explanation. "People need jobs."

Though the pain killers are starting to wear off, I have to smile at her.

She's oddly quiet on the last ten-mile stretch back to Echo Bay. Despite the thaw that launched us on the road this afternoon, there are patches of black ice everywhere and the narrow margins of the shoulder are encrusted with sheets of ice eroded by sand into dirty, lacey patterns. The wind has kicked up again, and dark clouds form and curl high against a blue sky that only offers a short reprieve.

Claire turns on the radio for a minute to try and catch the weather at the top of the hour, but it's three after four and we've missed it already.

Even though the road demands most of my attention, I keep stealing glances at her. She's got one arm crooked against the armrest near the door and she's cupping her chin in her hand, gazing out her window. Her other hand sits in her lap like a schoolgirl. Her left leg rests on the seat, her heel tucked under her. She's kicked her boots off—a habit she tells me, left over from when she interned two years ago with a vet from Portland who only had a car with heating vents in the floor.

Her feet would get too hot.

I want to take her hand, take that hand and hold it, kiss it, taste her fingers. Her skin is so beautiful, as if lit from within. As her hair moves with each jumble of the truck, and she reaches to tuck a wily strand behind her left ear, I shift in my seat because I start to get hard again.