June put her head as close to Frank and the handset as she could to hear the deputy’s answer.
“Your brother was involved in a car accident earlier this evening, thirty miles west of Palm Springs on Highway 99.”
“Is he okay?”
June had never heard Frank sound so afraid. Tears pooled in her eyes, though at the moment all she knew was that there had been a crash.
“He’s been transported to St. Vincent’s in Los Angeles.”
“So he’s okay? He’ll be all right?”
“You’ll need to discuss all of that with the doctors there at St. Vincent’s, sir.”
“But you can tell me if he was alive when he was taken there! You can tell me that! Can’t you tell me that? And what about Ruthie?”
“All I can tell you is your brother has been transported to St. Vincent’s. Do you need the address?”
“Is Ruthie there, too? Did you call her parents? They have her boys.”
June heard a slight hesitation in the deputy’s voice before herepeated his question. “Do you need the address of the hospital, Mr. Blankenship?”
Frank brought a hand up to his face and covered his eyes, as though he was seeing something terrible and was desperate to stop seeing it. “No. No, I know where it is.”
“You’ll be on your way, then?”
“Yes, yes. We’ll leave right now.”
“I’ll pass that along. I’m sorry you had to hear this news, Mr. Blankenship.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Frank hung up and, for just a moment, he drew June to him and buried his face in her hair.
“We have to go,” he said.
She nodded and they groped around in the dark for their clothes until June remembered there were light switches in the trailer. Of course there were. Dazed, they’d forgotten.
There were few cars on the roads at that hour and Frank sped all the way, but it still seemed to take far too long to cover the sixteen miles. They said nothing to each other until Frank was parking the used Chevy he’d bought after the war to replace Elwood’s old roadster.
Frank set the brake and then took June’s hand across the seat. “We need to be ready to hear the worst, June.”
He hardly ever called her June. It was always Junebug or Junie or JuJu. Something fun.
“I know,” she whispered.
They sat in the car in silence for several long minutes, June sure that neither of them knew what one did to be ready to hear the worst. But then Frank whispered, “Amen.”
He put his hand on the car door. “Let’s go.”
The hospital emergency room was active: nurses and attendantscoming and going, the phone at the desk ringing, the injured in chairs waiting.
Frank tapped his fingers nervously on the reception counter as he waited for a nurse to finish a phone conversation.
The second she hung up, he told her who he was and who they were there to see.
“Yes. So your brother is in surgery, Mr. Blankenship,” she said, placidly and yet with a hint of compassion. “If you’d like to head up to the surgical floor waiting area, you’ll be able to chat with the surgeon afterward. And it’s quieter up there.”
Frank’s next words came in a rush. “Surgery for what? What happened to him? What’s wrong?”
