Somehow she gets her hands under my arms, pulling and guiding me, and I’m popping out through the shattered window and both of us fall to the floor with a great woof! of expelled air.

“You’re bleeding,” she says, panting as she touches my forehead.

“Sorry,” I say. “Your poor car.”

“Can you stand up? Anything broken?”

My ribs hurt like hell, but a wobbly version of my legs seem to be functioning. Looking around, my vision is blurred but I can make out that we’re in some sort of conference room. Smashed chairs and tables, a lectern gone vertical, a torn projection screen hanging like a sparkly white rag. And the alarms making the insistent all-hands-to-battle-stations ring…ring…ring as if somewhere a nuclear-reactor engine is about to melt down.

Then, bursting into the room, a young security guard who can scarcely believe what he’s seeing.

“My God, what happened?”

With Connie holding my arm to steady me, I’m crunching through the glass fragments, heading for the guard.

“The police are on the way,” he tells us. “What happened? Did the accelerator stick?”

He thinks it was an accident, and I see no reason to disabuse him of the notion, particularly since he’s got a holster on his belt and, presumably, a gun.

“My son,” I tell him. “Surgery.”

Since he still seems befuddled by the shock of having his building invaded by a Volkswagen Beetle and a couple of suburban females, I hurry past him, out into a brightly lit hallway with slick, shiny floors. Behind me I hear Connie talking urgently to the guard and I’m thinking, Isn’t that nice, she’s taking care of business, good old Connie.

Floating into the hallway. Somewhere from the back of my mind, or maybe the inner ear, comes a single, high-pitched musical note. A dreamy violin with only one thing to say. Very odd, but sort of pleasant.

“Tommy,” I want to say, but my mouth doesn’t seem to be functioning for the moment.

From somewhere in the building, a flat popping noise. Somebody lighting firecrackers? Don’t they know it’s not yet the Fourth of July? Or is it? Have I missed the Fourth?

Trying to recall what day it is, exactly, when a man in green surgical scrubs hurries toward me, gowned and masked. There may be spatters of blood across his chest, I can’t be sure. My vision is still off, as if some internal part of me remains tilted inside the wreckage of the car.

“Are you a doctor?” I demand, trying to keep him in focus. Good, mouth working again.

He shakes his head, eyes on the ruined room behind me. “Nurse,” he mutters, and keeps on going.

Probably thinks they’re being invaded by an outraged patient, a transplant failure gone postal.

Then I’m jogging along the hallway, having trouble keeping upright. Something wrong with my sense of balance. The alarm bells have ceased, and in the distance I hear the whoop-whoop of a siren. Strangely, it sounds like it’s going away, but all of my senses are distorted, and for all I know the siren is actually inside the building.

That’s when I notice how hard it is to breathe. Something wrong inside? Can’t tell. Maybe the air is too thin. Very rarefied brand of air they have here in Scarsdale. Lurching around a corner, it feels like I’m attempting to manipulate a very difficult marionette, one whose limbs do not correspond to the strings.

Ignore it. Find Tommy.

“Tom-eee-eee-eee…”

Is the echo in the hallway or inside my head?

The wall steps out and slams me. Whoa. Keep it vertical, girl. Miles to go before you sleep. Somewhere in these tilting funhouse hallways your boy is waiting. You can almost see him sitting up in his hospital bed, a big grin on his beautiful face, saying, “Hey, Mom, what’s the haps?”

Did Tommy say that? Did I hear him? Must be close. Just a little farther on down the road.

Somewhere nearby, or a million miles away, a pair of doors beckon. The double doors to an operating room. On E.R. the O.R.’s always have double doors. Try saying that three times quick. Unless I’m seeing double, which is entirely within the realm of possibility. Or triple, is there such a thing as triple doors? Glass walls, lightly tinted, make me feel like I’m floating outside a space station, looking in. Carts of surgical equipment lurking in the tinted shadows behind the glass. Some of the shadows moving—no, those are people, not shadows. What are they doing? Why are they hiding behind the glass?

In the center of the glass-walled room, a pool of light. And there, stepping into the light, another figure wrapped into a green surgical gown, weird magnifying glasses that make him look really dorky, and in his gloved hands, a glint of light.

“Scalpel, please.”

No, no, no.

Must get through the doors. Must grab the hands of the man in the silly green gown, make him stop whatever it is he’s intent on doing.

Yell at him, Kate. Make yourself heard.

“Gahhh!” and then I slam through the doors and spin into the glass-walled operating room and the spin part gets out of control and the floor comes up and kicks me in the butt.

Looking up into lights so bright they make my head hurt. Can’t breathe. I try to say something but all I can do is gurgle like a baby, isn’t that odd? Isn’t that strange?

Then some icky green rubberized fingers are inserting themselves into my mouth and I’m no longer even trying to breathe—too much trouble—and a small, insistent voice in the dimmest part of my brain is telling me to stop struggling because I’m already dead, dead, dead.

45 get you a flyboy

Shane is waiting to greet me on the other side. “Hi, Kate,” he says in a husky voice. “Welcome back.”

How strange is this? I’m thinking. If anybody’s waiting to greet me it should be Ted. I’ve only known Randall Shane for a few days and it’s not like I’ve fallen in love with him, right? Not possible, too many important things on my mind, although I can’t seem to recall what, exactly. So what’s Shane doing here—wherever “here” is? And then I feel the gurney under me and background noise of life in tumult and the first word out of my mouth is Tommy.

“You should rest,” Shane advises, patting my hand. “You had a collapsed lung.”

“What about Tommy?”

The world slowly comes into focus. Doctors and cops rushing around, and a couple of suits that could be state police detectives or FBI agents, all of whom seem to be studiously ignoring me. So what’s new? Waiting at the end of the gurney, Connie and Sherona are giving me little encouraging waves. Deferring to Shane, apparently.

“It’s amazing what medical science can do,” Shane tells me, ignoring my question. “They put a tube down your throat and inflated your lung like a balloon. They tell me collapsed lungs are common in front-end collisions.”

Shane, with a huge chunk of white gauze taped to his head and two black eyes that make him look like a mournful raccoon.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” I say. “We were too late. Tommy’s already dead.”

Shane grimaces and keeps patting my hand, as if not sure what to do, or how to respond. He glances at Connie, who bursts into tears and then throws herself on me.

“Hey!” Shane exclaims, backing away. “Careful!”

“Terrible,” Connie mumbles, embracing me. “Just terrible.”

“I want to see him,” I say, forcing myself up from the gurney. Woozy but able to breathe, more or less. No tears. I feel frozen emotionally, unable to react. “Take me to Tommy.”

As the world reorients itself around me, it becomes obvious that I’ve been lying on a gurney outside the clinic O.R. Apparently I stumbled through the doors just before passing out, and the attending surgeon quickly determined what was wrong and fixed it. Whether or not he saved my life is questionable, as a single collapsed lung is not usually fatal, at least in the short run. Everybody keeps assuring me I’ll be fine.