Page 7 of Catch a Kiwi
“Help! Help!Help!”
I didn’t expect anybody to hear me. I didn’t expect anyone to come. I was shouting because it was all I had left. I realized that I was crying, that I was shaking, but I kept climbing, and I kept shouting. I’d run down the hill to the house. I’d break a window if nobody was home. I’d find a knife, cut the seatbelt.
Wait. There were knives in a drawer in the van, if they hadn’t fallen out. I should have checked. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
I was turning to go back when somebody came into view. A big figure in a raincoat, moving down the bank with enormous strides. Before he reached me, I was gasping, “My cousin. In the van. Trapped. She’s trapped. I need a knife to cut the seatbelt. I need?—”
He didn’t answer. He’d barely stopped. He was past me, then down to the van, looking inside. I followed as fast as I could scramble and slide, and when I got there, he said, “Climb inside. I’ll go through the windscreen after you and lift her up, and when I do, you get that seatbelt off her.”
I didn’t answer. I just did it, and so did he, both of us crowded together in the confined space. In seconds, Delilah was free, the man holding her around the waist with what must have been a major effort. He said, “Grab her legs and swing them around toward you,” and I did that, too.
“Owwww.”
It was a moan. I almost dropped her legs, and then I held on more tightly. “Delilah,” I said, my voice cracking on the word.
“Hurts,” she said.“Hurts.”
“We’re getting you out,” I said, through a throat that could barely open enough to let the words escape. “Hang on, baby. We’re getting you out.”
“Take her legs,” the man yelled in at me. Oh. He’d backed out through the windshield again. “I’m pulling her out now. Come out after her.” So I did that, too. The tears were thereagain, but I was trying to ignore them. The pain, and the fear, and the panic. None of it would help Delilah. I lifted her legs out the window so she wouldn’t cut them, and then I was shoving my own way out, grabbing with my hands, feeling the palm I’d cut getting sliced again, the blood running down my hand, and ignoring it, then turning awkwardly and dropping heavily to earth.
The man said, “All right to help me get her up the hill?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I can … walk,” Delilah said. “I can …”
“Take her ankles, then,” he said, ignoring that. “And let’s go.”
Roman
I wasn’t sure which of them was in worse shape.
When I’d seen the girl hanging from the seatbelt, her face immobile, her body still, I’d thought she was dead. When I’d got her loose and she’d been limp in my arms, I’d been sure of it. Stunned, though, that was all. Concussed, but coming around, once she wasn’t upside-down anymore. How long had she been like that? You could burst a blood vessel hanging upside-down too long, and with concussion on top of it …
The other girl was a mess. Gasping with effort and fear, hair hanging in long, lank streamers, her blood flowing, smearing, mixing with the mud on her hands and legs. She had the other girl’s ankles, though, and was forcing her way up the bank, sometimes tucking the girl’s legs under an arm and hauling herself up bodily, sometimes dropping to her knees and staggering upright again while I held the concussed girl under the arms and went up backward, one hard-fought step at a time, through the rain and the mud that coated my shoesand made me slip. We dragged that girl up somehow, meter by meter, and when we got to the top of the hill, I was blowing.
“Into my car,” I told the bloody girl. “We’ll put her in the back.”
“I can … walk,” the concussed girl said. I set her on her feet, but kept my arm around her, and she staggered and said, “All right. Maybe I can’t walk.”
“Open the door,” I told the bloody girl, and she ran to do it. I lifted the other one—she was even shorter and slighter than the bloody girl, maybe fourteen? Fifteen?—and got her into the back seat, and the bloody girl scrambled around to the other side and grabbed her.
“Where—” the bloody girl asked.
“Hospital,” I said, and slammed the door, then jumped in, started the car, and backed out of the drive and back onto the road.
“Shouldn’t we call an ambulance instead?” the bloody girl asked from behind me. Her voice was shaking, but she was still thinking, so she couldn’t be too badly hurt, despite the blood. Not even in shock. Should I have treated for the blood first? Pretty clearly not. She wouldn’t bleed to death from those cuts. I didn’t think there was time to get blankets from the house, either, not with the roads like this.
“No,” I said. “They won’t get here faster than I can drive you, not in this weather and with as much as they’ll have going on. Good thing she isn’t worse off, because you won’t get a helicopter out in this muck, either. Ninety minutes. Maybe less.” I put the heat on and put my foot down. The rain was coming down as hard as ever, and I needed to get back to the motorway while I still could.
The girl didn’t answer. She said, “Delilah. Talk to me. Please, baby.”
“I’m kind of … tired for that,” the other girl said. “And my head hurts. Maybe I could just … rest.” What accent was that? Canadian? American?
A choked laugh. “OK. You comfortable?” Not quite the same accent.
“Not … exactly. But I’m OK. I like your hand … on my head. Nice. Except your hand’s … bloody.”
