I reached slowly past her, into the glove compartment, where I had several napkins tucked away, and a bottle of water. I wet one of them slightly, then bent over to clean the blood from her forehead, being careful not to press too hard. After a little scrubbing, I saw that the source of all the blood was a fairly small cut that was beginning to bruise a bit, nothing that looked too major. It wasn’t even swelling up like her little brother’s head had when he’d tried to catch a baseball with his face. I knew I wasn’t a doctor, but I was willing to believe, unless I saw evidence to the contrary, that she would be fine, at least in regards to that.
As it turned out, luck was still with me when I got out and set to the real work, and just a few pushes had the car mostly back out of the ditch. I climbed back inside, crossing my fingers, and was pleasantly surprised when it did the rest of the work for me, grinding a bit, then jolting backwards, and up onto the road. The motion woke Nancy, who gave a little stretch and yawn while I got the car aimed in the right direction, then hit the gas, just wanting to get the hell out of there as fast as possible.
“Home?” Nancy asked, popping her thumb right back in her mouth.
I sighed, staring out the window as we rocketed by the truck, half expecting the man with the scar to come popping up out of the ditch again. He didn’t. “Yeah, baby,” I told her, with as much a smile as I could muster, “we’re going home.”
“Stay in here for a second for me, okay?” I smiled as sweetly as I could at Nancy, sitting her down on the closed toilet. She stared up at me innocently, but it was impossible to tell if she’d really understood. I closed the door as I left, figuring that would at least slow her down, and hopefully be noisy enough to allow me to catch her before she got into any trouble.
Still, I didn’t want to leave her alone for too long, so I hurried into the living room, snatching up her bag from the floor in front of the couch. I needed something dry to change her into for long enough to take her out to the drugstore and pick up some diapers. I’d almost stopped on the way home, but I didn’t want to take her out of the car and into public while she was still wet, and, despite having just done so, I didn’t want to just leave her sitting in the car. I hadn’t had a choice before, and, other than the guy with the scar, there hadn’t been anyone else around. It was hard to tell who’d be wandering through the parking lot in the middle of the night. I could only hope that the diapers would be easy enough to find that I could get Nancy in and out quickly, without an accident.
As I unzipped the bag, emblazoned with a “N. Thompson” across the side, however, I realized I didn’t have to worry about that – and that wasn’t a good thing. As I caught the first glimpse of the bag’s contents, my breath and hand froze, until I forced the latter to keep going, despite it beginning to shake, to confirm what I was seeing, as much as I didn’t want to.
I dropped the bag, scooting across the couch, away from it as it tumbled back to the floor, a cascade of thick, disposable diapers that had certainly not been in there earlier flowing from it. “No,” I shook my head, feeling tears start to fall from my eyes. “This isn’t happening!”
And yet, no matter how hard I stared at them, the diapers were still there, along with, I saw after moving the bag with my foot, a bottle of baby powder, a box of baby wipes, and something pink and frilly that looked almost, though not quite, like a T-shirt. It was unmistakably something meant for a baby, but big enough for Nancy. “It’s not real,” I told myself anyway, hoping that insisting upon it could make it true. “I’m dreaming.”
