Someone dragged me back to the curb and gently pushed me down to the grass. I stared at the firefighters and paramedics working as someone inspected my knees. It took me a minute to realize he was talking to me. “We should take you in and have someone check you out. Got a lot of glass in there, looks like.” I nodded mutely and turned my attention back to the wreck. The uninjured driver of the other car stood on the opposite side of the street staring wide-eyed at the mash of cars. The paramedics around Dianne’s car were talking rapidly to each other in the foreign language of medispeak; I stared in fascination as bags of liquid were passed from one to the other and tubes snaked through the window. The medic that had inspected my knees stood and faced the crowd gathered behind me and asked them to disperse.

I remained where I was, fully intending to watch everything until she was safely in the rig. Instead, Carl came up and knelt beside me. “Why don’t I take you to the hospital so they can check out your knees, okay, Jack?”

“No, I need to stay and—”

“You don’t want to see her like that, Jack. Let’s go now; we can be there when they bring her in.”

There was a hint of that tone of voice you use when reasoning with a child, but I knew he was just trying to help. And I knew he was right. Someone handed me a towel to wipe Dianne’s blood from my hands. When I tried to stand, pain shot through my knees, and I could barely straighten them to walk. Carl and Todd half carried me to the nearest car in the circle drive, which happened to be mine. I fished the keys from my pocket and handed them to Carl, who helped me inside. A five-point turn rotated the car in the direction of the unblocked side of the driveway, and we were off.

Being in the emergency room was like a twisted form of déjà vu; everything was vaguely familiar from the last time I’d been here with Dianne. Carl did most of the talking for me, since I’d settled into a mild state of shock. They picked glass out of my knees for quite a while, and I sat in a daze, not feeling the doctor’s tweezers, and stared out across the nurses’ station to the ambulance bay doors, which were barely visible from where I sat. Time seemed to drag, and yet when I looked at my watch, I found that more time had passed than I realized. The ball of adrenaline was replaced with a ball of fear, because I realized the longer Dianne was out there and not in here, the smaller her chances were of surviving.