The state trooper on the phone said, She’s doing okay, she’s lost some blood and the doctors are with her now. Sir, she was very lucky. The car was immersed in flame.
         Brian gave the briefest of summaries to his coworkers on his way out the door and within two minutes he was speeding his way to the hospital. He never picked up the flowers or the cake.
         Immersed? he thought.
         At Methodist they had been told to expect him and he went right to the ER. Ellen was sitting up in bed as a young man tweezed shards of glass from her right arm. A bandage covered the right side of her face from forehead to cheek. With nurses in the way he couldn’t hug her. Darling!
         They had given her something. She smiled at him, but it clearly hurt her to speak. He made his way around to the left side of the bed and sat and held her hand. She turned to him and smiled. She seemed to drift off.
         They smeared iodine and wrapped her arm. They unwrapped her face.
         It didn’t look so bad, to him. Scratches and abrasions yes, deeper than scratches and some bubbly red and black parts on her upper cheek that he couldn’t really see, and her cheekbone was obviously broken, which might also mean her jaw— Well, let’s let the doctor tell us.
         They put her under. They picked deeper and deeper into her face as he watched and she slept.
         Later, rested, bandaged, and less drugged, she squeezed his hand over and over. The doctor said: Six to eight weeks for the jaw, by that time the rest of it would be fine and that would be the time to talk about reconstruction. A dentist for the back teeth? asked Brian. Of course, but after we unwire the jaw. That and the skin job can be arranged at the same time.
         The doctor left them alone. She kept squeezing his hand. She couldn’t speak. It was still a little hard, it seemed, to focus both of her eyes on his, but nonetheless she conveyed an exuberance, a thrill at still being alive, and with him.
         After the plastic surgery, he figured, you’d barely notice anything. But he remembered a young doctor digging around in her cheek with a tweezers while she uh-uh-uh-ed even though she was unconscious, and the doctor beginning to pull something out, and her hand spasming in his and her eyes shooting open, and her right eye rolling this way and the other, up and down and back and forth as the young doctor from behind her eye socket drew a three-inch piece of windshield glass as slender as a canine tooth, and dropped it in a tray, where it broke in half.
💀