The Zero Hour

“I-I don’t know,” Sarah said.

The man came closer, knelt down, touched Jared’s head. Jared let out a yowl of pain. “It looks bad,” the man said. “We’ve got to get him to a hospital. Is there one nearby?”

“I have no idea,” Sarah said, now terrified as the realization struck her that Jared might in fact have been seriously hurt. “Oh, God. There’s got to be one.”

“Can you pick him up? If you can’t, I can. He shouldn’t walk.”

“No,” Sarah said quickly. She didn’t want the stranger to touch Jared, though he was a nice-seeming man, maybe around forty, quite good-looking, and seemed gentle. “I’ll carry him,” she said.

“I’ll get a cab.”

The man ran ahead of them and flagged down a cab, which came screeching to a halt. He opened the back door, then came running back toward Sarah, who was struggling to carry Jared, and helped them into the cab.

“Get us to the nearest emergency room,” the man ordered the driver.

In the cab, the man introduced himself. His name was Brian Lamoreaux, and he was an architect, a writer, and a professor of architecture and town planning at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Things were moving so quickly that she forgot even to thank the stranger for coming along to help them.

When the cab stopped, Sarah allowed him to pick up Jared and escort them into the St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital ER. Jared’s bleeding was still profuse, but it seemed to be slowing. Although he had stopped crying, he seemed dazed.

“I think he’s probably okay,” Brian assured her. “The scalp always bleeds a lot. He probably got cut when he was shoved to the ground.”

Brian dealt with the triage nurses while Sarah comforted Jared, and Jared was seen quickly. The examining physician asked if his tetanus shots were up to date. It took Sarah a moment to remember that Jared had had a DPT shot at the age of four or five.

The doctor wanted to take Jared away to suture his scalp, but Brian insisted that Sarah be allowed to accompany her son, and they reluctantly agreed.

As they wheeled Jared, Sarah noticed for the first time that Brian was limping slightly. She wondered whether the limp was from the blow with the bat. Jared, who was looking over at Brian, wasn’t burdened with tact, and for the first time he spoke.

“Did you get hurt trying to help us?” Jared asked.

“Hardly at all,” Brian Lamoreaux said. “Hip’s bruised a bit, but I’ll be fine.”

“But you’re limping,” Jared persisted.

“I’ve had this limp for a long time,” he replied. “Let’s worry about you.”

“How’d you get it?” Jared asked.

“Jared!” Sarah exclaimed.

“No, it’s okay,” Brian said. “I was in an accident once. Years ago.”

“Wow,” Jared said, satisfied.

The surgeon clipped the hair around the scalp wound and numbed the area with a syringe of something, chatting with Jared the whole time to distract him. Then, a few minutes later when the numbness had set in, he began suturing the scalp. Sarah held his hand; Brian sat in a chair nearby.

“Okay,” the surgeon said to Sarah when the procedure was done, “he’s going to be fine. He must have fallen against something on the ground, a piece of metal or broken glass or something, and got a fairly nasty laceration. What we call a ‘scalp lac.’ The scalp is richly vascular and bleeds like hell. Fortunately, scalp lacs are easy to suture.”

“Shouldn’t you check for concussion?” Sarah asked.

“No reason to,” the doctor said. “He didn’t lose consciousness at all, did he?”

She shook her head.

“Then no.”

“What about infection?”

“I cleaned the wound with Betadine, then used lidocaine with epinephrine, then dabbed on some bacitracin. He’s had his tetanus shots, so he should be okay there. I wouldn’t worry about it. Just don’t wash the hair for three days. Don’t get the wound wet. Watch for signs of infection, like redness or pus. In a week the sutures can come out. If you have a pediatrician in town he can take them out, or come on back here. He’ll be fine.”

They sat for a while, the three of them, near a vending machine in the ER waiting area. Brian told Sarah he was working on a biography of a Canadian architect Sarah had never heard of. He was here because some of the architect’s papers were in New York. Sarah said she was with the FBI, but was vague about what exactly she did, and he, apparently sensing her discomfort, didn’t pursue it.

Abruptly, Jared asked, with his eight-year-old’s straightforwardness: “Are you married?”

Sarah felt acutely uncomfortable. Was her son turning into a pander for his mother?

“I was,” Brian said.

“Jared knows all about divorce,” Sarah said quickly, mussing Jared’s hair. “Doesn’t he?”

“My wife died three years ago,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. She watched Brian as he talked to Jared. On closer inspection, she saw that he was prematurely gray; his face was youthful, although there were deep furrows around his mouth that looked like smile lines.

“How?” Jared asked.

“Jared!” Sarah said, shocked.

“No, it’s a natural thing to ask. She was sick for a long time, Jared.”

“What’d she have, cancer?”

“Come on, now, Jared!” Sarah said.