The Last Whistle Page 9

  Time to get to work before I fried like an egg up here. I walked carefully around, reminding myself of where the delicate spots were, hidden under the curling shingles. One was right over where I thought my bed was and I decided to start there. The shingles were actually so loose that I could peel them back with my fingers, which I knew was a bad sign for a roof. I would try to nail them back down more securely over the boards I was going to patch with, and it would be better than nothing. I hoped.

  Before I did anything, I happened to glance back at the lake, and I spotted a blonde head emerging from the crystalline waves. Gunnar, scuba diving again. I watched while he walked onto the shore. Maybe his back was healing—he appeared to be moving better than he had the previous week and even within the last day or so when I’d watched him. Not watched, but caught a glimpse of him, I meant. Their next game was tomorrow, at home, so I was glad to see his improvement.

  “Hey!” I called, and he looked to his right and his left on the beach. “I’m up here. No, higher!” I directed, when he peered around my deck.

  “What are you doing up there?” He walked toward me, shielding his eyes from the sun.

  “I’m fixing my roof. Is your back better?”

  “Better,” he allowed. “The docs and the physical therapists are telling me that swimming is good for it.” I saw him glance disgustedly at his scuba gear.

  “Is that mask bothering you due to the unexplained bruising around your eye?” I asked.

  He looked up again, smiling a little. “Unexplained, huh? No, that strange bruising is gone, pretty much.” I took a step forward to see for myself and he lost the smile. “Stay still, Hallie. You’re making me nervous so high.”

  “I’m perfectly fine. The slope isn’t very steep where I am. The ceiling is pretty flat above my bedroom.” It made me feel vaguely inappropriate to say the word “bedroom” in front of him, like I was in a Victorian novel and not a modern woman who was fixing her roof. I played with my hammer nervously.

  “What do you need to fix? What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s old. The whole house is old and I’m trying to do some repairs.” I cleared my throat. “About that, about my house.” Gunnar cupped his ear so I cleared my throat again and spoke louder. “Uh, I know that the whole deed situation isn’t your fault. You bought the Feeney place fair and square and you didn’t have anything to do with any deals between them and my dad. I was just, as you said at the time, a little startled. Shocked. I’m sorry that I took it out on you.”

  “That’s ok. I understood. The look on your face—I felt terrible. But you seem to have perked back up,” Gunnar pointed out, and I shrugged. What else was I going to do, curl up and die? Yes, at first that had sounded like a viable plan, but he was right that I had perked, to some extent.

  “Well, I have a lot to do to keep myself perky.” I gestured at the roof with my arm and threw off my balance a little. “I have a long list of projects. I was just working on my deck,” I pointed out.

  “Do you actually know how to do home repairs?” he asked doubtfully. I saw him look at the boards where I had tried to hammer in the nails. I hadn’t been able to get them completely into the wood and they weren’t totally straight, either. Even from up here, I could feel his misgivings.

  “I don’t know very much about fixing things, but I got books from the library.” Now I pointed down to the stack on the deck, but as I did, the boards in my backpack shifted, throwing me off-balance again. I stepped forward to steady myself, windmilling my arms, and I heard an awful crack. I thought I screamed and at almost the same time, Gunnar called out like he was in pain.

  “Ow! Jesus H. Christ!”

  It took me a moment to figure out what had happened, because while most of my body was still on the roof, my leg was not. It was significantly lower, having gone right through one of the weak spots. “Ow,” I moaned. It hurt. I wiggled my foot and felt it suspended in the air below me.

  “Hallie? Hallie! Are you ok?” Gunnar called anxiously.

  “Yes,” I called back. “Are you? Why did you yell?”

  “You threw the hammer at me!”

  Oh, no. I looked at my hand, and yes, there was no hammer in it anymore. “I didn’t mean to!” I said. “Did it hit you?”

  “I got out of the way. Mostly. It’s that reaction time we were talking about.” There was a pause. “Where are you? I thought I heard wood breaking.”

  “My leg went through the roof.” Insulation tickled the bare skin of my calf and the dust made me sneeze repeatedly.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” he yelped again. “Hold on, I’m coming up the ladder.”

  “No!” I shrieked. “No, this roof will never hold you. I can get myself out.” I did, slowly, carefully easing my leg out from the jagged hole and grunting with effort as I did. I looked down when I was free and saw that my bed was right below, my grandma’s quilt now covered in dust, dirt, broken boards, and a little dripped blood.

  “Hallie?”

  “I’m ok,” I said, and used the non-functional TV antenna to pull myself up to stand. My leg looked awful, all cut up and ready to bloom out in bruises. I tentatively put some weight on it. “I’m coming down,” I told Gunnar.

  “Use the ladder,” he suggested.

  “Ha, ha,” I answered, and stepped toward it. But I caught my toe on one of the loose, curling shingles and then—

  “Oof!”

  “Hallie!”

  A second later, I was staring at branches and at the sky, and then Gunnar’s face appeared, stark white. “My God, are you all right?”

  “What just happened?” I asked confusedly.

  “You fell off the roof!”

  “I did?” I tried to sit up, but I was completely embedded in the overgrown bushes next to my front porch. Lucky thing I hadn’t trimmed them back yet, because they had done a great job of stopping me before I hit the ground. “I’m ok,” I told Gunnar again. “I didn’t lose consciousness. My neck and back are fine.” They always asked you about those things after a fall.

  “Are you sure? Any broken bones?”

  I felt around. “Something’s wrong with my ankle. Can you throw me a rope so I can pull myself out?”

  It actually took him going to get some of the workmen from his house and their saws to free me from the prickly bushes. By that time, I was extremely uncomfortable and in even more pain. I tried not to cry.

  “You need to go to the hospital to be checked over,” Gunnar told me. “I’m going to drive you.” I took a limping step. “Stop! I’ll carry you.” He reached for me and I slapped his hands.

  “No!” I said sharply. “You’ll re-injure your back the day before a game!” Instead, two of the construction guys held a piece of plywood and I gingerly sat on it, and that was the way I got to Gunnar’s car, both men huffing and me swiping away a few tears. Gunnar helped me in, and in not too long, we were at the local urgent care. But when they got over their shock at having a Woodsmen there and actually listened to the fact that I had fallen off a roof, they sent us into Traverse City to the ER.

  “You can leave me here,” I told Gunnar as I waited in a bed. He had walked right back with me and no one had said a word to him, besides “Go Woodsmen,” mixed in with a few autograph requests. I lay and thought about how much my ankle hurt as he signed them. Ankle, leg, butt, back, left arm…

  “No, I’ll stay,” he said, and sat down in a hard chair next to me. He glanced around. “By the way, how did the woman at the front desk know you well enough to greet you by name?”

  “Well…”

  “Hi, Hallie!” one of the nurses said. He smiled at me from the end of the bed. “It’s been a while!”

  “I went away to college in Chicago and worked there for a few years,” I explained.

  “Well, we missed you!” Someone else called to him and he excused himself.

  Gunnar stared at me. “How—”

  “I’ve lived here all my life, and it’s not very big,” I explained, whi
ch was all true, but not the reason I knew that nurse, and the janitor, and almost everyone else in the ER. “Is it too small for you, or you like living here?” I asked him, to change the subject. “I guess you must like it, since you bought the Feeney place.”

  “I grew up in a small town too, and I do like it here a lot. It’s a great place to live.”

  “To stay?” I asked. “Like, don’t a lot of the Woodsmen leave when you aren’t playing during the season?”

  “Sure,” he answered. “A lot of guys are from other parts of the country and they go home to that, or they head someplace nice for the winter. But where I’m from in Minnesota isn’t any warmer, and the cold weather doesn’t scare me. Besides, my best friends are up here permanently.”

  “What about your family? Are your parents still where you grew up?”

  “Yes, and I have four older sisters, but only one of them still lives in Minnesota,” Gunnar said, and I nodded admiringly. I had always thought about having siblings and had imagined myself as one of many: Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, and Hallie. “We gather up for the holidays at her house, the house we grew up in,” he continued. “I love them all and I love my nieces and nephews, but they’re only a plane flight away. Besides, now they can come visit me.”

  “They can when your house doesn’t resemble a lotus pod,” I corrected. “They’ll like to be here in the summer, especially.” Especially since that he had all that beachfront to use.

  “And speaking of home repairs, do you plan to go up on your roof again?” Gunnar asked.

  I sighed. “It sure didn’t start very well, but I do have to fix it. I’m afraid that it won’t hold if we get a really big snow this winter, and I won’t be here to clean up the damage.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “I’m looking for a job doing something like what I used to in Chicago, working in the financial services industry. I started looking only there, but now I’m applying for jobs all over the county,” I said. I wasn’t ever getting past the initial phone interviews, but I was still trying. “I have to get back to what I was doing before I came home.”

  “To work in your family’s bookstore in town,” he added.

  “Yes, but mostly because my dad was sick.” Gunnar nodded slowly. “Now the building and the business are for sale, so no more Holliday Booksellers,” I concluded.

  “You didn’t want to do it anymore?”

  “I can’t afford to,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if I want to.”

  “I thought that your grandpa bought the car because he’d made it,” Gunnar commented, and I was very surprised he remembered me saying that.

  “Sure, the bookstore used to do well, but that was before e-readers and the internet. But it was still doing ok until my dad had some financial setbacks that I wasn’t able to fix.” Just like how things hadn’t worked out with me fixing the roof today. I looked at myself in the shiny, convex surface of the bedrail. “Am I still covered in twigs and stuff?”

  “Pretty much,” he answered.

  I let my head fall back onto the thin pillow. Great. From what I had just seen in my distorted reflection, I looked like I’d been rubbing my face in the dirt, which I would have actually done if the bush hadn’t caught me.

  “You have a lot of leaves and crap in your hair.” Gunnar leaned closer and started to nitpick me. “I’m still stunned that you fell off a roof and you’re basically uninjured and calmly talking about it.”

  “I’ve done worse,” I admitted. I brushed at his hand. “You don’t have to do that. I’ll get everything off when I go home.” And I would have to somehow patch the hole. I held in a groan.

  “I’m just removing a few spiders,” he said. “There, I think that’s the last living thing besides you. I feel like this is my fault, that I startled you.”

  “No, not at all. And I was really lucky that you happened to be scuba diving, because I could have stayed in that bush for days and no one would have missed me.” Marley at the tutoring center probably would have had a party when I didn’t show. “Did you see anything in the water today?”

  “Sand. Rocks. A few minnows. I’m not trying to see stuff, I’m just practicing. I took a course last year in Anguilla in the offseason and got certified.”

  Anguilla. I pictured palm trees and tropical fish. “How cool.”

  “I guess. I get really claustrophobic with the mask on.” He looked chagrined. “I can’t seem to get past that. It didn’t get any better after someone hit me in the face made it hurt, too.” He grinned.

  I tried to look innocent. “What do you mean? But anyway, why do you keep trying it if you don’t like it?”

  “I want to find a hobby. I need something that I can do with my time,” he explained.

  “Football isn’t enough for you?” I asked curiously.

  The curtains pushed open again. “If it isn’t my favorite patient!” a grey-haired doctor announced. “How are you doing, Hallie?”

  “Great, Dr. Crumpler.” I looked down at my scratched and bruised body. “Well, maybe not totally great,” I amended.

  She looked at my chart. “Do they have this right? You fell off a roof this time?”

  I nodded, and she shook her head. “Wow, that’s a bad one! But not as bad as some of the other times you’ve come in, right?”

  “What else has happened to you?” Gunnar asked, sounding appalled, and the doctor turned to him.

  She stuck out her hand and introduced herself to Gunnar. “Rebecca Crumpler,” she told him.

  “Gunnar Christensen,” he answered.

  She must not have been a Woodsmen fan, because she didn’t react at all besides smiling pleasantly at him, with no bugged-out eyes, swooning, or drooling. “We’ve known Hallie since she was a little girl,” she continued, and smiled at me, too. “How’s your dad?” she asked.

  “Um, he passed away last winter.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she told me. “You two were always so close.”

  I nodded, close to getting very emotional. Besides talking about my dad, trips to the ER were always a little stressful, as much as they were routine for me.

  “I’m sorry, too,” Gunnar said, and then a few tears did escape. I dried them on the sleeve of my dirty shirt.

  “Ok, Hallie, let’s see how you’re doing,” Dr. Crumpler said briskly. And it turned out, even a fall off the roof hadn’t done as much damage as it might have, and once again, I’d escaped serious injury. Besides a sprained ankle, I was ok. Mostly.

  “There’s one more thing,” I felt compelled to say. “I did get a puncture wound from a rusty nail.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Um, it’s probably fine, I just wanted to make sure my tetanus vaccine is up-to-date,” I hedged a little.

  “Looks like you had a booster when you were in for that scythe incident when you were seventeen,” she said, checking my chart, “but let’s take a look at where it got you.”

  “It’s in a spot that…well, you’ll have to go,” I told Gunnar, who looked very uncomfortable as he edged out between the curtains. I turned on my hip and showed her where one of the nails in my back pocket had done the damage.

  “He seems very nice, Hallie,” the doctor told me as she patched up that part of me, too. “How long have you been together?”

  “Me? And Gunnar?” If I hadn’t been so dirty, uncomfortable, and bare-butted, I might have laughed. “He’s my neighbor, that’s all.”

  “Oh. Well, that was certainly kind of him to stay at the hospital with you. You’ve been here for quite a while.”

  She was right. It was kind of him. “He seems like a nice person. I don’t know him very well,” I said noncommittally.

  “Hm. You’re all set.” The doctor stood up from behind me and I tried to peer over my shoulder at the repair she’d done. “I’m really sorry about your dad,” she told me as she stripped off her gloves.

  “Thanks.” I felt myself getting emotional again. I hadn’t actually ever been here witho
ut him. He had always told me jokes or read aloud to distract me from whatever injury I had mostly self-inflicted. “Remember that you’ll wake up tomorrow with the sun shining,” he’d reminded me, even if now I thought that he might not have believed those words about his own life.

  “Thank you for helping me tonight,” I told Dr. Crumpler. “I hope to see you…no, sorry, I hope I don’t.”

  She laughed. “The feeling is mutual. Have a good evening.”

  I used crutches to get myself out to the waiting room, but I leaned them on the nurses’ station before I left the hospital. “I have some at home,” I told a lady checking charts. Gunnar was standing in the corner of the room while the other people there, sick and injured as they might be, forgot about their problems long enough to take pictures, point, whisper, and gawk. He was doing his best to ignore it, looking at his phone, but he seemed just as uncomfortable as when I’d asked him to leave the room due to my nail injury.

  “Ready?” I mouthed to him, and he nodded gratefully.

  “You don’t need something to help you walk? A cane or something?” he asked as he approached.

  “I already have all kinds of aids in the closet at my cottage. Canes, walkers, boots, crutches,” I said. I hopped a little. “I’ll be fine. I just have to stay off it tomorrow, but it’s the weekend, so that’s ok.”

  “So you won’t be going back up on the roof?”

  “Just to cover the hole,” I said, and sighed down at my wrapped ankle, which wouldn’t be doing me any good. Since I hadn’t been able to do it on two feet, roof repairs while only using one were going to be a challenge.

  “I asked the guys who carried you to the car to nail up some plywood over the hole and to tarp your roof,” Gunnar mentioned casually. “I’ll go pull my car around.”

  I stared after him. He’d done what? And then, when he drove up in his car, he came around to open the door and to help me in. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for everything.”