Ladder of Years

Ellie stood straighter, breathing harshly, glaring at him.

Reverently, the little girl presented Noah with his papers. He took them without looking at them. Now Delia saw that two of his friends were loitering nearby-Ke

“I just wanted you to come visit! Like always! Just a normal Friday visit!” Ellie cried. “Is that too much to ask?” She turned to Delia. “Is that so-?”

Something stopped her. Her mouth fell open.

Noah said, “Gosh!” He was staring at Delia’s forehead. “Delia! Golly! You’re all bloody!”

Delia raised her fingers to her forehead. They came away bright red. But she didn’t feel much pain-only the least little sting at that spot in her temple where the pulse beat. She said, “Oh, it’s nothing. I’ll just go home and-”

But Noah’s eyes were huge, and Ke

She did seem about to pass out-her lips had an ashy pallor-and so Delia, attending to first things first, said crisply, “Don’t look, then.” She herself wasn’t dizzy in the slightest. This was plainly one of those wounds that appear much worse than they are. However, she was concerned about her clothes. “Somewhere here…,” she said, hunting through her purse for a tissue. Her Young Mister bag hindered her, and she passed it to Noah, leaving sticky red fingerprints across the scrunched top. “I know I must have a-”

Soft, blossomy mounds of tissue were thrust under her chin-an offering from Ellie. “I am so, so sorry,” she was saying. “It was an accident! Believe me, Delia, I never meant to harm you.”

“Well, I know that,” Delia said, accepting the tissues. She found it oddly flattering that Ellie called her by name. She pressed the tissues to her temple, and her pulse began to throb.

“Oh, God, we have to get you to a doctor,” Ellie said.

“I don’t need a doctor; goodness.”

“You’re no judge of that! You’re not in your right mind,” Ellie said. Although it was Ellie who seemed unhinged, thrusting more handfuls of tissues at her (did she carry them loose in her pockets, or what?) and shrilly ordering the others about. “Move! Give us room. Noah, you ride in back; we’ll put Delia up in front.”

“Isn’t there a school nurse or something? Why don’t we look for the nurse?” Delia asked.

But Ellie said, “You don’t want to end up with a scar, do you? An ugly, disfiguring scar?”

Which was something to consider; so Delia allowed herself to be shepherded toward the front seat. Noah, who had folded the seat forward so he could climb into the rear, straightened it for Delia. When she was settled, he leaned over her shoulder to offer her a gray sweatshirt from his knapsack. “Here,” he said. “You’re going through those hankies like a spigot.”

She would have argued (blood was so hard to launder), but it was true she had used up the tissues. She pressed the sweatshirt to her forehead and breathed in its smell of clean sweat and gym shoes. Meanwhile Ellie slid behind the wheel and started the engine. “You’ll probably need stitches,” she said, pulling into traffic. “Oh, lately it seems everything I touch goes galloping off in every direction! Leaves me staring after it amazed!”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Delia told her. She took a peek from under the sweatshirt. Up close, Ellie seemed more likable. Her lipstick was worn to a tired outline, and her eyes sagged slightly at the outer corners.

“I’m not myself these days,” Ellie said. “You hear people say that all the time, but up till now I’d assumed it was a figure of speech. Now I stand off to one side looking at myself like a whole other person, and I ask, ‘What could she be thinking of?’”

They turned left, onto Weber Street. Delia folded the sweatshirt to a new section. She was begi

Ellie had phoned Joel?

“In fact I watched myself dialing, and I said, ‘What a dumb thing to do!’ But I went right on doing it. And I’d pla

Love nest! Delia was thrilled.

“And if that wasn’t bad enough, then I go and drag Noah in too. I’m sorry, honey!” Ellie said, addressing the rearview mirror. But she didn’t wait for Noah’s reaction. “And you know how heartless kids can be. The minute you show you’re upset, they pretend you don’t exist. They stare right through you. They make up all these excuses why they can’t come and visit you.”

“Mom,” Noah said.

Delia was curious to hear how he would handle this, but all he said was, “Mom, you just passed Dr. Norman’s.”

“Yes, I know,” Ellie said. They were on Border Street now, heading toward Highway 380. “Every morning I’d wake up saying, ‘Today I’ll get ahold of myself. I’ll just put it out of my mind,’ I’d say, but there you were, regardless: this mystery woman no one knew a thing about, the very type Joel would fall for. I bet you speak perfect English too, don’t you?”

“You have it all wrong,” Delia said, much as she hated to. “It’s not the way you-”

But Ellie was turning north on 380, and Noah broke in to ask, “Mom? Where you going?”

“There are scads of doctors in Easton,” Ellie said.

“ Easton!” Noah and Delia said together.

“Well, you surely don’t think we could use Dr. Norman. He’s right there in town! Anybody in town will believe I did this on purpose.”

“Can’t we just tell him you didn’t?” Delia asked.

“Ha! You don’t know Bay Borough like I do. People there make a scandal out of the simplest little trifle.”

“Maybe a drugstore, then,” Delia said. She was begi

“Oh, Delia, Delia, Delia,” Ellie said. “You are so naive. Sure as you live, the pharmacist would be some Underwood graduate who couldn’t wait to get on the phone and start blabbing. ‘Guess what!’” she mimicked. “‘Mr. Miller’s demented wife tried to murder his girlfriend.’”

“I’m not his-”

“I bet you never say ‘share,’ do you?”

“Share?”

“As in communicate. As in, ‘So-and-so shared his feelings with me.’ Joel used to gnash his teeth when I said that. And he had this thing about putting in the objects of my verbs. ‘Enjoy what?’ he’d ask me. Or, ‘Take care of whom? Where’s the end of your sentence, Ellie?’”

Delia watched a field of dead autos slide past. In back, Noah was silent.

“Fu

She braked; they had reached the stoplight at Highway 50. While they waited for it to turn green, she started digging through her purse. “Do you have any cash?” she asked Delia. “I don’t want to pay with a check. Even over in Easton, my name might ring a bell.”