Five Days in Summer

in the rims of Sarah’s eyes; Sammie’s gaze fixed down, toward his sister. Will raced the car as fast as the old dirt road would let him. The deadly quiet was broken only by the crunching of the wheels over raw earth and the coarse wheezing of Maxi’s struggle for breath.
    The drive to Falmouth Hospital was only seven minutes but it felt like an hour. Will pulled up in front of the emergency room, grabbed Maxi from Sarah’s arms and ran toward the entrance. Sarah stayed behind to park the car. The boys followed Will through the automatic double doors that slid open when they sensed him coming.
    The emergency room was in chaos and he ran into the fray with his children, looking for help. Nurses and doctors seemed to rush in every direction. Will hated the sickening antiseptic smell and fought the inner cascade of blunted sensations, of echoes stirring like agitated ghosts. He had suffered hospitals for the birth of each child, and he would have run through fire for their survival, but every time he entered these cold halls, he became porous, absorbing every possible loss.
    There had just been a head-on collision on Route 28 and a badly injured family was being wheeled inon stretchers. David and Sammie watched as one by one, four bloody children strapped onto gurneys were rushed through the admitting area and into the next room. The swinging doors slapped against each other as attendants kicked them open for the next stretcher. The mother wasn’t moving and they had a tube down her throat. Two EMS attendants worked on her as they hustled her into the room with her children.
    Will tried to shoo David and Sammie out of the way but it was too late, they had seen it all. He looked at his sons and saw them spiraling away from safety and didn’t know how to stop it. Maxi was wilted against his shoulder and no one was coming out of that room to help her. He reached out his free hand and pointed Sam and David toward the admitting desk.
    The male nurse behind the high counter was busy on the phone.
    “Excuse me,” Will interrupted. “My baby is sick. I need someone to help her.”
    The nurse looked at Maxi and squeezed a drop of compassion into his smile. “I can see that. We just got a car crash in and everyone’s on that now, but I’ll call up to Pediatrics and get them to send someone down.” The nurse put his call on hold, pressed a red button on his phone, and his unruffled voice amplified over the loudspeakers in a general call for a pediatric M.D. to come to Emergency.
    Will sat the boys next to each other in molded orange seats that were bolted to a strip along the waiting room wall. Their eyes stayed on their father as he paced with Maxi, rocking her and whispering a lullaby in her ear. David was holding tight to the bottle of antibiotics.
    Will realized that he hadn’t given Maxi any medicinesince he’d arrived on the Cape, and now he wondered whether Sarah had actually remembered to do it as she’d said she had.
    “Let me see that bottle.”
    David handed it over.
    Will carefully read the label. It was dated September first, the Saturday Emily had joined him in the city and taken Maxi to her doctor. She had started her medicine that day. Monday would have been her third day, the day Emily vanished in the afternoon. Had Maxi gotten any of her antibiotics since then? It was Wednesday now. It was a ten-day prescription. This should have been Maxi’s fifth day, and yet the bottle was more than three-quarters full. Will’s stomach somersaulted. He himself had been there since yesterday morning. He should have taken charge of it; he shouldn’t have left it to Sarah, knowing how she overlooked things under normal circumstances. It was his fault this had happened. His own fault.
    And then he remembered something else. The morning of his parents’ accident, he had pestered his father to help mow the lawn. His father’s patience had snapped. “It’s too dangerous,” he’d said. “When you’re older you’ll help me.” He took the time to settle Will on the front steps, where he watched his father for the last time. Sleeves rolled up, sinewy arms, a sweat gathered on his neck. If his father had not lost time on Will’s five-minute distraction, would they have left that much earlier? Would they have passed the danger zone on the highway minutes before anything happened?
    Will looked over at his sons and knew that as a father it would be impossible to hold them responsible for such a fateful