Afterthoughts by Lynn Tincher

stopped her.
    “ Don’t move her! I’ll call
for help!” She knelt beside Sarah and found a faint pulse. Paige
grabbed her cell phone and called the police station. “An ambulance
is on the way.”
    “ She’s alive.” Tears
streaked down Paige’s cheeks as she held Sarah’s hand. “She’ll be
okay. She has to be!” She laid her head on Sarah’s
shoulder.
    “ Okay Sarah, hang in
there. Help is on the way. Please, Sarah. We need you. I need
you!”
    Aileen looked up at the bus driver.
“What happened?” Aileen pleaded.
    The bus driver stood over them, pacing
back and forth, rubbing his balding head and tears streaming down
his cheeks.
    “ I don’t know.…” Paige
answered for him. “I stood beside her and looked your way.… Before
I knew it I heard the crash. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t
even know she moved!” She looked at the driver again. “Did she step
out in front of you?”
    “ I’m not sure. It happened
so fast. She just appeared in front of me!”
    He continued to pace back and forth.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t see her until it was too late. Oh, what
have I done? Why didn’t I see her?” A crowd of people from the bus
formed a circle around them.
    “ It’s not your fault,”
Paige tried to comfort him. “It happened so fast.”
    Paige held Sarah’s hand until the
ambulance arrived. Jay came as soon as he heard Paige’s call and
pulled Paige away from the scene.
    “ Let them do their work.
She’ll be okay.” He rocked her back and forth and brushed her hair.
“She’ll be okay,” he repeated over and over again as Paige cried on
his shoulder.
    “ I couldn’t stop it. I
should have held on to her!”
    “ Paige, it’s not your
fault. Don’t blame yourself. You don’t know what happened.” He held
her tightly and continued to try to comfort her. He held out his
hand to Aileen, who seemed to be in shock. He pulled her into his
arms as well and the three of them stood in silence as they watched
them load Sarah into the ambulance.
    “ I’m going with her,”
Paige insisted and tried desperately to push away from
Jay.
    Jay grabbed her by the arm. “Come on,”
he said, “I’ll take you both to the hospital.” He led them to
Aileen’s car with Paige resisting all along the way. He took
Aileen’s arm as well. Aileen then asked Jay to call Jones on his
cell phone. They followed the ambulance to the hospital and hurried
to the desk as the EMT’s rushed Sarah in.
    After Aileen gave the nurse
information about Sarah’s history and insurance, she began to pace
back and forth across the waiting room.
    There was a long silence between the
three of them as they listened to all of the hospital’s intercom
pages.
    Aileen’s husband, Jones, ran in
through the door. “I came as fast as I could.” Jones had already
left the funeral and was halfway home when the accident happened.
He quickly took Aileen into his arms. “For Christ’s sake, is she
all right?”
    “ I don’t know. We haven’t
heard anything yet,” Aileen cried as she broke down into sobs that
covered Jones’s shoulder. Paige’s tears started to fall rapidly as
Jay put his arm tightly around her. He pulled out his handkerchief,
but Paige declined taking it. Silence again took over the
room.
    Paige glanced around the hospital,
feeling like she would explode any minute. She watched as one by
one, patients were called back to be seen by the doctors. One with
what looked like a broken arm, another was bundled up so much that
Paige knew it must have been a fever, and yet another with his hand
wrapped with a blood stained towel. As she looked toward the glass
doors, she saw someone watching her from the sidewalk. She jumped
up and ran for the door with Jay running behind her.
    As she ran through them, she
frantically looked all around. There was no one in sight other than
an elderly man pushing in his wife in a wheel chair.
    “ What is it, Paige?” Jay
asked her. “Are you okay?”
    “ Yeah, but there