A Flickering Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

to feel his face, then felt the cloth against his head, fingered the beads on the buckle.
    “I didn’t see anyone here,” Jessie said. “Nor see anyone leave. I think…that is, I think you fell.”
    “The floor tripped me up?” he questioned. He tried to turn his head and moaned again. “There’re the culprits,” he said. He pointed to an anvil that he must have stumbled over and the sharp corner of a bench that had broken his fall. “Them’s what did it.” He nodded toward the bench, an act that caused him to gasp again. “Came up behind me, I’d say.” He tried to smile at her then.
    “Are you well enough for me to leave you to go get help?”
    He started to nod, stopped himself. “Take the bicycle—oh, you needed it this morning.” He looked up at her with tears in his eyes. “I’ve ruined your adventure. I have no phone. Your mother, your clothes, all spackled with blood. What will she say?”
    His words dipped and dived, flying like bats.
    “Oh, she’ll find words,” Jessie told him as she straightened her hat. “Don’t you worry about that. Just sit still now, promise?”
    She hated to leave him, but she had to. She noted the camera bag where she’d set it when she made her way through the cluttered shop, then stepped onto the bicycle, wishing she had a pair of those special women’s trousers lady bicyclists in the magazines wore, and pedaled off.
    The doctor’s residence was closer than the hospital, so she went there and told him what had happened. He said he’d join her shortly as he pulled his breakfast napkin from beneath his chin. Jessie returned, riding over the boarded streetcar tracks, raced in to Mr. Steffes, then kept up a steady stream of conversation with the shop owner, one of his eyes seeming to float away from the center. He looked like he might doze. She buttressed him with pillows from his narrow cot, kept him sitting upright. His Thomas clock struck nine just as the doctor arrived. She waited for instructions, but when none came, she accepted the belt the doctor handed her as she told him what she knew and described what ministrations she’d performed.
    The doctor told her she’d done the right things, handling the “blood without fainting,” as she backed her way toward the door. But Mr. Steffes kept saying how grateful he was and how fortunate that she had been coming so early and how he might not have lived without her, a fact he exaggerated. Jessie figured he’d later realize that he wouldn’t have been there so early nor stumbled in the dim light if she hadn’t wanted to rent the bicycle at that hour. She waited for what she thought to be a proper time, then asked if it would be all right if she left. It wasn’t just the appointment edging her toward the door; it was the accident and her part in it.
    “Do you want me to call your parents?” the doctor asked. “About the blood on your blouse?”
    She looked down. “No, that’s all right.”
    “You run along then, Miss Gaebele,” the doctor said.
    “Do what the doctor tells you,” she told the bicycle shop owner. And with that she reached for her shawl, pushed up her spectacles, grabbed her camera bag, and backed out the door.
    The sun felt warm now, and the big clock on the courthouse clanged the three-quarter hour. She turned backward, holding her hand to her hat to stare at the clock. Nine forty-five? Where had the time gone? She’d have to prepare a double explanation now because she didn’t have time to make it home before her interview, and she’d barely make Mr. Bauer’s studio. She’d have to do the interview without her corset and with bloodstains on her blouse. What businessman would hire someone so disheveled?
    She walked her fast pace toward Johnson Street, where she was to meet her friend Voe Kopp, all the while wondering if she didn’t need a little bit more each of Lilly’s organizational bent and Selma’s capacity to adapt if she was to accomplish her dreams. She prepared an