Page 20 of Love By The Falls

Charlotte clutches her seat to steady herself. I glimpse her white knuckles against the black leather, and my heart beats faster as I speed through the bush.

A groan from the back has me looking over my shoulder, and I glimpse Arturo’s mouth moving, but his eyes are still closed. The man must be in excruciating pain.

I consider slowing down, but all I can think of is getting him to a hospital as quickly as possible.

Charlotte is staring at her phone, lifting it up above her head, looking for reception I imagine, but slams it back on her lap.

She stares ahead and up at the sky.

“Don’t worry,” I reassure her. “This is the right way.”

She bites her lip and nods. “Yes. I think so, too. I just wish I could check a map on my phone.”

“Yeah, me too.”

After nearly fifteen minutes of driving through the trees, I spot another clearance ahead.

“There,” points Charlotte.

“I see it,” I say, and when the vehicle rips past the last of the trees and we land on a paved road, my heart leaps out of my chest and I shout in excitement. “Whoo hoo! We did it, Charlotte!”

She turns her head to the right and points to a sign up ahead. “There! The town’s that way.”

She inhales, and then slowly exhales a loud, guttural breath. “I almost threw up back there when I thought I was wrong for a second.”

I chuckle at her honesty and impulsively grab her hand to reassure her that the worst is over. She stares at our joined hands, and I quickly remove mine, unsure if perhaps I’d crossed some invisible line.

We drive for another ten minutes before reaching a restaurant in the middle of an empty parcel of land. Charlotte hops out of the Jeep as soon as I pull up to the front door.

“Excuse me,” she says to a man sitting at a table, drinking a beer. “Where is the hospital?”

The man looks up at us and must have read the panic on our faces because he quickly points down the dirt road. “That way. Turn left at the vegetable stand and shops.”

“Thank you,” says Charlotte and jumps back into the truck.

I reverse out of the restaurant parking lot and onto the road, kicking up sand and dirt as I hit the gas.

Once we pass the vegetable stand, the hospital is easy to find. It’s the largest building at the end of the street and there’s an ambulance idling outside.

I park next to the ambulance, hop out of the truck and knock on the driver’s window. “We need your help,” I say.

The man doesn’t ask questions and quickly follows me to the back of the Jeep. Arturo’s eyes are still closed, but he’s moaning loudly and there’s blood on his shirt that I hadn’t seen before.

The paramedic runs back to his ambulance, throws open the back doors, and pulls out his stretcher. He shouts at his partner to help him.

They strap a brace around Arturo’s neck and carefully move him onto the stretcher.

Leaving the truck, we follow the paramedics inside, where a nurse checks on Arturo immediately upon arrival. “Take him to room two,” she tells the paramedic.

“Are you his friends?” she asks us. Her voice carries the local accent as strongly as Arturo’s did.

Charlotte shakes her head. “No. He’s our tour guide. He fell off a cliff and landed on some rocks. Will he be okay?”

“We won’t know for sure until we run some tests and check for internal damage. Was he coherent when you found him?”

Charlotte turns to me.

“He didn’t say much.”

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