Free His Frozen Heart by Nancy Straight Page B

to embrace material things. He had the
personality of a well-trained terrier: lots of energy, always
happy, not that bright. “Hi, Larry. How’s she doing?”
    His eyes were bloodshot and glossy.
“The doctor just came out. He won’t tell me anything, but I
overheard him telling a detective that she was awake when she
arrived. They gave her a blood transfusion. Her brain was swollen,
so he gave her some drugs to keep her sleeping until the swelling
goes down.”
    “ They induced a
coma?”
    “ Yeah, he said it would be
a day or two. Any idea what happened?”
    Larry had never been a friend. Truth
be told, I had never kept it a secret how little I admired him. For
some strange reason, Libby liked him. He was twenty-five and could
be pompous, but most men I knew had a touch of arrogance every now
and again. At first I thought she felt sorry for him because he had
the intellect of a stop sign, but after a while I figured out she
gravitated toward him because he was always upbeat. She hadn’t had
an ideal life, and I think she enjoyed being around someone who was
happy for no good reason.
    I hardly knew where to begin. I
motioned for Larry to take a seat while I took the one next to him.
I remembered every detail of our trip to the bar as they all came
crashing in on me. “We were out of food.” The rest of the words
poured out of me, and I didn’t stop until I told him what had
happened at the gas station and about the police finding Libby at
the house.
    He didn’t interrupt once. It was much
different than answering the barrage of questions from the police
at the gas station. I didn’t understand why, but telling him what
had happened somehow calmed me. When I was done, Larry asked, “This
Dave guy you went to high school with, do you think he’s
involved?”
    I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t
think so, but after the last several hours, I wasn’t prepared to
rule anything out. Larry’s knuckles were balled into white fists.
His angry accusation took me by surprise, “Why would you let her
shark like that? I thought you two only did that when you had
back-up with you. She swore to me she would never go
alone.”
    This was the first time I had ever
seen Larry angry. I didn’t have an answer; this had been a last
minute decision. He was right; normally if Libby knew she would be
playing at a bar, she would call and ask a few friends to come
along. We had never had any real trouble, but there was strength in
numbers, and we had gone in alone last night. He interrupted my
internal argument when he said, “You could have called
me.”
    No. Libby could have called him, but
she wouldn’t have. She told me he took their break-up really hard,
and I think if she had been going to play in the ghettos of Los
Angeles tonight, she still wouldn’t have called him. Which led me
to the question, “How did you know she was hurt?”
    “ I programmed my phone
number into her cell as ICE when we were together. She must have
never changed it.”
    “ ICE?”
    “ First responders are
trained to look for an ‘In Case of Emergency’ contact in cell
phones.”
    “ What about her
dad?”
    “ I tried calling him. The
only number I had has been disconnected.” Libby’s dad never stayed
in one spot for long. From a very young age, she had essentially
been taking care of herself. Libby used to pick on me when we were
young about how I never knew how to do anything. I could load the
dishwasher, but had never washed dishes by hand. I put my clothes
in the laundry basket, but didn’t have a clue how to sort them into
colors or work the washing machine. When we were girls, she always
seemed so much older than I was.
    When she moved in with me, after my
parents moved to New Mexico, I needed her. I had been able to boil
water, but Libby could make a meal out of almost nothing. She once
made some casserole thing out of just rice, tuna fish, and Italian
dressing. Reality punched me hard in the stomach: for all of her
flaws – I still