Catherine

by April Lindner

  I didn’t answer. Should I tell him the truth? Would it be so wrong to let him believe I was my mother? I squeezed his hand and noticed the flannel bandage was completely soaked with blood. I was about to pull free and run for another shirt when we heard the sirens, speeding toward us, growing louder.

  Chelsea

  Coop and I rode in silence in the backseat of a patrol car, neither of us saying much. We’d long ago lost sight of the ambulance that was rushing Hence to the hospital. It had run the first red light we came to, leaving us in the dust. I felt exhausted—achy all over, my body too heavy to move—but I held it together until Coop sighed, put his arms around me, and pulled me to his chest. Then I lost it, dissolving into hysterics, soaking the front of his shirt. I had been so sure my mother was out there somewhere. I’d been counting on a happy ending that would never come. And the thought of how she must have died, the brother she loved staring her down and shooting her… Had she begged for her life? Had she suffered? Had she thought of me?

  Each question brought a fresh wave of misery. Coop tightened his grip and hung on while I wept a monsoon of tears.

  “I’m sorry,” I said when I could speak. After all, he had his own sorrows and worries. “I’m such a wreck….”

  “Shhh.” Coop dug around in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out one of the napkins from his long-ago stop at the doughnut store. I blew my nose in it and collapsed against the vinyl seat. Pale and worried, Coop kept craning his head, looking for signs that we were getting closer to the hospital, but for a long time the police cruiser passed nothing but trees. Everything had happened in slow motion: the EMTs strapping Hence to a gurney and putting him in the back of the ambulance; the cops handcuffing Quentin and dragging him off; more cops taping off the crime scene, telling us we couldn’t ride in the ambulance and that we shouldn’t drive ourselves. One finally offered to take us, but said we’d need to be questioned before we could leave the hospital. Not that we were even thinking of leaving; the idea of abandoning Hence and driving back to The Underground was unimaginable. And knowing what I knew about my mother, could I ever go home to Massachusetts? How could I bear to look into my dad’s face and tell him how she died?

  At the hospital, we were ushered into an empty exam room, a surreal place to be answering questions about our relationship to the shooter and the victim and where the gun had come from and what we were doing at the scene of the crime. The cop—a youngish guy whose collar looked about a size too tight—took pages and pages of notes, and asked us the same questions seventeen different ways. I wanted so badly to close my eyes and shut out all the ugliness of the last few hours, to sink into sleep and maybe—please, God—wake up and find it had all been a dream. But the questions went on and on. I was starting to think the guy would never let us go when he put his pen on the table, stared gloomily down at his notes, and looked back up at us. “You can go out to the waiting room and find out how your friend is. We’ll be in touch.”

  The ER receptionist looked down her pointy nose while Coop tripped over his words in his hurry to spit our story out. “You’re related to the patient?”

  “We’re his kids,” I piped in. In a way, it was sort of true, wasn’t it?

  She clicked a few buttons on her computer and waited an agonizingly long time for news of Hence’s condition.

  “Mr. Hence…” She squinted for a better look at the strange name. “Mr. Hence is still in intensive care. According to this, he’s being stabilized.”

  “Can we see him?” Cooper asked.

  “Not until he’s out of the ICU. Have a seat right over there and we’ll call you when—”

  “Is he going to be okay?” I interrupted. “He’s going to live, right?”

  “I can’t answer that.” She didn’t even bother to say it nicely. “His doctors will be out to speak with you when they’re ready.” That was all she would say.

  The chairs in the waiting room were an awful shade of beige, and the magazines all dated back to when I was in middle school. I tried sitting down, but I couldn’t seem to keep myself from jumping up, pacing around the room, and returning to hover over Coop. He’d sunk into a chair and sat there looking stunned.

  “Can’t we do anything?” I asked. “Give blood or something?” I’d never had to hang out in an emergency room before, and the place creeped me out.

  Coop stared at the dingy carpet. If I felt this anxious about Hence, who I had barely liked until a day ago, how must he feel? Hence was his boss, his friend, his hero, and, in a way I’d never noticed until now, his family.

  I made myself sit down beside Coop. I took his hand, trying to send warmth and hope from my body into his. Holding hands seemed like the only useful thing I could do.

  “Hence is tough.” I made myself sound more certain than I felt. “By the time they let us see him, he’ll be yelling at the nurses. He’ll take one look at you and demand to know what you’re doing here when there are amps to polish and toilets to plunge.”

  Coop tried to laugh, but it came out more like a cough.

  “How did you know all that stuff about elevating his legs and wrapping him in blankets?”

  “My mom’s a nurse. She made me take first-aid classes as soon as I was old enough. She said someday I’d be in a crisis and be glad I knew what to do.”

  Thinking about mothers—anybody’s mother—hurt. I swallowed hard, linked my arm through his, and rested my chin on his shoulder. “You were good. You jumped on that gun like a superhero.”

  He gave me a sad smile. “You were pretty cool and collected yourself.”

  “Only in the sense that I didn’t throw up.” I took a deep breath, inhaling his Cooper-ness. “Um, about those things Hence said…”

  “Which things?”

  “About the club… about you giving it to me. That’s just nuts. When he’s better, I’m going to tell him how crazy it is. You should be the one to inherit The Underground. When he dies of old age.”

  Cooper kissed the top of my head. “He’s trying to undo the mistakes he made,” he said. “We have to let him.”

  That’s when we noticed the doctor walking toward us. Cooper jumped to his feet, and I followed. In this new slow-motion world we’d fallen into, there was time for me to say a quick, silent prayer—Please let it be good news—and time for me to realize from the grim look on the doctor’s face that my prayer was too late, all before he opened his mouth to tell us how sorry he was.

  Chelsea

  Somehow Coop and I got through the next hour. Hence’s doctor tried to give us the gruesome details—a shattered clavicle, a fragment of bone traveling to nick the brachial artery—but all my focus was on staying vertical. I held on to Cooper’s arm—the one solid-seeming thing in the room—and concentrated on taking deep breaths. Once I was absolutely certain I wouldn’t faint, I felt the return of that cool, detached feeling I’d had when Quentin’s gun was pointed at me. It allowed me to listen and speak, and do things I’d never have thought myself capable of.

  “Would you like to see him?” a nurse asked us. My normal reaction to that decidedly not-normal question would have been to run screaming out into the night, but Coop said yes, and how could I let him go through such a terrible thing alone? When he walked into that hospital room, I was right behind him.

  Seeing the body was not as horrifying as I would have thought. Though the face had his strong nose, his full lips, his brows and two-day beard, the body in the bed seemed much smaller than Hence had been, more like a wax figure of Hence than the man himself.

  We stood there for a long time, not knowing what to do or say. Coop drew up a chair beside the bed, so I did the same. In the oppressive quiet of that room, I could almost hear the silent good-bye he was saying. I tried to think my own farewell to Hence, but the words hardly made sense. Thank you for loving my mother. Thank you for bringing me Coop. Thank you for your songs. The next thought that popped into my mind seemed more sensible, so I spoke it out loud. “Thank you for saving our li
ves.”

  Coop looked up, startled, like he’d forgotten I was there.

  “Do you think he really meant it?” I asked. “About not wanting to live anymore? Wanting to be with my mother?”

  Coop thought a moment. “I do. I think he meant it.”

  “Do you think he’s with her? Do you believe in all that?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “I’m not sure. But she did, I think. She went to church and lit candles when Hence was missing. She prayed he was safe. She must have believed in something.”

  “Maybe whatever we believe is what happens,” Coop said.

  “Maybe.” It sounded as plausible as anything else.

  We fell silent long enough for a hundred questions to crowd into my brain. “What should we do now?”

  “First we leave this room.”

  “Are you ready?” I allowed myself a last glance at the figure in the bed.

  “He’s not really here.” Cooper stood. “There’s no point in staying.”

  After the police took us back to Quentin’s cabin, Cooper drove us home to Manhattan through a darkness barely broken by streetlights. “I can make arrangements from The Underground,” he said out of the blue.

  “There’s nobody else to do it?” I asked. “No close friends?”

  “He had friends,” Cooper said quietly. “Stan, and some others. But I’m the one who has to… the one who should…”

  “Right.” I fiddled with the climate-control buttons. “I can help.” Not that I knew the first thing about arranging a funeral.

  Then there was the other heavy, complicated business that surely would have to be dealt with. Hence’s will. Returning to Coxsackie to retrieve the car he’d driven to our rescue. Testifying at whatever hearing or trial would decide my uncle’s fate. Would there be a search for my poor mother’s body? The idea made me shudder. I thought of my father, not knowing and suddenly having to know that she really was dead. Would I be the one to tell him? Again I felt weak. Exhausted.

  “Chelsea.” Coop’s tone was gentle but grave. “You know what you need to do.”

  “I do?”

  Coop didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to. For a minute or two I sat there feigning ignorance, trying to ward off the future. I sighed and checked my phone. “There’s no signal out here. I’ll call my dad as soon as we get to The Underground. He’s going to be furious.” Even as I spoke that last bit, I knew it wasn’t the whole truth.

  “I’m pretty sure he’ll be relieved to hear your voice. He might even forget to be mad.”

  “I’m going to have to tell him about my mother.” The threat of being grounded for life was nothing beside the awfulness of having to deliver that news.

  “He probably already knows,” Cooper said. “Don’t you think the police have called him by now?”

  He was right, of course. I grabbed his arm and the car swerved. “We have to find a pay phone. Dad must be on his way down here to find me. What if we pass him on the highway?”

  “Check your cell again. The exit signs have been getting closer together. I think we’re almost back to civilization.”

  My phone had a few more bars. I took a deep breath and made the call to my father’s phone. He answered on the first ring. “Chelsea?” In his familiar voice I heard a mix of hope and fear. I pressed the phone so close to my face that it beeped.

  “Dad?” Like a little kid, I said his name again and again. “Dad. Dad.” Without expecting it, I was bawling, too out of control to even speak, but my dad held the line and waited me out. After that, the conversation went as Coop had predicted. Dad wasn’t mad; he didn’t scream and make threats. But he did make sure I knew what a scare I’d given him. He said the police had been searching for me, contacting practically everyone I knew at school, grilling Larissa repeatedly. “I kept picturing you in trouble, needing me, and me not being there to help you,” he said, sounding teary. By the time he apologized for making me use a cheap, untrackable phone, I was feeling way worse than if he’d yelled at me.

  “Don’t apologize, Dad.” Somehow I couldn’t speak the words above a whisper, but at least I was saying them. “It’s all my fault. I never should have run away. I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “All that matters is that you’re safe.” His voice got fainter. “Hold on,” he said. “I’ve got to go through a toll booth….” He explained that I’d caught him rushing to Logan Airport; he’d been planning to talk his way onto a flight to Albany or Westchester County or whichever airport would get him the closest to Coxsackie.

  “You should fly into New York City,” I told him.

  “That’s where you are?”

  “That’s where I’m going.” I gave him the address of The Underground.

  “You’ll be safe until I get there?” As if I hadn’t spent the last few days without him looking after me.

  “I’ll be safe. I promise.” I looked over at Cooper, who was staring intently at the road ahead. “I’m with a friend.”

  “Promise me that you won’t disappear again. That once you get to that address, you’ll stay put.”

  I gave my word, and was saying good-bye when he stopped me.

  “Wait. Chelsea. Just… well… what I’m trying to ask is, was I really such a terrible father?” Though steady as always, his voice sounded smaller than I’d ever heard it. “I left you alone too much, didn’t I? Is that why you left?”

  My heart twisted in my chest. “Of course not, Dad. You’re a good father—a wonderful father. It’s just… I needed to find out about Mom.” Saying her name made me remember, with a sudden sinking feeling, the important thing I needed to ask him. I struggled for the right words. “They told you? About what happened to her?”

  Dad sighed, as he always did when I mentioned Mom, but this time I couldn’t blame him. “They said her brother confessed to… murdering her.”

  I was crying again, too hard to speak.

  “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry about all this. I was wrong not to tell you, not to be up-front about her. I thought you’d be happier if you didn’t have to wonder about where she was.”

  “But what about you?” Had a small part of him believed she might be alive somewhere, waiting to be found? “How are you?”

  “I’m sad,” he said simply. “I’m just sad.”

  “I know.” I was crying again. “Oh, Dad, I’m so, so sorry.”

  Was he crying, too? His breathing on the other end of the phone was jagged, but his voice sounded calm and controlled. I loved him for that—for how hard he was trying to stay strong for me. Thinking of the things my mother had written about him, I couldn’t wait to hug him and tell him how much I loved him. After all, didn’t he deserve someone who really loved him, who hadn’t just been faking it?

  I hung up knowing that before long I would be home in Marblehead. I thought of my bed, with its polka-dotted comforter, and of the warm glow of the Chinese paper lanterns hanging from my bedroom ceiling. It was a strangely satisfying concept: my life, back to normal.

  But then I thought of Coop. I glanced over and caught him in the act of looking away from me, back to the road. Had he seen me smile at the thought of seeing my dad again? Did he think I was happy to be going back to Massachusetts, so far from him? Might he even be relieved to see me go?

  “Coop,” I began, struggling for the right words. “What happens next?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “With us, I mean. What happens to us?”

  “What do you want to happen?” His voice was neutral, impossible to read.

  “We’re just starting to get to know each other.” Again, my words came out in a tiny, choked voice. “I don’t want this to be over.”

  For the second time that day, he swerved to the shoulder, braked to a halt, and gathered me into his arms. “It doesn’t have to be. Massachusetts isn’t that far from New York. I’ll visit you. Or you’ll visit me.”

  “Like my father will ever let me out of his sight a
gain.”

  “If you introduce me to your dad, I’ll make a good impression. Parents like me.”

  “I hope you don’t mind being chaperoned,” I said. “My dad’s always been overprotective. I bet he’ll be even worse now.”

  Coop sighed. “How long till you graduate?”

  “A whole year. Forever.”

  “Well, you’ll have to come visit The Underground, now that it’s yours. You can drop in every so often. Keep an eye on the place.”

  I shook my head. “Seriously. You can’t give me The Underground. What do I know about running a nightclub?”

  “If you want, I’ll teach you everything you need to know.”

  I thought about that for a minute. Me, the owner of the legendary Underground, living in New York City, getting to decide which bands to break into the big time? If I hadn’t been so tired and homesick, it would have sounded exciting. Of course, I would have to finish high school first, then college. Maybe I could go to school in New York City—NYU, maybe, or Fordham—close enough to The Underground to learn the business, to see if running my own nightclub was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

  “And if you don’t want… Well, it’s still your family home. It’ll be waiting for you until you’re ready. And I’ll be there.” We kissed, and it was different this time, knowing we’d be far apart before long—sadder and even sweeter.

  Before I was ready, Coop pulled back. “We’d better get going. We can’t let your dad reach the club before we do.” He checked over his shoulder before returning to the highway. “I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot. Not if I’m going to impress him as good boyfriend material.”

  According to the GPS, we were still an hour from The Underground. I settled back into my seat, thinking hard. There must have been a thousand things Coop and I needed to say to each other while we still had time alone together, but, limp with exhaustion, I couldn’t think of a single one. Instead, I yawned loudly.

  “Tip the seat back,” Coop advised. “You can sleep. I don’t mind. Take my hoodie for a blanket.”