by R. H. Herron
Annoyed at her mother. That was normal. That was real life.
Whatever this was, wherever she was in space, this wasn’t real. This had to be a bad dream. How did you make yourself wake up from a dream? Jojo felt like she’d read the answer or seen it in a horror movie, but she couldn’t remember how, so maybe this was real life, and if so, she was fucked.
“Do you know why your legs won’t work?” Her mother had her calm voice on now, as if she’d pulled smoothness into her throat like a blanket, but Jojo could hear through it, to the raggedness of panic underneath it.
“Don’t you think I would have told you if I did?” Jojo tried again, and her left leg jerked electrically, as if it had been asleep for hours. “Ow, shit. I have no idea what’s going on. I woke up this way.” She woke up. Which meant she’d been asleep. Why had she been asleep in a bed she didn’t know?
“What can you see?”
“Not much. It’s really dark in here. I’m on a bed.”
“Can you hear anything?”
She listened. Silence. “No.”
“Oh, baby. Okay.” Jojo heard her mother suck in breath. “Okay. Look at your cell phone. What’s your battery at?”
Jojo glanced. “Half full.”
“Turn on the phone’s flashlight for me, okay? While you’re doing that, I’m sending a bunch of the guys in your direction, and they’re driving as fast they can. You tell me when you hear a siren, all right? Listen for me, baby.”
God, Jojo was stupid. She should have thought of the flashlight. She turned it on, expecting to find a creepy space filled with old chairs or baby-doll heads or something else from American Horror Story.
Instead it was just a generic room.
The bed she was on had a dark blue bedspread. The curtains were green. A low bookcase ran under the windows, filled with books on weightlifting. A treadmill was in one corner of the room, and in the other was a comfy-looking blue sofa that faced a large-screen TV. The en suite bathroom’s door was open, and she could see the front of the sink.
She didn’t recognize the room at all. “It’s a bedroom. A normal bedroom. Kind of big. With a sofa.”
“Personal items? A magazine or a piece of mail, with the address?”
She saw nothing that looked like it hadn’t come out of the home-furnishing catalogs her mom liked to read in the bathtub. “No.”
“Do you hear anything? A siren?”
A tiny wail. “Maybe, but it’s really far away.”
“What about anything else? Do you hear running water, or voices, or—”
Her mother broke off. Pieces of realization were dropping into Jojo’s mind like the jewels in that Facebook game, clicking into place.
If her mother was asking about voices—that meant that people could be near.
People who had brought her here?
“No,” Jojo whispered, trying to draw her breath into herself so that she could be as quiet as possible. “Is Daddy coming?”
“Yes, sweetheart. Daddy’s coming.” Jojo heard her mother tapping on the keys, so fast that the noise could have been a million popcorn kernels, all popping at once. “What were you doing earlier tonight?”
Muzzy. Everything in her head felt stuffed, as if her brain had been lifted out and replaced with a Styrofoam model. “I don’t remember.”
“Try. You have to try. We can get close, but I need an exact location. You can do this.”
Harper. Something about Harper’s laughter floated through Jojo’s mind.
“I was . . . at a party.” It wasn’t a party, it was a . . . God, why couldn’t she grab this? Why couldn’t she pull it out of her stupid brain?
“Where?”
“I don’t know.” Something about making signs. It had been a community meeting. Hadn’t it?
Kevin. Kevin, smiling down at her.
“Oh.” Holy shit, she’d kissed him. Why had she kissed Kevin? She remembered the feel of his lips and nothing more. What about Zach? What had she done?
“What, baby? What is it?”
“Kevin Leeds.”
A pause the space of a breath. “The pro football player? The one on the news?”
Jojo’s heart skittered against her lungs. “He lives in Old Coast, I think.”
“Hold on. Don’t hang up, baby, no matter what, okay? If I lose you, turn off your ringer and watch the screen for me to call back. Stay with me.” More frantic tapping. “Okay, I’ve got his address, and it’s really close to where your signal is coming from. Tell me when you hear a siren getting closer.”
As if her mother had pushed a police car on a game board closer to her with her finger, the sound outside filled Jojo’s ears. “It’s outside. There’s a siren right here. But Kevin wouldn’t—”
“I can hear it. Stay on the phone, baby.”
“Is it Daddy?”
Another pause, a muffled shush of the phone as mother covered the microphone and said something to someone else that Jojo couldn’t understand. “Daddy and everyone else, sugar.”
So many sirens now. Jojo, her right leg newly under her control, bent it and pulled her knee toward her chest. If bullets flew, the smaller a target she was the better, right?
How had she gotten here?
What happened to me?
Kevin was her friend. She’d been in his house a few times, but just in the front, in the living room and kitchen. Once they’d swum in the backyard pool and she’d tried tequila for the first time, which had been Harper’s idea—of course—and it turned out that tequila made Jojo wobble and giggle like a brain-dead cheerleader.
A banging came from another room, followed by a shout. “Mama, I’m scared.”
“Don’t be, sugar. We’re almost there.”
“You, too?”
“I will be. So soon. I’ll drive to you as soon as we hang up, but don’t hang up yet. Don’t hang up.”
There was a roar, at least two men bellowing like animals. “Mom! Kevin’s my friend.”
“We’ll figure all that out later. Are you hurting, baby girl? I’ve got an ambulance outside. Tell me if you’re hurting.”
How was she supposed to know? All Jojo felt was fear, fear that locked every cell in her body into a frozen, stiff, unyielding piece of stone.
“Take a breath, Jojo. A big one, right into your stomach.”
Her mother had always told her to do that when she was crying too hard to breathe. Was she doing that now? She couldn’t tell.
“One breath.”
Jojo breathed in deep and listened to the thumps and shouts from somewhere far away.
“Are you injured?”
Jojo’s head throbbed. Her eyes stung. She felt dizzy even though she was lying down, and she thought she might throw up. Her feet ached as they came back to life, and her knees burned.
And something else hurt, something in the middle of her, something she didn’t want to—couldn’t—name.
“I hurt.”
“Where?”
She could only whisper. “There.”
THREE
JOJO SAID IT, but she didn’t let her mind touch the idea. Not yet.
Instead she gave it to her mother to hold.
“Oh, baby.” A choked sound came over the phone. “Okay. It’s okay. We’re going to fix it all. Tell me when—”
The door of the room burst open, slamming into the far wall.
Jojo dropped the phone to the bed. Her father had her then, his arms all the way around her, and he was holding her so tight she could barely breathe.
“Jojo. Jesus Christ.” Her father pressed her head into his shoulder, rubbing her hair so frantically it was like he was trying to smooth out her curls. “Jesus Christ. It’s okay, Jojo.”
Jojo wanted to pull her head away and say something that would make him feel better, but
it turned out that all she could do was release the sobs that had wanted to come out while she was on the phone—her phone!
Jojo reached for it now. “Mom?”
She heard her mother’s sucked-in breath again. “Daddy’s got you, sugar?”
“Yeah.” Her father was letting her talk, though she was still scooped into his lap, her butt on the bed, her legs draped over his, his arms around her. Like she was five. And she didn’t mind. “Are you really coming? Here?”
“I’ve got my coat on. I’m dropping my headset the second we hang up, and I’ll be there in five minutes. No, three.”
“You have the staffing?” Her mother never had the staffing to leave dispatch. Once Jojo had passed out in gym after attempting a three-day fast with a couple of friends trying to get skinny (she’d only made it to day two), and her mother hadn’t been able to come get her because someone had called in sick. I can’t legally just leave 911 to ring unanswered, you know that.
“No.” A short laugh. “But they’ll handle it. Let Daddy take care of you, and I’ll be there in a flash, okay?”
“Okay.” Jojo felt a tremor in her voice, a quake that ran through her whole body from the top of her head to the tips of her aching feet. She let the phone drop from her hands again.
Her father said, “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
“I don’t understand.” Jojo wasn’t even sure what she didn’t understand, but it felt big and terrifying.
“Neither do I, babe, but we’re going to figure it out, okay?” He smiled at her, a true, big smile, like there was nothing wrong at all. It was the smile he gave her when she used to be good at softball, the one he gave her when she slid into home. Like she’d done something to be proud of.
Instead of . . . instead of whatever it was she’d done.
Whatever it was, it was her fault. She knew that much. Guilt swamped her lungs, a hot, silty rush.
Her father looked up at someone in the hallway who’d said something in underwater-speak. “Yeah, send them in.”
Jojo reclaimed her frozen legs and brought them up to her chest. She scooted so that her spine was against the headboard. “Who?”
He’d lost the total-father look and was back in partial-father/partial-police-chief mode, the mode she was most used to seeing him in. His eyebrows returned to their normal holding pattern at the top of his forehead, not squinched down like when he’d first come into the room. “The paramedics are going to take a quick look at you, okay? Then we’re going to the hospital.”
Jojo shook her head. “I don’t want to.” She didn’t specify which part. She didn’t want to do any of them.
“I’ll be right here.”
“I just want to go home.”
“We will.” He made a motion to someone in the hall she couldn’t see. “We’re going to take you home as soon as we can.”
“Now.”
But he wasn’t listening. He’d gone into full-on-cop mode now. “Come on in, guys.” He stood, like he was welcoming someone into his office for coffee. Jojo pressed herself farther into the headboard.
Her father craned his neck, as if waiting for someone else, but there were already three guys in the room. “No females on duty?”
“Not tonight, sir. But we’ll take care of her, don’t worry. Just like she was our own.”
Clearly the whole contingent outside had been notified that she was the chief’s daughter. Usually Jojo hated that. But right now it was okay.
The paramedic who had spoken to her father stretched out his hand. “Hi, there. I’m Mike. What’s your name?” The man’s eyes were tired blue, and he had a bare spot in his stubble the size of a quarter, as if the hair just wouldn’t grow there. It looked smooth and shiny, and for a split second of craziness Jojo wanted to press her thumb into it and ask him why he was bald in such a tiny spot.
“Jojo.”
“Jojo, I’m going to check you over, okay? Just a little bit, so that we can take you to the hospital. That okay by you?”
“I want to go with my dad.”
Mike looked at her father, who shook his head the slightest bit.
“Dad!”
“I’ve got to stay here. Just for a few minutes. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Mom said she’s coming. Let me go with her. I don’t want to go anywhere in the ambulance.” Funny, if anyone had asked her the week before if she’d like an ambulance trip, Jojo would have jumped at the chance. A moment to be special and to have an IV dripping into her arm like she had something terminal? A chance to ogle hot paramedics so she could tell Harper about them later?
Not now. Not like this.
“Maybe,” Dad said. “If she gets here in time.”
Mike held a clipboard with a pen poised over his form. “If you’re able to, scoot to the edge of the bed for me, okay? Just some routine questions. What’s your full name?”
She told him her age and her address while two other medics attached a blood pressure cuff to her and ran a thermometer wand across her forehead, like she had the flu or something.
“Do you have any pain?”
Jojo felt a pit in her stomach drop open. In a second she was going to fall right through. “My feet,” she whispered.
“Do you mind if we take off your shoes and have a look?”
She shook her head.
“Where else?”
She shook her head harder.
I can’t do this.
She couldn’t say what she felt. Not with—she shot her father a glance under her lashes, and oh, fuck, it looked like he was either going to cry or hit a wall with his fist. “Can I . . . Is it okay if I wait till my mom gets here?”
“Jojo.” Her father’s voice cracked, and he swayed toward her on the balls of his feet. “You can say anything in front of me. Did anything—”
“I want to wait for Mom.” Tears slid down her cheeks, tears she wished she could scrape up the sides of her cheeks and shove them forcibly back into her eyeballs.
“Jojo—”
“I want Mom.”
FOUR
LAURIE’S THREE CO-WORKERS all reacted the same way. “Go.”
“Get out of here.”
“We’re fine.”
“We’ll call you if we need you back.”
They wouldn’t, Laurie knew that. Once, years before, Sylvia’s mother had stopped breathing at her care home. While Rita gave CPR instructions to the caller, Sylvia got up and left, a fireable offense. After her mother’s funeral, Sylvia had come back to work as soon as her bereavement days were up. No one had said a word to her.
This felt like that, only Jojo wasn’t dying.
Laurie would, though, if she didn’t get there now. Right now.
It was a six-minute drive through the dark from the station to the Old Coast. She’d told Jojo she could do it in three, and she almost made it in that time. She took the last corner at forty-five, blowing a stop sign. She almost hit an old man. He dove out of the crosswalk just in time. “Shit! I’m sorry!” She waved her hand uselessly and kept going. If she’d run over him, she might not have stopped—that was the full truth.
Kevin Leeds’s house was normal for the neighborhood—huge and old. The upper floor was dark under the starless sky, but the lower floor poured light out every window. Four patrol cars, a fire engine, and an ambulance were in front, all their lights flashing.
Omid’s unmarked car was there, the driver’s door still wide open.
She jammed her car into park and hit the pavement so hard and fast that she stumbled. In another, bigger city, the uniform and badge she wore would have been what gained her entrance to a crime scene—here it was the fact that she knew every one of these men like family. Officer Dyer leaped forward and caught her arm. “Easy, easy. She’s in there. She’s okay.”
Okay?
&nb
sp; Officer Marks, posted at the door, took one look at Laurie’s face and threw open the screen for her. “All the way back, third left.”
Laurie ran.
The rear hallway was crowded with personnel and equipment. The medics had a fucking backboard blocking the way—surely Jojo wouldn’t need that?
She tried to say something—anything—but no words came, so she pushed through them, one by one. If they hadn’t moved, she would have pushed them all the way down.
She could see Jojo’s knee through the forest of arms that reached for her, just her knee. Those jeans that Laurie had bought, that Laurie had looked at in the dressing room. Really? Distressed this much is back? Because you’ll be lucky if these last you a year. Jojo had rolled her eyes.
Omid caught Laurie’s hand and pulled her forward. “Here. She’s here.” His voice was rough.
Laurie still didn’t have language back, but something eased as she saw Jojo. All in one piece. Somehow she’d expected limbs missing. Gaping wounds. Blood everywhere.
Most of the really bad calls went that way. And this was the worst call of her career.
But Jojo was there, intact, reaching for her. Roughly—almost violently—Laurie dug her fingers into Jojo’s skin and pulled her close, as if she could pull her child back into the body she’d come from. Jojo did the same, her own fingers digging into the flesh around Laurie’s middle.
“Laurie.” Omid’s voice.
What had she been thinking, just letting Jojo go out in the world, like she was a grown-up? She was sixteen!
“Laurie, we have to let them get the primary exam done.”
Jojo made a terrified noise and buried herself farther into Laurie’s side.
“No.”
“We have to. We have to be sure she’s fit to ride in the ambulance.”
“No. Not here. I’ll ride with her.” She caught the expression the taller medic tossed at the younger one. “Do you have a problem with that?” The man looked startled. “I didn’t think so.” She scraped her fingers against the Velcro of the blood pressure band still around Jojo’s arm. She pulled it off and tossed it to the floor. It didn’t matter that medics didn’t like parents riding in the ambulance. She wasn’t going to give them a choice. “We don’t do anything unless I’m with her and she’s okay with it.”