Twilight

by Nancy Pickard

  Geof was there ahead of us, already pacing the fluorescent lobby of the emergency room when we pulled into the garage, lights flashing. The two paramedics—one doubling as driver—had with tender care bound David to a board, which they secured to a stretcher. A white neck brace held his head immobile. From the garage, they rolled him into the trauma center and then slickly—keeping him on the board—onto a narrow bed in a curtained cubicle, all within no more than thirty seconds of our arrival. Geof and I were immediately crowded out by people in white, who all looked nearly as young as David.

  Geof grabbed my elbow—on my uninjured (as yet) right arm—and pulled me toward the two folding chairs that were placed a yard in front of the cubicle where they were stripping and examining David. I’d heard the paramedics use the words “head injury,” and I was badly frightened by that.

  Geof pushed me down into one of the chairs and stood right over me. He wasn’t trying to intimidate, only to erect a private place for us, using his own body as a shield. He still wore the jeans, plaid shirt, and sport coat he’d worn to work that day, only now the shirt looked wrinkled, its collar open. His face was creased with worry, and he needed a shave.

  “What the hell happened, Jenny?”

  “That’s what he asked me.”

  “David? He spoke to you? When? What’d he say?”

  “He opened his eyes in the ambulance, looked straight at me, and said, ‘What the fuck happened?’”

  Geof and I both laughed a little.

  “Then what?” he demanded.

  “Then he closed his eyes and he was out again.”

  “But that was a good sign. Wasn’t it? Isn’t that encouraging?”

  I clasped one of his big warm hands in mine. “I think so. Sure. It must be. Did you hear about the barricades on the highway? About somebody blocking the road with highway department signs?”

  “I’ll kill the sons of bitches.”

  If you find them, I thought.

  I told him as exactly as possible what David and I had been doing, and how I had found David lying in the road.

  “What was he doing?” Geof asked me, sounding angry, though I knew that he was scared, like me.

  “Making another test run,” I guessed. “Maybe he tried it too fast. He had wanted to see what would happen if he tried to brake suddenly.”

  “Moron.”

  “Excuse me.” A doctor, younger than us, bushy-haired, male, had pushed back the white curtain surrounding David’s cubicle, and now he was poking his head out at us. “You the parents of this young man?”

  Geof and I looked into each other’s eyes.

  A world of thoughts and emotions passed between us in that second. Of David’s loss of his mother and of the man who had raised him as a son. Of Geof’s enduring desire for children of his own. Of his acceptance of my reluctance to have any. Of the consequent place that David had won in his heart. I felt tears at the edges of my eyes, and thought, And mine, too.

  Geof turned toward the doctor and said, “His parents are dead. I guess we’re all he’s got for now.”

  “He’s concussed,” the doctor told us. “And he’s awake. Come here.”

  We went, each of us to stand on opposite sides of David, who was modestly covered by a white sheet. His clothes lay in a pile in a corner. His first words to us were, “I hate this goddamned thing!” Meaning the neck brace, I surmised. His eyes looked dazed, shocky. But his language was clear enough. “Can’t you tell them to take it off of me? And get me off this goddamn board, it hurts like hell, and I’ve got to piss. The fucker only broke my head, for Christ’s sake, not my goddamn neck!”

  I nearly laughed, he sounded so ribaldly healthy.

  He was loud in that little room with fabric walls, while the doctor and a woman in white conferred in much quieter voices.

  “What fucker?” Geof said to David.

  “His motorcycle,” I interjected. “Or maybe the highway.”

  “Shit, no!” David said, able only to shift his vision, looking like an indignant version of one of those dolls whose eyes roll back and forth. “I’m not talking about my damn bike, for Christ’s sake. The fucker who hit me!”

  I glanced over at Geof, who gave me a look right back.

  “What do you mean, hit you?”

  My husband’s voice—a calm, mellow baritone at the best of times—was so deep with affectionate patience, you’d have thought he had just opened a new vein of the stuff, right then, in his body. I recalled a book by Nancy Thayer, a novel I had dearly loved called Three Women at the Water’s Edge, in which one of the female characters had remarked—to the best of my memory—that when a baby sucked at her breast, it seemed to open new spaces for love inside of her. Since David’s appearance in our lives, new spaces had opened in my husband’s heart.

  “Were you hit by a car, Dave?” he asked, making it clear.

  “Hell no! With a frigging log. Somebody threw a frigging tree at me, Geof! Made me break and skid, and I lost it. Damn. How’s my bike?”

  “Fine,” I said quickly.

  “Did you see this person?” Geof asked.

  “I didn’t see zip, except asphalt comin’ up at me.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I don’t know.” David sounded fretful, anxious. “God, I’m in pain, doesn’t anybody fucking care? You’ve got to get me off of this board. My back is killing me. What have they got my neck in, anyway? I hate this!”

  “X rays,” the woman in white announced, looking over at us. “To make sure it’s only concussion. Check for bones broken, make sure he doesn’t have internal injuries. He’s badly contused, might have a broken clavicle, or a rib or two, but we don’t think he’s got internal bleeding. I’m sorry, fellow, but you’ve got to stay on :that board for a while longer. If you have to go to the bathroom, we’ll arrange a catheter.”

  “Shit!” David exclaimed.

  The woman smiled slightly. “We can arrange for that, too.”

  “Let me show you something,” the male doctor said, and he started to lift the covering off David’s body. But David said, “Stop that! Not with her in here.”

  Meaning me. Suddenly modest, our David. The doctor withdrew his hand.

  I would have left, so they could show Geof whatever it was they wanted to display, but orderlies arrived, and instantly they wheeled David out and away from us.

  “Do you always give such prompt service?” I asked the woman.

  Her smile returned, lighting her lively young face. “Hey, we’re the fast-food restaurant of trauma centers. We’re the drive-in window for victims of drive-by shootings. Prompt is our middle name.” She winked at Geof. “For relatives of cops, that is.”

  In other words: No, they’d hustled for David.

  “Come by with a stomach ache,” she admitted, “and you could sit here for hours. It’s the way the system is. The only real health care is not getting sick to begin with. Good luck. Hope he survives.”

  With that mixed benediction, she was gone to her duties.

  The first doctor returned, however.

  “You’re a cop, right?” he said to Geof.

  Geof agreed that he was and gave his name and rank.

  “Well, this is weird,” the doc said, “but I’ve got to tell you this.” He glanced at me. “I was told that you found him lying on a highway, with his motorcycle on top of him, like he’d wrecked it?”

  “Yes,” I affirmed.

  “He may have crashed,” the doc said thoughtfully, “but that’s not how he got all of his injuries.” Again, he glanced at me, appraisingly, as if he were scanning for a diagnosis. “Tell me exactly how he was lying there.”

  “I don’t understand …”

  “Which side was he lying on?” The young doctor was patient. “His right side? His left? How was the bike lying on him?”

  “Oh. David was on his right side, with the bike between his legs, and his left leg still hung over it. I was scared he’d broken the leg underneath.”
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  “No, it’s okay.” The doc frowned and transferred his attention to Geof. “It’s his left leg that sustained the worst injuries. In fact, it’s his whole left side clear up to his shoulder. I wanted to show you.” He smiled at me. “If he’d let me. He’s got contusions—they look like horizontal bands going all the way up the side of him, starting at his feet. The kid was beaten, Lieutenant. While he lay there, I’d guess. It looks like somebody took a stick and whaled on him.”

  I gaped at the physician.

  But he hadn’t time for our astonishment, or our dismay. He didn’t even look especially shocked at his own theory, merely a little surprised. As young as he was, he was probably already nearly unshockable—like my cop husband. At that moment, however, Geof was looking as stunned as I felt.

  Other emergency room patients in other cubicles needed help, and like the woman before him, the young man was quickly gone to attend to them.

  “Are you thinking of David’s relatives?” I asked Geof.

  “I frequently do, more often than I’d like to.”

  “I mean—”

  What I meant was that David Mayer came from a background that was rife with physical abuse; it was something of a cherished family tradition, you might say. A religious rite, akin to snake handling or speaking in tongues, only not as much fun. In David’s family, the snakes were the grownups. Beatings were only part of it. If there was a kid who didn’t need another “whaling,” I thought he was one. They had been split apart by death and imprisonment; the remaining members of the clan had disappeared from the area, seeming to abandon any claim to David. But for as long as he lived, any mark on his body would probably bring back memories of them.

  Were the monsters back?

  “They’re gone, Jenny, I swear it. Not a trace of any of them anywhere in this state, and they’re smart enough to know they’d better keep it that way. They have nothing to gain by coming back for him. I’d stake your life on the fact that I’m right about that.”

  He smiled slightly.

  “Thanks,” I said wryly. “Would you stake his?”

  He narrowed his eyes, but finally said, “Yes.”

  “Geof,” I then said slowly, “Lew Riss is back in town. Remember him? The reporter for the Times?”

  He looked at me as if I were speaking in tongues.

  “Lew’s not a journalist anymore,” I told him. “He’s head of First Things First. The national director of it, no less. He paid me a surprise visit today, Geof, to inform me that I can’t—according to Lew—touch any part of God’s Highway unless FTF says I can. And if I do, he intimated that I will regret it.”

  Geof absorbed that, his face expressing distaste. “Hyper little bastard, I remember Lew Riss, all right. Had a crush on you, which was his only redeeming quality, as I recall. Always bugging me for insider cop stories. Not a bad writer, but he wouldn’t have known the truth if it walked up and kicked him in the nuts.”

  I smiled. “He told me today that he hates facts.”

  “Is that right? Well, isn’t it a fact that FTF puts up blockades to stop environmental degradation? And isn’t it a fact they’re known for extreme acts, and suspected of violent ones?”

  “I don’t know where to tell you to look for him, Geof.”

  “Not to worry. That’s my job.”

  “The property owners,” I said, hesitating, hating to say it, “near the trail crossing … twelve years ago, they used blockades, too.”

  Geof reached for my elbow again. “Jenny. That woman. The one whose husband died. Is she off her rocker? Would she do something like this to close down the trail crossing?”

  “Oh, honey, I don’t think so—”

  “Maybe not even meaning to hurt David, maybe just wanting everyone to think that’s a dangerous place that needs to be shut down.”

  “Geof! He was beaten, the doctor said! You can’t think that Melissa Barney—”

  He snapped his fingers. “That’s the name. Thanks. Listen, Babe, I’ve got to get in on the investigation of that highway barricade. You’ll hold down the fort here?”

  But the doctor heard that he was rushing past, and he said, “Don’t hang around. The kid was in a lot of pain by the time he got to X ray, so we knocked him out. He’ll be unconscious all night. Go on home. Call, when you want news. Come back in the morning.” He grinned, on the run. “The kid’ll be cussing all of us, by then.”

  Geof and I regarded each other again, a bit helplessly.

  “You checked him into the hospital?” I asked.

  “Before you got here,” he said.

  “I don’t have my car. It’s still at the office. What about the cycle?”

  “I’ll take you to your car. I’ll take care of getting his bike home.”

  I sighed. “And I’ll go sit by the phone, I guess.”

  He grabbed me in a careful embrace—remembering my injuries from the day before, no doubt—and kissed me and vowed that he loved me. Actually, I would have agreed to sit by the phone anyway, but if he wanted to persuade me with passion, that was fine with me, too.

  “What happened to your hand?” he asked, noticing the wounded wing.

  I told him, holding it up for both of us to see, as if it were an artifact.

  We should have stared at it longer.

  The answer to the entire night’s disturbance and all of its pain was written—in the thin, bloody script of the abrasion—on the back of my hand. Metaphorically written, I mean. But all I did was ask a nurse for a spritz of antiseptic.

  He delivered me to my car, where I sat and thought:

  Home? Sit by a phone?

  Who was I kidding?

  It was only eight-thirty on a Friday night, and I still had errands to run for the festival, which was now only nine days away. And the town council meeting at which they might jerk our festival permits was only three days away. And …

  I pointed the nose of the Miata toward the Dime Store.

  What I really desired at that moment was food, specifically a double cheeseburger with pickles and onions, and fries, and a chocolate malt—comfort food—but my favorite diner would be open all night, while Nellie’s store would close at ten. Ten minutes to get there, an hour and twenty minutes to shop and to confer with Nellie about our current orders. Then food. Then home. Then sit by the phone.

  Life was easy, when you had priorities.

  I had one. An impulse, which was really what was driving me to the Dime Store. A childish one. Utterly silly, undignified in the extreme, and totally unbecoming in a proper young foundation director.

  I wanted a Halloween costume.

  By God. A particular one, no less. To wear to my fair. We had tons of cotton “First Annual Ever Port Frederick Autumn Festival and Apple Bobbing” T-shirts, which several print shops (with a combined whimsical sense of humor) had donated for us to sell. I could wear one of those. And we’d be selling black and silver half-masks at a buck apiece for charity. But no. I wanted to dress up in my own costume.

  There’s nothing like indulging a second childhood to take your mind off your troubles. Some people indulged it with motorboats or young lovers. A Halloween costume seemed, by comparison, a modest wish.

  I wanted to be a Fairy Godmother.

  As I turned into the parking lot across the street from the Dime Store, I had a sudden flash of humorous insight into my own psyche: This is not, I realized, going to come as a surprise to anybody.

  12

  NO PROTESTORS CIRCLED IN THE PARKING LOT AS I PULLED IN.

  I felt surprisingly relieved in their absence. Maybe, I thought, as I got out of my car, they weren’t as benign as I liked to assume they were. If I’d asked the pendulum about them, would my subconscious have told me that, in truth, I was afraid of them, of their flinty-eyed fanaticism?

  “Nah,” I said, and laughed as I crossed the street.

  Sidling in unnoticed among a crowd of shoppers, I edged my way around the perimeter of the wooden floor to the costume section, keepin
g my head down, eyes averted, not really in the mood to stop and chat with anybody who might recognize me. It’s so damn hard to go unnoticed anyplace in one’s own hometown. That was one reason Geof and I took off for our weekends in Boston periodically—although even there, in the most unlikely places, we ran into people we knew. You know how it is. One time when my sister and I were ten and twelve, respectively, our parents took us on a vacation to the Grand Canyon. And there at the south rim, while we were peering over the sides, up from a hiking trail came an entire family of people we knew from Port Frederick! Unbelievable.

  It was cheerful and loud in the Dime Store that night. No new-fangled acoustical ceiling tiles or wall coverings or flooring in this store. Just voices and the noise of lots of movement bouncing off the dusty, scuffed old wood counters, which were stacked with all of the useful and also all of the deliciously useless little gadgets that you could only really find in dime stores. The Kmarts of the world just didn’t cut it, when it came to the mystery and facination of great old stores like this, and we were fortunate still to have one in Port Frederick. Most people younger than I was knew only bright lights and neat, dull merchandise displays, but new generations of our town were still being introduced to the pleasures of a trip to the Dime Store. Many of us worried about what would become of this wonderful tradition when Nellie and Bill Kennedy retired. Nobody expected Ardyth to take it over.

  Oh well, I thought, as I had before, it was still here, and the Kennedys would surely operate it for at least a few more years before they retired, if they ever did; in other words, the demise of the Dime Store wasn’t anything any of us had to worry about anytime soon.

  I weaved among kids, parents, lots of Halloween shoppers.

  I was only one of many dozens of customers crowding the narrow, old-fashioned aisles. I saw Nellie standing outside her office talking to an elderly woman, and I caught a glimpse of Bill Kennedy shuffling down an aisle in the toy section, patting the heads of a couple of small children. They each looked up into his face and grinned back at him. Nellie’d said he was good for that, at least, making the kids feel welcome, which made their mothers happy.