“The bleeding seems to have stopped. You are dehydrated. You drank alcohol last night?”
“It was my first night out. What do you think?”
“Answer the questions.” Kate glared at him as she interrupted, her arms crossed, her jaw set. “And tell her about the other thing with your head. He needs a blood transfusion. He lost a ton of blood.”
It was hard to be angry at her when she was so damn sexy.
“What’s wrong with your head?” Villanueva asked, wiping the crook of Val’s elbow with an alcohol pad. It took her two stabs, better than most, the second barely hurt. In danger of becoming a heroin addict he was not. He watched the tubing fill up with red.
“It was bleeding from some funny places,” he said, looking away from his arm to lock eyes with Kate, daring her to say anything else.
The doctor looked from one of them to the other. “If you choose to tell me, of your free will, you will feel better about it. Letting me know everything can only help you. I’m going to need to do a drug test.” She let the implication hang there as she unstuck his arm, picked up the two vials he’d filled and left the room: the drugs will come up on the blood test, might as well tell me about them now.
“As if you needed to lose more blood,” Kate said.
“She thinks I’ve been snorting coke.” He closed his eyes.
“You look tired,” she said.
“I didn’t sleep so well. Someone was distracting me half the night.” The other half, well, the other half wasn’t so restful either.
“You’ve mentioned.”
“I’m joking, you know.”
“Yeah. I’m tired, too.” He wanted to tell her it was all right, no one would find TJ, but he wasn’t so sure. Villanueva came back and told him she’d put the sample in for testing and he should have his results within a few hours.
Kate looked at him. Cleared her throat. “Did you tell her about the hum in your head?”
“It’s gone.” He didn’t want to talk about this here.
“All last night he was complaining of this hum,” Kate said to the doctor. She turned to Val.
“Like a low frequency ringing in my ears.”
Villanueva pursed her lips. “I’d like to do some other tests. A CT scan. Just to be safe. A lot of ex-convicts have a hard time adjusting to life on the outside.”
“I haven’t been out long enough.” Val knew he was snapping, but he didn’t want to be here anymore. This place seemed too sterile and too clean, with its white walls and white countertops. A different kind of pressure pushed in on him, but this kind he knew was a panic attack. He knew how to hold them off. You couldn’t melt down like that in prison. They’d be on you like a pack of hyenas on a limping antelope.
Inhale, count to eight, hold for four, exhale counting to eight. Color started to creep back into the room.
“It happens faster than you think,” the doctor said. “You’ve been in a structured routine for years. Now you’re drifting.”
“Why don’t I take a rain check on that CT scan?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She checked some paperwork. “We could have you in by two this afternoon. By the time we get the blood work back, we could have you in for the scan.”
“I think I’ll be all right,” Val said, standing. “Thank you for your time.” His fight or flight mechanism was kicking in, jangling in his hum-free brain, and he didn’t want to start punching anybody, let alone a lady doctor trying to help.
He let Kate deal with the paperwork; he’d deal with the bill later.
Back in the car, Val said, “Can we stop at the Tire Warehouse? I want to get my truck back on track. As charming as it is to ride around in this thing all the time, I’d rather not.”
“Yeah, sure,” Kate said. She looked far away and pensive.
They didn’t talk on the way to the store. Val picked up two used tires, and as he started to move them to the car, Kate made one offhand comment that he shouldn’t be doing heavy lifting after his incident. After he politely told her to blow him, she leaned against the yellow hood of the car and watched him, looking surly, sexy and distracted at the same time, chewing at the skin around her fingernails.
Val popped open the Daytona’s little trunk and tossed the first tire in. He tried to ignore the dried Hershey’s stain that could be nothing but blood. He placed the tire over it, for optimal coverage.
“Is there blood?”
He willed her not to talk about it, but answered, “A little. Looks like old chocolate.”
She chewed on her lip, and it made him want her. Easy, down boy. He got in on the passenger’s side of the car. He bet she wouldn’t let him drive after being in the ER.
“Why didn’t you tell her how bad the hum is? It’s been driving you crazy since you’ve been home.”
“It’s gone now. Been gone since the bleeding stopped.”
“So what was it?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Kate headed back onto SR-179, through Lott and into the desert to the south.
The pavement ended and they passed a small brown sign informing them they were nearing the Lincoln National Forest.
It started in harmony with the Daytona’s engine. At first he thought something was wrong with the motor, it whined a bit louder now. A belt wearing out? He tried in vain to come up with automotive solutions, grasping at them like a drowning man, but as it got firmer and settled around him like a glove, he knew the hum was back.
8
“I’ve got to go and see my mom.” After Val woke up from his nap, an innocent conversation about nothing escalated into crazy monkey sex on the kitchen counter, the kitchen floor, and finally the couch. This, Val thought, was how it was supposed to be. Except for the fucking hum in his head. They lay there now, Val on the inside of the couch.
“Do you want me to come with you?” she asked.
“No.”
Kate’s lower lip stuck out. Not a deliberate pout, he knew, but a sure sign he’d annoyed her.
“It’s not another woman, it’s my mother.”
“Your mother is another woman.” She tried to make it a joke, but her sulky tone shone through.
“I can only see her for an hour.”
“Do you want me to come along for the ride?”
“Sure,” he said after a moment. He wanted to be alone. However, after so much time with so many other people, being by himself was one scary thought. He would go crazy out here without her. “Thanks for asking.”
“I’ll drive if you want,” she offered.
No fucking way. Now that he changed his flat, he wanted his truck, wanted to drive. “I got it. I want to put some gas in the truck anyway.”
“You can drop me off in town, and I’ll catch up with you when you’re done.”
“Sounds good,” he said, running his fingers through his hair, leaving it standing upright in a shocked mess. He reached onto the coffee table for his T-shirt.
“You’re not wearing that,” she said.
It was an Operation Ivy shirt, stained, faded and full of holes. Val stood up, and the blood rushing to his head caused the hum to accelerate like a chain saw. He grimaced. After a day, he was starting to get used to it. He collected the rest of his clothes, went down the hall to his bedroom and opened the closet. Everything was so old. He opened his mouth to call to Kate, to have her pick something out, but instead he sung under his breath a bit and selected a worn button-down black shirt. He sang the song in the same pitch as the hum. They played off one another, a pleasant harmony in his skull.
He heard Kate go into the bathroom and close the door behind her. Back in the living room, Val dropped onto the couch to wait, running his hands through his hair in an attempt to make it lie flat. While he waited he laced up his boots.
Kate emerged from the bathroom a moment later, and Val retrieved his black Stetson from the back of the couch and plopped it on his head.
“Kate,” he said.
; “Yes?”
“I love you.”
Her face lit up as she followed him out.
Rain pelted down from the sky and as they stepped out onto the wooden stoop, lightning flickered somewhere in the distance. Kate ran for the pickup, while Val chose to walk and feel the rain. You didn’t get to appreciate nature on the inside, not like this. After slamming the truck door behind him, he paused a moment and listened to the rain drum the metal roof. The engine coughed once then roared to life. The CDs in the visor seemed like a museum exhibit, untouched for so long. The truck, with its sparse layer of trash on the floor, felt like a time capsule. Coke had changed its bottle design at least once since the plastic bottle in the cup holder.
He turned his music up, an early Suicide Machines album, and it pumped through speakers worth more than the truck itself. Val cranked his window down so he could feel the cool, wet air on his face. Cleansing rain, good tunes, and his best girl…he could almost trick himself into thinking that things were looking up.
9
With a clap of thunder, Val realized the hum was gone. He wasn’t sure when it left him, but everything in his mind felt sharper, clean—as if the rain had scraped away the muffling fuzz. A stray patch of sun in the storm lit the Nassar Valley Hospice. Dark, wet pavement indicated he’d missed the rain here, but not by much. Val parked in visitor parking.
He turned the truck off and sat with his fingers on the keys. He could leave. He could come tomorrow. What was one more day of putting things off? Ignoring the temptation, he pulled the keys from the ignition and stepped out into air that smelled like hot, wet asphalt and clean rain.
He walked to the glass doors, taking as much time as he could. They’d told him his mother would be dead before he got out of jail, so he’d spent a great amount of time preparing himself in case he never saw her again. It didn’t happen, but his mother’s letters eventually stopped coming, replaced by updates written by Angelina Warder, a nurse at the hospice. Angelina was a pretty name, and he’d always pictured her to look like the actress.
Still, he really didn’t want to go in there.
Feeling the sun on him, he stopped walking and acknowledged that he could head back to the truck and go. His mother, in and out of consciousness, would never know.
The sun looked both sickly and bright in contrast to the dark storm clouds surrounding it. The hospice was named for the valley it overlooked; the land below was dark with rain.
Apparently they wanted you to have a nice view as you died.
So much goddamn brown. Val, though born here, spent most of his formative years in leafy green Massachusetts, and a slight longing for all that foliage and the ocean pawed at him. Anything, though, was better than the institutional gray he’d faced for the past few years.
He crossed the threshold into the air-conditioned hospice. As the doors slid shut behind him, goosebumps covered his skin in the cool air and he paused to look out a huge picture window overlooking Nassar Valley.
“I’m here to see Caroline Slade.” He pulled off his hat and ran his hand through his hair in a final attempt to make it stand down.
The receptionist clacked on her keyboard and slid a clipboard across the desk to him. “Sign in here, please.”
“Room 127,” she said, looking back to her monitor.
So no one would be going with him? He had to go and face this alone? He didn’t know what to expect. Stomach cancer, he knew, but that was about it. Could she talk? Would she know him? The prognosis had been so bad for so long, he sometimes wondered if this was all some manner of psychological prison abuse. Angelina, in her letters, suggested Caroline was waiting for Val.
The receptionist looked back up at him. “Yes?”
“How is she?” he asked. “Is Ms. Warder here?” Nurse Warder? Miss? Mrs.?
The girl clacked on some more keys. “Angelina will be in at five.”
Val looked at the clock on the wall. Four-forty.
She looked at his name on the sign in sheet. “Are you her son?”
He nodded. That’s me, the son who’s never been able to visit his dying mother because he got busted for banging his underage girlfriend. He felt a dark cloud of guilt.
“Sir?”
“Sorry, what?”
The receptionist had been speaking.
“Why don’t you go ahead and I’ll send Angelina down as soon as she gets here.”
“Thanks,” Val mumbled, and headed down the hallway, reading door numbers much slower than necessary. His fingers trailed along the wall as he walked. Why put all the numbers in the hundreds for a single story building? He turned the hat over and over in his hands. He should have left it in the truck.
Room 127. A neat hand lettered sign, the ink faded, read: Caroline Slade.
The door stood open. He hovered outside it awhile, took a few deep breaths then forced himself through the doorway.
Instead of cold water, medicinal smells and the sounds of the Home Shopping Network washed over him. White walls, white bed sheets—adrenaline pumped through him and he wanted nothing more than to run. Out of here, away from her, away from the white, back to the hum. He gulped in a mouthful of air, then another, then remembered what the prison shrink told him. He closed his eyes. Deep breath through the nose. Just like that. Okay.
Caroline looked more like a mummy than a human, her slight form a petite mass under thin blankets. She looked eighty instead of fifty and wore a blonde wig which removed, instead of added, dignity.
He wanted to turn, go back to the desk, explain to the girl that they made a horrible mistake, this wasn’t his mother. But there, on the night table was a picture of him with his cousin, standing outside the Boston Museum of Science. This was the picture she chose? He and Kevin were about ten at the time, and they’d both made horrible faces at the camera. Somewhere, at his Aunt’s insistence, there was a corollary photograph where they both smiled mom-friendly smiles.
“Mom,” he tried to say, but nothing came out. He swallowed, aching for a glass of water, and said it again. She turned to him so slowly he could almost hear her tendons creak.
“Valentine?”
“Yeah.” He stepped closer, setting his hat in a chair. The life support unit sat at her side like a sentinel, looking white and futuristic in the artificial light.
“I thought they had you,” she said.
“I got out. This morning,” he lied, not wanting her to know he let twenty-four hours pass before he came to her.
She smiled. Her eyes looked so dull. They were blue, like his, but much darker. When he was younger, she’d called his eyes husky-blue.
“I thought they’d never let you go.”
Not sure how to answer, Val said, “They did.” He floundered for something else to say. “And here I am.”
She touched his hand with one of her own: hot, dry and delicate like paper. Her nails were painted a light pink and it looked like a sick joke.
“I thought once they had you, they’d never let you go.”
“But here I am. My lawyer’s pretty good. He wouldn’t let them keep me any longer than the six years I promised them.”
“You promised them?” Caroline looked worried, but a minute furrowing of her brow was all she could muster.
“Well, I was sentenced.”
“You poor boy.” She squeezed his hand. “Did they hurt you?”
“No,” he lied again. “It really wasn’t all that bad.” And he closed a door in his head, keeping the memories at bay.
“They hurt me when they took me.” At first he thought she meant one of the times she’d been picked up before he was born, once for drunk and disorderly, three times for DUI, and once for prostitution, which had been thrown out of court for lack of evidence. He should have figured it out sooner. She meant a much different They. The kind of They that warrants a capital T. He guessed if she still had her alien fantasies, the drugs couldn’t have her too far gone. Val’s attention was pulled by the next question. “You haven’t seen
that girl, have you, the one who got you in trouble?”
More lies. They got easier and easier. “Nope,” he said, sliding his eyes down to his hands.
“Good.”
“I might look her up, though.”
“The girl’s trailer trash.”
“She can’t get me in trouble now.”
“Girl like her can always get you in trouble.”
Val tasted Rich’s shotgun again and suspected his mom might be right.
“I, uh, got my law degree,” Val said, staring at her hand in his. Not that I’ll ever be able to use it for anything.
“You’ll make a fine lawyer,” Caroline said. “Like your uncle.”
Nope, Val thought, I sure won’t. He smiled. More gently than was probably necessary, he patted her hand.
Blaring from the TV, a woman on the Home Shopping Network advised them to call now since only fourteen gold plated brooches with synthetic garnets remained. Outside, fat raindrops plunked against the windows. Alternating rain and patches of sun mottled the valley below.
“Knock knock,” someone called. Nurse Warder. Angelina. Who, at possibly four foot eight looked nothing like the actress Val had likened her to. “You must be Valentine,” she said; her voice an abrasive coo, and extended a chubby hand up to him. He relinquished his grasp on Caroline and shook.
“Val,” he said.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” she said, going to check Caroline’s vitals.
As the nurse made small talk, Val wondered if it was appropriate to discuss his mother’s condition with her here in the room. He didn’t want to talk about her as though she wasn’t here, but he also didn’t know how much she knew. What if she thought she was getting better? Fuck. He hated being around sick people. Of course she knew what was up.
Val stood, half watching Angelina as she ran through the machines, making small talk with Caroline, who told the nurse Val was back from his Aunt Sally and Uncle Dick’s place back east, half looking out at the valley.
“Mr. Slade? Val? May I have a moment?”
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