by Gregory Ashe
“Ok. Hold on. You were watching me?” Then it came to me: that giggle. That damn giggle that I had heard.
Hannah nodded. “And Tyler told me. He said that Jerry Casevich told him, and he said Jerry’s friend Rodney told him, and Rodney’s a fifth-grader, and Rodney’s sister is a sixth-grader.”
“What?”
“Tyler said he’s seen Austin kiss you on the mouth. Sometimes a lot.”
The Impala rumbled under me. The heat from the vents tasted faintly like exhaust. Out above the rangegrass, a falcon gyred.
“Tyler said that Rodney’s sister told Rodney, and Rodney told Jerry, and Jerry told him, that Emmett Bradley wants to kiss you on the mouth, but you don’t let him.”
The falcon’s spiral slowed.
“And Tyler said that Jerry called you the f-word and he had to punch Jerry in the face. And that’s why he got three days in the office. And then he asked Mom why you wanted boys to kiss you on the mouth, and Mom said, ‘What boys?’ and Grandma said, ‘It doesn’t matter which boys, Shay, just leave it alone.’ And Mom said, ‘I’m just asking him which boys, I think it does matter, especially if it’s that one we always see him with.’ And Grandma said, ‘It’s nobody’s business.’ And Mom said, ‘I know it’s nobody’s business, but sometimes I just want to know,’ and that’s when Tyler said he’d seen Austin kissing you on the mouth a lot at school, but I’ve never seen it at school because I have a different recess than Tyler, so I don’t always see the high school kids. I only ever saw you in your room. When you have your shirt off.”
The falcon straightened out its flight, dropping down slowly against the tumbled-up gray of the clouds.
“And then—” Hannah said.
I groaned.
“—Grandma said, ‘It’s a shame it’s not the Bradley boy.’ And Mom made a face, and Grandma said, ‘Well, I’ve still got eyes, don’t I, and those two together would make anybody have dirty thoughts.’ And then Tyler said that part about Jerry calling you the f-word, and I wanted to know why he called you a fart, and Tyler laughed and said I was too young to understand, and I said I wasn’t too young, and Tyler just kept laughing until Mom said, ‘That’s enough, Tyler.’ And then Grandma said, ‘Well if it’s both of them, I ought to smack his hand. He can have a cookie, but he can’t have the whole cookie jar.’ And Mom said, ‘All right, Mom, we get it.’ Because Grandma is her mom, so she calls her mom. And Grandma said, ‘He’d look better with that Bradley boy on his arm.’ And Mom said that was enough and told Tyler and me we could eat dinner in front of the TV, so we did, but Tyler said she was just doing that to get us out of the room, and I knew that already, so we put the TV low, and Mom said, ‘Do you really think he’s with both of them?’ And Mom said she’d pick Austin if she had her choice, and Grandma said Mom never had good taste.”
I groaned.
“Do you like it when they kiss you on the mouth?”
The falcon shot toward the earth, scooping up something—it was too far to see what—and carrying it into the sky. A vole. A mouse. A rat. A rabbit. Something that was dying a vicious, brutal, sudden death. Maybe, I thought, it wouldn’t be so bad to be a rabbit. Or a rat. Or a mouse. Or a vole. Any other goddamn thing in the universe wouldn’t be so bad right now.
“I think we should have quiet time,” I said.
“Vie?”
I shushed her.
Hannah fidgeted with her hair. “I just have one question, Vie.”
“I really think we should just have quiet time—”
“I just wanted to know which one walks funny.”
“Huh?”
“Those boys. The ones who kiss you on the mouth. Which one walks funny? Because Grandma said the only way to know which one you like was to watch and see who walks funny on Saturday morning, and I thought maybe Austin hurt his foot, because one day Tyler said he saw—”
“Ok.” The word was a squeak. I fumbled with the gear shift. “Ok, um. I think we have to stop talking. Right now.” Forever, I thought. We have to stop talking forever. “Because we don’t want to wake up Tyler. So let’s be quiet the rest of the way.”
Somehow I got the car into drive, and the Impala lurched away from the dumpster, and somewhere out among the rangegrass and the buffalo grass and the Junegrass, a vole was being ripped to shreds and having a much, much better time than I was.
“Vie.” Hannah was hunched toward me, hand to the side of her mouth, her voice a child’s attempt at a whisper. The hypersaturated colors of the other side pulsed with her curiosity. “Vie!”
“Dear God,” I muttered.
“I only asked you that about those boys kissing you on the mouth because I don’t think they’re going to want to kiss your cottage-cheese face.”
I EXPECTED THE KIND OF frenetic emergency response to my arrival at the hospital that I had seen on television hospital dramas. I carried Tyler in first, and while everybody seemed really curious about how I had gotten hold of a child, there was no dramatic rush of action. An orderly came out to the Impala with me, helped me get Hannah’s body situated on a gurney, and then took her back inside. I parked the car; by the time I grabbed my backpack and got back into the ER, they had Hannah and Tyler in a curtained-off exam room.
“Are you family?” The nurse who asked me was a large Hispanic woman. She had kind eyes and a dusting of a mustache.
“Yes.”
“Do you have ID?”
“No.”
“You’ll have to wait out there.”
Out there meant a row of plastic chairs at the registration desk. The nurse followed me to the desk, watched me until I sat down, and then disappeared back into the examination area. Hannah’s spirit, which had drifted along behind me, said, “I’m going to go watch Tyler.”
I nodded, and as she left, I let my inner eye shut. As soon as I did, my head began to throb. It wasn’t an ache or a pulse or a thrum. It was a goddamn hammer-to-the-skull pounding. I’d never had my inner eye open that long before, and I felt like I’d managed to split my skull in two.
Letting my head drop onto my arms, I tried to enjoy the cool of the laminate countertop, and I took slow breaths to keep the pain from taking up too much space inside me.
Shay and her mother arrived. Something about the sound of their steps—a frantic, hurried clicking—made me lift my head, and there they were: Shay glancing around the waiting room, and Lucy trailing after her. Spotting me, Shay hurried over.
“Are they here? God, where are they? Why aren’t you with them?” She raised up on tiptoes. “Someone called and said—”
“Mrs. Cribbs?”
“Me. It’s Harwood again, but that’s me. Mom, come on.” Shay scurried after the nurse and disappeared into the closed-off examination area.
Lucy Harwood lingered, though. She hadn’t changed in the months I’d known her: trim, coiffed, her back ramrod straight. Her platinum hair didn’t have any roots showing; I figured she paid enough to make sure they never did. The corners of her mouth made daggers.
“They’re fine. Or they will be.”
Lucy brought up one hand; a hundred years ago, she would have been trailing lace, a handkerchief between her fingers. Today she wore a Michael Kors watch with a rose-colored strap, and she dabbed at her eyes with wadded tissue. “How bad was it?”
I shrugged and laid my head down again.
For a moment, Lucy drifted toward the exam area. Then she stopped, and her heels clicked as she came over to me and ran one thin hand through my hair. “I won’t tell her. And I don’t want you to. But one of us needs to know.”
“Bad.”
Her fingers froze at my nape, tightening around the locks of thick blond hair, enough to hurt. I spoke out of that pain.
“Cribbs is dead.”
Her exhalation whistled, and a tremor ran through her. I saw it shake her little pink pumps, and I felt it in her fingers, trembling in my hair. Then she shook her hand free and smoothed the
back of my head.
“I’m sorry. She shouldn’t have asked you.”
“It would have been worse if it had been someone else.” That was true; at least, I more or less believed it was true. Someone else might have gotten a knife in the back courtesy of Axton or his brother. Someone else might have taken a spray of shotgun pellets. Someone else might have gotten caught in Tyler’s miniature hurricane and gotten a door jamb through one lung. And nobody but me would have been able to talk to Hannah.
“I didn’t want her to ask you.” Her thin hand—it was so thin, the weight almost nothing, as though the bones were birdlike and hollow, and I wondered what it would have felt like to have a grandmother to brush my hair—rested on my head again. “You picked them up on the side of the road.”
“What?” I raised my head, or I tried to raise it, but she gently forced me to stillness. Her fingers ran through the locks again, her nails gently scratching my scalp, and it felt so good that some of the ache went away.
“You picked them up on the side of the road. Do you understand?”
“On the way to Hunt.”
“On the way to Hunt,” she said. “I’ll make sure Tyler and Hannah remember exactly where you picked them up. On the side of the road. On the way to Hunt.” Then her voice changed. “I thought Sara Miller was keeping your socks darned and your stomach full.”
I shrugged. Her nails continued their rhythmic massage of my scalp.
“Why do you look beat to hell, then? Your daddy catch up with you?”
There was a frankness to the question, an absolute lack of judgment, that robbed me of the anger I would normally have felt. “No. Something else.”
“Does Sara know you’re here?”
“She doesn’t need to know.”
Lucy’s hand stopped again. With my head buried in my arms, I couldn’t see her face, but her voice thickened when she spoke again. “Boys are all the same, no matter what age they are. You think you’re half diamond and half dynamite, like nothing can touch you, and you’re all so stupid nobody can tell you different. I ought to call Sara right now and tell her to get down here. I spanked her bottom once in Sunday School for kissing Gene Peterson behind the pulpit. I ought to haul down her drawers and purple her ass again. It’s gotten plenty big.”
I lifted my head, then, shaking off Lucy’s touch, and I met her eyes. “But you won’t.”
She sighed, and she dabbed at her eyes again, and she twisted her watch around and around like she thought she could shake back time. Finally she shook her head. “No, I won’t because I might be old, but I’m as stupid as ever for a pretty face.” She rummaged through her purse and drew out something that she pressed into my hand. “There’s more of that. Come by the house. Or call; I can always wire it.”
I pressed the crinkling bills toward her, and Lucy shrugged her purse back up her shoulder so furiously that I actually wilted. She watched me for a moment, waiting to see if I’d do something stupid again, and then she sniffed and turned and walked toward the exam rooms. She might have been sixty, or thereabouts, but she had those pink pumps and she had a sway in her hip, and an old man with a straw hat just about fell out of his chair watching her go.
Two hundred dollars. Christ. I could get a lot farther now. As soon as I took care of things here, I could get as far away as I needed to. California, maybe. Not on two hundred dollars, not all the way, but I could get a lot farther now.
I just had to scrub Urho out of existence.
Laying my head down again, I tried to plan. Before I could make certain decisions, though, I needed answers. Sleep came unexpectedly, washing over me as I sat there, my head on my arms. It was patchy, broken by the noises of the waiting room, and when I woke—an hour later, to judge by the clock on the wall—my neck was cricked, and my tongue had dried up.
I walked the length of the waiting room, checking out the connecting hallways, and I followed one and then another. Then, near a pair of recessed bathroom doors, I saw them: a bank of payphones and, more importantly, a drinking fountain. I took a long drink. Then I went to the phones.
With the plastic receiver smooth in one hand, running my thumbnail along the seam, I held down the hook. The phone was dead in my ear. All I had to do was lift my finger, let the line open, and dial.
Down the hall, a middle-aged man with a mop of curly brown hair moved from trash can to trash can, removing the filled trash bags and stowing them in his cart before replacing them. A Bluetooth earpiece blinked on and off, and he mumbled into it as he walked, stopping as he shook open each fresh liner to laugh and deliver another short burst of response in a language I didn’t recognize. A pair of girls, sisters, I guessed by their similar hair and clothes, skipped down the hall, singing, “One-two-three, skipadee-doo, skipadee-dee.” The bathroom door behind me rattled open, and a cloud of air freshener—something pleasantly artificial to reassure you that the hospital was sanitary—filled the air. A red-faced woman shuffled past me, her skirt on backward, a tail of toilet paper wagging from the heel of her black sneakers. She had a phone pressed to her ear, and she was saying, “I don’t care if she thinks the paisley is a better match, Richard, it’s your father’s funeral and I’m not paying all that money for you to look like a Frenchman.”
Nobody. I couldn’t call anybody. Trash-can guy could talk to his buddy or his girlfriend or his wife or his brother while he worked. The sisters could hold hands and skip and laugh with each other. The lady with the toilet-paper tail might sound like a holy terror, but she still had Richard on the phone, and it didn’t sound like Richard was ever going to get a break.
A little shiver ran through me. My thumb slid off the hook, and it popped back up with a tinny ding, and the dial tone rang in my ear. I punched in a number. I’d had good reasons for memorizing this number. I might need it in an emergency. I might need it exactly at a time like this. I might need it if I was backed into a corner. Sure, I thought as I pressed the digits. Sure, you cowardly little shit, I told myself, keep thinking that’s why you memorized it, keep telling yourself all those good reasons, and tell yourself it didn’t have anything to do with the feel of him naked against you, the heat of him, the taste of his mouth like smoke and cinders stinging your lips.
Jim Spencer picked up on the second ring. “Hello?”
“I need to talk to you.”
The screech of sliding metal came across the line, then heartbeats of silence, and then Jim’s voice low. Low, but furious. “Where are you? Vie, what got into you? You know everybody is going out of their minds? Did you know that? Did you even think about that? Austin keeps trying to pull out the IV and go looking for you, and it’s about all I can do to keep Sara from falling to pieces. What the fuck were you thinking?”
The harshness of the vulgarity, when he was normally so controlled, normally so precise, normally such a goddamn English teacher, actually lifted my toes from the vinyl flooring. “Is he ok?”
“Where are you?”
I curled the metallic cord around my finger. My breathing sounded funny. It was just because of the phone, I told myself. Just because I had that plastic so near my mouth, it was making everything sound funny.
“He’s all right. Will you tell me where you are? I’d come pick you up, but I don’t have my car.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me. Where are you?”
“I’m at the hospital.” I forced some strength into my voice. “I need you to look at someone, two kids, and I need you to tell me what happened to them, and I need to know if I can help them.”
It wasn’t until I finished speaking that I realized Jim was talking to someone else, his words low and indistinct like he’d pulled the phone away from his mouth. Then, in a clear voice, he said, “What floor are you on?”
“What? No. I want to meet you outside first, and then I can—”
“What floor, Vie? You’re making this a lot harder than it needs to be.”
; “Ground floor. Near the emergency room. I’ll head out front, and when you get here—”
“Just stay where you are. I’ll be right there.”
The phone clicked. I held the receiver against my ear for another moment, and then I hung it on the hook. Something stuck with me about the way he’d said it. Why did it matter what floor I was on? It didn’t matter, not unless he was planning on coming inside to meet me. Or—
Or he was already here.
A perverse anger twisted inside me, and I stalked away from the bank of phones. I didn’t know why I was angry. I didn’t even know who I was angry with. Myself, mostly. Because I hadn’t even thought about the fact that Austin would be here, with an IV in his arm, recovering from almost dying. And angry at the universe. And at Mr. Spencer. And at Austin and Emmett. Especially Emmett.
They were here. Austin was here.
I didn’t even know where I was going, and then I was lost, and then I had to scramble from station to station, getting directions, until I took four flights of stairs to the top floor and stood halfway down a hallway outside his room and listened.
Kaden was laughing. “Good joke, man. All right. You really had me going. Come on.” The forced amusement in his voice, already brittle, snapped. “Come on. Quit messing around.”
Silence. Then the faint chime of metal. Kaden was nervous. Like, about-to-get-fried-out-of-his-socks nervous, and all that energy was manifesting itself. The hinges squeaked in response to that energy; the door swung a quarter-inch.
“You’re serious?” The weed-and-good-vibes ease of Kaden’s voice screwed tighter. “Austin, come on. You can’t drop something like this on me. Don’t—don’t look at me like that.” A rubber sole squeaked on the vinyl. Kaden’s ugly Chucks, I guessed, as he tried to beat a retreat.