The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  “Hannah,” Austin said with those horrible, gasping sucks of air from the wound in his chest. “This is Nurse McDonald. She’s going to take you inside, ok? And I’ll be there in a few minutes. And your mom.”

  Hannah raised her head for an instant, scanned her surroundings, and dropped back against Austin’s chest. She must have said something because he ran his hand up and down her back one last time. “Sorry, Hannah, but you have to. You’ve got to go—what?” He cocked an ear toward her. “Yeah, Vie’ll be there too. Ok. Ok. Here you go.”

  And he passed her to Nurse McDonald, whose pinched eyes looked like they’d been forced open with sticks of dynamite. But to the woman’s credit, she took Hannah gently and helped her onto the stretcher, and then she turned, and the crowd parted and jogged the stretcher toward the building. A few others went with her.

  Everyone else was frozen.

  Austin looked like a breeze was lifting him. Or like a current. And then he gargled something, and blood shot out of his mouth, and he fell. A big, bald guy in scrubs caught him before he could crack his head on the pavement, and it was like some invisible clock had suddenly resumed ticking.

  Everyone flew into motion. Some of them whisked Austin into the hospital; others swarmed my group, separating us out, a kind of triage-blitz that resulted in all of us being dragged in separate directions, even Tyler being pulled from my arms. He didn’t protest. He didn’t even blink. I met his eyes once, and I brushed against his mind, and I found the same broken-bottle pieces turned out against the world, ready to cut anyone who tried to come and help.

  I found myself alone in an exam room. The curtain was the color of old paper, and the room smelled like drugstore liniment. A built-in cabinet was papered over with a flyer for a blood drive (October 19, 1999), a detailed explanation of the Bird Flu, an irregularly-sized, hand-lettered piece announcing chlamydia statistics for the fall of 2017 in Mather, Sheridan, Big Horn, Washakie, and Johnson counties. I decided I needed to have a talk with Emmett. And, maybe, with Austin.

  The Crow woman was wearing a different pearl snap shirt, but the same jeans and the same boots, and tonight her white coat had a name tag that said Dr. Bird. She eyed me up and down, whistled, and jotted something on my chart. Something about the little flourish at the end annoyed me, and I said, “What did you write?”

  “Stray got in a dog fight.”

  “Fuck you.”

  She laughed, and the lines around her eyes deepened. It was a surprisingly deep laugh, and it was so pleasant and good-natured that I felt a small smile on my mouth. And then my eyes stung, and I had to tuck my face into my elbow and snort a few times and really scrub with my sleeve to keep from falling apart.

  When I looked up again, she was sitting on a stool facing me, a tray with sterilized instruments and gauze and a hypodermic needle on a syringe. “As far as I know,” she said, filling the syringe from a small bottle, “they’re all in good hands. Most of them are already in recovery.”

  “Most of them?”

  “This is a lidocaine solution. Otherwise it’s going to hurt like a mother when I work on those splinters and the other cuts you’ve got.”

  “What do you mean most?”

  “One boy is still in surgery. And two of them—it’s hard to know what’s wrong with them. Shock. Exhaustion. Traumatic stress.” She shrugged and held up the hypo. “You can’t do anything except wait, so we might as well get this part done.”

  “Are you supposed to be telling me this? Isn’t it confidential?”

  One of her dark, bushy brows went up. “Keep asking stupid questions, and I’ll put enough lidocaine in your face to keep you from talking for a week.”

  “Is Austin going to be ok?”

  Her eyes were kind but frank, and she took my chin and turned my face before the needle stung me. “That’s a stupid question. I don’t know. He’s still in surgery.”

  My cheek seemed to balloon, and I probed the puffiness with my tongue. The words that came out sounded mushy on the edges. “I think I’m still in love with him. You don’t even know me, but I’ve got to tell somebody, or my head is going to explode, and what the fuck am I supposed to say to Emmett? What he did for me, what the fuck am I supposed to say about that?”

  She eyed the hypo as though trying to decide whether or not to give me more—to get me to shut up, I guessed. Then she laid it back on the tray. She clasped her hands between her knees. Her boots had fresh mud on them. She looked like the kind of woman who could shoe a horse and till a field and fill a hypo with lidocaine all in the same day.

  “You’re in love.”

  I shrugged.

  She waited.

  I nodded.

  She nodded. “That explains all the stupid questions, then.” She picked up a pair of what looked like tweezers and turned my face toward the light. “Every boy who’s ever been in love is an absolute moron.”

  I was about to object when she yanked out the first splinter, and she did it so forcefully I half expected, even with the anesthetic, for half my cheek to come off with it. After that, I decided Dr. Bird didn’t need to hear about my love life.

  The problem, of course, was the way Austin looked at me when I said Kaden was bad for him. The problem was the way he had looked at me when he cradled Hannah and stroked her back. The problem was the way his voice had gone soft when he said, There’s really only one guy. And then the little crack that had followed, the little crack in his voice when he said, For me, you know. Just one. That crack was the sound of his armor falling off him, hitting the ground in pieces. That crack was the sound of him being the brave one. Again. And that was the problem. The problem was that Austin had always been the brave one, and I’d always been the coward.

  “Houston, hello, Houston.” Dr. Bird waved a hand in front of me. “You got a problem?”

  I blinked and touched the side of my face. My fingers found gauze taped over the wounds. Her laugh lines crinkled as she studied me. I forced myself to meet her eyes. “Yeah. A big one.”

  “You guys have a fight?”

  “I was an asshole. A jealous asshole.”

  “I dated a jealous asshole once. It was fun until it wasn’t.”

  Behind her, the curtain twitched. Chucks poked under the bottom of the curtain. And then a pair of retro Jordans.

  “You need to talk to someone? The hospital has a shrink. I could find her for you.”

  I shook my head.

  The stool’s castor creaked as she wheeled away from me. Patting her white coat into place, Dr. Bird stood, snapped back the curtain, and said, “You take a few minutes, just stay here. If we need the room, though, I’m kicking you out.”

  I nodded.

  “Bye, stray.”

  I gave her the middle finger, and she laughed again and was gone.

  Becca was standing there when Dr. Bird left. The owner of the retro Jordans, however, was gone.

  For a moment, Becca and I just watched each other. I wanted to ask about those retro Jordans. Instead, I said, “Are you ok?”

  She nodded.

  Somewhere out in the waiting room, a baby was crying. Shrieking, really, just this intense, high-pitched note that seemed like it went on forever.

  “Kaden? And Jim?”

  “They won’t let us in to see them. They won’t say anything. Ms. Meehan left. She took Mr. Spencer’s car, and she’s gone, Vie. Jake and Temple Mae want to leave. They’re only still here because Austin’s in surgery and his parents are on their way, but I think if it were up to Temple Mae, they’d walk out that door and go to Mexico or Aruba or somewhere and just disappear. She won’t talk to me. She won’t even look at me. And it’s not like we were friends or anything, but she won’t look at me, Vie, like she can’t even stand the fact that I exist, and I can’t—I can’t—” She clapped both hands over her face and sat down, and her foot tipped up so that only the toes of her Chucks scuffed the vinyl tiles, and her heels bounced against th
e empty air.

  “I need to see Austin.”

  “Well, they’re not going to let you see him.” She brought her hands down, and her face was dry and flushed, and her palms cracked against her knees. “He’s in surgery. And his family is here. And—” She bit off the word so savagely that she tore her head to one side

  “And he broke up with me.”

  “Can we just go home, Vie? I just want to go home tonight.”

  I thought of Sara, here, in the Western Bighorn Hospital, just a few floors above me, still recovering from a heart attack and a gunshot wound. Austin’s dad had driven here last night—Christ, was it only last night?—to make sure his sister was still alive. He was doing that drive again tonight, only this time it was his son, and his son might not make it through the night.

  “We’re going to have to hitch.”

  The toes of her Chucks squeaked on the vinyl. “I’ve hitched before.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “We did something good, today, right? That’s what I keep telling myself. We did something good. I should be proud of that. I helped with something that’s going to save a lot of lives. Save a lot of children. But then I think about Jim and Kaden and Austin. Then I try to talk to Temple Mae. I look at your face, and I don’t know anymore. None of it makes any sense.”

  “What’s wrong with my face?”

  She ran the ridge of her hand under her nose.

  “It’s a pretty fucking ugly face, I guess.”

  She sniffled. “You’re so stupid sometimes.”

  “Sometimes I breathe through my mouth and look like I need to be on life support.”

  She sniffled into her knuckles. Her eyes zipped up to mine and then back down.

  “When it’s summer, I get these ugly patches of freckles, and Pete Bernier told me in third grade that it looked like God took a dump on my cheeks.”

  She laughed, and the volume of it shocked even her because she steepled her hands over her mouth. “You are probably the dumbest boy I’ve ever met. And I’ve seen you in the summer. And you don’t really have freckles anymore.”

  “Tell that to Pete.” I stood, held out a hand. “I want to do one thing before we find a long-haul trucker who won’t slit our throats and drop us at a rest stop.”

  The soles of her Chucks smacked down. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  But she took my hand. And we wound a way through the hallways until we stood outside a third-floor room, where the door spilled open and light arced across the vinyl. From inside came the soft, struggling breaths, and the click of a woman’s heel, and then the rustle of paper.

  “But they’re going to be all right? I just want you to tell me they’re going to be all right.”

  That was Shay.

  And then, her mother’s voice: “They’ve been over this. They can’t—”

  “I want him to tell me they’re going to be all right. And then he can go do whatever he needs to do.”

  “It’s not that simple, Ms. Cribbs.”

  “It’s Harwood. I’m changing it back. Back to Harwood, I mean.”

  “Ms. Harwood, your daughter is fine—physically, anyway. Aside from a few scrapes and bruises, she’s in very good health. It’s hard to know, though, the extent of the psychological trauma that she’s undergone, and at her age, without some of the resilience that comes with age—”

  “You mean she’s not tough. But she is. We’re all tough; we had to be. Hannah will be fine. It’s Tyler I want you to tell me about.”

  “We just don’t know. I’m sorry, but that’s all I can say. We just don’t know. He reacts to physical stimuli—his pupils respond to light and movement; his hearing is undamaged; his reflexes—”

  “He just sits there. He just sits there and stares. I don’t want to hear about reflexes, and I don’t care if you shine something at him and he blinks. I want to know where my baby is.”

  “And he can’t tell you.” That was Lucy Harwood’s brittle snap. “He’s not going to lie—”

  “Ms. Harwood, he’s exhibiting behavior typical of post-traumatic stress disorder, a kind of catatonia, and that means he’s not able to move and react the way he should. We’ve got a lot of options for treatment, and we’re going to . . .”

  I tugged on Becca’s sleeve; she wiped her face and followed me. We left those voices behind us, and when I stopped in an alcove where a vending machine had a 3 Musketeers bar hanging halfway off a silver spring, I met Becca’s eyes and said, “Did we do a good thing?”

  She nodded.

  “Let me run to the bathroom, and we’ll go. Meet me downstairs?”

  She nodded again. I took a step away, and then Becca said, not looking at me, “I’m glad we saved those kids. And I’m glad . . . I’m glad nobody else will have to go through that again. But why do I feel so awful?”

  I shook my head. “Just shock. Stress. And you’re exhausted. It’ll be better in the morning. Gotta pee, Becca. I’ll see you downstairs.”

  I trotted away from her and didn’t look back, but instead of ducking into the restroom, I found the closest flight of stairs and climbed to the fourth floor. The fluorescent lights were louder here; the buzz went all the way to my bones, and I had a million almost-invisible shadows petaling around me on the vinyl. It was quieter here. I paced the length of one hallway. Then I paced the next one. And then I saw Don and Debra Miller in a waiting room, and I stopped.

  They looked like the Road Runner after he’d gone under a bulldozer. Flattened. Lifeless. Don kept grabbing at a pink paisley tie; he was still in his suit, his hair still in its perfect part, and he’d grab that tie and weave it between his fingers and every once in a while yank on it like it was choking him. Debra wore yoga pants and a Lululemon quarter-zip and was on her phone. Her fingers scrolled up and down, tapped, swiped, and then scrolled again. Her eyes held thin rectangles of blue light and nothing else. If she blinked once during the whole ten minutes I watched her, I didn’t see it.

  Becca’s question kept coming back at me. It was like those hundred different shadows I was throwing on the floor, all of them so faint they were barely ripples in the vinyl tile. Her question spread open around me, circled me, a hundred different versions of it. We did something good, so why did I feel so awful?

  The answer I’d given Becca—you’re in shock, you’re exhausted, you’ll feel better in the morning—had the taste of horseshit. But maybe it was true for her.

  It wasn’t true for me. I knew why I felt awful.

  I left Don and Debra Miller in the waiting room, and I found Becca smoking in the parking lot. When she saw me, the cigarette tip flared, and she tilted her head back, and her throat flexed as smoke made a silver screen between us.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I shook my head. I scanned the lot. The Charger was still there, painfully out of place among the minivans and family sedans. The Impala was gone, though. And so was the Ducati.

  “Emmett’s ok.” Becca jabbed with the cigarette, the red star pointing east. “He got stitched up, and they said the cut really wasn’t even that bad. He . . .”

  “He heard.”

  Becca drew heavily on the cigarette. She clamped her lips tight and jogged the pack inside her coat pocket. Then she flicked the cigarette from her mouth with her tongue, and it tumbled through the air like a spark falling toward a pool of gasoline. But there wasn’t any gasoline. Just slush and asphalt, and the coal-bright tip went out, and Becca ground it into the frozen ground just to be sure.

  I nodded; it was all the confirmation I needed. “Ok.” Then, a little stronger. “Ok.”

  “Just give him a night to cool down. He knows things are complicated; he’s not stupid.”

  “Let’s go home.”

  I SLEPT ALONE IN SARA'S house. I couldn’t figure out the thermostat, and the place felt almost as cold as outside, so I slept bundled in my quilt, fully dressed, while the wind shrieked and sl
apped the windows and pried fingers under the edge of the roof. When I woke, the clock said it was eleven thirty-seven in the morning, and the clouds were gone. The sun barged through the window like the cheeriest asshole I’d ever wanted to kick in the teeth.

  I showered. Alone. I dressed. Alone. I changed the dressing on my face. Alone. And I thought of what cheap motel soap smelled like. And then I felt guilty for that thought, so I thought about what Austin’s breathing sounded like, the way he was always trying to curl an arm around me, the calluses on his palm that came from rope and leather and hard work.

  In the fogged mirror, I wrote the question that I wasn’t brave enough to ask myself. Two words stenciled with my fingers, the oil on my skin keeping the humid air from swallowing up the writing. Which one?

  Austin was a rock. Austin was the ground under my feet. Austin made me better. Austin loved me.

  Emmett was fire. Emmett was heroin. Emmett made me feel alive. Emmett loved me.

  Austin was there day and night. Austin put up with my shit. Austin had taken a knife for me.

  Emmett understood me in a way Austin never would. Emmett was there with me in the darkness—he had walked all the way into the black with me. Emmett had given half of himself for me, surrendering perfection to a crazy bitch with a knife.

  I swiped the question out of the fog, stared at the blurry bastard, and scrubbed at the glass until all I could see were streaks. Streaks were a kind of nothing. Like the wind.

  I walked four miles before somebody picked me up, and all four miles were bright, happy, Disney-wildlife-singing fucking nonsense. On a day like that day, the Wyoming sky was blue streaked with white, like a goddamn Dodgers jersey. And that pissed me off because I hated baseball and I really hated the Dodgers, and the only reason I even thought about those jerseys was because Austin had made me watch hours of spring-training games. On days like today, the air on the high plains was so thin and so clear that it felt like I could throw a fastball twenty miles and still see the rawhide splash down in the buffalo grass and the rangegrass and the Junegrass and watch the ripples spread through the sea of tall, waving stalks.