Nick of Time

by John Gilstrap

  Then, when the heart and lungs were ripped from their hands, it was as if his soul had been ripped from his body. There was nothing left anymore. There was no hope. When he replayed the details of last night’s argument in his head—no, wait, that was two nights ago, wasn’t it?—he found that the specific words were gone, evaporated from his mind into the cloud of so many similar screaming matches. But the desperation in Nicki’s voice remained etched forever in every synapse: All she wanted was to be normal.

  Even in the panicky, giddy ride to the hospital for her transplants, her nervous chatter had dealt not with life in its metaphysical form, but in terms of being able to go to college next year, with a specific eye on spring break. This, from a girl who’d never attended anything close to a spring break.

  Carter hated himself for never having taken his daughter to the beach himself. She had in fact seen it several times, en route to Italy one year and to Disney World another, but she’d never touched it. Neither Carter nor Jenny were all that fond of the water, and together, they’d justified their dismissal of a beach vacation by telling Nicki that she had a whole lifetime in which to make up for lost time at the beach.

  A whole lifetime. My ass.

  The ring of his cell phone brought Carter back to the here and now. He pulled it from the clip on his belt and flipped it open. “Janssen.”

  “Hello, Carter, this is Warren Michaels. I’ve got some troubling news for you.”

  As he listened, it was all Carter could do to keep his vehicle on the road.

  * * *

  The sky was the color of lead. Brad and Nicki didn’t make it five miles down Shore Road before heavy drops started to hammer the windshield. Three minutes after that, the skies erupted. Rain fell in torrents. They had no choice but to pull to the side of the road and stretch the fabric top over the Sebring. It was time they could ill afford, but necessary. Brad told himself that the rain gave them a reason to have the windows up, and therefore be less noticeable.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said when they were on the road again. Nicki hadn’t said three words since they’d left the Quik Mart, and the silence made the whole nightmare even worse. His comment drew a numb gaze. “A boy was killed,” he said, “and we witnessed it, and we need to do something about it. Is that close?”

  He was right on the money.

  “Well, listen. That’s not our problem. If we’d come into that place ten minutes sooner or ten minutes later, we wouldn’t even be giving it a second thought. That poor bastard would still be dead, and we’d still be on our way to Florida. It was a coincidence, okay? A random happening. You can’t sacrifice your future because some asshole you never met fired a gun.”

  “But he’s dead,” Nicki said. No matter how many times she tried to wrap her mind around it, the concept seemed too large. Dead was forever.

  “We’re all gonna die sooner or later.” Brad looked at Nicki, a long enough take that she began to worry about him seeing the road. “We’re in the sooner category, know what I mean? So was the kid in the store. Christ, I don’t even know his name.”

  “Chas,” Nicki said. “Short for Charles, I guess.”

  Brad brought his eyes back around to the road. “Well, Chas just drew a low number. That sucks, but I wasn’t holding the hat he drew from. Us staying free for a while won’t bring him back. All it will do is keep us free.”

  Nicki couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Don’t you even care?”

  “Of course I care.”

  Nicki pounded her thigh with her palm. “We should have done something!”

  Brad flashed anger, and then his features softened. “You did do something, Nicki. You held his hand and stroked his head and made sure that he didn’t die alone. You made sure that somebody noticed his pain, and you eased him over to whatever lies on the other side. You did everything that could have been done.”

  Nicki looked at him, shocked.

  “I care, Nicki. I really do. But he’d be no less dead if we’d hung around there. Don’t you understand that? It’d be different if we were patching his wound, or keeping him from bleeding to death or doing CPR or something. But dead plus one minute is the same as dead plus fifty years. We had to leave.”

  “What about the old guy?” Nicki asked.

  “What about him?”

  “He thinks that we did the shooting.”

  “All the more reason to get the hell out of there,” Brad said. “The tape will show it wasn’t us. That’ll be the first thing the cops look at, and when they see what happened, you’ll be off the hook. I, on the other hand, will be one giant step closer to getting nailed again.”

  They fell silent. Nicki couldn’t clear the image of the dead boy out of her mind.

  “Do you want me to drop you off and go it alone?” Brad asked.

  Nicki looked at him, surprised. “No.”

  “It’s getting a lot hotter than you signed on for,” he added. “I just thought—Well, I want you to know there’s no hard feelings if you want to just bag it. For you, this is like spring break. For me, it’s life and death. If they get too close—” He cut himself off before he said something he might regret.

  The spring break line pissed her off. “Jesus, Brad, I’m dying. That’s not exactly a vacation.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “I just meant that the stakes are different for you. If this all goes to shit, you get to go home. I don’t exactly have that option.”

  Nicki’s gut seized with the tone of his voice. There was a finality to it, a subtext that terrified her. “What are you saying?”

  Brad returned his eyes to the road. “Forget it.”

  “No, I won’t forget it. What are you telling me?”

  “I’m telling you exactly what I said. I’m not going back to prison.”

  “Neither am I.”

  Brad kept his eyes on the road as he said, “It’s not the same.”

  There it was again. “So, what, you’re going to kill yourself if the cops get too close?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “That’s crazy, Brad. That’s totally insane.”

  She saw the muscles in his jaw flex as he worked to swallow anger. “You haven’t been there, Nicki. You don’t know.”

  “Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea.”

  “Well, you’re wrong,” he snapped. “You think that because you’re sick, you’ve got the shittiest deal in the world. Trust me. It can get a lot worse than that.”

  “Spoken like somebody who has a life ahead of him,” Nicki said. It was one of the most powerful lines in her repertoire, guaranteed to shut down an argument, the one verbal thrust for which there was no parry.

  But Brad didn’t back down. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’m already dead. Don’t you get it? My clock started ticking the second I walked out of prison. It’s just a matter of time. There is no transplant that can prolong anything for me. Today, tomorrow, next week, one way or the other, I’m dead.”

  “But you can’t do that,” Nicki argued. “It’s too . . .” She struggled for the right word. “Easy.”

  Brad laughed. “If it were easy, I’d have done it by now. I’d have done it after my first week in the joint. Killing yourself might be a lot of things, but easy isn’t one of them.”

  Nicki opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again. What was there to say?

  “And you’re a fine one to talk about easy. If you believed the crap you’re slinging you’d be in a hospital, squeezing out every drop of hope. Yet, here you are.”

  The words hit Nicki hard. She’d never thought about this adventure with Brad being a weird kind of extended suicide pact. Now that she did think about it, she didn’t like it at all. “It doesn’t matter for me,” she said. “I’ve got a year. Maybe. At best. It might as well be a week or a second. You could have another fifty, seventy-five years ahead of you.”

  Brad scowled. “I think you really think that’s a good thing.” He looked at her. “I’m twe
nty-two years old, Nicki. Do you realize that if the State of Michigan has its way, I’ll be forty-six before I even get my first parole hearing? And nobody ever gets out on their first hearing. I can’t do that. I can’t.”

  “Won’t,” Nicki corrected.

  He shrugged. “Okay, I won’t spend the rest of my life in prison, just as I won’t sit here and argue the point with you. That’s not to piss you off, that’s just the way it is. You’ve never lived with that kind of violence, and until you have, there’s no way for you to understand.”

  Nicki could tell from his body language that this discussion was over. Maybe the smart play for her really would be to just walk away. Brad was a criminal, for God’s sake. A cute criminal, and sweet and mostly kind, but everything about him was criminal. He stole cars, he lashed out at old men. He participated in armed robberies where people were killed. Having seen for herself how horrendous a thing that was to do, how could she possibly continue this way?

  They were barely moving. All she had to do was open the door, and it would be all over. She wasn’t a prisoner. Pull the handle, open the door, take a step, and there you go. There was no way this could turn out well, not for either of them. If Nicki had a brain in her head, she’d get as far away from Brad as she could, and head on back to—

  What?

  What was there for her to return to? A hospital room and a pump in her gut? Slow death in a sterile room. Just like Mom.

  “What are you thinking?” Brad asked, breaking the silence.

  Nicki forced herself to look right at him as she answered. “You never laughed at me,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  She felt the heat rising in her cheeks. “I was trying to figure out a reason to stay here, a reason not to run back like a scared little girl.”

  Confusion etched Brad’s brow. “When didn’t I laugh?”

  “You know, back then. Back in the old days, when you lived next door and I was drooling over you. When I pretended to be so worldly, talking about things I thought would impress you, you never laughed. You could have. I was always afraid that you would, but it would have destroyed me.”

  “This is a high-price reward for showing a little restraint.”

  Nicki was getting to the difficult part. “That’s just part of it. You were the boy of my dreams.”

  Brad grew uncomfortable, shifting in his seat.

  She went on, “I used to do those crazy things, like writing my name as Nicolette Ward, and I used to hate myself for it, because I knew that nobody as gorgeous as you would ever think twice about me.”

  He groaned, “Oh, God.”

  “I know. It was puppy love. But even after you left, I used to dream that we’d get married and we’d go on long drives, just the two of us.”

  He shifted uncomfortably again.

  “This is the dream,” she said. “Silly, huh?”

  Brad didn’t know what to say.

  “Too much information?” Nicki ventured.

  He answered, “No! I guess maybe I’m just not all that comfortable with the idea of being ‘gorgeous.’ ”

  They shared a laugh. “Your turn,” Nicki said. “What happened to your parents?” The question seemed to startle him, so she added, “I know your mother’s in jail, but I don’t know anything else.”

  He quipped, “I guess that jail thing is the family business.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She sold drugs to the wrong guy. Sold a lot of them, in fact, got hit on a federal beef and sent up for like, forever.”

  “Oh, that’s awful.”

  “Last time I saw her, I was eight. I never did know who my dad was. I don’t think my mother did, either. At least she couldn’t narrow it down to one paying customer.”

  Nicki gasped. “You mean she was a pros . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word.

  “Prostitute? No, she was a whore. A crack whore at that. I don’t remember a single day when I could look in her face and not see her stoned. She decided to keep me around for the welfare money. She got a check every month to take care of me.” He scoffed. “Now, there was money well spent.”

  “She spent it on drugs instead?”

  “I don’t know what the hell she spent it on.” As he mined deeper into the memories, Brad’s tone hardened, and the muscles in his jaw flexed. “But it wasn’t on dinners and birthday cakes, I can tell you that. Neighbors were the only reason I didn’t starve to death. They fed me and the other stray cats. All of us alive because nobody got around to putting us in a sack and drowning us in the river.”

  It was an image that hit Nicki hard. No wonder Brad had learned how to hot-wire cars. No wonder he could compartmentalize his thoughts so well.

  “When they first arrested her, I was scared to death,” Brad continued. “I didn’t know what would become of me. I didn’t know where I would live, or how I was going to do anything. I mean, my mom wasn’t good for anything useful, but at least she was there, you know? At least there was another heartbeat in the room at night. But then this nice social worker—her name was Alice—took me away from our apartment, and put me in this group home, just for one night. She actually stayed in the room with me.

  “Alice settled me down by telling me how they’d get help for Mom, and how they’d get all the drugs out of her system so she could be healthy again. And in the meantime, I would be sent to live with some other really nice people. You know? Like, I was going to be taken in by the Brady Bunch or something. I had these images in my head—I mean, really, this is how I thought—I had these images in my head of me tossing a ball around in some front yard somewhere, hanging out in the neighborhoods where kids like me never had a chance in hell of living. It was like I’d get this really big jump start on my life. And then, after Mom was healthy again, she’d join us, and everything would be just like it was on television.

  “Then I hit the first foster home. Nice enough people—I mean, they fed me and didn’t scream at me—but they were both four hundred years old and smelled like dirty underwear. That’s what I remember most about them, seriously. They smelled like dirty underwear.”

  Nicki laughed. “How pleasant.”

  “No, it wasn’t. I stayed there for a few days, I guess, maybe a few weeks, they all run together after a while. They drove me to a new school where I’d never been before, with kids who only knew that I was somebody’s foster. That meant I was fair game for anything anyone wanted to do. Who’s gonna complain to the principal, right?”

  “What, did they beat you up and stuff?”

  “Only at the beginning. This ‘nobody cares’ shit cuts both way, you know? It wasn’t like I was gonna get in trouble at home if I got expelled from school. There’s nothing like getting beat up a few times yourself to teach you how to beat the shit out of others. I was never in one school long enough to have any friends, so it was fine with me to have only enemies. Just so long as they were all scared shitless of me. In the long run, it’s easiest to have one really nasty, nose-crushing, ball-busting fight at the beginning, so that everybody knows to stay the hell away from you. When you’re the new kid and you’re nice, people just think you’re a pussy.”

  “So, how many fights did you get into?”

  Brad launched a bitter laugh. “Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. How many days are there in a school year? Times how many years in school. I was the baddest guy in the building, all the time. It was the way I survived.”

  A station wagon on their left was pacing the Sebring as the traffic crept along, its turn signal blinking relentlessly. When Brad paused to let a space open up in front, the guy behind them blasted them with his horn. Nicki spun in her seat and gave the guy the finger.

  “Way to go,” Brad laughed.

  “Fastest finger in New York.” She let a moment pass before pressing for more. “What happened to you after you left the Bensons?”

  Brad didn’t want to go there. “You want the first day or the second?”

  “There’s a difference
?”

  Brad considered changing the subject, and then just went for it. What the hell. “The Bensons were fed up with me. All of the foster families got fed up with me. It’s my special gift. But giving the devil his due, they did keep me for almost two years. That was, like, eight months longer than anyone else. Anyway, the burglary beef was the final straw, I guess, and your father’s never-ending desire to make his house a convent. Since I was seventeen then, just a few months from official sorry-pal-you’re-on-your-own emancipation, the social workers didn’t want to endanger another family by putting me in with them, so they sent me to another group home.”

  “A detention center?”

  “Not really, but it might as well have been. Nasty-ass place. One thing for sure, I wasn’t the baddest guy in the house anymore. There, I wasn’t even in the top ten. So, after one night, I said screw it. I packed my stuff into my school backpack, walked out the door in the morning, and never checked back in. I lived on the streets after that.”

  Nicki looked horrified.

  “It’s not that bad,” he said, shooting her a smile. Then he had to hit his brakes hard to keep from hitting that station wagon, whose driver had finally decided to move over.

  “It has to be scary,” Nicki said.

  Brad shrugged. “You learn who to stay away from, and who you can trust. I’ll tell you what surprised the hell out of me is that there really is a homeless community. Just like you get to know people in your neighborhood because you go to the same clubs or the same church, us street bums do okay taking care of each other.”

  “How did you live? On handouts?”

  “I wish. You see, that’s what the smart ones do. You can make a pretty decent living panhandling if you’re not one of the drooling crazies. My age kinda worked against me there. People look at a homeless guy who’s sixty and they feel sorry for him. Try that when you’re a teenager, and you just get a lot of lectures about your work ethic.”

  He intercepted the look that flashed across Nicki’s face.

  “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” He laughed. “You’re one of the lecturers.”

  “Well, why should you get handouts when you’re perfectly capable of working?”