If I Die Tonight

by Alison Gaylin

  “He seems nice,” Jackie had tried, after Rafe had left.

  But Wade had just rolled his eyes. “The teacher put us together.” Rafe Burgess, the last friend Jackie had seen Wade spending any time with—and it had stuck in her mind so deeply, she remembered the kid’s first and last name.

  Did Wade have any friends at all?

  Jackie reached the front desk, corralling her thoughts. The nurse was typing into her computer, but when Jackie tapped on the glass, she looked up.

  “I was wondering,” Jackie said, “how is Liam Miller doing?”

  “He is the same, ma’am.”

  “Critical?”

  “If we have any news from intensive care, we will let all of you know.”

  Jackie swallowed. “Are his parents around?”

  “They’re with him, ma’am.”

  “Oh, yes, of course . . .”

  “Intensive care waiting room is reserved for close family. You understand.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I understand.”

  The nurse returned to her computer. Jackie backed away from the desk, her gaze traveling around the room, the unfamiliar faces. Why did I come here? Before now, she hadn’t questioned it. All she’d felt was the need to be here, the need to know. But why? Jackie figured it was for the same reason she slowed down at car accidents. Not to stare at the carnage despite that old saw. Not to rubberneck and get some kind of sick thrill. She did it in order to care about what had happened, and she was certain other people felt the same. To make certain that someone else’s tragedy didn’t go ignored.

  Well, Liam wasn’t being ignored. There had to be more than fifty people in here—a good percentage of the senior class, all of them waiting for him to wake up and speak. Just to the right of the front desk, a boy and a girl were crouched on the floor, staring into a single screen. There was something heartbreaking about the way they huddled together, coping with a feeling that was too big for them, too old. The boy looked up at Jackie. Just for a few seconds, their eyes locked, and Jackie saw in his such despair; the eyes of someone caught in deep, churning water and knowing that he was about to drown, that nobody could help . . .

  The girl, she realized now, was Stacy.

  It had been years since Jackie had seen Helen’s daughter outside of a Facebook photo, but still she felt the warmth of recognition. Stacy’s hair was the same pale blond as it had been when she was a little girl, pillowcase veil pinned to her head. Jackie said her name, and Stacy looked up at her with dull, flat eyes, as though Jackie were just another screen. She doesn’t remember me, Jackie thought, which was more than understandable, given the span of time—an eternity for a teen.

  “Jackie Reed,” she said quietly. “Wade’s mom.”

  “I know.” Stacy’s voice was as flat as her eyes, her face, the whole of her as close to lifeless as a healthy teenage girl could be. Numb from worry. That must be it. Poor girl. “You just missed him,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Wade. That’s why you’re here, right, Mrs. Reed? Wade?” She said Wade’s name like it was an embarrassing ailment. The boy’s eyes stayed on the screen, absorbing the light.

  “Yes,” Jackie said, playing along. “I’m looking for Wade.”

  “He just left,” Stacy said. “My mom showed him out.”

  “She showed him out?” It came out louder than she’d intended. Jackie glanced around the waiting room, at the downcast eyes and sidelong exchanges of teenage shock, of dark amusement, hands thrown over gaping mouths, everyone so studiously not looking at her. Her face felt hot. Sweat trickled down her rib cage.

  Jackie left the waiting room and sprinted down the hall, out the door, into the parking lot. She could see the car leaving just as she got there. Wade’s car. Her old car—a metallic-green Corolla, dented and distinctive as hell, even from this distance.

  “Jackie?” Helen jogged up next to her, cheeks flushed from the cold, shearling coat pulled close to her slim frame. “I didn’t know you’d be coming to the hospital.”

  “What happened with Wade?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your daughter said you escorted him out of the waiting room.”

  “Stacy said that?”

  Jackie exhaled, condensation puffing from her lips. “Not in those words,” she said. “But that’s what she meant. What did he do? Why would he need to be escorted out?”

  “Stacy is upset. She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Helen said. “He stopped in very briefly. I wanted to go out anyway for a breath of fresh air, so I walked out with him.”

  Jackie gave her friend a long look, trying to figure out whether she was being truthful or kind. Helen so frequently went for the latter.

  “Look, Wade came here for the same reason I did,” Helen said, finally. “The same reason Stacy and all her friends did and the same reason you did, Jackie. One of us has been hurt. He was worried. He wanted to know what was going on. He found out, and then he left.”

  “Okay,” Jackie said, believing. Wanting to believe.

  “I’m freezing,” Helen said. “You want to go back in? Maybe get a cup of coffee at the cafeteria?”

  Jackie pulled the belt on her coat tighter. “I should probably just head home.”

  “Okay. See you tomorrow?”

  Jackie nodded. Helen started to head back in.

  “Wait,” Jackie said. She reached into her purse, fingers touching the cat key ring as she grabbed her wallet, slipped out a twenty-dollar bill. “Can you buy Liam flowers from Wade, Connor, and me? Something nice from the hospital gift shop?”

  “Any preference?”

  “Mums if they have them.”

  Helen smiled. “You got it.”

  Jackie gave her a quick, tight hug. She jogged back to her car, thinking, as she had earlier, of Wade’s birth, only she allowed herself now to really remember it—the thunderstorm lighting up the room, Bill’s strong hands on her shoulders, and the Bob Marley tape in the boom box. The breathing and the ice chips and the burning, cooling tears. Bill’s smile. The pink sunrise. The exquisitely fragile weight of her newborn son on her chest.

  Four

  The bag was from Stop & Shop. Wade had probably gotten it out of the kitchen, Connor figured. Mom shopped there all the time. She kept forgetting to bring the canvas bags she’d bought to be environmental, and since Stop & Shop only carried plastic bags, not paper, one of their kitchen drawers was stuffed with them, Mom rationalizing that if they were going to contribute to the destruction of the environment with petroleum products, they should at least try and reuse the bags. The handles were tied tight. The plastic knot pressed into Connor’s palm as he left the house with it, locking the door behind him, walking fast and with his head down so as not to be noticed but not really knowing why. Connor was determined not to open the bag and look inside. The less he knew, the less chance he’d tell someone about it. And he couldn’t tell anyone. He’d promised Wade.

  I can trust you, right, buddy? You won’t say anything?

  It had taken Connor hours to get himself to open his closet door, to look behind the sneakers and baseball mitts and old textbooks and all the other stuff he kept on the floor of it in order to locate the bag his brother had stashed there last night. The thought of the bag had scared him. He’d imagined a Hefty bag with a head in it, a collection of limbs. Not that Wade was capable of anything like that. It was just the way his voice had sounded over the phone . . .

  Connor watched way too many scary movies.

  When he’d finally found the bag and taken it out of the closet, Connor had felt kind of stupid. It was small and white and clean. It didn’t smell, and it couldn’t have weighed more than a few ounces. All this time wasted over a little plastic grocery bag that held . . . what? Something Wade wanted to get rid of. Outside his front gate, Connor jiggled it a little. The thing inside made a shook-shook sound.

  Whatever. It wasn’t a severed head. He’d keep his word and toss it in the Dumpster at the Luk
oil station and then he’d go home and play Minecraft and act as though he’d never been outside at all.

  Connor shivered. It was so cold, and he had left the house without a coat. Why had he waited so long to do this? It had been much warmer out earlier, and now, because of stupid fall, the day was almost over. Mom would be home soon and so would Wade, and he didn’t want to be seen outside by either one of them. Just get it over with. He walked faster, the wind biting at his face, the tips of his ears, creeping under the collar of his flannel shirt.

  And those leaves. Those dumb, noticeable fall leaves . . . Connor’s street was called Maple, and maple trees lined the sidewalks, their leaves now orange, yellow, and red, bright and swirling as cartoon fires. Maple Street was one of Havenkill’s poorer streets, the houses dinky ranch homes with postage-stamp lawns. Nobody had a pool or even a garage, but this time of year, it almost looked impressive. Usually Connor didn’t think much about the changing leaves. His mom always remarked on them—“Look up from your screens and out the window, boys!”—but Connor would roll his eyes. Changing leaves meant fall, which meant back to school, which meant boring. Everybody knew that. “You just love those leaves because they help you sell houses,” Wade had said to Mom once. He hadn’t been wrong.

  But now the leaves seemed too bright. They were drawing attention to Connor, making his neighbors look up from their screens and out their windows, and then they’d see him, the younger Reed boy, walking without a coat, shaking all over. Would they call each other, wondering what he was up to? Would they ask his mom?

  The thing, whatever it was, bounced in the Stop & Shop bag as though it were trying to tell Connor something. Shook-shook-shook . . . I know the story. Don’t you want to look inside, so you can know it too?

  Connor reached the end of his street and crossed onto Orchard, the main road that fed into town. He hugged his shirt tight to his body, his breath coming out in white puffs, the tips of his ears burning now, eyes watering, the thing in the bag shook-shooking away.

  The Lukoil station was three blocks up and across the street. Connor made a run for it, sprinting with all his might. The sidewalk was so cold he could feel it through the soles of his shoes, but at least this was a way to work off these nerves.

  What a day this had been—the police at his door, the fight with Noah, the news about Liam, the phone call from Wade, and now this . . . No. That was wrong. The day hadn’t started with the police at his door. It had started with Wade in his room at three in the morning . . .

  Shook-shook-shook.

  He was sweating, the sweat freezing on his skin, his fingers numb as he clutched the bag. It’s nothing. It’s no big deal. Just trash. Taking out Wade’s trash. He rounded the corner and made for the Lukoil station, but he was barely onto the crosswalk before he heard the screech of tires, a horn honking. And then, the blip of a siren.

  Connor stopped. His hands shot up, a reflex.

  “You’re not under arrest,” said the cop. She talked to him through an opened window, her hand resting on the door of the cruiser. Her face was shaded by her hat, but he remembered her—one of three police officers who’d come to his school at the end of last year for assembly, the one girl officer, telling the seventh and eighth graders about the dangers of heroin. Connor had been in the front row sitting next to Noah, who, in typical clueless Noah Weston fashion, had remarked, loudly, on the girl officer’s hotness. Connor stared back down at the pavement, hoping she didn’t recognize him, hating Noah all over again.

  “Watch where you’re going,” the cop said. “The traffic light’s green. You could have gotten hit.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I mean, officer. I’ll be more careful.”

  “Go back to the curb. Wait for the light to change. Look both ways.”

  Connor went back to the curb, and she sped off. It wasn’t until the police car was gone that he realized his hands were still raised, the bag clutched in one of them like he was a robber from a bank heist movie. He gazed up at the bag. He could see the outline of the object inside—pocket-size and rectangular. A phone?

  Connor dropped his hands. The light turned red and he hurled himself onto the crosswalk, racing across the street to the Lukoil station without looking both ways. When he reached the Dumpster, he fell against the side of it, wheezing. Connor lifted the lid and threw the bag in fast, listening for the soft thump of its landing over the sound of his own breath.

  Done.

  For several seconds, he stayed bent over, eyes on the rusted side of the Dumpster, hands gripping his knees. He breathed deep, ten counts in, ten counts out, until the stitch in his side smoothed out and the balled-up tension inside him started to unravel and, finally, he began to feel normal.

  He straightened up. Behind him, Connor heard the slam of a car door, then footsteps—boots clicking on the concrete, coming closer. A lump formed in his throat. He thought of that cop again. Is she back? Did she see?

  But then he heard something that was, in a way, a lot worse: Mom’s voice saying his name. Connor straightened up. He gave her a small, idiotic wave he wished he could take back.

  She stared at him, looking strange. Like she didn’t know what to do any more than Connor did. “What on earth are you doing here?” Mom said.

  Connor tried his best to think of a lie.

  PEARL’S PHONE JOLTED her awake, the ringtone piercing into a dream that was more memory than imagined: Amy Nathanson falling into the station, mascara running down her face just as it had at 3:00 AM in real life, sopping wet curls clinging to her forehead, yellow and orange, blue, green, and red like a clown. A drowned clown. “Don’t you know who I am?” Said directly to Pearl with such an odd thing going on in her eyes, almost as though she were daring Pearl to say no.

  In real life, Pearl had shaken her head, thinking, What a weird question, and Who cares, before Sergeant Black had called her by her stage name, mollifying her. But in Pearl’s dream, that was all Amy Nathanson had said. “Don’t you know who I am?” Over and over again, until it sounded like nonsense and Pearl wanted to slap her, to scream at her, to handcuff her to the holding bench and leave her there, alone. A boy is in the hospital, barely alive, and all you want is to be recognized. But she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Pearl could never move or speak in her dreams. She wondered if that was normal.

  Pearl’s ringtone was wind-chimey and placid, but it woke her anyway. She’d only been sleeping for an hour, after all, and she had that weird, sick feeling she got when forced awake, the whole room swimming and the dream still nagging at her, the fog of it in her head like a mild fever.

  She ran a hand across her eyes. This was like waking up after a night of drinking, only she was alone in her own apartment with nothing fun to remember or regret. “You know who I am, Pearl,” Amy had hissed at the very end of the dream. “Because it takes a killer to know one.”

  Pearl grabbed the phone from her nightstand. Looked at the screen and saw the number moving in and out of focus. Albany area code. Same number she knew from the reverse directory search. She declined the call. Him again. Third time this week. She wondered if maybe this time, he’d leave a message. “Hi, Dad,” she whispered.

  And now she couldn’t sleep.

  Pearl struggled out of bed and padded over to the kitchenette in her socks. Her floors were hardwood and freezing. Her apartment was as drafty as every other ancient, cracked structure in Havenkill—but Pearl never wore shoes inside; she couldn’t. She lived in a two-story brick complex called the Garden Crest. It was populated almost entirely by senior citizens, and save for the noise of some of the hard-of-hearing residents’ very loud TVs, quiet here was enforced. Mrs. Waterford, who lived in the unit downstairs, had once knocked on Pearl’s door, complaining about her “clomping around up there in those clompy shoes” and warning Pearl that if she wore shoes indoors again, she’d hear from management. This had been at around 5:00 PM on a Saturday, two days after Pearl had moved in. Her shoes had remained by the fron
t door ever since. Pearl was a uniformed police officer, after all. She knew from authority.

  She opened the refrigerator and grabbed a beer, so cold the hand gripping it went numb, and when she popped the top and drank it, she felt frozen inside—the opposite effect of what she’d been going for. Instead of drowsy, she was hyperawake, an image flashing in her brain—Amy Nathanson’s two-story Colonial home in Woodstock with its peeling paint and rows of brown weeds so tall they reached halfway up the front door. The shades had been drawn on every single window. A hoarder’s house if Pearl had ever seen one—and she had seen one. She’d grown up in one.

  Amy had burst out of the cruiser, shedding it like a dead layer of skin or a bad memory, racing up the driveway and around the back of the house, leaving Pearl behind without asking her in. Of course she hadn’t asked her in. No one was welcome here, that was clear—not even a gardener or a painter.

  Pearl took another swallow of beer. She savored the bitterness of it, and remembered the whiskey scent on Amy’s breath in the booking room as she told her about the gig she’d played before the accident. “Club Halifax in Hudson,” she’d said. “Ever heard of it?” All those H’s toxic with the smell. Drunk driver, Pearl had thought then. Still did. Whether or not the carjacking story was true, alcohol had played a role in Amy’s decision-making process.

  As she headed back to her bedroom, gulping down the rest of the beer, Pearl tried to figure out how Sergeant Black had been able to ignore the booze on the breath of his idol. She wondered what he would say if he saw that weed-choked house that belonged to Aimee En. Would he ignore that too, or would he think, as Pearl was thinking now, Something is going on with her. Something sad?

  Trying to sleep again, Pearl flashed on that young boy with his hands in the air, that kid she’d nearly run over when she was coming back from Amy’s—oh the irony of that.