How Lucky You Are (9781455518548)

by Kusek Lewis, Kristyn

  Dr. Meyer leans against the wall and slowly sways back and forth against it as if she’s scratching an itch on her back. The casual gesture might put me off if not for the thoughtful cadence of her voice and the way that her eyes hold mine despite the constant blur of people blazing past us in the hall every few seconds. I lean back against the wall behind me.

  “Your friend has suffered from an epidural hematoma,” she says. “It’s a brain injury that affects the middle meningeal artery, which is one of the arteries that supplies blood to the brain. The hematoma, or blood mass, forms on the outside of the dura, which you can think of as the protective layer that covers the brain.” She cups her right hand into a C shape and makes an arc, back and forth, to clarify her explanation. “She’s in surgery, where our neurology team is working to remove the mass.”

  I stare at a smudge on the wall behind her head, waiting for her words to settle into place. “Is she going to be okay?” I sputter. My mouth feels like I’ve been chewing on sawdust.

  “These hematomas are traumatic injuries, meaning that they result from some sort of blow to the head. Sometimes from car accidents, sometimes from an altercation of some sort.” I can tell from the way that she says it that this is not the first time she’s given this speech. “I know that it must have been frightening when you saw her. She seemed confused? Not lucid?”

  When I nod, the movement feels severe enough to make me topple over. I try a few deep breaths. The doctor keeps talking. I lean my head back on the wall behind me and shift my weight more sturdily toward my feet.

  “Her recovery depends on how long it’s been since the injury occurred. Usually sufferers have a lucid period immediately following the trauma and then they quickly decline. Did you talk to her at all today? Did she complain about being tired? Having a headache?”

  “I didn’t talk to her today.” I messed around online when I first got into the bakery, reading the online comments about the Times article. I made myself a cappuccino. I talked to Randy about a chocolate hazelnut torte recipe I read in Food & Wine the night before. I called the farmer who supplies my eggs. Meanwhile, Amy…​I shake off the thought and try to refocus on the doctor.

  “The good news is that, with these kinds of injuries, a full recovery is very possible if the patient gets into surgery quickly enough.”

  “And if they don’t? What if it’s been too long?” I put my hands to my mouth, crossing my fingers over each other.

  The doctor reaches out and squeezes my shoulder.

  “What? What does that mean?” I remember this now: the not knowing, the feeling that you are the only one in the hospital who isn’t in on something.

  “It will be another few hours before we know how this is going to go,” she says. “Is there somebody who can come be with you? Somebody whom I can call?”

  I shake my head impatiently. “Wait a second. What if it’s been too long? What if she can’t recover?”

  “Let’s not focus on the what-ifs right now,” she says. “So far, the surgery is progressing in the way that it should. Let’s focus on that. Are you sure I can’t call somebody for you?”

  “I can do it,” I say.

  The doctor reaches forward to pat my arm and I flinch. She notices and takes a step back. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I have some more news.”

  I slump back against the wall and slide down to the floor. I watch Dr. Meyer weave her way through the crowded mass of people and stretchers and wheelchairs like she is an expert skier traversing a well-known slope. When she disappears behind a pair of doors, I take a deep breath and dig my hand into the front pocket of my jeans for my phone.

  “A listing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina,” I say when the operator comes on. “Davis and Margaret Lane.” I swallow against the web of phlegm in the back of my throat. “Yes, it’s a residence.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I can’t just sit here and wait. It will be four hours before Amy’s family can get here, and probably more with traffic. When Amy’s mother picked up the phone, probably expecting that it would be one of her daughters, a neighbor, a telemarketer, I stammered that Amy had been in an accident and that they needed to get here as soon as they could. It’s a head injury, I’d told her, and when she asked where Mike was and I said I didn’t know, and that Emma was safe at my house, that was all she needed to hear before she said they were getting in the car and hung up the phone. She wasn’t hysterical, as I’d feared. She didn’t ask any other questions. In fact, when I pressed the “end” button on my phone, I almost felt as if she’d been expecting and dreading this call.

  I don’t feel right leaving Amy alone, but I can’t stay here. I need to do something. I call Kate and ask her to come to the hospital. When she arrives, there are tears in her eyes. “I’ll call you if anything happens,” she says, pressing her keys into my hands because my car is still in Amy’s driveway. “Go.” She nods. “Go.”

  I park Kate’s car in front of the Maple Hill police department. It’s dusk, usually my favorite time of day, but today it feels ominous and angry, a reminder that I don’t need. I zip my jacket against the wind as I walk toward the precinct and shove my hands in my pockets, twisting the scraps of soggy tissue inside. Dr. Meyer couldn’t tell me how long it would be before Amy would speak, or if she ever would. This is my chance to speak for her, and I pray that I will be able to say everything that needs to be said.

  The police department is right in the middle of town, smack in the center of the bull’s-eye if you were to look at an aerial map of the city I’ve lived in all my life. Yet standing frozen in front of the entrance, I realize that I’ve never really noticed it until now. There is a refurbished old-fashioned movie theater around the corner that Larry drags me to occasionally to see the classic westerns they sometimes play, and a frame shop at the end of the block where I’d had some of my grandmother’s recipes framed for my office a couple of years ago. How nearsighted has my life been that I’ve never noticed the cavalry of police cruisers lined up like dominoes in front of the building, or the proud flagpole in a patch of grass in the middle of the circular drive, with the Virginia state flag flapping loudly in the wind? It strikes me that if somebody came into the bakery, sweaty and gasping for breath and screaming for the address of the nearest police station, it would have taken me a minute to remember exactly where this place is. It is so strange what you don’t notice until you absolutely have to. It is so odd what you can completely pass over.

  The precinct is quieter than I imagined it would be, a stark contrast to the hustle of the emergency room I’ve just left. The officer at the front counter is studying something on his computer. “I’d like to talk to somebody about my friend Amy Rutherford,” I start, my voice not nearly as authoritative as it had sounded in my head when I’d practiced on the way over. “Your officers found her in her house this afternoon. I’m Waverly Brown. I gave a statement.”

  “Rutherford?” the officer repeats, wrinkling his brow. He scratches the side of his face. His skin is pockmarked and he needs to shave. “Hold on a minute.”

  He stands and disappears behind the closed door on the other side of the counter.

  I wait, shuffling my feet against the sparkly-flecked linoleum floor. A door down the hall to my left opens and the wind rushes in.

  “This is ridiculous!” a voice shouts.

  I turn toward the door.

  Mike!

  He is a good thirty feet away from me, handcuffed between two cops. The moment I hear his voice, I want to throw myself down the hall and hurt him as badly as I possibly can. I want him to suffer. But because I’m here for Amy, I force myself to stand still. It’s like trying to ignore a magnetic pull, like I’m on the losing end of an invisible game of tug-of-war, but I make myself stand frozen. I have to keep my composure. I am here for Amy.

  “Hey!” he yells, trying to get my attention. “Waverly!”

  I can’t help myself—I turn again to look. He’s craning hi
s neck toward me like a dog trying to escape his leash. He may as well be exactly that; my heart is racing as if a rabid pit bull’s careening toward me. When his eyes meet mine, it’s not like it used to be; I don’t feel the sort of mild dislike I used to feel in his presence, the slightly aggravated confusion over what Amy sees in him. Now I see pure evil.

  “Waverly! Come on…Waverly!” I grip the counter in front of me—I’m shaking with rage. It’s obvious that I hear him. I’m the only person in the dim hallway. Thankfully, just before my anger’s about to bubble over, they disappear behind a door.

  “Ma’am?” I hadn’t noticed that the officer I’d spoken with had returned.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, loosening my grip on the counter. I’m breathless.

  “Ma’am, our report says that you gave a statement on the scene.” He must have missed this when I said it on the way in.

  “Yes, but there’s more I need to say. Can I talk to somebody? Add to my statement?” I look down the hall. “That was her husband I just saw. In the handcuffs.”

  “We’re handling everything. Someone will call you if we need more.” He taps the end of his pen impatiently against the counter.

  I grab it and he lurches back. I need to do this for Amy. “I’m sorry,” I say, looking deep into his eyes. “But I must see someone. Please. Please.”

  He rolls his eyes and turns back again. “Give me a minute,” he says. “I’ll see if there’s someone around.”

  The interrogation room is as cold as the walk-in refrigerator at the bakery, and the folding metal chair that the police officer across the table asked me to sit in—she actually sort of pointed her hand toward it when we entered the room—is creaky and rusting along its gray edges, the seating equivalent of an old dented can of peas.

  Every time I shift in my seat, a high-pitched screech erupts from under one of the legs of the chair. After the third or fourth time it happens, the most bizarre thought pops into my head: it’s the kind of coffin-creaking-open noise that plays right before the opening beats of “Thriller.” I think of Jenny Ryan, my childhood next-door neighbor, and how the two of us would spend hours in her living room trying to learn the choreography, pausing and rewinding the tape of the video over and over again on her family’s Betamax. The memory leads me to another one—Amy—dancing on the roof deck of this pubby sort of sports bar that we used to go to in Adams Morgan when we were in our twenties. She would always pull me toward her, bopping her head: “Come on, Waverly! Who cares if no one else is dancing! You’ll never see these people again!” I always wrestled myself away from her, more content to stand against the railing, nurse my beer, and watch. The handful of times when Amy was able to persuade me to dance with her were always at the end of the night, in the safe confines of our across-the-hall apartments, music blaring through our open doors, our upstairs neighbors screaming at us to shut up and go to sleep. I wish now that I’d never turned her down.

  The policewoman sitting across from me—Lieutenant Dillon, her black-and-white plastic badge says—doesn’t flinch as I recite every detail about what I know about Amy and Mike’s relationship. I try to remember everything that I can, to toss out every shoddy scrap of information that comes to me, but the lieutenant doesn’t make it easy for me. I tell her about the injuries I’ve seen. I give her a near-verbatim account of what Amy told me that night at Finelli’s. I explain how Mike skipped counseling and how he belittled her in front of us. I tell her that it was just ten days ago when Amy came to me with a bag under her arm and said that she was leaving him.

  She doesn’t give me any indication that I’m telling her too much or too little or the right thing or the wrong thing. Worse, she doesn’t offer any reason to believe that she is sorry for what’s happened to Amy. I want to believe that she has to be this unemotional to do her job—that we are all the better off for it—but even when I tell her about the welts on Amy’s back and the things that Mike said to her, she looks at me as vacantly as if I’ve been reciting the items on a Chinese takeout menu. She just keeps scribbling and scribbling on the yellow legal pad in front of her, her head bent so deeply that I can see the oily white of her scalp along her part, which is so straight that it looks like she measured it against a ruler. What is it about the police officers in this town that they take such copious notes? I pause to take a breath and think of what else I can tell her. The only sound in the room is the damn chair and the scratch, scratch, scratch of Lieutenant Dillon’s pen against the paper.

  “So what is he being charged with?” I ask.

  “I can’t give you any of that information, Ms. Brown,” the woman says, her head still bent. Even though she is clear across the table, I can smell the sour scent of her coffee breath along with the mint that has failed to cover it up. “So you say that she said that they were working things out? Do you have any reason to think that they weren’t working things out?”

  I shoot forward in my chair. Has this soulless bitch been listening to me at all?

  “Yes,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “I mean, I don’t have specific, concrete reasons. I just—She said that this had been going on for years, and when I was around him lately, he always seemed so angry, and like I said, she said that he had decided not to seek help, which I didn’t think was a very good sign, and she didn’t either. She was ready to leave him, and then she changed her mind. He scared her. She lived in fear of him. Really, I think he brainwashed her.” I shake my head at her, disbelieving. “And, let’s see,” I say, my voice rising. “She’s in critical condition now because he practically beat her to death.” Tears start to roll down my cheeks. I squint my eyes, trying to stop them.

  The officer looks up at me, her head still bent toward the table.

  “I’m sorry.” I shake my head at her, my palms turned up toward the dank, gray ceiling. “I guess I’m the kind of person who believes that if somebody’s an abuser, he doesn’t just suddenly stop one day and turn into a wonderful husband. I mean, she told me that he hit her. She told me it had been happening for three years. I’ve seen the bruises.”

  “But you don’t have anything specific you can tell me about recent abuse?”

  “It was barely over a month ago when I saw the bruises!”

  “But nothing since then?”

  I rub my hands over my face and wish that when I pull them away—I don’t want to pull them away—I will be magically transported somewhere else and none of this will have happened. I’ll be on a beach on the north shore of Oahu or in a bar in Amsterdam, anywhere but here.

  I blink the room back into focus. “No, I guess she hasn’t told me anything about specific incidents since that one that I already told you about,” I finally answer her. I chew on my lip, trying to think of any other details. Then it hits me—my diary. “I don’t know how helpful this would be, because it just repeats everything I’ve told you, but I keep a diary. And even though I haven’t written anything in it about Amy recently, I did make notes after she told me specific things.” I point to the legal pad on the table. “All of the stuff I told you,” I repeat.

  “What kind of notes?” The officer shifts forward in her seat. Could she actually be interested?

  “Well, I don’t keep a detailed diary,” I say. “I mean, I don’t write entries that are pages and pages. Just sentences scribbled here and there, like, ‘February 3, dinner at Italian restaurant. Amy told me about Mike hitting her.’ ”

  Dillon nods and scribbles some more notes. I swear that I’ll see that blue ink for days after this. “But it’s dated? You mark the entries with dates?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, that’s good. That’s really good.”

  I nod back at her. Finally, something.

  “I think that’s it for now,” she says, her eyes following the back-and-forth of her pen over her pad as she reviews her notes. She reaches into her pocket to fish out a business card. “Call me if you think of anything else.”

  I reach out to take it, but she slap
s it on the table like a blackjack dealer. She starts to stand.

  “Wait,” I say over the screech of the chair as I stand. “What happens next?”

  “He’ll be charged.” She’s fumbling with her ballpoint pen, trying to get it to stay tucked behind her ear.

  “Charged with what?” I say.

  “We’ll be in touch if we need anything else from you,” she says, reaching for the doorknob.

  “But wait! Charged with what?” I say.

  She shakes her head—a disallowing, end-of-story shake. “We’ll be in touch.”

  I get in the car to call Larry and check on Emma. Larry tells me that they stopped at the grocery store on the way home, where he bought a frozen pizza for dinner and supplies to make ice cream sundaes. They’ve just come in from playing in the backyard. He says that Emma is now busily stacking the coins that they dumped out of the fish bowl where Larry puts his spare change.

  “Are you okay?” he says.

  I shake my head no and then realize that he can’t see me. “It’s not good, Lare,” I manage. “How am I going to explain to her parents…?”

  “She’s so lucky to have you, hon. We all are.”

  It’s the first time that any tenderness has passed between us since our fight, and I want to be able to tell him that it helps, and that I’m so thankful for him, but the past few hours have me so shaken that I shouldn’t even be behind the wheel of a car, much less trying to string coherent sentences together. “Thank you,” I say. “For everything. Tell Emma that her grandparents and her aunts will be here soon.”

  When I get back to the hospital, Kate is in the waiting room, on the phone with her lawyer. “Still nothing,” she mouths. I sit down next to her, and she wraps an arm around me. I fold myself into her and rest my head on her shoulder. She squeezes my arm. “It’s going to be all right,” she says, and I close my eyes, thankful, for once, for her unshakeable conviction.