Meet Me Here

by Bryan Bliss

  She steps back in front of me and points to my leg. “You’re bleeding.”

  I try to step around Mallory, but my leg buckles. She tries to look me in the eyes, but I’m so pissed at Jake I can’t focus on anything else. “Hey, hey,” she says. “You need stitches. And a tetanus shot. We’re going to the hospital.”

  “What the hell is he doing?” I ask, finally looking her in the eyes. This softens her face, her words.

  She turns and looks at Jake. “I don’t know. But we have to take care of you first. We’ll take him with us, and then . . .” Her voice trails off.

  “I shouldn’t even care,” I say.

  “Of course you should,” she says. “He’s your brother.”

  A lot of good that’s done so far because I can’t shake the feeling that if I had taken even the smallest of actions to help him, we wouldn’t be standing here right now. But what can I do? Even the simplest moves he makes can’t be anticipated. It’s like living with a bomb that could go off in a hundred different ways.

  Mallory looks down at my leg.

  “But really, that cut. It’s deep.”

  “I’m not leaving here without him,” I say. Jake is back near the edge of the bridge, hands on the railing and chin dropped to his chest. He looks like a fighter resting in his corner between rounds.

  “Wait here,” she says. I object, try to follow her, but the first step I take sends a shiver of pain up my leg that nearly brings me to the ground. She walks over to Jake, puts a hand on his shoulder. I can’t hear what she’s saying; but he eventually nods, and Mallory walks back to me.

  “Okay, let’s go,” she says. “I’m driving.”

  “Is he coming?”

  “Yeah, he’s coming, but I told him he has to sit in the bed because of your leg.”

  “Wait.” I hobble after her. “What did you say to him?”

  She pauses but doesn’t turn around as she says, “I told him you needed him.”

  The hospital is only a few miles away, and the emergency room is packed with every malady one would expect after midnight. In the corner a man holds a blood-soaked rag over his left eye. A woman cradles a toddler in her arms. Two seats away from me a man dutifully presses an ice pack against his wrist, purple and bulbous. Jake stands against the far wall, naturally camouflaged with the infirm.

  Mallory examines my leg from every position she can manage in the seat next to me.

  “It’s fine,” I say.

  She doesn’t believe me, but that doesn’t matter. My real concern is Jake. Every time he shifts against the wall, mostly trying to get a better view of the infomercial that’s playing silently above him on the mounted television, I move forward in my seat like a sprinter at the starting line. Ready to chase him down the hallway, pain be damned. Mallory puts her hand on my shoulder, gently pushing me back into the chair.

  “He’s okay,” she says. And then, as if she realizes that’s not exactly right, she adds, “He’s not going anywhere. All right?”

  We sit this way until a tired-looking woman in blue scrubs comes through the large double doors and calls my name. Jake keeps leaning against the wall, oblivious. I wait a second, and Mallory pointedly says his name, but nothing. When the nurse calls for me again, I raise my hand and struggle to my feet.

  The pain has become biblical now that the adrenaline is gone, but I try not to let the nurse or Mallory see how much it hurts as we walk to the room. I need to get out of here and figure out what I’m going to do with Jake. However, as soon as I’m on the gurney, my head drops onto the shallow hospital pillow, and any fight I had left disappears. My body collapses.

  It doesn’t stop the nurse, who sticks a thermometer in my mouth and wraps a blood pressure cuff around my arm. As it expands, she watches the dial, not saying anything until the air releases.

  “So what happened?”

  “I cut my leg,” I say. She nods, ignoring the blood that’s dripping onto the paper sheet.

  “And how did you do that?”

  “I jumped off a bridge. Into a river.”

  She looks up from her notes. I open my mouth to explain, but she’s already tapping something into the small laptop, shaking her head. When she finishes, she hands Mallory a large piece of gauze.

  “Hold this against his leg. And try to keep him from jumping off anything else until the doctor gets here.”

  Mallory presses the gauze gently against my leg, and I shift my focus to the wall, trying not to worry about Jake. Generic posters of men and women with equally generic diseases stare back at me. On the opposite wall, a kitten hangs from the high branch of a tree. Any other time we would have had a field day with these.

  Mallory lifts the gauze cautiously and frowns. The pain is constant, pulsing like a heartbeat in my calf. Even the smallest movement sends iron rods up my leg. When she puts the gauze back on, I wince.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s just a leg,” I say, trying.

  “You’ve got two,” she responds.

  But it’s flat, an effort where there was none before. Something is missing. Or maybe something has been added: that idiotic kiss, Jake. Now she’s burdened, too. My brother’s inability to function in a spectacular way has bound us together in a new way, a connection I wish we never had to share.

  A doctor comes into the room: a confident woman with a big smile and hair tied back in a ponytail. She looks at my leg and frowns.

  “Please tell me jumping off bridges isn’t some new graduation night challenge,” she says, “because I don’t want to do stitches all night.”

  “It’s not. I was—”

  “He was trying to help his brother,” Mallory says, not looking at me.

  “Well, that seems noble. I guess I’ll give you the stitches.” She smiles, taps the bed. “Okay, back in a sec.”

  Mallory considers my leg again once the doctor has left and says, “Real talk? That’s going to be a badass scar.”

  “I’m going to tell people I got attacked by a puma,” I say weakly.

  “That’s definitely sexier than saying you got it jumping off a bridge. Or at least less redneck.”

  I try to play. I really do. But all I can think about is getting off this table. About getting Jake in my truck and—I have no idea what. But doing something.

  “I was kidding about the redneck thing,” she says.

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m worried about Jake.” I say. The paper sheet crinkles beneath my body as I shift my weight. “Do you mind going out there to check on him for me?”

  She hesitates but then nods. “Yeah, I can do that.”

  “You don’t have to baby-sit him or anything.”

  “Don’t you think he’s fine? I mean, I’m happy to go out there and look, but he’s twenty-two years old. And your leg—I think you need somebody back here with you.”

  I close my eyes. I don’t want to yell at Mallory or further ruin whatever we had tonight. But he could be a hundred years old, and it wouldn’t matter. My leg could be in a bucket of ice on the counter, and it wouldn’t matter. That’s not the point. My words are sharp.

  “If you want to help me, go out there and check on him. Please.”

  She pulls away, her eyes, her body, every word that’s been spoken between us tonight. I regret the way I said it, but she saw him on the bridge, throwing his medals into the river. She has to realize that even something as simple as sitting in a waiting room is enough to warrant concern. He could walk away, could disappear in a puff of smoke. When I don’t say anything else, she stands up without a word and walks out of the room.

  When the doctor comes in to stitch up my leg, Mallory still isn’t back. I’ve pissed her off, but I can’t focus on whether she’s mad at me or not, only on Jake. The doctor hums as she works, not saying much beyond the occasional direction to rotate my leg left or right. As the minutes pass, each one turning painfully and slow around the clock above the door, I convince myself that something’s wrong. When a nurse comes into the roo
m and I jump, the doctor tells me to keep still, that she’s almost done. But I barely hear her. I have to get out of this room. I have to find Jake and Mallory.

  When the doctor’s finished, the same nurse comes back and tells me about pain—“nothing ibuprofen can’t fix”—and then gives me the pills. I nod and nod and nod, until she hands me a piece of paper and helps me off the bed.

  The first step is a killer, and I yelp. But by the time the nurse turns, ready to catch me, I’m already walking as quickly as I can manage.

  I push through the heavy doors to the waiting room and don’t see either Jake or Mallory. For a moment my heart stops racing, and I take a deep breath. They’re outside, I tell myself. They’re walking the halls. Jake is being charming, and Mallory is making it seem like she wasn’t sent out to baby-sit him.

  I’m halfway across the waiting room when Mallory comes rushing in. I don’t need to see her face to know I was kidding myself. She opens her mouth, but I hold up my hand. I already know.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Mallory wants to retrace her steps—to check the cafeteria, the darkened wings of the sleeping hospital—but I limp toward the parking lot. He isn’t getting a late-night snack or haunting the hallways. He’s gone.

  “Maybe we should wait near the emergency room,” Mallory says. “Or maybe he’s by the truck?”

  I keep stumbling forward. He’s not at the truck. He’s off . . . where? Running through the shadows of our small town. But for what reason? That’s the big question, of course. Why he needs to disappear. Why he can’t just turn himself back on, flip whatever switch got rearranged inside his head.

  When we get to the truck and he’s not there, my point proved, I put my head on the hood and try to think. The pain in my leg makes it difficult to form clear thoughts, especially when Mallory’s phone goes off again. I stand up, and my vision swims momentarily. I’m not sure if it’s my leg or everything else.

  “If you’re not going to talk to him, just turn off the phone already,” I say.

  She silences the phone as it rings, giving me a hateful look. “This isn’t my fault.”

  “Thanks for clearing that up,” I say, tweaking my leg as I move to the driver’s side of the door. I grimace, and the annoyance drifts from her face.

  “Give me the keys,” she says, rubbing her hand over her face. “We’ll go find him.”

  “I don’t need you to drive.”

  I try to take a step, and another bolt of pain shoots up my leg. She blocks the door and says, “Listen, I get that you’re worried. And if you want me to help you, I will. But the first thing you need to do is stop being an asshole, and then we can start searching for him.”

  I’m going to scream. To punch the truck until my knuckles bleed. I have to move, to do something before all the pain and anxiety and anger that are inside me mix together and become a bomb. I halfheartedly take another step toward the door, and when Mallory sees me cringe, she leads me to the passenger side and doesn’t move until my seat belt is buckled.

  After she gets in and starts the truck, she takes a deep breath and says: “Do you think he went home?”

  I don’t answer her at first, because I honestly hadn’t thought about that. If we go back now and he’s not there, then I have to answer not only for being out all night, but for losing Jake, too. At this point I have no idea what to say to my parents about either question without being completely honest.

  “I don’t think he would go home,” I finally say, trying to believe it.

  “So . . . where then?”

  I look out into the empty parking lot. Before, when Jake was in high school—when he wasn’t so bent—the possibilities would’ve been endless: parties, friends, football, and baseball games. It’s just as endless now, of course, but there’s no framework to lean on. No way to anticipate even the simplest of scenarios.

  A security guard in a golf cart, yellow lights spinning across the parking lot, pulls up to the driver’s side of the truck and gets out. He shines a flashlight into the cab, the beam right in our eyes.

  “You can’t sit here,” he says. His hair is tied in a long black ponytail, and he glares at us like somebody who doesn’t get paid enough to deal with this sort of bullshit.

  “He was a patient,” Mallory says, motioning to me. “And then his brother ran off. About six-two. Short black hair. Beard. He was wearing—” She looks at me, and I tell the security guard about Jake’s T-shirt, his pants. Mallory turns back to the guard and says, “Did you see him?”

  “You two can’t sit in the parking lot,” he says again, tapping his flashlight on the side of the truck twice. Mallory cocks her head to the side, as if she didn’t understand what he said.

  “We’re not sitting in the parking lot.” Her voice breaks as she says it, straining to be polite. To not rip this guy’s head off. “Like I said, we’re trying to find his brother who’s”— she pauses and then, less confidently, says—“sick.”

  The security guard leans his mouth close to a microphone clipped to his shoulder, pausing to consider us one last time before he presses a button and says, “Five-four, this is Lucien. I have a possible resist and detain.”

  Mallory explodes. “Resist and detain? What the hell are you talking about?”

  The security guard jumps back, dropping his hands into a ready position. As if Mallory were going to come through the window. To be honest, she looks like she just might.

  “Calm down,” he says.

  “I explained to you why we’re sitting here. And now you’re going to detain us?” She laughs. “Yeah, okay.”

  “Mallory,” I say, but she ignores me. Everything she has is trained on this guy. I speak to him instead. “Hey, I’m sorry, sir, but we’re going now. Right, Mallory?”

  The security guard reaches forward, putting one hand on the truck and another on his mic. “Five-four, permission to detain subjects for trespassing.”

  Then he smiles. It’s the smile that gets me.

  “I just got stitches!” I point down to my leg, but he doesn’t look. “How in the hell is that trespassing?”

  “Loitering then.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Mallory makes another frustrated noise and hits the steering wheel. “Listen, mall cop, we’re leaving. It will save us all the embarrassment. That way you can pretend that you were going to detain us and we can go on with our night. So, adios.”

  Lucien steps forward and says, “I can’t let you do that.”

  It all happens in one quick motion. Mallory glances at me and smiles, really quickly, before slamming down the clutch and shifting into first gear, nearly bunny hopping the truck forward, as Lucien yells out. She skips second gear completely, putting us straight in third as we fly across the parking lot. I turn around and watch Lucien run a few steps before skidding to a stop and then racing back to his golf cart. We’re already out of the parking lot before he gets there.

  I keep checking behind us, fully expecting to see cops or at least Lucien’s golf cart with its spinning yellow lights giving chase. But after a few blocks, when nobody appears, Mallory looks over at me and says, “Calm down, that guy’s not doing anything.”

  “I’m not worried. But I do wish you hadn’t gone at him.”

  “Am I the one who dropped an F-bomb on the guy? Uh-uh. So, jump off that pedestal, Bennett.”

  “Well . . .” I start to form an objection, but I can’t. For a second, I almost lob out a lame joke, something like “I don’t think I should be jumping off of anything else tonight.” It would be stupid, but she’d laugh; we’d laugh. Things would snap back to the way they were before. But then reality crashes into me, and of course all I can say is “I just want to find Jake.”

  Mallory turns right onto Fairgrove Church Road. In the distance is the interstate. Wilco, a gas station that surely has some of our fellow graduates hanging around its parking lot, smoking and pretending like they’re not drinking beer, and a Waffle House dot either side o
f the road. She guns the engine, pushing us through a yellow light and at the last second skids into the parking lot of the Waffle House.

  “Okay, first things first. I need to go to the bathroom, and I’m not going in that gas station. It’s disgusting.” She looks at the gas station, then back to the Waffle House. “Not that this is going to be much better. While I’m in there, call your brother. Keep calling him until he answers.”

  How many times has he ignored me, every attempt I’ve made since he came back? Why would a simple phone call make him respond? Mallory reaches over and puts a hand on my forearm.

  “Just try. If he answers, great. We go pick him up, and this is all over. If he doesn’t . . .” She trails off for a moment. “Well, we’ll drive around until we find him. How far could he have gotten?”

  Truthfully, probably not too far. It’s not like he’s in shape. A small belly has formed under his T-shirts, and his face looks subtly different. Like a blurry photograph. But we still didn’t know which direction he had gone. We could drive all night and never find him, actually end up farther away from him than when we started.

  Mallory reaches over and takes my phone from me. She scrolls down, pushes a button, and hands it back. I can hear it ringing as she says, “I’ll only be a minute.”

  When Jake’s voicemail greeting starts, I almost hang up. In the background, someone laughs as the recording starts. “This is Jake”—pause, more background laughter—“leave me a message.” And then, just before the recording cuts off, Jake says, “You two are idiots.” I have no idea who they are or why Jake didn’t redo the whole thing, but he sounds happy in a way I didn’t remember was possible. I keep dialing his number, and every time I listen to the whole thing.

  Somebody hits the hood of my truck, and I jump. Wayne’s standing in front of me, arms spread wide and grinning like a fool. Sinclair gives me a nod.

  “The prodigal son, back again!”

  I don’t immediately get out, both because of my leg and what I know is the reality of officially acknowledging Wayne’s presence. It means pulling him in, letting him know about Jake. I finally open the door when he hits the hood again and says, “What the shit, Bennett!”