I heard her stop and say, “I’m very sorry, Rob. Most times, when you hear hoof beats, it’s horses. But sometimes, it’s zebras. You can stay right there and we’ll bring some pillows and blankets to make you comfortable. You did good work getting her here and immobilizing her arm. She should be ready to leave by four, four-thirty. I’ll go with you in the helicopter.”
I BECAME PROBABLY the only patient in the history of Duluth Summit Hospital to be medevac’d in order to beat the dawn. I had never seen the sunrise from high in the sky, and of course, I’d never been in a helicopter. From the way they appear to move, so fleet and graceful, you imagine they’d feel swift and weightless as a dragonfly. But the experience was like being shaken in a soup can, hot and noisy and bumpy, each voice echoing and the chuffing of the blades deafening, infernal.
Except for the patient, everyone’s issued big rubber ear muffs. They all end up shouting, straining to be heard over the sound of the rotors. The ride was also weirdly unstable, scary, not the flying carpet of efficient medical reassurance you expect for those in the worst case. In the worst case, though, most of the injured are probably zonked.
After an eternity, we landed. The rosy pink glow of morning filled the air as the door opened. The doctor said, “Give her … blur of numbers … Dilaudid … blur of words … push. No, right now. Before you move her again.”
I went flying again, but without leaving the bed. My mother’s stern, sweet face loomed over me, then Dr. Andrew’s … and then nothingness. My last thought was that this was the closest I’d been to sunlight in a long, long time.
I SLEPT AND woke. There was Rob: cleaned up and childlike, with little-boy comb marks in his wet hair. He sat in the chair beside my bed, in a dark room where a small lamp was softly shaded. Only after smiling at him did I notice the dark circles under his eyes.
“What time is it?” I sounded like a frog. My throat had never been so parched.
“Seven.”
“All this time, just two hours?”
“It’s seven at night, Allie.”
“Oh, wow.”
“Juliet just left,” he said. “She said to give you a kiss from her.” He kissed me, on the forehead.
I wanted to say, what about us? What about last night? I’m sure that about a billion girls everywhere on earth were saying just that, in those precise terms, at that exact moment. Rob added, “Now, I want to give you a kiss from me. But I don’t know if I should.”
“Well, I think you should at least give me some ice chips.” At that moment, I realized that I had already been chewing ice chips. The drugs created a very weird set of feelings, as though I were remembering my present, instead of my past.
He chewed his dry lips.
“Maybe it was a sign. Your getting hurt,” he said.
“A sign of what?”
“That we weren’t supposed to be together. Like that.”
“You don’t believe in signs,” I croaked. “Maybe that was a sign that you should believe in signs.” Abruptly I felt weary and nauseated and dizzy, as though the doctor had somehow misconnected some of my strings so that I had a pulse on the front of my elbow instead of my wrist. “I don’t feel like kissing or debating kissing, Rob. I feel like sleeping.”
“Go ahead.”
“Okay.” I shut my eyes. Then I opened them. “Did you see your film?”
Rob smiled, and I had to reconsider the kissing.
“It was awesome. That was sweet of you, Allie.” His smile flickered. “I had my phone on to film you, too, and when you fell, I was running to you but I tried to get the license plate. I didn’t. But it’s an Alfa Romeo. There are only three Alfa Romeos in Iron County. One belongs to Warwick Quinn, you know, the anchor.…”
I thought I had said something wrong, something that I wouldn’t remember I’d said until he left the room. “I know who he is.”
“And the other two belong to Stephen Tabor.”
“So that was Dr. Steve who tried to wipe me out?” I tried to sit up, and moaned so loudly that a nurse hurried into the room and pushed my pain medicine button. I collapsed back against the pillows and winced. “That would be funny if it wasn’t so nuts. The country coroner is trying to kill me? For what, body parts? And that girl in the apartment, too? The only problem being, of course, that the guy wasn’t Dr. Stephen?”
“That’s the weird part.”
“That’s the weird part?” I was the one on drugs, yet the previous eight hours of our lives had contained more sheer weirdness than the previous eight years. “What’s the weird part?”
“He’s not here,” said Rob. “Dr. Stephen’s not here. Dr. Andrew and Dr. Stephen are in London for the week, for some graduation or something.”
“But he owns the apartment building.” Just as fast as I’d been worked up, I was slipping back down into the welcome haze of the drugs. “Where Tessa and Tavish live—you know, the lady I work for and her baby. Where the body was.”
“The car’s in his garage on this kind of lift thing he has to stack his sports cars up when he’s not using them.”
I squinted at him. Since when had he become an expert on cars? “How … you … know?”
“I told Gina, your mom’s friend, that I saw a car like he has. And she said he must be from Chicago. That’s Dr. Stephen’s baby. He would never let anyone else drive it. There’s no way it’s the same guy you saw that night. There’s no way it was the same guy who tried to sideswipe you. Are you sure, Allie?”
“Sure … and not so sure.”
“I mean, are you sure that you saw anyone in there, I mean the second time?”
“Rob, I’m tired. My head hurts and my arm kills. I’m sleepy.”
“I’ll let you sleep for a little while,” Rob said. “The cop is out there. I’ll tell him to come back.”
WHEN I AWOKE, only Juliet was in the room with me. She stood over my bed. For a moment, alone with my best friend, I was afraid. Then, I took a deep clean breath. Juliet kissed me on both cheeks. Funny: it was something we’d decided to do on a whim about a year ago: kiss each other on both cheeks Euro-style. It was an inside joke that never really took. We hadn’t done it in months. The last time we had, our lives were a lot less complicated. Or at least mine was.
“I can’t leave you alone for one day,” she said. “Much less a couple of weeks.”
Was this her way of saying she was sorry she hadn’t been with us? Was it her way of saying she was sorry she hadn’t protected me from Blondie? What the hell was it her deliberately obscure way of saying?
“You’re supposed to have a close relationship to the earth, but not that close!” she joked. Leaning near to my cheek, she added, “Bear, quit scaring the hell out of me. I never thought I’d say I was glad anybody had a broken arm, but when you consider the alternative.…” She clucked her tongue.
What’s wrong? I wondered. Her voice was off. Her posture was too posey-phony. She stood like an actor in a play, as though she wanted everyone in the cheap seats to see how very sincere she was. It wasn’t the drugs playing games with my brain. Everything about her was false.
She turned toward the door. “Rob, how much of this do you think is Allie-Bear seeing things? Or did a phantom really try to knock you off the parking lot?”
“Somebody did,” Rob said. He came in without knocking, not that anyone expected him to. “Somebody really did. It’s absolutely not funny, Juliet.”
“It sounds like a foreign movie,” she replied.
“Juliet, it happened just like I said, before she woke up.”
Rob’s voice flattened. “I got the ripped up elbow to prove it.”
“You’re hurt?” I said, trying to sit up, to look in his eyes.
He hesitated at the foot of the bed. “I jumped away from that car and cut my elbow up. It’s nothing.”
“I thought the rope was around your waist.”
“It was. I was just adjusting it when I heard the car behind me. Basically, I wanted to tie it, so I cou
ld adjust the camera … I had it in my hands for a couple of seconds, right at the wrong time.”
There was something wrong in his voice too, something wrong with what he said. It sounded rehearsed.
“It couldn’t have been the guy from that night,” Juliet explained, as though I was a trauma victim, as though Rob had not just admitted to breaking focus with me before Blondie ever came along. I’d never considered the mechanism by which the rope went slack. That would have happened only if Rob had been hurt. That’s when it hit me: He’s ashamed. Rob hadn’t been messing around with the camera. He’d dropped the rope. Which meant he’d dropped me. Out of fear. He’d had my back, literally, and he’d let go.
“Maybe it’s some effect from her medication,” Juliet said. “That makes her keep thinking she sees him.”
I glared at her. “Why is this about my mental problems instead of some freaky stranger? I don’t take medication. Just sleeping pills and not very often. And hallucinating cars and dead people isn’t a side effect.” On the other hand, I wished I had imagined it. A little crazy in exchange for a lifetime of fear? It would have been a good deal. Before I could raise my voice even louder, my little sister burst in with my mom. Angela took one look at me and started to cry.
“Angie, I’m okay,” I said. “I’m really, really okay.”
“I don’t want to go to school,” Angie sobbed, leaning against Juliet. “I should stay here and read to you.” Despite my pain and confusion, I almost laughed. I saw my mom’s lips twitch.
“You can come back right after school, Angela,” Mom said.
Juliet kneeled down and hugged Angela. “Pick which pocket,” she whispered.
Through her tears, Angela mustered a grin. She was nine and greedy as a crow. She pointed to the right side of Juliet’s suede jacket.
“I can’t fool you!” Juliet cried. She pulled out a tiny bottle of nail polish, the kind of garish pink-orange only a girl who’d just recently stopped using her hands as shovels could have loved. I felt vaguely sick. I could have scripted this scene myself. Angela had always worshipped Juliet in a starstruck sort of way. Juliet was everything glamorous and carefree that I wasn’t, like someone on the red carpet, at least by the standards of Iron Harbor. In turn, Juliet had always treated Angela like a midget princess: first bearing gifts of sequined hair bands and matching plastic clogs with light-up Disney princesses on them, then nail polish to compliment the skinny jeans, butterfly tops, and chocolate bars as big as her head. “If Allie was really going to stay sick, wouldn’t I be crying too?”
Angie nodded.
“So, I’m not crying. After she takes you to school, your mom is coming right back here. And Rob is here. And I’m here. And we’ll take care of her.”
My sister’s gaze focused on Juliet. “Okay,” she said.
“Okay.”
Mom cleared her throat. “Let’s give Allie some time alone with her friends. We’ll be back soon.”
When my sister was gone and the door closed, I asked Juliet, “Are you psychic or a sociopath? Nail polish?”
She looked at me as if I were the one who’d been body-snatched. “I’m logical, Allie. I figured that she would be here, and I figured she would be upset the first time she saw you.”
“You’re good.”
She didn’t respond. No, having performed a magic trick, Juliet then decided to disappear down a rabbit hole. Poof! How convenient! Yes, it seemed that she’d forgotten she had to be somewhere right at that moment, somewhere else. She started busily fussing with her hair and her jeans. If body language could be translated into speech, Juliet’s would have announced: Well, my work here is done. Attempting to muddy the brain of a drugged, post-surgical girl was my mission, and now I’m history.
She kissed me. Her “love you” was light, the drop of a leaf.
The door closed.
I waited for Rob to say something. Finally he did. Of course, they were the words every girl fantasizes when she wants to stab herself through her own heart. “Allie. I hate to do this.”
“Don’t then.”
“I have to.”
“Just don’t.”
“I don’t think I’m good enough for you, Allie. Not after what happened last night.”
“What really did happen?”
“I heard the car. And he was coming right at me. And I …”
“And you let me go. You dropped the rope to get away.”
He stared down at the floor and squeezed his eyes shut. “Yeah. Which is why I can’t be with you. I don’t even have the right to be your friend.”
I forced myself to take a deep breath. “Everybody gets scared Rob. You acted out of instinct. You knew I could take care of myself.” The words sounded as if someone else were speaking them. I couldn’t tell if it was the drugs or the pain.
He shook his head, still avoiding my gaze. “I should have held on to you. No matter what. But I let go.”
“Well, I shouldn’t do Parkour if I can’t take care of myself,” I said quietly. Maybe it was the drugs, but I added the thing you should never say, even if you’re being tortured. “Don’t you want to be with me?”
Rob straightened and shrugged. Finally he looked me in the eye. “The question is, how could you want to be with me? Shh. Don’t answer.” He leaned over and kissed my hair. “I’ll come by tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “I have a lot of thinking to do.”
Rob bit the inside of his cheek. “Okay. That makes sense,” he said. I watched him leave. The door closed behind him. We were no longer the tres compadres or even a Tribe of Two. I was alone: a Tribe of One, a single Dark Star.
Maybe it’s not possible to experience a broken heart when you’ve had a mutually exclusive relationship for less than thirty minutes. But that’s how it felt.
Still, I had pride. I used it like a fossil fuel. I ran on it. Every time I seemed certain to scream or wail or sob if Rob hadn’t called (not to mention Juliet, for whom I’d wrestled with the kind of feelings you have for freshwater sharks and Ebola virus), I topped off my pride tank and kept going. Like Juliet, I went on sabbatical. I vanished for the rest of the summer.
I’d left the proverbial balls in their courts. They had to make the first moves. I’d done what I could. Besides, I was the one with the freaking broken arm.
Another dull night.
Another sleepless day.
More pain in my arm. More painkillers to numb it.
If being in my room for basically eight weeks didn’t do much for my mood or sanity, it did do a great deal for my mind in other ways—good, bad, and pathetically useful. I became the living authority on Ellen and the newest incarnation of Oprah. I learned all the things even smart people will do to fawn on celebrities. I learned how dysfunctional families will rip each other to shreds for a piece of the limelight. On one show, a woman who’d married her daughter’s boyfriend revealed her pregnancy. How would Christmas morning look at that house, a year down the road?
In addition to these lofty pursuits, I discovered that a semester’s course work in AP English takes just about exactly four weeks of seven-hour days. When school actually started, I’d read Virginia Woolf and who was afraid of her; I’d read James Joyce (Dublin), Joyce Carol Oates (not Dublin), and the Millers, Henry and Arthur (way more exotic than Dublin). I’d written papers about all of them.
On top of all that, I started something new.
I began to research serial killers.
Of course, this only began after I’d once again scoured the police records for any sign of any injured or dead young women with dark hair. There were none. But the total number of missing young women in a two hundred mile radius of Iron Harbor over the last decade was truly horrifying: there were over two dozen.
What I learned confirmed the few things I’d probably gleaned from snippets of A&E shows. These types of murderers looked and acted like everyone else so much of the time, nobody could believe what they did the rest of the time. They
worked in restaurants. They drove buses and went to law school. They wrote poems for Comp II, one about “reaper’s eyes” that didn’t refer to harvesting the corn. Their histories, their kills, their habits of mind, their stealth, boldness and uncanny good luck (if you can call it that) opened a new world: the world of the abyss. There was no bottom. Ted Bundy abducted and killed two girls in one night, not once but twice. Alex Rendell brought his Big Ten soccer team a national title; but his real gift was as a marathon death merchant: he cut the throats of groupies in twenty states.
Oddly, the more I read, the less I feared. These guys weren’t animals; that would be insulting to animals. And they weren’t Quantum Physics, either; they were Algebra I. They did the same things over and over, for two reasons. The first? They were compelled to do it. At first they loved it, too. It was their addiction, their crack. They’d gotten a taste and just couldn’t say no again, no matter how disgusted they were with their own actions. They’d created a wall of denial that would make any drug addict or alcoholic seem like a saint. The other reason? They were good at it—probably better at it than they’d ever been at anything in their lives. And that private victory, that “another-one-down-and-nobody-knows” feeling was tied up with the thrill of secrecy and denial, too.
Sometimes after reading a particularly gruesome passage, I thought of Rob and me. I pictured that first moment we hopped into his Jeep to sneak to Duluth to do Parkour without Juliet. I remembered that first kick of excitement, what it felt like to let Juliet go. To kiss Rob and know that I was the one. I also remembered a lot of weird and terrible stuff, though, too—mostly about the absence of life in the ghoulish faces of those poor women I’d glimpsed in Blondie’s apartment. I remembered Blondie’s car disappearing into the night after trying to kill Rob and me. I remembered all those moments a thousand times, and I still felt just as icky and unsettled.
A “sabbatical” does that to you.
EVERY WEEK, I had to get my arm checked.
My cast was a flexi-mold. I felt like barfing whenever they changed it, despite the efforts of the medical appliance makers to amuse me with a choice of subtle blue or wild paisley. My arm transformed into an old-lady’s arm: pale and shriveled. I couldn’t exercise, so I lost strength. The pain lessened but the itching drove me mad. Babysitting Tavish became my only real connection to the outside world, beyond my immediate family and doctors. I had to admit, showing up at Tabor Oaks three times a week was a thrill, like I was getting one over on Blondie.