Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (16 page)

And, of course, this also meant that right that second the local police were being notified automatically.

Trevor picked up Missy’s gloves off the floor of the hallway and then dragged us all into the kitchen. I expected we would run back to the Miata, but I guess his instinct was only to escape that screeching bleat, which meant running in the opposite direction. In the kitchen the sound was muffled, but still plenty loud. We all still had to yell to be heard.

“Look, we should get out of here,” PJ was saying, and I remember I was nodding like crazy.

But Trevor shook his head and said, “We still have a few minutes before the police get here, right? We give ourselves sixty seconds and grab all we can and then—”

And then the phone rang, and it was on the wall right beside me and I jumped. Trevor looked at the number and name on the screen and saw that it was the alarm system company.

“I guess they call to see if we set off the alarm by accident,” Missy said, sniffling and wiping at her nose. It suddenly dawned on me that we hadn’t broken any law. I wondered what would happen if Missy answered the phone and told the company that she had come home to get something and just forgotten the code. Merely a false alarm, no biggie. Then we could all drive back to Poacher’s, get stoned, and try some other house some other night.

But the answering machine picked up before I could say a word, and the company didn’t bother to leave a message. There was no turning back now.

“Okay, people, let’s do it: sixty seconds!” Trevor said, and I followed Andrea into the dining room so we could steal the silver, and Missy ran upstairs to grab as much of her aunt’s jewelry as she could find (and, supposedly, her aunt had some serious ice). Trevor and PJ started pulling the plugs from the Blu-ray player and the flat-screen TV in the living room, though how the hell they thought they were going to fit a TV almost the size of a pool table into the back of a Miata was beyond me. But they were male, and so they had to at least try, right? (Me? I would have just unplugged the Xbox and called it a day.)

Andrea and I had these cloth laundry bags with string ties, and we just started throwing candlesticks and silverware and these oil lamps that were probably pewter and not silver into them. It was hard to focus with that off-the-hook-crazy alarm coming at us, but it’s not like what we were doing was brain surgery. We had been at it maybe half a minute, shoveling knives and forks and spoons from this sideboard into our bags, when suddenly Andrea dropped her bag and swore.

“Shit!” she said. “My eye!” Then she ran into the bathroom on the first floor beside the stairs. I followed her.

“Something’s wrong with my eye! It’s like there’s glass in there!” she was saying, and while she had turned on the water, she was staring at her eye in the mirror. It was her left eye, and I could see it was vampire red. And I could see something that looked like a dollop of green goo at the edge near her nose when she turned to face me. “What the fuck?” she shrieked. “It hurts so fucking much!”

I heard Missy pounding her way down the stairs, and she paused when she saw me standing in the doorway to the bathroom. “What happened?” she asked.

“My eye!” Andrea wailed. “Something’s gone wrong with my eye! It hurts and I can’t see out of it!”

“You can’t see out of your eye?” Missy said.

And before Andrea answered, Trevor and PJ came up behind Missy and me. “Let’s roll,” Trevor said. “Done and done.” He was
holding a coffee table and PJ had a vase. I guess they had given up on the TV and felt they had to steal something to earn their keep. Still, that coffee table had as much chance of making it into the Miata as the TV.

“I can’t see!” Andrea screamed at all of us. “Don’t you fuckers get it? I can’t see! Something’s happened!”

I knew Andrea was capable of losing it; I’d witnessed one of her tantrums the day we had met at the shelter. (Let’s face it: All of us, as our therapists liked to say, were a little too impulsive and a little too emotional for our own good. We ratcheted up the drama. We talked some serious shit.) But this was bad, and it didn’t help when first Missy chastised Andrea, saying, “I told you, you can’t sleep with your eyeliner on!” and then Trevor yelled at her for taking her gloves off. He pushed between Missy and me and turned off the faucet and started wiping down the sink with his gloved hands.

But Andrea just turned it on again and stamped her foot and then collapsed on the tile floor against the toilet. She curled up her legs against her chest and wrapped her arms around her knees. She was sobbing and repeating over and over that she was in agony and she was going blind and no one cared. I leaned over, half hugging her and half trying to get her on her feet. But I really didn’t accomplish either. Andrea was taller than me and seriously stubborn when she wanted. We’re talking unmovable object.

“Andrea, we need to go,” I begged and my mind was racing as I tried to think of what to say. It didn’t help that the family’s asinine alarm was flipping all our brains sideways. “We’ll take you to the emergency room,” I added, which at the time I thought was inspired. In hindsight, of course, it really wasn’t all that brilliant. It was only what a normal person would have suggested, right? “We have to get you to the hospital.”

She looked at me—and her eyeball, I saw, really was disgusting—and I could tell that I had gotten through to her. Something had clicked. She put one hand on the floor and one on the toilet and pushed herself to her feet.

“Okay, let’s get out of here,” Trevor said, and we all raced
through the house and piled into the Miata. I grabbed Andrea’s sack, so I was carrying two, and Missy had hers, but we left that ridiculous coffee table behind on the front steps. PJ was clinging to that vase like a little kid with a teddy bear. He really did look like a five-year-old.

Missy was driving because it was her car, and Trevor was in the seat beside her. Once again, Andrea and PJ and I were wedged into the backseat, which was fine with me, even though I wound up in the middle. I held Andrea’s hand and told her she was going to be fine, she was going to be okay, but in the back of my mind I was thinking,
Well, that’s why God gave us two eyes. So if we sleep in our eyeliner and go blind in one, we have a backup
. But I didn’t say that.

Missy had just put the car in reverse when we saw the flashing blue lights racing down the road and turning toward the driveway. The driveway was maybe a hundred yards long, and it was lined on both sides with pine trees six and seven feet tall. This was a pretty new meadow mansion. So what kind of a badass was Missy? Without saying a word to any of us, she turned off the headlights and gunned the car straight ahead and off the driveway, roaring into the side yard and then racing over the patch of ground where her aunt had what she called an Italian garden in the summer. Tomatoes, basil, peppers. Stuff like that. But there were still those wire tomato cages, empty now like pieces of broken chain-link fencing, and Missy plowed right through them. In the moonlight they made me think of the debris in some postapocalyptic zombie movie, which then made me think of Cape Abenaki, and what it must have been like those days inside the Exclusion Zone.

Meanwhile, Trevor and PJ were whooping like rodeo cowboys. They thought this was hilarious. The Great Escape and all. Then Missy drove through the next-door neighbor’s yard, dinging some little kid’s metal swing set. It wasn’t that late, and so there were still lights on at that house—and at the next one. But even if it had been two in the morning, I have to believe the burglar alarm would have gotten the neighbors out of bed. (Further proof that Missy could have been one heck of a serious criminal, if she’d wanted:
she had the instincts to keep the headlights off as we raced across people’s property.) We must have rock-and-rolled through half a dozen yards, and some were obstacle courses. Think
The Amazing Race
. In addition to the gardens and that swing set, there were long piles of logs and prefabricated metal tool sheds and lawn tractors and birdbaths and a picnic table with those attached benches. There were Adirondack chairs. There was a plastic playhouse. There was a gazebo. We dinged that, too, because we were trying not to run over a sandbox Missy saw in the dark at the very last second.

But then we reached someone’s driveway, and she turned the car hard to the left and for a second it felt like we were only on two wheels and were going to flip over—which would have really put a damper on the evening, because none of us were wearing seat belts and the convertible top was, of course, down. I think we were probably only going forty or fifty miles an hour, but that’s fast if you’re driving at night without headlights through the backyards of rich people’s meadow mansions.

I remember breathing a sigh of relief when we were back on the road. Missy punched on her headlights and slowed way down. She wasn’t sure what the speed limit was, but she guessed it was thirty-five. By now the flashing lights were long gone, as was the sound of that house alarm. I looked at Andrea and her head was bowed and her hands were over her eyes. I wondered if crying was going to make her eye better or worse, and I told myself it was only going to help because the tears might wash away some of the gunk.

We drove until we got to this little elementary school and Missy pulled into the parking lot. I wasn’t sure why—I guess none of us were—and so she told us. “I’m going to cut across the playground. I want to be sure we’re on Dorset Street before the police,” she explained.

And that might have been the end of our night, but Missy decided to press her luck. She accelerated off the pavement onto the grass, and we banged hard into a railroad tie for some little raised garden bed. And we hit it in just the right way that we kept going and didn’t even get a flat tire, but PJ went flying from the car, still
clutching that lame vase. Missy jammed on the brakes and stopped, and we all jumped out after him. Even Andrea.

When we got to him, he was curled up on his side in a ball. He looked up at us, winced, and then closed his eyes. “I am so fucked,” he grunted, his voice almost inaudible. Right about then we saw the blood starting to stain the side and the shoulder of his gray hoodie. There were big and small shards of the vase all around him.

“One hell of a face plant there, PJ,” Trevor said, and I think he was trying to lessen the tension. “Can you get up?”

PJ didn’t answer, so Trevor squatted beside him and repeated the question. This time PJ shook his head. “Give me a minute,” he groaned.

“Okay, then. Good to know,” Trevor murmured, mostly to himself, and he went back and turned off the car lights. About then Andrea remembered that she was supposed to be going blind—which, for all I knew at the time, she really was. “I still can’t see!” she wailed hysterically, “I can’t see and none of you care!” Then she fell to her knees beside PJ. Trevor and Missy and I stood there for maybe half a minute, trying to figure out what the hell we were supposed to do. I was terrified for PJ. I was terrified for Andrea. I mean, I cared about these people, as fucked up as they were. They were my friends.

That’s the moment in my mind that feels just like that image from the documentary about Bonnie and Clyde. A bunch of wounded criminals sitting in a field, one of them maybe dying and the other going blind.

It was after that cluster fuck of a robbery that Missy’s parents came to get her and bring her home, leaving instead with only the Miata. They must have known that we were the ones who had broken into Missy’s aunt and uncle’s home, but no one ever pressed charges. We made a little over a thousand dollars from the
stuff we sold, but that wasn’t nearly as much as we had hoped we would. And it was a lot of work and had involved a lot of risk. We were flirting with way more legal trouble if we’d been caught than when, for instance, we were walking out of the Grand Unions and Walmarts with big jugs of Tide. That would have been just a misdemeanor if we’d been caught. But that nightmarish moronathon at Missy’s aunt and uncle’s would have been a felony.

Later that night we would bring Andrea and PJ to the hospital, but just in case we drove almost an hour south to Porter Hospital in Middlebury. The doctor and the nurse who took care of them were cool, but the receptionist was a total bitch. It was like it was our fault that we didn’t have insurance. (Okay, it was. But, really, did we have to be lectured about it right that moment?) Andrea was fine. In the emergency room, they numbed her eye and then touched it with a little strip that left behind this orange dye. She screamed like she had just been impaled in a slasher movie and then yelled at the doctor for having coffee breath, but he just nodded and said they should both try and breathe through their noses, and kept right on examining her. (That’s what I mean about how cool he was.) He was middle-aged but still seemed pretty buff, and when he was in her face it was like they should have kissed. It was very intimate. But, of course, that didn’t happen and she finally chilled and became an okay patient. He flushed out Andrea’s eye with saline solution and gave her some antibiotic ointment. He told her not to share her mascara brush with me.