Heartsick (10 page)

Chapter Seventeen

I stand on stage in something like Mountain Pose. My bare feet are firm against the hardwood. My stance is straight, proud. I am exactly in the center. I know it’s the center because Rachel and I measured it and there is a small blue blob of paint there leftover from last spring’s “The Iceman Cometh.” My chest is just slightly out and my hands are both about a foot behind me. Props flank me. My set designer encouraged me to use these large columns with big, metal balls at the top. They’re supposed to match my Romanesque outfit.

The music starts. Just a piano at first, but it sounds like chandeliers tinkling in the window. I’ve listened to that music over and over. I’ve heard it so many times it became annoying. But right now, I relish the familiarity. Energy pumps through my soul. As the piano notes cascade, my fingers wiggle. When I choreographed this, I thought of the wings of a baby bird and how their small feathers at the tips would blow, softly, in the wind. But standing here, with the possibly antagonistic crowd before me, it feels more like my arms are a makeshift cape. I am a makeshift hero, sort of.

On the eighth beat, the stage lights dim. This is part of the routine. I dance in the shadows for the first few steps. I’m surprised at how clearly I can see the audience. During rehearsal, I could barely make out the scattered figures of my dance troupe as they watched me. But now, it’s all clear. It’s still dark, but it’s like I no longer need the light to see.

There are many in the crowd here for us, for me. Their cheers are positive. No sound comes from Jared or his friends. They are to the right, so still, so silent, it makes my heart beat faster.

Mandy is on the left side. Her clenched hands are on her armrest, as though she’s on a ride holding on for her life. She isn’t looking at the stage. She’s looking at Jared. Zachary is next to her, his hand on her back, whispering something. I think for a sliver of a moment that Rashid should be next to him. But I knock that thought away.

Luke is here. He must have gotten out of work. He stands in the back of the auditorium. But he isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at the audience. His mouth is slim, grim.

As I shift positions, Jared gets up. Sweat beads at my temples. Two beats later, I shift into my next position and start counting again. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. On the final beat, my left leg extends and the tip of my toe gently reconnects with the stage. The stretch opens me up. My hips shift and my right hand makes a fist that plants itself on my lower back. My left arm extends, palm up, to stage left. I hold the pose, my thigh stiff. I can see Lei and Rick there along with a few other dancers. They give thumbs up and you-go-girl gestures, all silently. Except Lei bites her lip, and Rick clutches at his thumbs. I allow myself the tiniest of smiles. You have to keep a performance face, but it’s enough for them to notice. Lei smiles back, big, and Rick’s tense shoulders relax.

Good. They don’t see how my body is shaking, a slight fear-induced tremor.

I swing back to my Mountain Pose with the cape position, facing the audience, for just two beats. But those beats are enough for me to see that Jared is making his way down the aisle. Luke and another guy are following him, but Jared’s strides are quick.

I don’t stop. Some people say it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees. Well, I’d be just fine living on my knees, but there is no way in hell I’m stopping my senior solo for some punkass like Jared.

I turn to stage right, doing the same fist-against-my-back, palm-out-to-the-people-offstage position I did before, just in reverse. Rachel’s on that side. Her arms are crossed, and she gives me a proud nod. But she’s behind the curtain. She doesn’t see Jared approach.

I do two twirls, which make me a little dizzy, and end up facing backstage. My two open palms glide out, welcoming nothingness. My thighs are strong in this semi-chair pose. During rehearsal, I thought of this move as my reprieve. My break. Here I can just wallow in dancing and not worry about the crowd, which is behind me. Out of sight.

But it’s scary not to see what Jared is up to. It rankles my gut to hear boots pound up the stairs but not see the man. I do two more twirls, part of the routine, and I see him, twice, quickly, as I revolve. He’s on the stage. My stage. He’s not facing me, he’s facing the audience. Arms raised.

I do something horrid.

I break out of routine. I approach him. I hardly notice the throngs of people coming to the stage, thumping up the steps.

“You aren’t Kanye West, and I’m not Taylor Swift, so sit the fuck down,” I say.

He furrows his eyebrows and tilts his head. Perhaps a pop culture reference wasn’t the way to go. Someone grabs my arm. Voices smish and smash in my ears.

“Let him talk!”

“He can save the people.”

“Get the fuck off the stage!”

Dozens of students are on the stage. My stage. Jostling and pushing. They spill into the backstage. Lei, Rick and the others turn in fear. A guy with a poster pushes another guy into one of the columns. I try to find Rachel, but as I’m looking for her, something strikes me and pain spasms down my body. There’s a crack.

The heavy prop, the gold ball atop the tower, crashed against my arm. But it’s not done yet. There is a flash of pain in my side. I slam against the stage, the massive metal ball pinning me. I squirm, but the heat and hurt is too much.

There are so many people, pushing and shoving. No one sees me. Other set pieces have fallen. Chaos ensues and I am swallowed up in it. I try to get up, but the ball is too heavy, and my right arm won’t move. The bone in my forearm is bent. I have an extra elbow. The flesh grows a deep purple that matches my eyes. Something warm and gooey lodges in my throat and I try to get it out. Coughing and hacking under the weight, my side hurts, like a knife is moving around in my lungs. Fizzy blood sprays from my mouth across the hardwood dance floor.

Luke is close now, up on the stage. He has to push aside screamers and people fleeing and people fighting. His eyes lock with mine, and I try again to get up to reach out to him as he lifts the column, up up up. The golden ball is no longer on me.

I try to move again. Luke puts his hand on my shoulder. “Quinn, stay still. The paramedics are on their way.” He kneels beside me.

“Okay,” I say, and cough again. Blood gets on his shoe. He looks at it and looks at me. His mouth parts. The lines around his eyes are like deep caverns. “Hold on, Quinn. Just hold on.”

“To what?” I try to laugh, but the world is getting blurry, like I’m seeing it underwater.

He shifts to get closer to me. “Just hold on. For me.” He tells me to talk to him. But even without the blood it would be difficult to keep on talking— because I see it. When he shifts, his jacket moves and I see it. It’s black and hangs on his hip like it’s supposed to be there. I feel cold. He asks me to describe the next dance moves I was going to do. He asks me to tell him what I am going to paint tomorrow. He asks me a whole bunch of crap questions about things that are very low priorities, given the situation.

I stay quiet. I just keep staring at his hip. As the world drifts away and my vision grows black, I have only one remaining thought lodged in my brain.

Why does Luke have a gun?

Chapter Eighteen

There are voices and bright lights. “Her GSC is 3.”

I’m jostling. I force my eyelids open.

The ceiling is white with a big, bright light. Something on my arm is very, very cold. Two women and a man bustle and hustle over me.

“She’s conscious,” one woman shouts as she adjusts whatever is cold on my arm. The iciness makes me flinch.

The other leans over. “Everything will be fine, miss. We’re just about at the hospital.”

“The dancing,” I try to mumble.

They’re doing things over me, through me. Passing each other tubes and needles and metal instruments. “She’s bradying down,” one of them says. “She’ll need a hematocrit,” another says. It’s in English but it might as well be French for all I can understand.

And then the world jolts and stops. Doors open and a misty night wind blows in and curls around my body, which is now devoid of clothes, minus a thin stretch of itchy fabric.

“Clothes,” I mumble.

As the stretcher moves and shifts out of the ambulance, the moon is big and bright in the sky. The male paramedic holds up a plastic bag. “We cut off your dress, but it’s here. It will stay with you.” He puts it next to my feet as he strides alongside the stretcher.

They shout more words that I can’t comprehend, except
internal bleeding.
I understand that.

Bill, the nurse from my multiple visits to the hospital, joins the ride that’s the Quinn stretcher. “She’s got a GCS of 12,” the paramedic tells Bill.

“Luke,” I mumble. “Luke was with me. Where is Luke?”

“Or, okay, make that 13,” the paramedic says. “She’s probably talking about Detective Peterson. He was following us in his car.”

Detective Peterson? Luke Peterson? I try to hold on to that thought but the words around me are like popcorn, popping so fast I can’t grab them. I can’t swallow them. Even lying down, the world feels so dizzy and spinny, like I’m in a swirling tunnel. I stay still as the world goes round and round around me.

The paramedics let go and new riders come on. I take in all the dirt that is in the ceiling of the ER. This ceiling that only patients like me examine. Double doors burst open. A plastic mask covers my mouth. I can no longer talk.

But Bill is still here. Bill holds my hand. “Quinn, you’ll need emergency surgery. It looks like you may have some internal bleeding.” The
may
is a nicety. Gruff doctors and nurses rush and hustle around him. They have an urgency he doesn’t have. The words they say to each other sound much scarier than anything Bill says as he describes the surgery I will go through. He has been relegated to handle the bedside stuff.

“How is she?” It’s faint, far away, angry and determined. Luke’s voice.

And then his voice is louder. In the room. “Bill, what’s going on? Tell me.” There’s a desperation to his words that I don’t quite feel myself, but, then again, all of a sudden I’m feeling okay about most things.

As I breathe deeper, the world disappears.

* * *

Something pounds and warps inside my head. I’m naked, but not as free as I’d feel naked. No, something traps me, a scratchy cloth. The world is blurry, but bright.

Three vague voices.

“Perhaps she just had a lesion in her throat?” a crispy voice says.

Shoes click against the floor. Pace. Pace. Pace. “No, it’s internal bleeding. Or, at least it was internal bleeding.” That’s Dr. Brown.

“It isn’t possible you were wrong?” a soft male voice asks. Peachy.

Dr. Brown sighs. “I don’t think so. The pain was severe enough to knock her out. Detective Peterson said her blood was fizzy and dark. And, well, after what the surgery revealed...”

“She was fine,” Peachy says again.

“Well, not completely fine,” Crispy says. “It looked like she had a mostly healed laceration on her left lung. It was healing. The bleeding had stopped, but it was a wound.”

“And the bone?” Peachy asks.

“The bone is bruised, but we monitored her,” Dr. Brown says.

“In surgery?” Peachy presses.

“Yeah, we kept her under for an hour,” Dr. Brown says.

“We shouldn’t have,” Crispy says.

Dr. Brown breathes out. “It was a risk, but we didn’t know what we were dealing with. We don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

“This is related to her condition.” Peachy says it all serious and gruff, but I can still hear the childlike glee jumping around in his vocal cords.

“Internal bleeding is one thing—we didn’t know for sure what was happening to begin with,” Crispy says. “But her arm was broken. We know that. It’s definitive.”

“Definitive of what?” Peachy asks.

“Definitive of a miracle.”

The arm. My arm. It had purple bruising and that frightening, unnatural bend. I shift against the scratchy hospital sheets. I raise my arm. It’s fine. Straight. Normal. Healthy.

I use it to prop myself up, carefully because there are a few wires attached to me. The voices are coming from the hall. Dr. Brown is with another person in scrubs and Peachy in a lime green shirt. But he’s still Peachy. Their heads are bent toward each other as though they’re in a sports huddle. Or praying.

As I try to lift myself higher, a muscle pangs at my side.

“She’s coming to,” Crispy says. All six normal eyes are on me.

They approach delicately and ask how I’m feeling. How my pain is on a scale of one to ten. I say I’m sore. I say otherwise I feel okay unless I try to move.
What happened? What happened? What happened?

“You have a bruised rib,” Crispy says. “Nothing to be too concerned about, they usually heal in...uh...well I’m sure you will be fine soon.” He rubs his nose.

I sit up with the help of the other guy in scrubs. Even though it hurts, like a dull stick is going into my side. But nothing like the sharp knife it felt like earlier.

“Why is my arm fine now?” I ask. Crispy swallows, Peachy looks away and Dr. Brown clutches her clipboard to her chest. At least she will look at me.

“Honestly, Quinn,” she says, “we aren’t sure. We’re still waiting on your test results, but if you also have a decreased white blood cell count, it might be related to that.” She takes a couple steps toward me and looks down. “Of course, I’m still not sure how it’s related to that. We’ve never seen anything like this, but, I assure you, we’re doing our best to figure out what’s happening.”

“Okay.” I squish a wad of hospital sheets and try to ignore the worry spreading across Dr. Brown’s face.

“How is she?” Luke leans into the room. His forehead furrows, as though the weight of the world is on him. But his face shifts so suddenly into a smile once his eyes lock with mine. Something flips in my stomach. My shoulders tense.

He strides toward me, almost running over Crispy on the way. “You’re awake.”

I nod, wondering how long he had been around while I was not awake.

Crispy turns to Luke sharply, but as though he is a wimpy teacher confronting a terrifying seventh-grade bully.

“Um, Detective, she has just woken up. I would really urge you to wait before you question her,” he says. “I must insist.” The insistence is so squeaky, all the crispness is gone. I feel sort of bad for the guy, but also don’t understand what’s so terrifying about Luke.

Or, more to the point, what the fuck they’re talking about. Luke can’t really be a detective. He’s directionless and wild and rough and tumbly. Right? Cops are stable and serious and stiff.

I scrounge and scrape for Ginger’s words. About his job being something that scares off most girls, but attracts others. Only they just like him for what he does. If it’s true, I get it. They like the badge, not the man.

And the other girls? Dating a cop. Marrying a cop. Well...

“Of course, Doctor. Whatever you say.” Luke is pulling out the sweet Southern boy charm. Smooth and buttery. The doctor’s arms loosen. Luke is not done though. “But I’m here as a friend.”

He doesn’t wait for the doctors to allow or deny friendly visits as he pulls a chair from the side of the room and plops it by my bed. He takes my hand, all taped up and wired, with both of his. His fingers curl under my palm, as though I’m protecting them.

The doctor nods. “Well, okay, as long as you understand she needs rest. Not too much stress. I imagine she’ll be up to talking to you later, maybe at...?” The doctor talks about me in the third person, but his eyebrow arches, asking me.

“Whenever you’re ready to give a statement, Quinn, just let me know,” Luke says. “I’ll have an officer come by.”

He has the authority to have officers come by?

I force myself to nod.

Luke smiles at me, but turns to the doctors and Peachy, who are still looking at me as though I’m something that would be sort of fun to prod. Except for Dr. Brown. She looks like she’s solving a really heinous math problem.

Luke doesn’t ask them to give us some space. He doesn’t even wrinkle his forehead at them. But his small, stony expression gets the message across. The doctors mumble something and say they’ll be back to check on me. They shuffle out.

Luke brings my hand to his mouth. This would be an incredibly romantic gesture except, again, my hand is covered with tape and tubes and this splintlike thing that I guess is supposed to keep track of my pulse. But his lips feel good on my skin.

“So...” he says.

“You’re a cop.” I blurt it out without hiding the edge in my voice. I’m not being entirely fair. He did, after all, lift that prop off me and get me to the hospital and wait to see if I was okay. Maybe my first words to him should be sweeter.

He sighs. “Yeah. I should have told you before. But I didn’t lie to you.” The way he says it though, I can tell he knows he sort of did. At least by omission. “I said I was between jobs and I was. I was a detective in Richmond, and then I came back here for Ginger and Rachel. A job with the Allan Police Department just hadn’t come through yet.”

“Tonight, you were there as a cop?”

He nods. “But I loved your dancing. Well, the bit I got to see. And you’re great at encouraging audience participation.”

It’s enough to make me laugh. Which is enough to make my rib hurt. As I reflexively grab at my side, he cringes. “Shit, I’m sorry.”

I shake my head. “It’s okay. It actually doesn’t hurt that much.”

“They told me it was broken, that it looked like the rib cut into your lungs,” he says. He looks so much older when he’s worried. I guess we all do.

“They can’t tell you that. I’m a patient,” I say.

In response, he pulls out his badge from his inside pocket. His jacket moves, revealing the gun on his hip. I stare at the black device. My hands sweat, and I want to break away from these wires and run away. I close my eyes, squishing my eyelids together.

I try to breathe, I try to remember what Mandy has told me.
Don’t be afraid.
But it doesn’t help right now. I tense and take in air too quickly.

“Quinn, what’s wrong?”

“The gun,” I say between big, swooping breaths that hurt my side.

He pulls the gun out. He holds it in his hand. The idiot.

“Please,” I beg. My voice is thick. “Put it away.” I focus on the pink shades of the hospital room window. Anything but the gun.

“Okay.” He puts the gun back and pulls a pillow on his lap to cover it up. “Better?”

“Yeah,” I say.

He looks at me for a long time. He thinks I’ll tell him why I don’t like guns.

I won’t.

I will change the subject, though. “Why was that doctor acting so weird around you? He seemed afraid of you.”

“Well—” he swallows, “—he is a little afraid of me.”

I want to laugh at this, but it was only a few seconds ago, when the gun was out, that I was a little afraid of Luke too.

He puts his hands on his knees, his elbows sprouting away from him as he looks down.

“I was an ass.” He sighs. “The other day I was here with Ginger for one of her checkups. Another patient with ALS had just died. Ginger was having a tough time with it. I went to the cafeteria to get her a cupcake, and I overheard that doctor. He was making fun of a patient who had just died. When he said something about truffles—Ginger’s friend always had truffles on her—I knew he was talking about Ginger’s friend.” He smiles. He breathes out. “Anyway, that doctor, he was imitating how she looked dead, crackin’ jokes and such.”

“What a jerk,” I say. I reach for him, but he isn’t ready for me to reach for him. He ignores my hand and sort of hunches his shoulders and leans toward me, but without looking at me.

“I exploded on them, cursing at them about goddamn respect for the dead. But I was wrong to do that. They needed to make fun of it.” His eyes plead. “Do you understand?”

“I’m not sure.” I curl the itchy sheet between my thumb and forefinger. “It does seem cruel to poke fun at the recently departed.”

He smiles, but it’s stretched and awkward. “Yeah, it would seem that way, if you didn’t have to confront the recently departed on a regular basis.”

He runs his hand though his short hair. I think about apologizing but am not sure what I’d be apologizing for.

Finally, he takes my hand again. “I’ve laughed at crime scenes.” He says it as though he’s in the hospital chapel. “Sometimes it’s the only way to distance yourself. And you need to distance yourself in order to do your job.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Yeah, I guess I asked about the beef between him and Crispy, but I didn’t expect Luke to turbo charge into full-on confession mode.

He rubs his thumb in circles over one of my knuckles. “I want you to understand me.”

I’m about to say he doesn’t need to explain himself to me when Mandy’s head pops into sight in the hallway. “Here she is.”

Mandy’s eyes are wide, and her lips are tight. She’s trying to be positive for me. Zachary shuffles in after her. Rashid, coming in last, has a smile that seems like its own kind of medicine. He also has daffodils. My favorite flower. The flower I picked on a walk we took a month ago around the graveyard. I told him then that I hated painting flowers. Except daffodils.

I jerk my hand away from Luke’s. Rashid continues striding in, unaware. But Luke’s face sort of crumbles. He recovers quickly, like the sadness is washed away, and he stands up.