Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend (24 page)

“Baby,” he said, “are you all right?”

Shiels hadn't been “baby” to her father since Jonathan had been born. She started to tear up just at the word.

“No,” she said. “I'm not all right. I've screwed up everything a hundred times over. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry!”

She thought she heard him crying too, and that was disconcerting. He was her father, a surgeon, for God's sake. He was professionally calm. “Did they charge you with something?” he asked finally. “Is this your one phone call?”

It took a long time for Shiels to set him straight. “I'm outside,” she said. “They aren't interested in me. But we need to free Pyke as soon as possible. Oh, Daddy, if you'd seen him—”

She described it all for him, the grim room, the flattened, beaten being lying in the dark corner. “I know . . . I know Mom is going to kill me,” Shiels said. “But I'm glad I went. I had to see him. We have to get him out!”

“Your mother really is going to kill you, because you broke her foot when you smashed the door on it,” her father said.

“What?”

“On your way out of the house. Didn't you hear us yelling at you? You didn't even stop. I had to take her to the hospital.”

Shiels suddenly noticed just where she was—the cracked glass of the booth, the scratchings on the black metallic side of the ancient phone box, the blinking pink and red fluorescent lights of the corner store illuminating her black pant legs, the way her breath seemed to be clogging in her throat.

“I broke Mom's foot?”

She had a glimpse of herself flinging the door open right on her mother's foot like some Godzilla toppling buildings with every unthinking swish of her tail. It was a heavy door too, and her mother had cried out. Shiels remembered it now. She thought it had been just to keep Shiels from turning herself in.

The imagined pain of it now crackled through her body.

“I didn't . . . I'm so sorry!” Shiels said. “I wasn't thinking.”

“Don't go anywhere!” her father said. “I'm coming to get you.”

•  •  •

She could not call Sheldon from the pay phone. It felt wrong somehow, desperate. But if she had had her phone with her, she would have told him everything. Just out of habit. That was the way they worked. The cement mixer fingers, Pyke flattened against the wall, smashing her mother's foot.

That she was fracturing everything she touched. At least they would have talked about it.

And somehow the sound of Sheldon's voice would've calmed her. What would he say exactly? She couldn't think—she couldn't think, except that if she were talking with Sheldon, she wouldn't have felt so completely alone standing by the ragged phone booth in a sorry part of town in the blinking lights of a convenience store.

A car approached, a beat-up boxy thing, not her father's gray Mercedes. She let her eyes drop. She thought:
I am all alone standing here without a coat in the cold, and I do not even have my phone.

The window opened. She saw a narrow face, a balding head.
Tell me this isn't happening,
she thought.

I am just a block away from the police station,
she thought.

Probably they wouldn't even hear—

“I thought I recognized those yellow shoes,” the man said. “Are you all right? Do you need a lift?”

It was the old guy from the running-shoe store. He looked concerned.

“No. Thank you. My father's coming to pick me up. He's on his way. I just called him. Really.”

He looked like he didn't believe her. His engine was idling. She could smell the exhaust. And God, it was cold. If she hadn't just talked with her dad, she would've gone with the running-shoe man. He seemed harmless enough.

She imagined herself in his car saying, “Any ideas how to spring a pterodactyl from prison?”

“How are the shoes?” he asked finally.

“Good. Great! I would run home now but I am exhausted. And it's uphill. I broke my mother's foot.”

“How did you do that?” he asked, and she told him a bit of it without going into details.

“That stockroom you cleaned up is a hundred times better than it was,” he said. “If you ever want to come work at the store, I'll find a place for you.”

She thanked him and thought if she didn't end up studying with Lorraine Miens, if she didn't become a doctor, if she didn't go to law school, she could see herself happily stacking running shoes, keeping at least that corner of the world in order.

“I know a thing or two about running,” the old guy said.

“I'll keep it in mind,” Shiels replied.

•  •  •

The ride home with her father was quiet. What could Shiels do about her mother's foot now? Nothing. Other plans whirred in her head, forming and dissolving and reforming like clouds on a riotous day. They absolutely had to free Pyke. If Melanie Mull now was the one to rally students, then maybe Shiels could rally the crows, and together they could sow confusion amongst the police, and in the meantime . . .

“Your mother is in a state,” Shiels's father said quietly from behind the wheel.

Shiels imagined the crows descending upon the police station like something out of Hitchcock.

“You're going to have to be careful how you handle her,” Shiels's father said.

In a state.
What did he mean by
in a state
?

“It's not just her foot. She's really worried about you and your future. She asked me to talk to you—”

“I am so sorry about her foot. You know I didn't mean it. But, Dad, a pterodactyl is dying in a jail cell right now because of something else I did. If there were any justice in the world, I would be the one kept in solitary confinement like . . . like a beast in a zoo!”

“I know, baby. You're concerned,” her father said. “You get wound up in your causes. It's admirable. So many adults are past caring, or they have no idea what they can do to help. But I'm giving you a heads-up about your mom.”

Her father had curly hair, too brown still for a dad his age. And he was doing what he always did—he was taking his wife's side against his daughter, as if his wife were not the perpetual champion of everything in the family, now and forever.

“I didn't know her foot was there,” Shiels said. “I just ran and shoved the door behind me. I will apologize to Mom. But about Stockard—I really have been thinking. I've been thinking for a long time now. I'm not—” How to frame it so he would understand? “I'm not doctor material.”

Her father snorted, the way he did whenever something unbelievable was happening on the television news. His hands were strong and relaxed on the steering wheel, his fingers long and tapered
. Like Sheldon's hands,
she thought. “I changed your diapers long before you knew what a doctor was,” he said. “I know all about your force of will, your focus, how smart you are. Believe me, Shiels, you could be a terrific doctor if you wanted to be. But that's not the issue here. The issue—”

“That's just it!” she said. “I don't want to be a doctor. That's the whole issue!”

“The issue is that your mother is in a state,” he said again, slowly and carefully. “I'm fine with you not being a doctor. Really I am. And your mother will be too. But right now she thinks you're out of your mind in love with a pterodactyl. She thinks that you don't need her, that you don't love her. She thinks you broke her foot on purpose.”

“I didn't break her foot on purpose,” Shiels said.

But maybe she had wanted to bring the whole house down?

“You're going to have to tell her yourself,” her father said. “Carefully. You know your mother is a lot more fragile than you are.”

Now it was Shiels's turn to snort. Her father glanced at her, his face naked with surprise. “She has always felt threatened by your strength,” he said. “And so you have to be very gentle with her. You know you're going to win.”

“I have no such thought in my head!” she blurted. “Win what? I lose every time it comes to Mom!”

The car hummed ever homeward in the dark.

“You're young, just coming up. You don't know your own strength,” he said.

•  •  •

Her father had tried to warn her, but still Shiels was unprepared when she got home. She tiptoed into her mother's room ready to say the right words, to ask for forgiveness, to set things as right as she could before turning her attention to the larger problem of saving Pyke. But who was this pale, withdrawn creature propped up on pillows, her foot enormous in a black plastic cast that looked like a ski boot, her eyes pilled-up and dopey?

Who was this woman who did not seem to see her?

Shiels approached cautiously. “Mom?” It was her little-girl voice, still living somewhere inside her.

Her mother stirred. She looked a decade older. Had Shiels really done all this to her just by rushing out the door?

“Baby.” Her mother's voice was groggy. She lifted her hand slightly. Shiels took it and squeezed. She had a sudden feeling of someday years from now, decades away surely. The day her mother would die.

“I'm sorry, Mom,” Shiels said. “I wasn't thinking. I'm sorry.”

Her mother seemed to both see Shiels and not see her at the same time. Obviously she was heavily drugged. Shiels remembered something about foot pain being amongst the worst a body might suffer. Wasn't that a torture method, beating people's feet?

Shiels sat still, holding her mother's hand, until her mother seemed to be fast asleep. The more Shiels thought about it, the more dreadful the whole thing seemed—the weight of the door (which she could remember now feeling in her hand as she'd fled), what a relief it had been to throw that weight behind her as she'd run. How shocked her mother must've been when the heavy metal had swung so hard into her instep.

Normally Shiels would have stopped to see what was the matter.

She hadn't
tried
to injure her mother.

Had she?

She hadn't been trying to defeat her so utterly as to send her into a medicated stupor like this.

Had she?

•  •  •

Shiels retreated down the hall to her own room. At last, reunited with her phone, she saw that indeed Sheldon had been texting her during Melanie Mull's rally for Pyke outside the police station. One text even included the word “sori,” as in,
sori i doubted u. huge crowd. portant 2B here.

And then:
what r u doing?

And then:
cant bleve u just did that.

And then, much later:
where r u? have u seen Pyke? whats the word?

She phoned him, and he picked up even before the ring—which used to happen, a lot, before things fell apart.

Why had they fallen apart? Because, she realized, she had not been paying attention. Just flinging doors on her way out.

“The word is bad,” she said, by way of greeting. “I saw him, but I didn't get a chance to talk to him. Oh, Sheldon, he's broken, he just looks folded and stepped on. We have to do something right away. I don't know that he'll last the night. It's that bad!”

“Where are you now?” he asked. She imagined where he was: in the arms of Rachel Wyngate. She almost blurted, “That was pretty fast moving there, mister!” She almost said, “Glad to know I can be replaced in about fifteen minutes.” She almost yelled, “I saw you with her! At the rally you practically told me not to go to!”

And the voices in her head argued—He already told you he was going with Rachel. . . . But it makes a difference when you actually see people together. It isn't real until you see it.

It was real all right. Shiels felt the sadness tighten like a shrinking ball in the shell of her rib cage.

“I'm at home,” she said. “The police didn't want me. Except to know about my sex life.”

“What?”

She told him about the questioning by Inspector Brady.

“So—you fantasize about Pyke?” Sheldon said.

Oh, for God's sake!

“I told you already,” she said. “I've had dreams. We all have. It isn't real. What's real is that we have to get him out of there. But I don't know how to do it. I'd like to rally the crows somehow, but the cops are keeping him in a windowless room—”

“You are practically raving right now,” he said. “Rally the crows?”

And she remembered: He hadn't been running at the track in the early morning when the crows had come en masse and lined the fence to watch her; he hadn't been in the gymnasium to clean up after Autumn Whirl, when the crows had rescued her and Pyke from hours and hours of thankless toil; he hadn't even been at the football game when the crows had swarmed the stands in the sucking wind.

“It won't work anyway,” Shiels said. “I'm not crazy. I've just seen some things you haven't.”

And in saying this, she realized they had been inseparable, one mind practically, two bodies, and now they were ordinary again. Separate and alone.

Well, Sheldon wasn't alone.

“The media have picked up on the rally,” Sheldon said. “It's a pretty unusual story, a pterodactyl football player ending up in jail. Maybe if we can raise enough of a stink—”

“Yes,” Shiels said. They talked about it, the stink, the attention they might be able to garner in a short time, if they caught the world's attention, if the right people became aware. And as they talked, she thought about that night she had spent with Sheldon, after the wrangle dance. In his room, in his bed, skin to skin. How he hadn't tried to take advantage, yet . . . They had simply held each other, and breathed together. He must have held her while she was sleeping.

Oh, how she liked the idea of that, falling asleep in someone's arms tonight, if somehow sleep were even possible. Yet most of her yearned to burst out of the house and do something superhuman to free Pyke immediately!