B
y the time the EMTs arrived at Susan’s apartment, Liz had fainted. She woke up speeding sixty-five miles an hour in a gurney next to Susan’s naked body. When they got to the hospital, she’d recovered. She watched as a pair of orderlies in pink scrubs pushed Susan down the hall and out of sight.
Bobby, who had followed the ambulance in his car, rushed into the emergency room soon afterward. Taking her quite by surprise he hugged her hard, then kissed her cheeks and the bridge of her nose and finally her lips. “You’re okay,” he said. “I was scared you weren’t okay.”
To keep from crying she started talking. “I guess I should call my mother now,” she said. “I told her I wasn’t going to see Susan. There’s blood on my shoes. It was so good you gave that CPR—you’re so good at that stuff. You’re so smart,” she babbled. Then she saw the troubled look on his face and tried to slow down. “I’m okay. Don’t worry. Really.” She came close to crying again. “Do you think someone did this to her? How could someone do this?”
Bobby led her to the visiting room chairs. “Take a deep breath,” he said. She did. “Another one,” he instructed. She did. “Okay, now give me your hands.” She put her hands in his. “Squeeze,” he said, “No, not like that, really squeeze as hard as you can. Harder.” She squeezed until the muscles in her fingers cramped. “Better?” he asked.
“Better,” she said.
“I’ll call your mother,” he told her.
Within a half hour, Mary Marley came storming through the waiting room doors, her Shaws grocery store apron still wrapped around her waist. Liz sat back and closed her eyes while Bobby did the talking. Distantly, she heard him say, “Yeah, we went over to her apartment. No, we’ve never been there before, at least I haven’t…. It was lucky we found her though, so I guess you should be glad we went.”
A half hour after that Sheriff Danny Willow arrived. Holding his hat in his hand, he stood before them in the waiting room and spoke softly like he was in church. He told them that Paul Martin had witnessed Susan’s fall. He hadn’t thought to use her phone and had called the police from a pay phone instead. They’d just missed each other. Then he held up his hands in a show of frustration as if to say: That’s the way these things always happen. It’s absurd, but there’s never anything you can do. There’s a lot of spilled milk in the world. Mary nodded in agreement. Yes, lots of spilled milk. All kinds of spilled milk.
“How is she doing?” he asked.
“Oh, we don’t know. She’s a sly boots. Can’t believe a thing she does,” Mary answered.
“She’s got internal bleeding and brain damage. She’s going to die,” Liz said. Though she did not turn to look at him, she felt Bobby’s hand reach for her own, and they clasped fingers.
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Willow said.
Mary took a deep breath. “Accidents happen,” she said.
Liz let out a quick, nervous giggle that sounded less like laughter and more like a noisy facial tic. “Right Mom,” she said.
Before he left, Sheriff Willow smiled warmly at Liz. He was a small, round man with thick arms and callused hands. Seeing him made her wonder what her own father might have looked like if he’d ever lived beyond forty. It made her miss him, as she always missed him when she wanted someone to hold her tight. “You let me know if you think of anything you and your mom might need, okay?” Danny asked.
“Yes,” Liz said, “I’ll let you know. Thank you for coming all the way down here.”
The three of them sat together after that, none speaking. Bobby sat to her left, her mother to her right. Like at an airport; each with one arm on a seat rest, waiting for their flight to be called. Or maybe they were following Susan down a rabbit hole.
Now she stood and stretched her legs. The fluorescent overhead lights buzzed in low tones like mental static. The waiting room was mostly empty. The chairs were orange vinyl, each linked to another in six rows. There was an old woman twisting a wrinkled handkerchief between her fingers, sitting alone. A nurse at a desk. A junkie lying across three chairs, probably waiting for a friend who had overdosed. She paced the room. She asked the nurse, whose name tag read “Arlene,” if there was any news. None. She gazed at the remnants of her family; Bobby, her mother, the space between them, meant for herself. Her mother looked no different from any other day, any other time. A stranger would not be able to detect that anything was amiss in their lives if not for the apron strung across Mary’s waist. But then, something had always been amiss in their lives. Only now another little piece of it was out in the open.
She thought of praying like when she was little, kneeling next to her sister at the foot of her bed, her father leading them in the Our Father. The Hail Mary had always seemed too close to blasphemy, the Glory Be too short, and “Now I lay me down to sleep” like asking to die. So it had been the Our Father. She started to say the words, then stopped. “Good luck, sis,” she said out loud, because that was how she felt.
Just then, Bobby joined her. His eyes were bloodshot and she suddenly wondered what time it was, how long they had been there, if it was morning yet and he was tired. She looked at her watch, eleven; they’d been here only a little over an hour.
“Can I talk to you?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Not here, away from your mom.” He pulled her into the corridor outside the main waiting room. Nurses and attendants walked by all in white.
“What is it, Bobby?” she asked in what she hoped was a warning voice.
Please don’t fall apart. I don’t think I could deal with that. Not from you.
“What do you think she was trying to tell you in your dream?”
Liz shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I just don’t get it,” Bobby said. “It doesn’t make any sense. If Mr. Martin was there, then why didn’t he call the hospital instead of the police and why isn’t he here now?”
“What are you talking about?”
He rubbed his eyes, spoke in a whisper. “What if somebody did something to her? She was naked, you know.”
“Bobby. I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want you to talk about that.” She wondered then whether her father was really dead, if he had done this to Susan and Bobby had somehow guessed.
“I’m sorry, that was really uncool. I should never have said that. I don’t know why I said that.” He squeezed her hands, and she knew he thought she should be crying. She tried to encourage tears for his benefit but they would not come.
Her mother found them in the corridor. Mary’s feet were wet. She had left the store without her boots or coat. She shivered, and Liz thought about finding her a blanket, someone should do that. Someone should do a lot of things.
“What were you doing there, anyway? I told you not to go there, didn’t I?” Mary asked. Liz did not respond, and when Bobby opened his mouth to explain, Mary waved her hand. “It doesn’t matter now.” She opened her black vinyl purse and took out a wrinkled five-dollar bill, appraised it, then added another five and placed it in Bobby’s hand. “Why don’t you two go get something to eat. I’ll come get you if something happens.”
At the cafeteria, Liz concentrated on the buzzing of the fluorescent lights. She tried to decipher a pattern. All the electricity in this building was connected to a single generator that was separate from the storm, the town, the mill; linked to every light, every vending machine, every respirator. She listened for her sister’s voice underneath that buzzing.
I
t was a little before midnight by the time Bobby and Liz got to the cafeteria. There were about fifteen people eating at various tables. A group of six, mostly orderlies in light blue uniforms, drank coffee near the register where a small woman sat behind a counter, reading Eudora Welty’s
Golden Apples
in paperback. The walls were painted blue. Bobby had read someplace that blue was supposed to have a calming effect. Like people were these lemmings, and if you shined the right light into their faces, they’d feel exactly how you wanted them to feel.
He’d kept thinking that Susan would breathe. Her breath, it had been so strange. Like cigarettes and paper mill. Every time he’d exhaled into her lungs and her chest rose, he felt like he’d been giving life, watching a miracle. When the ambulance came and the EMTs lifted her from either end, they tried not to move her too much, but her head rolled parallel to her shoulder anyway. It was then that he understood he had been breathing into a corpse waiting to happen. Even now, he could taste her smoky breath on his lips.
He’d called home and told his dad what happened. He knew he shouldn’t have said it, but no one was in hearing distance, and he told about how he’d administered CPR. His dad had whistled like:
Pretty cool, Bobby, I’m proud of you. You’ve got that doctor blood in your veins.
Worst of all, he was proud of himself.
His father had offered to come, and Bobby now regretted saying that it seemed like a family thing, maybe later; he didn’t know if he should be here himself. But neither Mary nor Liz was acting the way they should. He wanted to give Mary his jacket, or find her a blanket, or tell her to stick her hair under a hand dryer in the bathroom. He wanted to tell her to please talk to her daughter, because Liz didn’t look so good right now. She looked about an inch away from hysteria.
Please take care of your daughter, Mrs. Marley, because I don’t know how just yet.
If his father were here, he would have said all these things with the confidence and ease dictated by the gray hairs on his head. His father would have asked Mr. Willow what the hell had really happened, and it would have sounded fine coming from his father, it would have been perfectly reasonable. No one would have said,
And who do you think you are, asking that? Who do you think you are, asking anything?
He looked across the table at Liz. Her eyes were kind of wild, and every time somebody at the other table laughed she practically jumped out of her skin. If she didn’t calm down soon she’d wind up fainting all over again. That would be bad. Really bad. When she fainted at Susan’s apartment, he’d tried to wake her up, but her body had been like dead weight. He’d started crying, and when the ambulance came and she still didn’t open her eyes, it was worse than he ever could have guessed. He’d felt like the end of the world had happened, and nobody except him would really understand.
Bobby cleared his throat and Liz startled, as if just then remembering where she was. “I could call my dad and ask him to come down.”
“Why?”
“He works here. He already called somebody at the ER and told them you were a friend of the family. It might be good to have him around,” Bobby said.
“What would he do, Bobby?” she asked. Her voice had this high pitch to it like she was about to yell at him.
“Forget it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my mother, she can handle this just fine.”
“I know that.”
“You think you need to call your dad because we’re too fucked up to handle this by ourselves.”
“No. That’s not what I was saying at all.”
“Fine,” she told him. “You know, everybody’s gonna be talking about Susan at school tomorrow and it’s not like they have a right to talk.”
And it all fit together. Of course she’d say that. That was exactly the kind of thing she would be thinking about. She enjoyed having secrets, tragedies that belonged only to her. Like she thought she was a better person for having suffered. Every time he complained about having a bad day or some shit like that she could say,
Yeah, but you don’t know. My dad died. My sister’s a fruitcake. You don’t know, Bobby. Only people like me can be mature.
What would good old dad tell her? He’d shrug like he had no idea what she was talking about, give her a hug, take her away from this place, and pop a sleeping pill down her throat.
“I know how you feel,” he told her, because he was not his dad.
“No you don’t. I know you try but you can’t get it, you can’t ever get it. That’s the problem. You’re Wonder Bread, boy wonder.”
He reminded himself where he was, that she was tired, that she meant none of what she was saying before he answered. “That’s not true.”
“You know it is.”
“Are you trying to say I think I’m great? Is that it?”
“No,” she told him.
“Or you think I’d spend time with somebody I didn’t like? You really think that? Why else would I be with you if I didn’t like you? There’s no good reason.”
A look of surprise crossed her face and the thought that passed through his mind before he pushed it away was:
I’m Bobby Fullbright and I could be with anybody in the high school that I want as long as they’re under five foot five, so don’t look so surprised.
And then he was sorry. Because thinking bad things about somebody who’s just seen their sister’s broken neck is pretty bad. Thinking bad things about your girlfriend is even worse.
“No good reason?” she asked.
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Why, it’s how you feel, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not.”
He put his hand over hers. She had soft, pale skin that didn’t burn in the summertime. Short, white fingers. He could leave her after this, after high school. She would be one less string tying him to this town. But for whatever reason, he liked that string.
She stood. “Your mom would have gotten us if something happened,” he told her.
“I know. I need to go to the bathroom. I need to go for a while. I’m sorry, Bobby, I’m glad you’re here, but I have to go for a while.”
“Okay,” he said. And then he thought,
You know how to act; it’s Liz. You know how to make her feel better. You don’t need Dad.
He got up and kissed her. When his lips touched hers, she jumped back and ran out of the room like this was the fourth grade, and she’d just been the victim of a particularly cruel joke.