The River (15 page)

18

At Salem General they abandoned the idea of Tomás and me as Gretchen’s family and wouldn’t let us go with her into the treatment room while she was being “stabilized.”

Sensing I was about to pitch a hissy fit, one of the medics took me aside and said, “She’ll live. But starting tomorrow she’s in for a world of hurt.”

While they were speeding Gretchen through triage and into an empty bed, some burly guy nurse with a Semper Fi tattoo and scruffy hair caught sight of Tomás wheezing, clutching his ribs, and sprouting a massive black eye. He said, “Man, let’s get you looked at, too.”

He tried protesting but Semper Fi Guy led him back to the triage nurse talking gently the whole while, as though he were dealing with some lumbering and nervous animal.

I was left alone in the waiting room with a saltwater aquarium, a woman in full burka with a screaming baby, and reruns of
Friends
playing on the wall-mounted TVs. I’d left my purse at Gretchen’s so only had my cell strapped to my belt. I tried calling Dad but they wouldn’t let me because it interfered with medical equipment, so they booted me out to the parking lot.

When I finally reached him, he was alert—almost combat-ready. I looked at my watch. No wonder. It was way past our curfew. “What happened to you, Ronnie? Your mother’s tearing her hair out. We heard the sirens but by the time I got to Gretchen’s everyone was gone. I got your purse, by the way.” I listened to the tone of his voice, trying to gauge his mood, and how much I should disclose. I was afraid if I told him everything it might push him into some dark abyss.

“How much anti-anxiety meds you on, Dad?”

There was a pause on the other end as he braced himself. “Enough,” he finally said. So I came clean.

I told him about the beer Jell-O. I told him about the mirror and the hard drugs. I told him that I should’ve seen the signs but didn’t because I thought she had allergies and kept baker’s hours. And I should’ve known that she was stealing my stuff because how many other people had access to my locker and nightstand, where it had all gone missing?

He kept quiet through the whole thing. And when I was done, I held my breath and waited for him to react. Would he yell? Cry? I just dumped on him a whole lot of civilization, and he moved us to Hoodoo to escape civilization.

“Dad?” I prompted.

“You did the right thing,” he said, sounding like his old, competent self. And the idea that after all these months he might be able to back me up again made me want to cry more than anything that had happened so far tonight. I had my back to the ER window. I leaned on it and slowly dripped down, til I was squatting in a mushy heap on the ground.

“Ronnie? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Dad. It’s just been so
hard
.”

“I know, honey,” he said. “Hang tight. We’ll pick up Joanne and be there in an hour.” Joanne was Gretchen’s mom.

I didn’t have a Kleenex so wiped my nose on my sleeve, leaving a snail trail. It was gross, but at least the tide of my mood was ebbing.

“Dad?”

“Yes, honey?”

“Come quick. I’m tired.”

I heard him breathing on the other end. “I love you, sweetheart,” he said, and hung up.

I looked back inside through the waiting room window. Marine Nurse came out of a set of double doors and called something I couldn’t hear.

I went back into the hospital and walked up to him. He was wearing a nameplate that said
Curtis
.

“You’re the girlfriend, right?” he said.

“Probably,” I said.

He nodded. “Come on back with me. You’re being paged.”

I followed him through a set of double doors along a linoleum-floored hallway past a set of semi-private bays. In one of them, Gretchen was stretched out on a bed with tubes up her nose and in her arms. Her eyes were closed and her hands were still. Three people in scrubs were working efficiently but not hurriedly around her. I paused on the threshold. I heard one of them say “blood work” and “pregnancy” and “HIV.” They looked up, saw me, and a woman in royal blue scrubs firmly closed the curtain around Gretchen’s bed, blocking her from my sight.

We turned a corner and he led me into another bay. Tomás was lying under a white blanket, a thin gown with tiny blue flowers tied loosely around his neck.

“Hey, baby!” he called casually, in a smooth un-Tomás-like tone. He held out his hand, beckoning me closer. I took it and he scooped me to him, planting a smooch on me that made Petunia’s kisses seem dainty and refined. And I let him. Because kissing him felt really good. It wasn’t like kissing Keith—he didn’t make me shake with excitement and panic. No, this was different—comfortable but exhilarating at the same time. His breath was cool but had a tart taste to it, as though he’d been gargling with iced limes.

He made an “Mmmm…” noise.

I pulled away, but just slightly. He looked at me through those long lashes, and his gaze was soft, like a puppy dog’s. Something had smoothed the punctuation right off his face.

“You’re on something, aren’t you?” I whispered.

“Yummy yummy Percocet,” he breathed.

“Among other things,” said the nurse behind me. He was looking at X-rays on a screen. I saw the ghosts of ribs, a neck, and very long finger bones.

“Kiss me again. You taste like bean dip,” Tomás said, tugging on my arm.

I looked at Marine Nurse. “Did he try to make out with you, too?”

He snorted. “Yeah, but I’m not cheap like you are. I told him I don’t do that on the first date.” He smiled indulgently. I was really happy that we’d landed with him. He oozed casual confidence, as though he’d already been through combat and nothing else fazed him.

“Come over here and check this out!” he said. “Looks like your prince fractured a rib and his collarbone. The thumb, too. Now that we can splint,” he said, and chortled like he’d made some kind of dirty joke.

“Wait, a collarbone? He plays basketball. What is that going to do to his playoff chances?”

Curtis didn’t say anything. He just shook his head. Basketball season was over.

“It’s all right, Ronnie. I don’t care too much about winning. I’ll play next year. Besides, most of the college scouts have already seen me. I’ll get a scholarship.”

“What a trouper,” Curtis said, clucking with approval. “I hope you’re worth it, babe.”

“Worth what? The broken collarbone? That wasn’t for me,” I said.

“Yes it was,
corazón
,” Tomás said.

“No it wasn’t. He got into it with Gretchen’s pusher.”

“Which one is Gretchen?” Curtis said.

“She’s my other girlfriend,” Tomás said.

The medic smirked. “You hound.”

“Not that kind of girlfriend. Not like
gordita
here.”

“I am not your
gordita
.”

I didn’t mind humoring him. I liked seeing this side of Tomás, the side that had moves. I didn’t know if he was really interested in me, or if he just felt so good it didn’t matter who he charmed. I had to draw the line at
gordita
, though, because it meant
little fatso
.

“Whatever you say,
mi cielo
,” Tomás said, gave my hand a squeeze, then puckered his lips, waiting for a kiss.

Looking at him, so unclammed up, gave me an idea. “Excuse me,” I said to the nurse. “May I please have a moment with my prince here?”

The nurse snorted and backed out of the bay. “Sure thing,
gordita
,” he snickered, and ran the curtain closed behind us.

As soon he was gone Tomás pulled me to him again. I kissed him for a bit and tried to tell myself it didn’t mean anything. Chances were, tomorrow when he woke up I’d have to release him back into the wild. I understood that his shyness built a fort around him that would take some heavy artillery to breach, and I didn’t know if I could do that. But for the moment I let us both think we belonged together.

When we came up for air, I whispered in his ear, “What did your dad do that was so heinous?”

“He had a meth lab,” he said. And reached under my shirt to my waist. He ran his fingers across my bare stomach. They were cool and feathery.

“Meth? Is that how you knew what Gretchen was on?”

Tomás made the “Mmmm” noise again, and I took it to mean yes.

“How long have you known?”

“Since forever,” he said.

He kissed me again and then smiled this evil guy/seductive smile, like Sting. Who knew this boy had moves? “Come to papa,” he whispered, tangling his fingers in the curls at the nape of my neck.

There was a crack sound of a curtain being pulled back. “Son, I love you as though you were my own, but you’d better not be trying to cop a feel.”

I looked behind me. Dad was there with Gloria Inez and two other guys I’d never seen before. They were clean and their hair was slicked back, and they wore badges like leashes around their necks.

“Oh, hey, Mr. Severance. It’s okay. We’re engaged,” Tomás said.

“He’s on pain meds.”

“She’s the love of my life.”

Gloria Inez bounded ahead and grabbed her son’s hand. “
Ay, gordito, que paso
?” Coming from her the word
gordito
didn’t sound like an insult. It was gentle, like being covered in a warm quilt.

“May we borrow Veronica for a moment?” Dad asked Tomás.

The tilde went back to Tomás’ forehead. “Okay. But only if you give her right back.” Then he cracked himself up so hard he spat saliva everywhere. And his laughter was so infectious I laughed, too.

It was a hard night. Down the hall Gretchen was fighting something that was devouring her alive. Just thinking about it made me feel cold and puky, but here, in this room with Tomás, I was wrapped in warmth and citrus and fingers tracing butterfly shapes across my skin.

I walked out into the hallway still tittering, but sobered up pretty fast. Who were these guys with Dad? Police of some kind.

“Veronica, I believe you know Agents Sadler and Freeman of the DEA,” Dad said.

Agent Sadler acknowledged me with a nod. Then he reached into a jacket pocket and read something on a cell phone. And that was what did it. Just a tilt of the head a certain way and I knew him. True, his hair wasn’t mussed and there was no Tiger Balm on his lips, but there was no mistaking him now. There was no mistaking either of them.

“Good Brad?”

19

Good Brad couldn’t help a chuckle. “I told you you were too patronizing,” he said to his partner, Agent Freeman.

Evil Brad crossed his arms. “It’s not my job to flirt with teenage girls.”

Dad cleared his throat. “I would like to remind you gentlemen that I’m standing right here. And feeling very litigious.”

I looked between the Brads and tried to picture them as I knew them. It was hard. Without the lip balm and ski jackets they looked like they were born to law enforcement.

“How long have you known about this?” I asked my father.

“It was my idea,” he said. “I thought Patchworks might make a good staging area.”

“Listen,” Agent Sadler said, “we need your account of the incident. Is there some place we could talk?”

We wound up in a staff break room, surrounded by vending machines that sold Red Vines and SunChips and packages of crackers with Spreadable Cheez Paste. We sat down at the fake wood table. I dusted off the remainders of Doritos from the surface while Good Brad bought us Diet Cokes. Evil Brad sat there looking intimidating.

I popped the tab on my soda and swallowed deep. It was cooler than mountain runoff.

I set the can down on the table. And with a quick look around, to make sure that no one else was here, I whispered: “This is about meth, isn’t it?”

Evil Brad threw up his hands. “Finally! The kid gets it.”

“It’s not her fault,” Dad said. “We wanted to keep her out of it, remember?”

Good Brad took over. “We’ve been trying to shut them down for months. But if we’re going to shut them down, first we have to find them. And they’ve camouflaged themselves pretty good. There’s no trail, no nothing. All we know is they’re parked out in the wilderness somewhere.”

I flashed on a memory. That day on the riverbanks, when I refused to follow Karen across, and the squaring of her shoulders. She was going to go farther than she was used to. What if she didn’t just go once? What if she wandered off, say, every time she thought no one was looking? What if someone else was watching her, waiting for her to get close?

“You think Karen found it,” I said.

Jesus
, I thought, and bit my lip.
And I let her go
.
I practically dared her
.
Her death was my fault
.

I felt as though I were running and something huge and dark and faster than Alberto Salazar had overtaken me. I’d gotten through this difficult night just by finding the next step, the locked door, the bathroom window, holding Gretchen’s arms down while she tried to claw herself. But now nothing I did was going to be clear.

“This is my fault,” Dad said. “I moved us to Hoodoo. I thought I could get away. But as the agents here can tell you, I just landed us right in the middle of drug land. These guys practically have their own frigging cartel.”

It was so easy for me to stay
stop guilting yourself
to someone else. But I couldn’t rid myself of my guilt. All I could do was push it down hard into my stomach. For now that had to be enough.

“When you’re ready, Ronnie,” Good Brad said. “Just tell me what happened. We can’t bring Karen back from the dead. But we can catch the ones who killed her.”

“We’ll go home,” Dad conceded, as though he were surrendering. “Home to Portland. I’ll call Catlin Gable School and see if you can finish the year out there.”

“But what about the finding the lab? What about the cartel?”

Evil Brad spoke up. “We can take it from here. You tell us what you saw, Gretchen will give her account in the morning. That’s probably enough to prosecute at least some of the parties involved.”

Some
of the parties. That had a hollow sound. Did I care? They were offering me what I wanted. We could go home. All I had to do was give them a name, then I would get everything back: the coffee shops, the boutiques, the clubs, the midnight movies… I could be me again, this whole year washed away as though it had never happened.

But could I really go back to the way I was before? No. Not yet. Somewhere underneath everything, all the things I thought I loved, even beneath the guilt and frustration, was a core that I felt but didn’t yet understand. It was important to me to figure out what that was.

I closed my eyes and tried to think. Instead I heard running water, and beneath that, snatches of songs running through my brain.
Can you see the real me
?

Then I flashed on something odd, and it wasn’t what I thought it would be. It had nothing to do with Karen or Tomás or
la llorona
. It had to do with the end of the movie
Quadrophenia
, when the kid stands up on the seat of his scooter and rides it off the cliff. I suddenly had to know: does he go with it? Or does he chicken out at the last moment and decide to live his life?

I wondered if Agents Sadler and Freeman could scare me up a DVD even at this hour of the night. I could watch the movie in the break room over and over so I could see if the figure on the cliff was a person, or the shadow of one. But that was not the way to get my answer.

There was only one way to solve the end of
Quadrophenia
. “Could I please see Gretchen now?”

Evil Brad pursed his lips in frustration, but in the end had to defer to my father the attorney.

“Of course, honey,” Dad said, and he led the way out the door and back down the linoleum hallway.

Gretchen was asleep, her arms still. The overhead lights were low but not off. There was no one in scrubs bustling around her. The only sign that she hadn’t been forgotten by the medical staff completely was the steady
blip blip blip
from a machine to the right of her. Her arm, the one that had been leaking stinky pus, was tightly and thickly bandaged, mummy style. They’d pulled back her hair so we could see another thick bandage over her temple. Her good arm was hooked up to an IV.

Blip blip blip
. Slow and steady, like a long-distance runner’s—not the crazy
BADOOMBADOOMBADOOM
of the bathroom floor. Whatever the doctors had done had worked. She was stabilized—at least for now.

Gretchen’s mom, Joanne Kinyon, was sitting next to her bed. She was shivering in a rayon dress in which bloodred suns set behind black palm trees. There was a plastic lei around her neck. She was a tall and stern-looking woman. Not the kind you’d expect to be waitressing in a Polynesian restaurant.

She might have made a great office manager in another life, but there were few offices in Hoodoo, so she had to settle for managing Gretchen.

She looked up when we came in. He face was unnaturally smooth and broad, like a giant cherry soaked in rum. “How’s our girl doing?” Dad asked, pulling up a chair.

“Oh, fine,” Mrs. Kinyon said, when we could all see she wasn’t fine. “The doctors cleaned out her arm pretty well and she’s on antibiotics. Now we just have to wait and see.”

“Wait and see about what?” I asked.

Dad hushed me with a look.

But Mrs. Kinyon replied to me anyway. “If she gets to keep it.” The expression on her face didn’t change. She looked competent and sure of herself, but she had begun silently to cry.

“Keep what? Her arm?” I asked, horrified and more shrieky than was appropriate.

Dad patted her on the back. “Apparently Gretchen’s been at this for awhile, Veronica. There was gangrene.”

Then Mrs. Kinyon seemed to notice me, really notice me, and deliberately didn’t ask the question I knew she wanted to ask: if you two were such good friends, how come she’s lying here and you’re not?

I thought of all the defenses I could offer. Gretchen kept me out of it. I wasn’t exempt because she ripped off my stuff to pay for her habit. But what it really came down to was that I was stupid, and there was no excuse for that.

Mrs. Kinyon wiped her face with her fingers and I offered her a paper towel. She thanked me and there was no blame in her words, just fatigue, probably realizing there was enough blame for all of us—including Gretchen herself.

“Four thousand dollars!” Mrs. Kinyon said. “That’s how much it’s going to cost to get her into Riverside. I don’t have that kind of money, Paul. Where am I going to get it? She won’t finish out the school year, and even if she goes there’s no guarantee. The social worker said even with Riverside there’s a ninety percent chance of relapse.”

Riverside must have been a treatment facility.

She dabbed at her eyes some more. “I’ve been sitting here thinking about my options. And I’ve been thinking about kicking her out of the house. Can you imagine? My own child? I mean, what kind of parent am I? She’s all I’ve got.”

I wanted to reach out to her and say it will be okay, but I didn’t, because I didn’t know if it would. If what all of us wanted counted for anything, Gretchen would get to keep her arm and go back to school, clean and whole and scared straight.

“Joanne,” Dad said softly, his voice dim and soothing as the lights in Gretchen’s room. “Take the opening. We’ll help with the expense. We’ll find a way.”

And at that moment, even though he was burned out, I loved my father more than ever. And all because of the we.
We’ll
help out.
We’ll
find a way. He was trying to help patch together someone who wasn’t even his. And there, I realized, was something I could latch on to, a quality more true and solid than an army jacket and a pair of heavy black boots.

I slowly backed away. I didn’t need to see any more. Not tonight. I had my answer.

I still didn’t know what had happened between Gretchen and Keith in the bathroom. All I knew was that Gretchen was here in the hospital and Keith was not. Had he given her a stronger dose than he gave himself? Or had he just watched her ingest poison while he sat back and chugged beer?

Either way, I now knew the end of
Quadrophenia
: there were two people on that scooter, not just one. Keith had stood Gretchen on the seat in front of him, maybe whispering things like:
it’ll be fun
, or even
I know how to make you feel good
. Then at the last minute he pushed her off while he rolled out of the way. He was the coward standing safe at the top while Gretchen plunged into wreckage.

I found the Brads leaning against a counter of a nurse’s station, sipping Diet Cokes. Good Brad looked hopeful and pulled me out of earshot of anyone in scrubs.

“I didn’t really see anything,” I said.

“That’s all right,” Evil Brad said. “Just tell me what you did see. We’ll get Gretchen’s testimony when she comes around.”

I hated him, standing on that cliff, watching from a safe distance. So I stole up behind him…

“They were in the bathroom. Two of them together. When they came out Gretchen was acting all strange.”

“Who, Ronnie? Who was in the bathroom with her?” Good Brad said.

I saw him from the back in his Eisenhower jacket. He didn’t notice me. With one hard kick, I toppled him over the side, too.

“Keith Spady,” I said.

And there it was, the core of me. It had changed, but it was one thing I was now sure of.

I didn’t need any more rock-star heroes.