Going Too Far

by Jennifer Echols

  He looked down at me and put his big, warm hand over my hand.

  The scanner buzzed to life with Lois’s voice. John didn’t move, but those worried creases appeared between his eyebrows.

  “I don’t understand Lois’s code,” I whispered. “What is it?”

  He dropped his hand and stepped away from me. Picking up my soaked clothes from the floor, I followed him into the living room, where he was already putting on his gun belt. “A fatality at the Birmingham Junction,” he said. He bent to strap the other gun onto his leg. “What we’ve been waiting for.”

  I trailed him through the wake of his cologne. Out the door, into the fog that had replaced the rain, down the stairs, and into the car. He radioed to Lois that we were close by and could respond to this call. Which didn’t matter, because every siren in town was already wailing.

  I drew the seat belt across my chest and fastened it like a good girl. The past few nights I’d gotten used to wearing it. I hardly ever felt faint. Now I was back to the panicky feeling. I knew what John had meant when he said we’d been waiting for this wreck. Finally, after holding their breath responding to crashes at the dangerous intersection, the emergency response personnel had the fatality they’d dreaded. It was The Big One. And John wanted me, Tiffany, and Brian to get an eyeful.

  I was scared. And tired of being scared.

  As he checked both ways for nonexistent traffic and pulled onto the main road, I said, “My favorite drawing wasn’t the one of Venice. It was the one of the bridge. Your bridge.”

  He took a deep breath and sighed through his nose: Here we go again.

  “But the view you should draw isn’t the view of your bridge,” I went on. “It’s the view from your bridge.”

  His jaw hardened. “That’s illegal, as we’ve established.”

  “Sometimes breaking a rule is worth it. You’re so obsessed with this bridge. Haven’t you ever longed to see the view from the other side?”

  He made one final turn, and the red and blue lights came into view, flashing long on the wet pavement. “Why are you doing this?” he asked so quietly that I could hardly hear him over the sirens.

  “Because of what you’re about to do to me.”

  It was a one-car crash. A circle of cop cars, fire trucks, and ambulances surrounded the car. It had crumpled against a round pillar holding up the interstate. “How do you even have a wreck like that?” I asked.

  “Drunk. Poor judgment.” He opened his door. “Come on.”

  Normally I would have jumped at the chance to get out of the cop car with him on a call. Brian and Tiffany were there already. They stood on either side of the mangled car, far apart from each other, both with their arms folded. But I hung back against the hood of the cop car, trying to tamp the panic down.

  John crossed the accident scene and talked to a couple of firemen in their long coats with their helmets on and face shields down. He slid an engine enclosed in a cube-shaped metal frame off the fire truck and set it heavily near the wreck. The firemen screwed some hoses into the motor. They attached the other ends of the hoses to what looked like an enormous set of pliers.

  Quincy the paramedic passed by me. I called out to him, “Are those the jaws o’ life?”

  “Yeah. A little late for the life part. You can see no one’s in a huge hurry.” He kept ambling on his way.

  The jaws o’ life engine started up with a racket, and the firemen set to work spreading open the collapsed space that used to be the car’s front door. Broken glass and shards of metal flew into the air, bounced on the hood of the car, and cascaded to the pavement.

  John beckoned me forward to the crumpled car.

  My heart raced. My fingertips tingled. Red lights flashed behind my eyes. But I had to do what John said. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t put it past him to throw me in jail again, 6:01 A.M. or no 6:01 A.M. I took a few steps forward.

  Brian put himself in my path. He shook his head at me. “Meg. You don’t want to see this.”

  Behind Brian, John still motioned to me. He called, “Come on.”

  Brian walked over to John. “Don’t make her.” He put his hand against John’s shoulder to stop him.

  John flinched away. “Do not touch me while I’m in uniform,” he shouted.

  Brian ducked back.

  John walked toward me, grasped my wrist, and pulled me. By now my face felt like a mask, with no blood pumping to my skin. I knew I was as good as gone, but I’d lost the strength to fight. I stumbled after him toward the wreck.

  The noise from the jaws o’ life was so loud, I didn’t see how the firemen or anyone else could stand over here. It pulsed loud enough to hurt, like a motorcycle twice as big as mine with no muffler. I felt the concussion of every pulse in my chest, throwing the rhythm of my heartbeat off. As the scene collapsed into tunnel vision, the pulse of the engine melded into one long scream.

  The interstate lights glared off the firemen’s face shields so I couldn’t see their expressions. They looked like aliens in space suits. At a signal from John, they backed away from the car to let us see inside.

  She was twisted in a way the human body did not twist, in a very, very, very small space.

  For me to hear him over the jaws o’ life, John must have shouted. But in my head his voice sounded smooth and hollow and sinister, like a doctor in my hospital room after I’d been sedated.

  “This is what I wanted you to see.”

  12

  I wasted away. My flesh shrunk so quickly, I seemed to melt, to collapse in on myself. Through my transparent skin, my bones showed. I wiggled one finger back and forth, watching the bones grind together underneath.

  THE AMMONIA LODGED IN MY NOSTRILS like two Q-tips.

  I meant to cross my right hand to my left arm and pull out the IV. I missed, and my hand bounced off my shoulder. I slid my hand down my arm, feeling for the needle. No IV.

  I sniffed more ammonia, trying to get it past the Q-tips and into my brain. I couldn’t wake up. I couldn’t open my eyes.

  “Do not stick a needle in me,” I mumbled. “Whatever you do, do not start an IV. I would rather die, do you understand? Go ahead and let me die.”

  “You’re not dying,” came Tiffany’s voice. “And you’re crazy if you think they’d let me start an IV. I’m lucky I got to take your blood pressure. Which is very low, by the way, so don’t sit up yet.”

  I took one more big whiff and sat up. Outside the open square of the back of the ambulance, John stood chatting with Officer Leroy and another cop and Quincy. John was smoking a cigarette.

  Bastard.

  Bastard!

  I moved toward him.

  Fell.

  Off the ambulance?

  Heard Tiffany shriek.

  Found myself lying on my back on the wet highway, the shock of the fall still rippling through my muscles.

  John lifted me under the arms and stood me up against the ambulance bumper. “Watch that first step. It’s a doozy,” he said around the lit cigarette hanging from his lip.

  I shoved him. His chest was solid under the dark uniform, and he didn’t budge. I shoved him again, as hard as I could, but only shoved myself back against the ambulance. I screamed at him, “I had cancer, you fuck!”

  The other cops and Quincy crowded around. Suddenly I could see myself the way they saw me, a blue-haired girl screaming for no reason. I was about to get taken to jail for assaulting a police officer.

  John’s cigarette dropped onto the wet asphalt and steamed there. I didn’t look up at him to see whether he was gaping at me and the cigarette had fallen out of his mouth, or he’d thrown the cigarette down on purpose. I didn’t want to know whether I’d mortified him in front of his macho coworkers. I didn’t care.

  “I’m hitching a ride on the fire truck back to my motorcycle,” I told the cigarette. “I’ve had enough of what you wanted me to see. I’m done for the night.”

  My legs wobbled underneath me as I staggered to the fire truck, but no one
offered to help me, not even Tiffany or Brian. Keeping my head turned away from the wreck, I pulled myself into the roomy cab of the fire truck. I curled up like a cat next to the giant pliers from the jaws o’ life. Which was probably a good thing. I would need them to extract me from this fix I’d wedged myself into with Johnafter.

  I HAD CANCER, YOU FUCK.

  I was so tired. I’d almost finished my daily five-mile run in the park. And I hadn’t been to sleep yet. Well, except for a half-hour catnap in the front of the fire truck before the emergency response personnel dropped me off.

  Even on my last leg, I managed a burst of energy, trying to outrun the memory of my own words.

  I-had-can-cer-you-fuuuuuuuuu—

  Part of me wanted to take it back. I hadn’t looked at John’s face when I shouted at him. I hadn’t seen the dark look of pain. But I could imagine. This macho pride thing was very fragile, I knew. I’d hit him where it hurt, in front of the older men he was trying desperately to be like.

  Then I remembered the twisted body in the very small space of the mangled car, and I wanted to shove John harder.

  Done. I reached the wall of handprints and walked around it to cool down. I half expected the ghost of Johnafter to round the bend toward me.

  We hadn’t met in the park since that first afternoon. One night I’d asked him whether he was trying to avoid seeing me there. He’d responded like the honest do-gooder he was. Sometimes he had to stay late at the police station to finish paperwork for the arrests he’d made and reports he’d taken that night. So he didn’t get to bed until mid-morning. He was still asleep when I went running.

  He ran later in the afternoon, when he woke up. I wasn’t willing to stay later and lose sleep to see him, any more than he was willing to get up early and lose sleep to see me. I guess we both understood that our relationship was built entirely on witty repartee, and neither of us thought we could be witty on four hours of shut-eye.

  Wait a minute—what was I thinking? What relationship? We probably didn’t even have an appointment for sex anymore. John was gone, back into the yearbook from whence he sprung. And I didn’t look forward to spending my last night on patrol with Officer After.

  My cell phone rang.

  “John!” I exclaimed, sprinting to my motorcycle at the edge of the parking lot and pawing through my bag. We’d exchanged numbers in case another suspect tried to bash the door of the cop car while John wasn’t around. “Hello?”

  “Hey!” Tiffany said. “I was afraid you’d be asleep, but you sound wide awake.”

  I tried not to huff out my disappointment. Wiping wet blue strands out of my eyes, I said, “I just finished my run.”

  “You’re running this week, even with everything else going on?”

  “Have to.”

  “Well? Do you have leukemia?”

  I held the phone at arm’s length and frowned at it. If Tiffany knew why I ran, I was even more transparent than I’d thought. I brought the phone back to my ear. “Not today.”

  “That’s good. How about last night? Were you okay last night? I’ve never seen anyone that mad.”

  I kicked my handprint on the wall. “Thanks to John.” I should have been kicking John’s handprint, but it was too high.

  “He went after you, you know. On your way to the fire truck, you looked like you were about to fall over those orange cones. But I called him back. I was afraid you’d hit him again and get in trouble.”

  “I’m a threat, all right.” I felt my face flush at the thought of John coming after me. He cared, he cared! He cared so much that he made me faint on purpose! I was pathetic.

  Tiffany cleared her throat. “Listen, I wanted your advice on something.”

  I laughed heartily. “Yeah, I’m a regular Dear Abby. Shoot.”

  “Brian still isn’t speaking to me. He won’t return my calls. But right before we went to the bridge, he had started hinting every other word that he and I should have sex—”

  I knew what she was getting at. “No.”

  “—and he was trying to convince me to do it. But I didn’t want to.”

  “No.”

  “Now, to get back together with him—”

  “No.”

  “—I thought I might tell him I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Earth to Tiffany!”

  “Why not?” she exclaimed. Translation: If you can have sex with a drug offender, why can’t I have sex with the salutatorian?

  “I could probably think of twenty reasons. Since I haven’t slept today, I can think of only three. First, you don’t want to get back together with someone who gives you the Silent Treatment.”

  “The Silent Treatment isn’t so bad.”

  “Obviously it’s driving you crazy. Second, you’re trying to get drunk and have sex because everyone else is doing it. At least, you think everyone else is doing it, because they’re bragging about it. But you need to do what’s right for you.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. I waited for her to thank me for my infinite wisdom. Instead, she said, “I thought I could count on your support. You wear a T-shirt that says Peer Pressure.”

  “Today I’m going to peer pressure you into not doing something rather than doing something. Look, I use protection when I have sex. It’s over, and I never think much about it again. With you, it would be different. You would use a condom, it wouldn’t break, and there would be no problems. The next day, you would go to the doctor to make sure you weren’t pregnant and didn’t have AIDS. You would go back every day for a month.” I raised my voice over Tiffany’s giggles. “Three years later, you would still be obsessing that you were having a delayed reaction. You might be pregnant and you might have AIDS. You would do everything you could to keep Brian from breaking up with you, because if he did, he might call your mama and tell her you weren’t a virgin.”

  “Am I that obvious?” Tiffany asked.

  “Yes. And I’m not saying that’s a bad way to be. I could probably use a little obsessive worry in my life. It would make me more balanced.”

  I realized with a start that I’d been pacing madly up and down the parking lot, as if Tiffany’s sex life really concerned me.

  I walked back to my motorcycle and continued, “I’m saying you would not be comfortable with casual sex. Or whatever we’re talking about here. The National Honor Society version of prostitution. When it’s right, you won’t have to call me to check. You’ll know. And here’s the third reason you shouldn’t do it. Sex isn’t that great.”

  She was quiet. “Touch My Body” played in the background, like she’d been psyching herself up. “Oh, come on.”

  “It’s not.”

  “It’s supposed to be no good the first time. I thought you were way past that.”

  I laughed shortly. “Thanks, Tiff. It’s still no good.”

  “Then why are you doing it?” she shrieked.

  A gust of wind made me shiver in my wet sweatshirt. “I want to make sure I’ve lived, in case I don’t have a lot of life left.”

  “You told me you finished jogging and you don’t have leukemia!”

  “I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

  “That sounds a lot like obsessive worry,” she said.

  “About this particular thing.”

  “It’s a pretty intense particular thing, Meg.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re one to talk. Go ahead and proposition Brian, and I’ll tell the whole school you’re a beer-swilling slut-whore.”

  She hung up on me.

  I was just stuffing the phone back into my bag when it rang again. I clicked it on. “Okay, you’re not a slut-whore. If you’re going to run with the big dogs, you have to learn to take a joke.”

  Silence on the other end of the line again. But no “Touch My Body.”

  My heart stopped. “John?” I asked.

  “The other one,” Eric said.

  My heart beat again, slowly. “Oh, hey! I’ve been expecting your cal
l. And I take back what I said about you not being a slut-whore.”

  “Right back at ya,” he said. “Booty call.”

  “I ain’t no hollaback girl.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  A cop car cruised slowly by the park. Not John, of course. Some lucky soul on day shift. But my heart stopped again for the split second before I realized it wasn’t him.

  I was far gone. And I needed to come back. Otherwise I’d end up like Tiffany, making sacrifices on a boy’s behalf.

  “Okay, I guess I am. I need some sleep first, though.”

  “Leave your motorcycle at the police station tonight,” Eric said. “I’ll pick you up there at nine, and I’ll have you back at the beginning of John’s shift—when—ten?”

  It never took Eric long.

  “I couldn’t get any pot,” he warned me. “I’ll have some beer, though.”

  “Are you crazy?” A couple of elderly ladies speed-walking on the track in sequined workout suits turned to stare at me. I lowered my voice. “I can’t drink beer and then ride around for eight hours with John.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to do it sober.” I could almost hear Eric shudder as he hung up.

  Me too.

  THAT NIGHT, I WALKED TO THE drugstore across the street from Eggstra! Eggstra! and bought condoms. I always brought condoms. Eric was liable to forget them and not care. Somehow I had known this about him from the very beginning.

  Then I rode my motorcycle to the police station, as we’d agreed. Eric was fifteen minutes late picking me up, as predicted. And he would be fifteen minutes late dropping me off again, so John was sure to be steamed.

  That was Eric’s plan, and it was good.

  I didn’t even say anything when he turned the Beamer onto the dirt road and parked in the clearing beside the bridge.

  He cut the engine and turned to me. At least, it sounded like he turned to me. Clouds covered the moon and stars. With the engine and the dashboard lights off, the darkness was total and heavy.