“Home,” I say again.
All the way there I breathe against the nausea, holding the pieces of myself together. He walks me to my door, and as soon as I’m inside I lock it between us. I’m halfway to Oscar’s cage, seeking the comfort of rat snuggles, when I remember. No more Oscar. I stop short in the middle of the living room floor, rainwater puddling around my feet, thinking about what the crime scene investigators are going to find in my car.
Chapter Three
My house feels wrong, as if somebody has come in and renovated in my absence. I stand still, breathing, shivering, dripping, trying to connect with my surroundings. There is my thrift store couch, shabby and stained, but broken in to fit my curves. My Nikes on the mat by the door. My poster prints on the walls—Monet and Chagall intermingled with surreal photomontages.
It’s dark and stifling, all the blinds and windows closed up tight. My teeth begin to chatter despite the heat, my jaw and shoulders aching with the effort to contain my shivering.
I discard my soaking clothes in the middle of the floor. Rain has diluted the stains on my T-shirt into pale pinkish splotches that look more like Kool-Aid than blood. My jeans are ruined, gravel and tar ground into the knees. They cling to me like a second skin, leaving a rusty streak on my right thigh when I peel them away. Blood is caked beneath my fingernails and smeared up my arms to the elbows.
Shock.
My brain isn’t working right, but I latch onto that one word. I need to move. I need to do something.
Get clean. Get warm.
The legs that carry me into the bathroom don’t feel like mine, and the face gazing out at me from the mirror belongs to a stranger, ghost pale, blue eyes shading into gray. When my hand rises to touch the blood speckled on my cheek, the hand in the mirror does the same. Both the mirror woman and I are shivering, our blonde hair plastered to scalps and shoulders.
Turning from the mirror I strip out of my bra and panties and climb into the shower. But this is a cold that hot water can’t begin to touch. By the time I give up and get out, the bathroom is full of steam, but I’m still shivering.
I pull on an old pair of sweatpants and my favorite oversized sweatshirt. Wrap myself up in a blanket. Something needs to be done with the heap of ruined clothes on the living room floor, so I stuff them into the trash can, get them out of my sight. But no matter what I do, I can’t get warm and I can’t stop the movie replaying on an endless loop inside my head.
Kat’s eyes, inexplicably angry as she pedals along beside me. Oscar rolling around on the floor mat. The lurch of my car as the wheels roll up and over something in the road.
A person.
Kat.
Make it stop. Please, make it stop.
Maybe music will help, something light and catchy. I settle for Taylor Swift and turn it up good and loud, trying to drown out the noises in my head. Since I’m already as miserable as I think I’m capable of being—unless she dies, unless she dies, oh God, don’t let her die—I tackle Oscar’s cage. It hasn’t always been Oscar’s cage, of course. I’ve used it for a succession of small creatures.
This time I want the cage gone. Out of my room. Out of my house. Out of my memory.
Gathering up the bag that holds my clothes in one hand, and Oscar’s cage in the other, I lug everything out to the trash cans. The rain has passed; the sun is breaking through the clouds. It’s still well above the horizon, but the light has softened. The air smells of rain and grass.
For the first time since the accident I’m able to draw a deep breath. I stand there, barefoot in the wet grass, eyes closed, letting the sun warm me. The sound of a car interrupts my solitude. I ignore it, pretending it isn’t there, waiting for the driver to either move on or turn off the engine, but the idling continues.
When I open my eyes, Mendez is watching me from his patrol car.
My stomach lurches.
The world spins, and I brace myself on the trash can. There can only be one reason he’s back so soon. Kat’s dead and they’ve come to arrest me for vehicular homicide.
But when Mendez opens his door, it’s not to read me my Miranda rights and put me in handcuffs.
“We’re done with your car. Figured the least I could do is give you a ride over to get it.”
My throat is dry as a bone, and I can’t speak or swallow.
“Rae? You okay?”
I manage to nod but can’t get out the question I need to ask. Maybe he sees it in my eyes. “She’s in surgery,” he says. “Some sort of internal laceration. You don’t look so good, Rae. Maybe we should get your car another time.”
I shake my head and manage to croak, “I’m fine. I’m good. Let me get my keys.”
Shoes would be good, I remind myself, as I scoop up my house keys from the table. Maybe some clothes that don’t make me look like I’m homeless. But I’m just going to get my car and come right back, so I shove my feet into a pair of sandals and call myself good to go.
Mendez opens the front door of the police cruiser for me, making it clear I’m not a suspect anymore. He tries to make small talk on the way, but his words are little more than a buzzing in my ears. I hope the listening noises I make are adequate and I’m not accidentally admitting to a crime.
When we reach the scene of the accident, the bicycle is gone. My car sits by the side of the road. From the back it looks innocent and normal. I wonder if there’s blood on the tires or paint on the bumper.
“There was a dead rat in your car,” Mendez says, opening my door for me. His voice is unusually tentative. “We took care of it. Figured you had enough to worry about.”
A wave of gratitude takes me by surprise. Even knowing that Oscar is decaying ignominiously in a nearby dumpster, all I feel is relief that his interment is no longer on my worry list.
My car has been sitting in the heat with the windows closed, and I can tell by the smell that the rat removal wasn’t immediate. My hands start shaking again, my whole body reliving the sensation of that bump in the road, solid and soft.
I start the car. Open the windows. Turn on the radio.
Mendez waits, watching, and I signal and pull away, watching in my rearview until he pulls a U-turn and heads in the opposite direction.
As soon as he’s gone I want him back. Freedom sucks. I need purpose and a place to be.
I arrive at the hospital parking lot without conscious intent. I’d meant to go home and don’t remember the turns that brought me here. But if Kat is dead, I need to know. If she’s going to make it, I need to know that, too. Everything in my life teeters on the fulcrum of this important information.
Mount Carmel Hospital is familiar territory; most of the employees know me. I worked here for a couple of years when I first moved into town, before shifting to extended care as a better fit. I smile at Liz, behind the registration desk. She smiles back, but tentatively, staring at me as if I’ve grown antennae or turned green overnight. Gossip runs quick, and I figure she’s already heard about what happened.
In the waiting room next to the surgical suite, a man sits in one of the chairs. There’s a laptop open on his knees, but he’s staring at the clock, not the computer screen. I take him in with one quick glance. Dark hair in tight curls over a well-shaped skull, gray at the temples. Tailored suit, dirty at the knees and damp at the shoulders. A leather briefcase at his feet.
“Mr. Impatient,” I say aloud, before I catch myself.
His eyes brighten in recognition; his lips curve in a tight smile.
He gets to his feet and holds out his hand. “Mason Montgomery.”
“Rae.”
“You don’t look like a Rae.”
“I don’t?”
His hand is warm, but he ruins the shake by putting his other hand over mine, like a preacher or a politician.
“I’ve been calling you Barbie all afternoon.”
“You have got to be kidding.”
Surely the man isn’t trying to flirt with me, not with Kat dying or maybe dead jus
t beyond the forbidding double no-admittance doors that separate us from the operating room.
His eyes travel over me—crazy hair, baggy old shirt, sweatpants, sandals—and a spark of laughter lights his eyes. “Well, maybe Finger-in-the-Light-Socket Barbie.”
My rising anger collides with the taut anxiety that underlies his awkward humor. I yank my hand away and take the chair on the far side of the small room.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. His presence feels like an intrusion, as if Kat belongs to me and I’m the only one who has a right to be here.
He shrugs. “Same thing you are. Guilt. Responsibility. I couldn’t rest until I know if she’s okay.”
I remember the creaking of her pelvis under my hands, the deformed rib cage, the blood on her lips. She’s not going to be okay for a good long time, if ever.
Mason glances down at his laptop screen and taps a couple of keys. I hope he’s going to ignore me now, but no such luck. “I had a job interview. That’s where I was going.”
“Did you get it?”
“What? The job? I missed the interview.”
He doesn’t look like the sort of guy who would be interviewing for anything in Colville. That low-level anxiety wafting off him is at odds with his big-city persona, but then anybody would be rattled by watching somebody get run over.
“It doesn’t seem to matter, does it?” His right leg bounces, jarring the laptop so he has to steady it with his hands. “A woman very nearly died. What’s an interview in the balance of that?”
A rat.
An interview.
A woman’s life.
Priorities and perspective. The man grates on my nerves, but I feel a weird connection to him, like we’ve known each other for years, not just a couple of hours.
“How is she? Have you heard anything?”
“Nothing, other than that she’s in surgery. She was still in the ER when I got here. I told them I was a friend, but they still wouldn’t let me in. Then the doc came out and said they were taking her to the OR. Bleeding internally. Fractured pelvis. Broken ribs and a flail chest, if that means anything to you?”
“How long has she been in surgery?”
“Three hours, ten minutes, and about fifteen seconds.”
A quick jerk lifts the corners of his lips, as if he’s given himself instructions to smile. Another couple of taps on his keyboard, and then he closes the lid and shoves it into his briefcase without powering down. “Who am I kidding? I can’t work. I keep seeing her go down in front of your car. Horrible.” He shakes his head and repeats himself. “Just horrible.”
This is not helping my own nerves at all. I wrap my arms around myself to head off another bout of shivering, realizing as I do so how frayed the cuffs of my sweatshirt are. It’s also three sizes too big and sports a skull-and-crossbones logo. Great. I’ve come in a ragged grim reaper outfit to a death vigil. No wonder Liz looked at me that way when I came in. Mason hit the nail on its proverbial head with that whole Light-Socket-Barbie thing.
“Hey,” he says, concern in his eyes. “You okay? How about I get you a cup of coffee. I’ll be right back.” Without waiting to hear whether I want coffee or even like coffee, he’s off, leaving his laptop in my keeping.
The level of implied trust alarms me. What makes him think I won’t just take it and run?
I can’t sit still, and I’m pacing the small space when he returns with two Styrofoam cups. “Forgot to ask what you like,” he says, handing me one. “So it’s got cream and sugar in it. Figure it’s got to be swill, right? So I doctored it up for you.”
His laugh is nervous, his movements tight and jerky. He’s as rattled as I am. What I can’t figure out is why. He didn’t run over anybody. All he’s guilty of is big-city driving in a small town. The coffee is bitter and burned, but at least it’s hot. The cup warms my icy hands.
Mason sits, holding his cup but not drinking. While he was talking, his voice irritated me and I wanted him to shut up. Now I can’t stand either the silence or the unspoken horror that tethers us together.
I make an attempt at small talk. “So, where are you from?”
“It’s that obvious, huh? That I’m not from here?” This time, his smile is real. It softens his face, brightens his eyes. “Born and raised in Chicago.”
“What on earth are you doing here?”
His right hand combs through his hair and then scrubs at the side of his jaw. “Running away.”
“Aren’t you a little old for that?”
“Family is family, no matter how old you are.”
“Me, too,” I say. His eyebrows go up, and I clarify. “Running away from family, I mean.”
I ran away nine years ago, on my twenty-first birthday. Colville was meant to be a way station, a short stop on my way to freedom, but somehow I got hung up and never kept going. As places to be trapped in go, it’s not half-bad. I love the mountains and the trees, and the people are generally good at minding their own business.
“Is that ruined now?” I ask him. “The running away? Seeing as you missed the interview and all.”
“Rescheduled it for tomorrow. Couldn’t have made up a better excuse.” He sets the coffee on the table beside him, untouched. “God, watching her disappear in front of your bumper like that . . .”
My insides turn over at his words. Coffee and acid burn the back of my throat, and I can’t quite swallow it all back down.
“Oh God. I’m sorry,” he says, in a voice that means it. “I shouldn’t have said that. I can’t even imagine how you must be feeling.”
“Like I ran over somebody. That’s how I feel.”
“Nothing you could have done,” he says. “Like I told the cops. She turned right in front of you. A woman on a mission like that, you can’t . . .” His voice chokes off. He pulls a tissue from his pocket and coughs into it, then blows his nose.
Time slows. His words refuse to make sense. His face behaves strangely, moving in and out of focus. There’s a tiny black spot just above the bridge of his nose. A blackhead, maybe. Or a bit of dirt. I can’t decide.
“What do you mean, a woman on a mission?” My lips feel numb and stiff, like I’ve been to the dentist.
“You didn’t . . . nothing,” he says, wadding up the tissue and using it as an excuse to turn his back to me on the way to the trash can. “Never mind.”
“What kind of a mission? What are you talking about?”
Kat’s face as she pedaled beside me. Kat’s eyes, drilling into me. Kat’s body . . .
I press the palms of my hands against my eyes, making bright-white light to burn out the images.
“God,” Mason says. “I’m sorry. Me and my mouth. I thought you would have seen it.”
“I didn’t see anything. I glanced away, and then . . . I thought she’d lost control of the bike. Hit a pothole. I don’t know.” My mouth is dry, my voice muffled by my hands over my face. I don’t want to look at him, don’t want to hear what he is saying.
“I’d think you’d be relieved,” he says. I hear the guilt in his voice, though. He’s looking to make me feel better, not so much for me as to relieve himself from responsibility for the blunder. “To know it’s not your fault. I mean, if it wasn’t you, it would have been somebody else.”
And that’s when it all comes clear. By somebody else, he means him. He would have been the one with a bicycle crumpled under his bumper. It would be his tire that rolled a dirty tread track over Kat’s shirt, broke her ribs, tore up her insides. His guilt, instead of mine. Anger burns through me, sudden as lightning out of a clear blue sky.
“Well, it wasn’t you. It was me. Maybe if you hadn’t been tailgating, I’d have been driving slower. Maybe I wouldn’t have hit her at all.”
Maybe I’d have taken time at the corner, picked up Oscar, and put him in his box. Kat and her bike would have been way ahead of me, and she could have wound up under somebody else’s tires.
“You still don’t get—” His voice cuts off sha
rp as a razor’s edge.
Footsteps in the hall, a man in the doorway. He’s still got a surgical mask hanging around his neck and has forgotten to take his paper booties off. Otherwise, he looks like some ordinary guy you might see hanging around the hospital, visiting relatives or waiting to be seen in the ER. I happen to know better.
Dr. Maxwell Klemmer, fantastic surgeon and all-round nice guy. He’s also the inspiration behind Bernie’s dimmer switch lectures.
“Rae.” Max smiles at me, then fades to seriousness. “Oh no. It was you?”
“She turned right in front of my car. I couldn’t stop.”
“Poor girl.” He doesn’t specify which one of us he’s talking about, but his hand descends, warm and comforting, on my shoulder. “Surgery was a success, you’ll be happy to hear.”
“She’ll make it, then?” Mason breaks in, coming to stand beside me. He smells of deodorant-masked sweat. That, and fear. The deodorant commercial people are missing a market with that campaign.
Will your deodorant stand up in court?
Max looks from me to Mason and back again. “Friend of yours?” he asks me.
“Friend of Kat’s,” I clarify. “That’s her name. Kat.”
“I’m a witness,” Mason says. “Driving just behind Rae. I saw everything.”
“He helped save her,” I add. Then look up into Max’s face. “We did save her, right? She’s going to be okay?”
“Stable for now. Unless something goes south, I think she’ll do quite well. We’re moving her to ICU. I think we can keep her here, rather than life flight her to Spokane. How she recovers depends partly on how her lungs hold up. And that flail chest—breathe, Rae. Don’t pass out on me.”
His hands grasp my shoulders and push me down into a chair. I drag a breath into my lungs and push it out again.
“Have you eaten today? You’re pale as death.”
I pull my hands up inside the sweatshirt sleeves and hug my arms over my breasts. “Can I see her, Max?”
I Wish You Happy: A Novel Page 3
