The Next Time You See Me

by Holly Goddard Jones

“I don’t know.” Wyatt thought about a cab again, his familiar house, Boss sleeping heavily down next to his feet. He’d led such a small life, and he wondered why he was so desperate to get back to it.

  “You’re here, buddy. You’re one of us tonight. Have a damn drink and lighten the fuck up.”

  Wyatt turned toward the bar, where the rest of the guys from work were gathered, laughing and tipping back longnecks. His home, his bed, his dog—they’d all be waiting for him. For the rest of his life, they’d be waiting. And it seemed to Wyatt that he could, at the least, finish the night he’d started. He’d share a drink with these young men. He’d do his best to part ways amicably. That would be it.

  “One drink,” he told Gene.

  “That’s my man,” Gene said. He shook Wyatt’s hand, a warm, genuine gesture, and clapped him on the shoulder.

  Wyatt followed him to the bar, to the sweaty tumbler of Jim Beam they’d ordered for him. In another hour he was drunk.

  3.

  He stayed a few minutes past the three-thirty whistle to finish labeling the pallets Jusef had loaded, lingering over the work, and the second-shifters were taking to their stations by the time he sealed the last box. He hurried past a few familiar faces, waving absently, and ducked into the men’s restroom. It was empty. He had broken out in a peppery sweat, but his arms were spiked with goose bumps, his bowels heavy and loose. He had been feeling worse and worse since lunch, and he’d barely made it to the end of his shift without collapsing. He splashed some water on his face, then grasped the wet porcelain and hung over the sink, nauseous. The fist was back in his chest, its mate running sharp little fingers along his bicep, and at the moment when Wyatt was certain he was going to collapse everything eased a little, and he breathed deeply in and out, and it seemed that he was passing some of the sickness out of him with each exhalation. He looked at his reflection. He was sweaty and ashen. But he was fine.

  It was overcast when he emerged from the plant, a rain falling so lightly that it felt more like a mist, barely enough to dampen his clothes. He blinked as he always did, wearing the stunned expression of a person emerging from a Saturday matinee in the middle of summer. Each finish to a workday came as a surprise to him. He’d wished a third of his life away between the hours of seven and three thirty, and he’d used the rest of the time to sleep and watch television and eat the same succession of skillet-fried meals. A small life, a sad life, but look what happened when you tried to be a person you weren’t. Look what happened when you started to think you could have more.

  In a few moments he was topping Harper Hill and winding down the north end of Hill Street, riding the brake as he passed Sheila Friend’s place, letting gravity carry him slowly down the road. He hadn’t meant to come by here again. Sheila knew him, was probably as familiar with his Chevy S-10 as he was her Jeep, the two of them having shared a parking lot for better than ten years. Sheila was divorced, had gotten on at Price after finishing her twenty years for the city, working dispatch at the police department. Wyatt knew her the way he knew Morris Houchens, comfortably but not intimately, and she’d find it odd if she spotted him making regular slow-motion drive-bys. But he couldn’t help himself.

  He was descending past a sharp turn in the road, Sheila’s house now out of sight behind him, when the little fingers clutched his left upper arm again, and his mouth flooded with bitter liquid. He braked, struggled with the gears, and managed to get his truck onto the gravel shoulder. Then he rolled down the window, bracing himself against the cool drizzle. The air smelled moldy, like piles of leaves gone slick and black. His lips were numb.

  There was a flicker of movement ahead, along the tree line, and his heart set off again immediately, wham-WHAM! wham-WHAM!, the fist not knocking but beating, as though there were some guy inside him, some watchman, and he was saying, Do you see this, Wyatt? Do you see this? Put the truck in gear. Drive. Get out of here.

  He couldn’t, though. He stared, paralyzed, as a figure climbed the hill toward him, the shape slumped but vaguely human, pale, blurred in the drizzle on his windshield. It moved in an awkward but oddly quick shuffle, and when he opened his mouth wide to choke down a breath, nothing came. It was as if his body was tightening all over, fingers around his arm and his heart, fingers clamping his throat until he could only wheeze with the whistling uncertainty of an asthmatic.

  “Scott!” someone shouted. “Scott, I told you to wait for me!”

  The pale figure stopped.

  “If you take another step, I swear to God we’re going home!”

  A woman rounded the turn, run-walking, pausing to put her hands on her knees and slumping over to catch her breath. Wyatt lifted his hand, feeling the last of his energy burn away with the motion, and let it drop on the toggle that triggered his windshield wipers, increasing their speed. The pale figure was a child, he could see now—he could see it plain as day—with a white sheet draped over its head, the material dangling almost to the ground, and a plastic jack-o’-lantern clutched in one hand. A little ghost. A trick-or-treater. Yesterday was Halloween, Wyatt remembered, and the boy must have insisted on wearing his costume a second time.

  The woman and boy were walking uphill, coming straight toward him, and he tried to turn the key in the ignition three times before realizing that the engine was already running, the truck in neutral. The tightening in his chest hadn’t dissipated. He took the knuckle of his thumb and kneaded it into his sternum, circling the spot he called his crumb catcher. He put his right hand on the gearshift and grimaced around a fresh spike of pain. He’d seen that child and thought—Lord, he didn’t want to admit what he thought. He needed to go, to not be seen here, but he couldn’t even get the emergency brake released. He was stuck.

  “Mister?” the mother was saying, peering cautiously into his window. “Sir, you all right?”

  Wyatt managed to nod. “Okay. I’m okay.”

  She grasped the child’s hand and looked up and down the road. “You don’t look okay,” she said. The child, the little ghost, was tugging on her arm, making an ennnh sound, and she grabbed his chin through the costume. The ghost face was exaggerated and mournful: a warbled O of a mouth, long black eyes, the boy’s whites glinting in the slits his mother had cut. “Knock it off,” the mother said. “Or we turn around and go home.”

  “I’m fine,” Wyatt gasped, gripping the steering wheel against another knife of pain, and the woman said, “I’m going for help. I’ll be right back.”

  No, he tried calling, realizing he hadn’t spoken aloud. There wasn’t any breath left. There was only the metal ping of rain on the roof of the truck cab, the cold mist blowing into his window, the intermittent squeal of his windshield wipers, and the agony in his chest.

  Chapter Five

  1.

  “Hey, cowboy,” a voice was saying. “Snap to, cowboy. I need to roll you over.”

  Wyatt lifted an arm to rub his eyes, grunting when its progress was stopped by a cord or cuff or something. He felt nauseous. There was a spike of pain in the center of his forehead.

  “Sick,” he muttered, rocking side to side, trying to lift himself. He grasped at air, sensed something hard being tucked into the space beside his shoulder and a firm hand pulling him toward whatever it was. The pressure made him gag, and he vomited hot, metal-tasting water.

  “Is that better?”

  Wyatt groaned over the bedpan.

  Something was pulled out from beneath him, and he heard the crisp snap of the bedding being patted smooth. “Lean you back now?”

  He nodded.

  He was lowered gently to his pillow. His chest, which had been pinched as he’d lain on his side, opened up, the ache over his left breast suddenly apparent. It was bearable—he could vaguely recall when it hadn’t been—but there was a dull throb emanating from a knot of muscle, as though he’d exercised vigorously or gotten punched.

  He lifted his hand to rub the knot, felt the pull of the cord or cuff again. He sobbed before he could stop him
self.

  “There, now.” A cool hand was on his forehead. He caught a whiff of vanilla. “It’s hard right now. The worst is over.” A pause. “You can move your left hand, you know.”

  He lifted it to his face, embarrassed, and wiped his eyes.

  “So here we are again.”

  He blinked, confused. The light in the room was so bright it was bluish, but he could make out the IV in his forearm, the bed rails, the thin, rough top sheet and woven thermal blanket. He could see his sock-clad feet sticking out at the end of the bed, startled looking, and on the sink across the room a vase of yellow carnations with a white bow tied around the rim, like a delivery to the funeral parlor. He was in the hospital; that was evident. But leaned over him was the woman from the other night at Nancy’s, he realized with a start, and his addled mind tried in vain to account for her. Had she found him on the road near Sheila’s house? Did she have a little boy?

  “Sarah?”

  “You remembered,” she said. She smiled in a sweet but reserved way. “I’m flattered.”

  He felt exposed and ashamed, lying on his back with his feet jutting from beneath the bedclothes, gown shifted around so that his pale, freckled shoulder was showing. He hadn’t wiped his mouth since vomiting. “What are you—” He stopped, worried he was being rude. “How did you know I was here?”

  She stepped back and swept her arms down with a flourish, indicating her outfit: pink hospital scrubs, an ID tag clamped on the breast pocket of the top. “I work here,” she said.

  “Oh,” Wyatt said, remembering. “That’s right.”

  “It’s Tuesday morning.” She reached up, checked the level of fluid in whatever was draining into his arm. “You’ve been in and out. You had a heart attack.”

  Wyatt had figured as much. He nodded a little.

  “The paramedics got a clot blocker into you at the scene, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. You’re lucky that woman found you and acted as quickly as she did.”

  He turned his face into the pillow, aware that he was leaking tears again. “She should have left me.”

  “That’s the medication talking,” Sarah said briskly. Her warm hand, those oddly slender fingers, grasped his. “You’ve got to trust me on this one, Wyatt. Tomorrow you’re going to remember why living’s so good, even when it’s so bad.”

  He felt himself shaking his head, denying her. She had no idea what she was talking about.

  “You think of one thing you love, Wyatt—just one thing’s all it takes—and hold that thought for a while. There’ll be a doctor coming in soon with the bottom line, and you’re going to hear some stuff you won’t like much, but I can promise you that you’ll be able to go home in a few days. You’re going to be alive to do it. That’s something.” Her fingers tightened. “What’s waiting for you out there?”

  The question threatened to sink him further, because the first thought that sprang to mind was, Nothing. Nobody. Mother and father both dead. No brothers or sisters. No friends. He mentally walked the rooms of his lonely house, wondering how he’d lived among them so peacefully, even contentedly, for all these years, what delusion he’d been nurturing. The full-size bed with the depression in the center of the mattress. The cast-iron skillet, yesterday’s sausage fat congealed to a waxy sheen. His neat line of baseball caps on the shelf in his closet. Boss no longer waiting for him at the back door when his truck rolled into the driveway every evening, tires throwing gravel—

  Boss.

  “My dog,” he said, trying to sit up again. “What time is it?”

  “Whoa, there.” She blocked him from rising with the back of her arm. “Lie back, now. Calm down.”

  “My dog’s been cooped up at my place since yesterday morning,” Wyatt said. His chest throbbed. “No one’s fed him or let him out. Somebody’s got to get out to my house.”

  “OK,” Sarah said. Her face was strong and purposeful. “Wyatt, hon, I hear you. I’m not going to let anything happen to your dog. Do you know someone who can go over there?”

  He thought hard: someone, anyone. The despair was suffocating him.

  “A relative? Do you have family in town?”

  “No.”

  “What about a friend? One of the guys you were with the other night? Would one of them go over there?”

  Wyatt imagined Sam Austen in his home: finding the leash to hook onto Boss’s collar, pouring a cup of Ol’ Roy into the dog bowl. “God, no,” he said.

  Sarah bit her lip, gaze unfocused. “I’m stuck here until midnight, or I’d do it.” She looked at him again. “Someone at work?”

  Again Wyatt thought of Sam, then Sam’s work gang: Gene Lawson, Daniel Stone, all those guys. He was ready to say no again when Morris Houchens came to mind. He was still ashamed of needing Morris’s help yesterday morning and bristled at the thought of calling him, disturbing him at work—but it was Boss. His heart ached anew at the thought of the old dog pacing the house, trembling on weak legs, going back again and again to empty food and water bowls. Holding it until he couldn’t any longer, then hiding under the bed in shame. So he gave Sarah the name.

  “He’ll be on shift at Price,” Wyatt said. “You’ll have to call the main line and ask for him.”

  “I’ll call now.” She patted his knee. “Don’t you worry.”

  He did worry, though. Boss was an old dog, in worse shape physically than Wyatt. If his stupidity and weakness—his mistake—had caused something to happen to that dog, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.

  Are you living with yourself now?

  He put his left hand over his heart out of habit, massaging, and waited for Sarah to return.

  Chapter Six

  1.

  Christopher Shelton and Leanna Burke were an inevitable coupling, one that the eighth-grade class at Roma Middle School had been anticipating ever since Christopher moved to town the previous year. Christopher’s father was a chemical engineer at Spector Plastics and Die Cast. The transfer to Roma had been accompanied by a moving stipend and a modest pay bump, but the real advantage, he’d explained again and again to Christopher in the weeks preceding the family’s relocation, was in cost of living: they could live like royalty on a salary that would barely get them into a country club in Ann Arbor. Christopher had been doubtful, then morose, and his first weeks at the middle school were a misery. He’d hated the stupid, syrupy accents, the way that even the cooler kids still dressed themselves proudly in the silk shirts and Eastlands that had been considered dated in Ann Arbor two years ago.

  Then, inexplicably, Christopher wasn’t unhappy anymore. He’d gone to a junior high of almost two thousand students before, a school where well-dressed children of relative privilege were the norm rather than the exception, and he’d drawn no special attention. In Roma, he was watched, emulated. When he wore K-Swiss sneakers to school in the fall, half a dozen of his classmates returned from Christmas break in a pair. When, on Friday nights, he put in a Pearl Jam CD instead of Sir Mix-A-Lot or Tim McGraw or Salt-N-Pepa, his friends came to school shortly after showing off their own finds from the Sam Goody: Nirvana, Alice in Chains, the Melvins. He cultivated a reputation for smarts and ironic detachment. He liked to recline in his chair in class, slip his feet into the book basket under the desk in front of him, and look out the window as though he were daydreaming, as though he were above it all—but it was an act. When a teacher snapped at him with a question, trying to trick him, to get him to jolt in his seat—“And what do you think about that, Christopher? We’re all really keen to get your take”—he’d madden her by responding correctly and politely, barely shifting his eyes from the window. His classmates loved it. And his teachers hated it, or wanted to, but Christopher ultimately won most of them over, too, because he knew just how far to push them, knew when to let slip some hint at regret or gratitude. “Most people let me get away with murder,” he’d told Mrs. Hardoby, the social studies teacher, when she kept him after class to lecture him about the importance of at
least appearing engaged. “I respect you for calling me out on my BS. I really do,” he’d said, and she’d beamed, perhaps even blushed a little, and Christopher had never had another moment’s trouble from her.

  On the surface, Leanna Burke was the ultimate local; she was a fourth-generation Roman, her father a prominent attorney in town, the kind of guy who’d gotten rich on other people’s misfortunes, divorce and personal injury, mostly. He had an office on the square, and he dressed in the costume of a deeper southerner: seersucker and linen suits, bow ties, fine-woven straw Panamas—affectations he’d likely acquired during his undergraduate days at University of the South. There were two kinds of success stories in Roma: the ones who got away and the ones who stayed to exploit their own. Johnny Burke was the latter, and Leanna was her father’s daughter.

  Christopher and Leanna had begun “going together” during Christmas break of seventh grade. Leanna’s dad had allowed her to host a boy-girl party in the basement of their home, which he’d had built brand-new only a few years before: two and a half stories with an in-ground pool and tennis courts, three acres of land, a long, paved driveway lined in crepe myrtles. Where Christopher’s house (his mother’s full-time project) was antique, studied, and understated, Leanna’s house was delightfully gaudy, everything oversized and overwrought, a mishmash of periods and aesthetics, high-end and low. The dining room featured a giant crystal chandelier that had been imported from France, but the table underneath it was a too-shiny veneered cherry, the eight chairs upholstered in a black-and-green diamond print that looked like it belonged on a bad sweater. The flooring was wall-to-wall beige carpeting, linoleum in the kitchen and baths, but the electronics were all state-of-the-art: there was a fifty-inch big-screen TV in the family room, another in the basement, and the basement also housed four La-Z-Boy recliners lined up side to side—one for each of the Burkes—plus a wet bar, a full-sized refrigerator, and a microwave oven.

  Leanna’s mother and father had agreed to stay upstairs until ten o’clock that night—rides home were expected by eleven—so time moved in that dark-paneled basement the way it does only for thirteen-year-olds. Relationships began and ended; alliances shifted; one girl spent the night in a corner alone, trying to hide the fact that she was crying. When the evening finally culminated in the obligatory game of spin-the-bottle—and already they were on the edge of being too old for it, of feeling embarrassed by the pretense—Christopher had known that somebody would contrive to pair him with Leanna, that the seventh grade wanted it as much as or more than the two of them did. And did he want it? He wasn’t sure. She was pretty, she intrigued him, but he wasn’t sure if he even liked her. She had this way of holding her face when someone like Emily Houchens walked by: lips drawn into a slight smirk, eyebrow tilted upward a trace, a look of amusement that hid something harder, like disgust, even anger.