His thumb clicks the off button, but he still holds the phone to his mouth. The giant cop stares at me almost as though he’s afraid. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he has the look of someone who wished he didn’t wake up this morning.
“What?” I whisper. I don’t think I actually make a sound when I say it, so I clear my throat and say it again. “What?”
“We need to talk,” he says.
I look back at Newie and Erika. Newie’s slowly chewing away at his hand. Erika’s eyes are shut, and I think she might be crying. “Um . . . sure,” I say, because there isn’t anything else I can say. After all, this is the cop who caught me stoned last night with his son. This is the cop who’s holding my fate in the palm of his baseball-mitt-sized hands.
Chief Anderson jerks his head to one side and motions for me to follow him.
We walk deeper into the parking lot, past Tenzar’s, with its autumn corn stalks and pumpkins set out front and bushels of apples that have come from one of the local orchards.
There’s a place a little outside of town called Apple’s Apples where most of the local crop comes from. On weekends, tourists come and pick bushels there, eat cider doughnuts, and sometimes go on haunted hayrides. If you’re lucky or stupid enough to take a seasonal job there, you can get ten bucks an hour to wear a sheet and hide in the trees until the hay cart rambles by, filled with wide-eyed kids and folks from other places.
Then you can scare the crap out of them, if you aren’t already scared yourself.
There was a murder in the Apple’s Apples orchard last year. It was one of the biker dudes who used to hang out at Millie’s Café. Someone used a hammer and nails on him so that his braided ponytail was fixed to the tree where he was found sitting, leaning against the gnarled bark. His eyes, nostrils, and mouth were nailed shut, too, and spikes were driven into the ground in the middle of his feet. His arms were left spread wide.
Sort of like a crucifixion.
The chief grabs an apple as he walks past one of the overflowing bushels. It’s totally stealing, but I don’t say anything. He shoves it into his mouth and takes a huge bite. By the time we pass the grocery store, a discount bakery that sells yesterday’s fresh goods at half price, and a dollar store, he’s done with the apple and tosses the spent core into a trashcan.
Suddenly, he stops and turns around. I involuntarily take a step back, because I’m that freaked out. He rubs his chin again as he looks down at me. Finally he takes a deep breath and says, “We have a problem.”
“I’m sorry about last night,” I blurt out. I’m more than a little scared, and the thought of getting busted for smoking a joint is more than I can handle right now.
“What?” he says. Then he realizes what I mean and shakes his head.
“Don’t worry about last night,” he grumbles, and I’m genuinely shocked. “Consider it a freebie.”
A freebie? What does he mean? Is he giving me a warning instead of a ticket because I’m his son’s best friend? Maybe he feels sorry for me because my girlfriend’s mother was just murdered in the fish department at Tenzar’s and left there, wrapped and packaged?
Wrapped and packaged.
“Okay,” I say to him, but he can see the concern in my eyes as much as I can see the concern in his. Only then do I realize that he doesn’t want to talk about last night. That’s not why we’re here.
He wants to talk to me about something else.
“Annie’s being taken to the hospital,” the chief says in that deep baritone voice of his. The side of my lip curls up, and I squint, because I don’t quite get what he’s saying.
“Annie’s being taken to the hospital?” I say, repeating the words slowly.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Terror slaps me in the face. “Is she dead?” The burning in my chest that I didn’t even know was rekindled becomes a bonfire.
“No,” he tells me, but his words sound thin. “That’s all I know for now.”
As I try and process what the chief is saying, I hear the wail of the ambulance that passed by when Newie and I first got to Tenzar’s. It’s the ambulance that I thought was coming for Mrs. Berg. Sunlight splashes off its windshield as it speeds past, its siren tearing into the morning.
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s asking for you,” he says. “She doesn’t know about her mother yet.”
“But . . .”
“If you want to go to the hospital, I’ll have one of the officers drive you, okay?”
“Okay,” I say, but I think I only nod my head. For a second, the world seems to turn sideways, so I take a deep breath and force it right-side up. I can’t break—not now. If I let myself stop to take in everything that’s happened since I woke up this morning, even for an instant, I think I might die.
I think I might surely die.
37
OFFICER RANDY drives me in his cruiser. Newie doesn’t come. He stays with Erika Tenzar because Erika isn’t herself and needs someone with her who can tether her to reality. I’m sure that in the back of Newie’s mind he’s expecting that, someday soon, he’s going to get into her pants. I can understand that. Sometimes Newie’s priorities are messed up.
I sit next to Officer Randy as he pulls out of the parking lot and turns left down Main Street. Wang Memorial is Apple’s hospital. It’s perched on a hill that overlooks the Quabbin Reservoir. Everyone makes fun of the name, but somehow the thought of “yanking my chain at Wang” doesn’t strike me as funny today.
A million years ago, Wang was an orphanage. After that it was a boarding house. Somehow, Apple got up enough funding to turn the place into a hospital, but everyone knows that you only go there if you want to get your finger stitched or if you have a twisted ankle. If you have anything worse than that, you have to go to one of the bigger hospitals in Worcester or Springfield, where they know which end of the thermometer goes into which end of the patient.
“Annie Berg,” says Officer Randy. “She was the redhead with you the other day, right? When the three of you found that Fish girl?”
He isn’t really asking. He’s only trying to make conversation, because he thinks talking is better than silence right now. Besides, he saw her as a blond when we were in the woods yesterday.
I thought cops were supposed to be observant. Maybe Apple cops are just numb to the details.
“She’s blond now,” I say to him. I watch Main Street whiz by in a blur. “And her name was Claudia, not ‘that Fish girl.’”
Officer Randy turns and stares at the side of my head. I can feel his eyes boring into me. He waits another minute. “You guys a thing?”
I don’t answer—a silent cue for him to shut the hell up. I just want to see Annie and make sure she’s okay, although I know she’s not, because her mother’s dead and all wrapped and packaged.
Officer Randy reaches down and flips on the radio, pressing the buttons a few times before hitting on a song he probably thinks I’ll like.
I don’t give a crap. I’d be just as happy in silence, because in silence I would be able to hear my thoughts better, which are jabbering away at warp speed.
I feel like there’s a giant puzzle in my head with a bunch of pieces missing, so I can’t exactly tell what it looks like yet. There are familiar parts, and there are parts I don’t understand. The picture it’s making keeps moving in and out of focus, and if I concentrate on it too long, it disappears altogether.
It’s almost as though I have to look at the picture sideways to actually see it for what it really is.
I know I’m not ready yet. I know that I don’t want to see the picture, because if I do, everything’s going to change, and I’m not sure I want that to happen.
Officer Randy makes a right and pulls past a small dairy farm that stinks during the summer and sells crappy
ice cream made out of goats’ milk. He then turns left and keeps winding farther up the hill. This is where most of the nice houses are. Anyone who has money in town lives on the hill. Their houses have things like granite kitchen countertops and automatic lawn sprinklers.
In my fantasies, hill kids don’t have problems at home like me, but I’m not stupid enough to think that’s true. There are secrets behind everyone’s door, and some of them are probably worse than what I have to deal with.
I’m sure there are drunk single parents up here, or dads who go on coke benders to re-live their glory days. I even have it on pretty decent authority, meaning Newie, that some of the worst parties up on the hill—the ones the cops have to break up—are the ones that mid-l ife-crisis people throw.
I think that’s sad. What do they have to party about? Don’t they know they’re living in a ticking time bomb, and any moment it could explode? When it does, any one of them could become another Apple statistic.
No one’s immune.
Officer Randy palms the wheel, and we turn a corner. Wang Memorial looms ahead of us like something out of a horror movie. Its spires and round corners make it look creepier than it should. Juxtaposed against all the creepiness is a fairly new electric sign that welcomes visitors and points drivers in the direction of the Wellness Center and the Emergency Room.
“I’ll stay with you,” Officer Randy says to me as he pulls into a special spot reserved for the men in blue.
“You don’t need to.”
He stops the car and pockets his keys. “I know,” he says, his hands still gripping the steering wheel. “But I’m staying, anyway.”
I can’t tell if he’s trying to be nice, or if he’s a little leery of me. After all, I’m connected to two people who have died in the past two days, and Margo Freeman from two years ago. Now, a girl—my girl—is hurt. Maybe he thinks I’m somehow to blame.
It’s the first time that thought dribbles into my mind, and I wonder if that’s what’s going on here. Maybe the chief wants me watched. Maybe he thinks that I’m some sort of suspect.
Maybe I am.
For some reason, I can’t shake the feeling that everything’s my fault. Even though the rational part of me knows that’s not true, the irrational part keeps telling me that nothing’s rational about my life.
I sit there, in the passenger’s seat of Officer Randy’s car, staring at the double entrance to the emergency room. There’s a cement ramp leading up to it for handicapped people to use and two huge sliding doors that look as out of place next to the dark brick of Wang as the electric sign in front of the hospital.
Someone probably thought the new sign and the new doors would make Wang look all up-to-date. That’s a joke. The inside of the hospital is as dank and old as the outside.
“Ready?” he asks me. I’m not, but I find myself opening the door and sliding out of the cruiser. Officer Randy walks a few steps behind me. I slowly cross the parking lot to the cement ramp and purposely zigzag up the handicapped gauntlet to the sliding doors.
He doesn’t follow me that way. He walks up the few stairs and waits for me so that we can go through the emergency room doors together.
When we do, I see a couple people sitting in dingy upholstered chairs, reading magazines that have probably been there for decades. We don’t sit in the chairs, though. Officer Randy points me toward a desk with a woman sitting behind it, popping her gum. She’s twenty-something and trashy looking, with too much makeup on her face. She smiles when she sees us, and I can see that some of her red lipstick is on her teeth, making them look as bloody as my world has turned since finding Claudia Fish in the woods.
“Sheila,” says Officer Randy like he knows her a little too well.
“Randy,” she says back and smiles at him broadly. “What can I do you for?”
About fifty bucks, I think. Maybe twenty-five.
“This is business,” he says. “We’re looking for a patient who’s probably still in the emergency room. And don’t give me any of that crap about only family members being able to see patients, yada yada.”
“Okay, okay,” she says and snaps her gum again. “You don’t have to get all official about it. What’s the patient’s name?” she asks, absentmindedly rubbing her fingers across her teeth and moving the lipstick stains from her molars to her hands.
“Berg,” I blurt out. It’s the first time I say anything to her at all, and she shifts her gaze from Officer Randy to me and does a quick once-over, like she’s judging me at a 4-H show.
“Which one?” she asks, as she looks at her computer screen.
“What do you mean?”
“Berg,” she says again. “Which one? We brought two in. Anthony Berg and Annie Berg. I think they’re father and daughter.”
38
WE WAIT LESS than five minutes, but each minute seems like a lifetime. Officer Randy goes to the vending machines at least twice, and I endure watching him eat like Newie after a game. For some reason, listening to his lips smacking together is making me sick. I turn away from him, stare at the wall, and try not to think horrible things.
I need to find out what’s wrong with Annie. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive, and I don’t know anything about her father—although Mr. Berg being dead wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Every time the second hand winds around the clock on the wall, my shoulders tense up. Finally, I’m about to explode. “Who found them?” I ask Officer Randy.
“Huh?”
“Who found Annie and her father?”
“Oh,” says Officer Randy. “One of the officers went to the Berg residence to inform them about, well, you know, and found the door open.”
I nod and turn away again, right as he’s reaching out to offer me a mini powdered doughnut from the vending machine. I don’t want it. Like I said, doughnuts and cops always seem to go together—doughnuts and cops and death.
Finally, Officer Randy and I are let into the triage area by a jolly nurse who seems way too happy. I want to lash out at her for being so freaking normal. Doesn’t she know we don’t do normal in Apple? Didn’t she get the memo?
Triage is the place where they check you over and try to figure out what’s wrong with you. The jolly nurse—the one I want to smack upside the head—immediately ushers us to the central desk. Another nurse, with thin skin stretched across her hatchet face, looks up from whatever work she’s doing, but it seems to me like she’s not doing anything much but reading a fat novel. Her glasses are perched on the edge of her beak.
“What?” she snips.
“This is Jackson Gill,” says Officer Randy.
Her eyes widen. “Jackson Gill?” She nods her head toward the far corner of the room. “You’re all that little girl’s been asking for since she’s come in here. ‘Jackson Gill. Get me Jackson Gill.’”
“Well, I’m here now,” I say, letting the words burn in my mouth like acid. I want to punch a wall. I want to scream. Most of all, I just want to see Annie.
“What’s with the patient?” asks Officer Randy.
Hatchet Face leans in and pretends she’s whispering a secret, but she’s not whispering at all. “Pills, honey,” she says. “Lots of pills. We didn’t have to pump her stomach, though. She’s pretty groggy. We’re letting her ride it out.”
I don’t know what happened to Annie last night after Chief Anderson dropped her off, and I don’t give a crap about her father. All I know is that Annie’s not a pill-popper—she’s a cutter. We all have our preferred methods of self-torture. Mine’s just on the inside. Besides, me, Newie, and Annie never got into doing pills. Ziggy Connor has the market cornered on that sort of stuff, and his prices are out of our league.
Ka-dunk. Something clinks inside my head—a puzzle piece in the picture I can’t yet see.
They use the shit in the
capsules to make some of the hard junk. That’s what Newie said last night. They use the shit in the capsules to make some of the hard junk.
The nurse comes out from behind the counter and motions for me to follow. Officer Randy follows us, too. I want to yell at him to back off, but I can’t. It wouldn’t do any good, anyway.
Annie is in a cubicle, sectioned off by drab beige curtains, but the front is wide open because I think she needs to be watched.
“She’s talking,” says Hatchet Face. “She’s just confused.”
“Five minutes,” Office Randy says to me. “That’s it. Then I need to have some words with her.”
Thankfully, Officer Randy and the nurse stand outside and let me see Annie alone. I get the sense that he’s probably breaking some sort of rule by doing that, but I think the police break a lot of rules in Apple, just so they can cope with how ineffective they are.
I wait until they are safely in a conversation by themselves, mere inches out of earshot, before I say anything to Annie.
“What happened?” I whisper to her as I stand next to the bed.
Annie’s curled into a ball on the small industrial cot with her back turned to me, but I’m sure she can hear every word.
“They say I took pills,” she whispers hoarsely. “Like an overdose.” She rolls over to face me. “I didn’t take pills, Jackson, but no one will believe me.”
I’m not sure I believe her, either. Her eyes are vague, and it seems like she’s looking right though me.
I’d like to think I know Annie better than to believe she would swallow a handful of pills, but the truth is, sometimes everyone has dark thoughts about how it would be so much easier if they were asleep.
It kills me that I can’t say anything to her about her mother. It’s bad enough that she’s already tried to kill herself once today. I don’t want to give her a reason to try and do it again.
I can’t think of anything that won’t sound horrible, so I say, “What now?”
“I dunno,” she murmurs. The words sound like butterflies fluttering out of her mouth. “I think it’s bad.”
Bloody Bloody Apple Page 17
