by M. D. Thomas
“I’ve got to put Lee through his stretching exercises,” Sarah said, refusing to meet his gaze as she walked away.
Eight
SARAH
“Do you have a moment, Mrs. Young?” The head poking through the cracked door belonged to Lee’s doctor.
“Of course,” Sarah said as she put aside her knitting and got to her feet, her heartbeat rising.
“No, no, you’re fine,” Dr. Kamarti said, gesturing her back down as he entered the room. “No need to get up.” He grabbed a plastic chair from the corner, moved it in front of her, and sat.
Sarah’s stomach began to churn. Sitting meant bad news. They didn’t sit if it was good. If they had something good to share, they told you as soon as they walked in the room.
As usual Dr. Kamarti didn’t bother with small talk. “The results of the culture came back and it turns out Lee does have a urinary tract infection.”
The nurses had warned her that was the likely result, but it still sent a bolt of fear through her. “But he’s already getting antibiotics, right?”
“Yes, since we found out yesterday that he had a fever. The problem is that the culture came back positive for an antibiotic resistant bacteria called MRSA. Methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus. It isn’t susceptible to a lot of common antibiotics so sometimes it can be harder to get rid of.”
“But there are drugs that will kill it?”
“Yes,” Dr. Kamarti said, his porcine eyes squinting. “Sometimes they take a little longer, or we have to use a couple of drugs in combination, but we’ll be able to clear it.”
“How much longer?”
“It varies. Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear-cut answer. But I promise you, we’ll be able to get rid of it.”
She asked the question she’d learned had to be asked. “What’s the worse case scenario?”
Dr. Kamarti didn’t hesitate. “Kidney damage or a blood infection. Neither likely though. Infections like this are common when patients use a catheter and rarely are they ever a serious problem.”
Dr. Kamarti continued, told her the same thing over again in a different way. She nodded her head and pretended to pay attention, but she barely listened because a voice she hadn't heard in years, a voice she’d hoped was buried for good, blossomed inside her head like a poisonous flower.
If you’d made sure he was taken better care of, this wouldn’t have happened, Sissy…
She had to leave the room.
There was a garden behind Rainbow Pines for visitors or patients seeking a little natural serenity. The garden was rectangular and large, covered almost two acres, and was filled to bursting with ornamental plants, all bisected by winding paths that led to secluded benches that gave views of flowers, or bird feeders, or fountains. It was called the Peace Garden and Sarah had gone there on Lee's first day at Rainbow Pines and never again.
Instead she went to the loading dock that was a short walk down the hall from Lee's room. Rather than green leaves and flowers, she stared at cracked asphalt and trash that had blown into corners where it was left untouched, where the view was of the stark walls of a nearby warehouse and a swath of weed-filled grass that stretched toward the back of the Rainbow Pines parking lot. A concrete platform overlooked the asphalt, accessed by a blank metal door whose emergency exit siren was broken. Disabled according to Sarah’s favorite nurse—it was where most of the facility employees went for smoke breaks.
She pushed through the door, eyes already full of tears, sagged against the short section of railing next to the stairs that led down to the asphalt and sobbed, thankful there were no delivery trucks unloading.
Every time she thought Lee’s condition couldn’t get worse, she was proved wrong.
Cry cry cry, Sissy, cry cry cry, that’s all you ever do. Go and feel sorry for yourself, that’ll make my grandson better…
Dr. Kamarti and the nurses all said Lee would get better. Every day they told her he would get better. Every day.
Every day they lie, Sissy. You know he’ll be in that bed the rest of his life…
She sobbed harder, wished she couldn’t hear her mother’s voice, great gasps driving her to her knees, her hands rigid around the upper section of railing while her forehead rolled against the lower. Snot dripped from her nose and she bit her tongue so hard that a metallic burst of blood filled her mouth.
Cry cry cry, Sissy, cry cry cry…
The tears fell as dark clouds scuttled by overhead, didn’t ease until the damp air filled her wet nostrils with the smell of stale cigarettes and brought back the memory of sipping the last bit of soda from a can next to her mother’s bed and getting a bitter mouthful of wet ashes.
Sarah felt drained as she pried her fingers off the railing and settled onto the concrete, used the underside of her shirt to clean her face. A wind gusted through and tumbled her hair around her head, blew away the lingering smell of burnt nicotine.
Sarah pulled herself to her feet and saw Lee standing in the long stretch of weedy grass next to the parking lot, his glove on, his free hand moving a ball. She could almost hear the ball smacking against the worn leather, that pop that came each time it went home in the pocket.
Lee?
He looked so real, so… there, that she almost started toward him. But no, Lee was back in his bed, his urinary tract teeming with bacteria. He had to be a hallucination, a creation of her own distressed mind, just like her mother’s voice. She missed her Lee so much the realization didn’t even bother her.
What am I supposed to do, Lee? I don’t know anymore…
As if in answer, Lee tossed the ball straight into the air, spun in a circle, and caught the ball as it came down. He did it again and again, and as always she wondered how he never got dizzy.
“It’s easy, mom,” he’d said once when she’d asked. “I figured it out watching ice skating during the winter Olympics last year. Whenever the skater twirls, they pick one thing to focus on and they look at it every time around, watching it as long as they can. It stops the dizziness.”
“Only you could take something from ice skating and use it for baseball,” Sarah murmured, repeating what it felt like she’d said years before and a moment ago.
The door opened behind her and she turned to see an orderly emerge from the building. He was tall and thin, green scrubs hanging off his shoulders like too-big overalls on a scarecrow, his features angular and harsh, as if his moon-pale skin was pulled too tight. His arms were so outlandishly long she could almost envision him flapping them and taking off from the back of the loading dock, flying off into the sky like a frigate bird, all wings. “Sorry, Ma’am. Didn’t know anyone was out here.”
“You’re fine,” she said.
He nodded in thanks, his bony shoulders looking like they could just keep going forever and swallow his entire head. He moved a short ways down the loading dock and lit a cigarette, took a puff, and then let it dangle from his left hand, held close to the palm by long fingers as he stared across the asphalt. He couldn’t see Lee standing in the grass of course.
Lee no longer spun, the ball popping in and out of his glove again.
What do you want, Lee? she asked. What do you need me to do?
Lee didn't answer, but her mother did, and while Sarah didn’t want to listen, she couldn’t help herself. He wants you to find the people that did this to him, Sissy…
“Won’t be able to come out here this evening,” the orderly said, his eyes on the sky. “Rain’s coming.”
Sarah glanced at the orderly, surprised by the comment because she’d already forgotten he was there. When she looked back at the grass, Lee was nowhere in sight. She closed her eyes, willed him to reappear to her, but when she looked again he was still gone.
My Lee. Mine…
Again her mother’s voice filled her head. He wants you to find them, Sissy. Find them and punish them for what they did…
Nine
JON
“The police will never find them,”
Sarah said. She sat in the big chair, wringing her hands as she spoke. Instead of leaving the room when he arrived that evening, she’d bit her lip and started talking. “After what they did to Lee, they just get to walk away. It’s not right.”
“No, it’s not. But the detectives—”
“The detectives didn’t believe you,” Sarah interrupted.
That was probably true. His memories of the accident were incomplete. Some were terrifying in their clarity—like circling around the car looking for Lee—but others were blurry and indistinct or gone altogether. He couldn’t remember finding Lee. He remembered seeing Sarah in the car, but no longer had any memory of when she picked Lee up and carried him to the road. But one memory was as clear as fine glass—the man had said the woman was a bartender. Jon couldn’t remember what she looked like—the glaring light in his face was all that came back to him—but he knew she had a tattoo on her face and she was a bartender. What the tattoo was had been lost, the memory a victim of the concussion he’d suffered during the rollover, but there couldn’t be that many female bartenders with a tattoo on their cheek in the city. When the detectives had come to interview them the day after the accident—Jon and Sarah still under the naive assumption Lee would wake up when he was weaned off the coma drugs—Sarah had little to tell since she’d been unconscious until right before the police arrived, but Jon told them everything he could remember, from trying to get out of the way of the other car, to the man and the woman, to looking for Lee. He had no physical description other than an unknown tattoo to give them, but he told them what he’d heard. They’d been skeptical.
Sarah continued. “But if you could find them, we could turn them in.”
“It’s not much to go on.”
“No,” Sarah agreed, “but it’s enough.”
Jon didn’t understand why Sarah had brought up the subject, but the idea and how to execute it spun through his mind, and after a moment, he realized Sarah could be right. “But they might not even live around here. Just because they were on the Accotink Parkway doesn’t mean anything. It’s an assumption.”
“It is. But… we can’t do anything about that. Isn’t it worth a chance, though? For Lee?”
“Of course it is,” Jon said. He realized the best way to find the woman was to start at the bars closest to the parkway and circle out from there. Just the way he’d found Lee after the accident.
Jon was astounded at how many bars there were. Google and a radius ten miles from the parkway gave him a list of fifty-three. If he could visit two a night that still meant nearly a month to check every one. But the woman with the tattoo wouldn’t work every day, so to be safe he really needed to visit every bar at least twice, preferably on different nights of the week. And that was only ten miles out. When he expanded the radius to twenty the number of bars went into the hundreds. Assuming it was even possible, it could take months to find her.
But Sarah is right. They shouldn't get to just walk away…
So a month to the day after the accident he went to the first bar on the list. Terry’s was a disintegrating hovel on the Little River Turnpike right off the beltway, the small, poorly illuminated parking lot littered with trash and the exterior of the building covered with faded, crooked beer posters that had to be older than Lee.
Jon got out of the boring Volvo he’d bought to replace the Cressida totaled in the accident and closed the door with reluctance, more than a little concerned he was setting himself up for a mugging. Guilt drove him onwards.
The inside of Terry’s might have been worse than the outside, but Jon couldn’t tell because it was even darker, lit only by a few neon signs—the largest of them a Pabst Blue Ribbon monster that had less than half its letters still glowing—and a green, half-burned out fixture that hung askew above a crooked pool table in the center of the room. There were no televisions, but Merle Haggard’s voice filled the room, a tune that Jon—whose father had an inexplicable obsession with classic country music, listened to while he snacked on rice cakes—recognized instantly as The Bottle Let Me Down. It was the kind of establishment where the regulars started drinking in the morning, and the few patrons inside faded and blended into the decor as if they’d been there for years.
Jon walked to the bar—no women on either side of it that he could see—and sat on a rickety stool. The bartender appeared from a back room a moment later, a black apron covering his bulging stomach, his head bald and shiny even in the dim light. He put meaty hands on the bar in front of Jon and spoke with a deep voice. “What’ll it be?”
“What do you have?” Jon asked. As much as he’d imagined the moment since making the list he’d never really considered that he’d have to order a drink.
One of the bartender’s thick eyebrow’s rose a fraction of an inch as he stared at Jon. “We have alcohol,” he said, no hint of a smile on his face.
“Good one, Carl,” said one of the permanent fixtures a few stools down.
“Budweiser, I guess,” Jon said, deciding that asking for more details would be a mistake. He hated beer, but he didn’t want any liquor, and asking for water might get him thrown out.
Carl walked away without expression and returned a moment later with a full glass. “Three-fifty,” he said as he placed the beer in front of Jon.
Jon dug out his wallet and gave Carl a five-dollar bill. “Keep the change.”
If Carl was impressed by the tip, he didn’t show it. He tucked the money into an apron pocket and disappeared into the back room again.
Jon took a few sips of the beer and left a couple of minutes later without having spoken another word to Carl or anyone else there, convinced no woman in her right mind would work at such a place.
Back inside his car, the doors locked, Jon picked up the small spiral-bound green notebook that lay on the passenger seat. He could have used his phone to store the names and addresses of the bars, but he found the notebook easier. Jon flipped it open and put an x next to Terry’s, as well as the day and time he’d visited, and then looked at the address of the second bar.
Finding the woman he’d seen shrouded in light was probably impossible, but he would try anyway. He owed Lee and Sarah that much and more for what he’d done.
Ten
ELLE
The first thing she became aware of was the pounding in her head. She tried to ignore it, to dive deeper back into sleep, but the throb was steady even when she lay still.
Did it again…
She slit her eyes and looked for the clock on the nightstand. Instead she saw the cord running down to the floor. To see the time would require moving, which she knew with absolute certainty would set off an even bigger throb in her head.
She noticed the stereo was on, the volume low. She listened for a moment and realized it was playing country music.
What in the goddamn hell?
Then she remembered.
I brought a cowboy home to fuck…
Bracing herself, Elle rolled over, the movement driving a knife of pain through her right temple that quickly took over her entire head.
The bed was empty thank god.
She stared at the ceiling, an army on the march through her skull, tried and failed to remember what had gone on the night before.
I hope it was worth this headache…
Elle wasn’t sure what she wanted more—painkillers or a cigarette. Painkillers were the smart choice, but she wasn’t smart, and she was pretty sure she didn’t have any, so a cigarette won the day. Unfortunately, they were in the kitchen.
She levered herself up to a sitting position on the side of the bed and her head exploded. After the worst of the pain had subsided, she noticed a couple of empty condom wrappers on the floor close to the still unreadable clock, its face turned away. She looked down and saw that she was wearing an old t-shirt and underwear. That meant she’d kicked the cowboy out at the end of the night, whenever that’d been. When she woke up naked that meant they’d left her passed out in bed.
Elle struggled to her feet and stumbled toward the bathroom.
Might still be drunk…
She couldn’t remember how much she’d had, but there was a vague memory of a tipping bottle in her hand. That and the feel of a cowboy hat on her head.
Elle was a few steps from the bathroom when her stomach began to roil. “Oh shit—”
She sped up, sure she wasn’t going to make it to the toilet and she’d have to puke in the sink or, worse, on the threadbare rug that lay before the vanity. But she fell to her knees and managed to get the toilet lid out of the way in time to retch into a bowl full of stale brown piss. She heaved once, twice, and—the smell assaulting her—a third time so violently that it felt like her stomach turned inside out.
Panting, her long curls threatening to fall in the filth in the toilet, she groped for the handle. She found it a second later, flushed the vile mix of vomit and old urine. The whoosh of foul air that pushed up when the water went down engulfed her head and threatened to turn her stomach yet again. As the water gurgled and swirled away beneath her, Elle wondered—not for the first time—if she was better off dead.
When her stomach settled enough to risk movement, Elle got slowly to her feet, fighting the sway of her body. Once steady she took the two steps to the vanity and leaned her hips against it, her head beating bass in a steady rhythm. She avoided looking in the mirror as she held her hair back and rinsed the bile from her mouth.
Gotta stop doing this shit…
A quick rifle through the vanity confirmed the absence of any painkillers. The shower held some appeal, but not as much as a smoke, so she shuffled out of the bathroom and into the kitchen. The counter was a mess of Chinese takeout cartons, empty beer bottles—that’d been the cowboy, she avoided the swill at all costs—and two fifths of bourbon, one bone dry, the other with no more than an inch of liquor riding the bottom.
