Rehab Run

by Barbra Leslie

  And I had climbed out a window, sitting above it all on a roof like a coward, when people around me were dropping like flies.

  I looked out. My room was at the back of the building, looking toward the Bay of Fundy. There was nothing to see but a beautiful early summer day and Cape Blomidon in the distance. A couple of cars were parked below me – I could see The Beast, Mary’s Mustang, below, so Laurence was probably still here. I breathed deeply, trying to calm myself. There was one police cruiser, but no officers calling me off the roof, no residents pointing up at me. No people.

  Except, perhaps, for someone in my room, directly below me.

  Whatever was happening was happening – whatever had made someone scream – around the front of the building, or at least off where I couldn’t see. I turned my head and put a hand over my bad right ear to see if I could better isolate the sounds. No more screaming, but I could hear a siren in the distance – another one; the events around Rose’s were certainly giving first responders in the Valley a hopping week – and lots of excited voices. Someone was crying. At least I thought so.

  I could hear nothing from my room below me. I crept forward and leaned down, hoping to be able to see in without falling off the roof.

  Then a head popped out my window, with a dark-red ponytail.

  “Mary,” I called out, and she let out a short shriek and looked up, too much of her body outside the safety of the window. “Get inside, I’m coming in,” I said.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, what are you doing up there?” she said. “You just about gave me a coronary.”

  “The view,” I said. I smiled at her, both of us looking at each other upside down. I was calm. I climbed out of windows barely clothed every day, as far as she knew. “Gorgeous day.” I looked into the distance with a hand over my eyes as though to block the sun, Lewis and Clark-style. Yes. So cool.

  “Are you trying to kill yourself or something? Please tell me you’re not up there to kill yourself.” Mary leaned even further to see, and I was worried she would slide out, all ninety pounds of her, down to the paving stones below.

  “Get inside! No, I’m not trying to kill myself!” I started to move, to adjust my position so I could climb down and swing my legs inside the window once she moved out of the way. At which point, of course, I realized that a couple of the shingles were loose, and the gutter piping was rusty and full of wet leaves from who knew how long ago.

  Note to self: If we all live through this, tell Dickie he needs to drop a few bucks on some maintenance around here. In the meantime, however, it was clear that getting in might be harder than getting out was, and that climbing out windows before I had a chance to fully wake up and assess the situation was not, perhaps, my smartest move.

  “Stay there, Danny, don’t you budge,” Mary yelled out, as though I was a hundred feet away. “I’ll get the fire department. We need the ladder. We need some men. You try to climb back in here, you’ll break your goddamn neck.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I started to say, but her head popped back inside. And the window slammed shut.

  Great. No ledge under the window meant no way to open it from the outside. Couldn’t swing myself in, even if I had been able to manage it, without taking a header after all. Which would be ironic, and probably what I deserved.

  Mary had probably just come in to see if I was there and to tell me about whatever was happening. Probably sent by Laurence, in fact. And now, whatever was going on around front would be disturbed by the need to come and rescue one of the residents from the roof. It would probably get written up in the local paper as a suicide attempt. And with my luck, my name would be on the front page: NOTORIOUS P.I. ATTEMPTS SUICIDE AT REHAB.

  My name in the papers again. Michael Vernon Smith possibly knowing where I was. Presuming, as I was, that he was hopefully thousands of miles away and had nothing to do with what was going on with Dickie Doyle and Rose’s Place, I’m sure he had all his search engines set to ding him if my name popped up anywhere. He would always want to know where I was, just as I would always be looking for him around every corner.

  I sat on the roof and cursed the security consultants we had hired. Shouldn’t someone have told me that I should have booked in here – registered anywhere, in fact – under a false name? I thought of Darren and Fred and the boys in Toronto. They were as safe as money could make them, but I knew that Darren would probably never relax until we knew Michael Vernon Smith was behind bars. Or preferably, six feet under.

  I crossed myself. I didn’t want to wish death on anyone else, ever again. I didn’t want to have anything to do with making anyone else dead. Sometimes I thought about my soul, if it would be possible to wash myself clean of what I had done. And then I would remind myself that I’m not Catholic; but with the amount of sin I knew I had to be forgiven for, I sometimes thought about converting. I daydreamed, sometimes, about how comforting it would be to go to confession and pay penance and be forgiven.

  But then again, I figured I paid penance every day, with Ginger and Jack dead, and my constant desire for crack cocaine whispering in my ear. I sat on the roof and thought about it. I could try to be good. I would try to be good. But there are those of us in life whose job is to carry the burden of others. I never wanted Darren to do what he had done in California; he carried a burden too. But if I could help it, I would spare Laurence – and for that matter, anyone else I cared for, anyone good, whose life had never been tainted like mine had – from seeing and doing evil.

  Not doing crack was a penance. It was pain. But it was pain I would endure, as long and as much as I could, to make the people who loved me happier. We all have that responsibility, to try to spare our loved ones pain, or even to spare good people pain. Mary was good, of that I was sure, even after our short acquaintance. I was pretty sure Dickie Doyle was good – my brother was an excellent judge of character, and from what I knew about Dickie, with him living in his little cabin and pouring his money into a rehab facility to help others, he was living his own penance for what had happened to his wife. And having had the monkey on my back myself for so long, I was the first to know that no one can be responsible for another person’s addiction. Rose Doyle had died an unnecessary and ignominious death because of her own predilections – whatever may have gone on in their marriage, no one starts hooking for opiate money unless they have that special cocktail of psychology and brain chemistry that makes pain reduction in the form of narcotics or alcohol seem as necessary to survival as air.

  I heard Laurence calling my name, and I looked down.

  He was lighting a cigarette. From where I sat, I thought I could see his hands shaking, but his voice was even. “Nice day,” he called up.

  “Beautiful,” I said, and nodded. “Thought I’d catch some sun.”

  “It’s true, you’re a little pale,” Laurence said. He didn’t take his eyes off me.

  “What’s happening?” I said. I jerked my arm behind me, indicating the commotion at the front of the building, and two of the shingles I was sitting on started sliding, taking me with them. I caught myself easily with my feet on the slanted roof. “Whoopsie,” I said.

  “Let’s just get you down,” another voice called up, and there was Mary’s nephew Colin the cop, with another cop and someone who looked like an EMT. They were carrying a long ladder.

  “Place needs new shingles,” I called down. Des appeared around the corner and I waved at him. “Just wanted to get a better look at your beautiful view here.” Mary came trotting toward Laurence in her heels and grabbed his arm. She said something to him I couldn’t hear, and he smiled.

  “Mary wants to know if you’re accident prone,” Laurence called up to me, as Colin and the other men extended the ladder and put it in place.

  “No offence, Danny,” Mary yelled up, again like she was shouting across a great distance. She slapped Laurence’s arm. “He wasn’t supposed to repeat that. I just meant with the fainting and everything.”

  Colin was climbing up
the ladder as though he was going to lift me off the roof himself, fireman-style. Two other men stood at the bottom of the ladder and looked up. The EMT, I could not help noticing, was very good-looking. Of course. And me in my dead husband’s boxers. Very revealing, unflattering boxers at that. I’ve never tried to be a sex bomb, but this was ridiculous.

  “Not to worry, Mary,” I said. “Nothing I haven’t heard before.” As a matter of fact, despite my general physical confidence, I did have an aversion to going down ladders. Or, in general, to climbing down things. I was always a climber as a kid, unable to resist the urge to scramble up trees as high as I could go, but I always had to talk myself into the climbing down part. I used to love to climb the ladder on the high diving board at the pool, and got a rush out of sailing through the air, off the board. But climbing down the same ladder? Pass.

  I had a moment of pure embarrassment, during which I debated scrambling across to the front of the building – which would mean climbing higher, across more potentially sketchy shingles and who knew what else – and just jumping from some unobtrusive spot on the other side. But then I remembered my healing leg, and the thought of re-breaking it – and the embarrassment of not getting over there to jump before the group assembled below me could run over to witness it – made me move. I crab-walked down to the ladder, waved Colin down ahead of me, and managed to swing myself onto it, hoping my face wasn’t as red as it felt.

  “Well, that was fun,” I said, when I reached the bottom, trying not to sound shaky. “Seriously? The roof needs repairs, and the gutters really need cleaning.”

  “Oh, Lord, Geoffrey was supposed to be taking care of all that,” Mary said. She looked pale, for her. Mary was the type of woman who liked a year-round tan. “My husband? But he’s been laid up lately. He has MS,” she said to me. “Some days are better than others.”

  Colin looked at the ground, I sputtered an apology, and the EMT just stood there looking uncomfortable. Des was there, pacing.

  “Never mind that,” Mary said. “We all have our troubles. Poor Sarah.”

  “Sarah?” My heart started to pound. “What happened to Sarah? Isn’t she at the B and B?” The young dancer who had found Evan last night. Laurence had given her his room, so she’d feel safe.

  “She never made it there,” Des said. He looked at me. “One of my men drove her there and watched while she walked up to the place. It’s sort of on a hill. There’s a staircase to get up there, and then the house, the B and B, is back about fifty, sixty yards. She waved when she got to the top of the stairs to say she got there safely.”

  “When I woke up, I checked my messages,” Laurence cut in. “The woman who runs the place had called, wondering where her guest was. She’d heard about all the troubles out here, I guess, and she didn’t want to sound too irate, but she obviously wanted to go to bed.”

  “Somewhere between the top of those stairs and the front door of the house, she disappeared,” Des finished. “The officer who took her there is – well, he’s very upset. He knew he should have walked her right in, but he was tired, worked a double yesterday, and his knee has been giving him troubles lately, he said. He didn’t want to do the stairs.” It was pretty obvious what Des thought about that. He looked like murder.

  I felt a flash of pity for whoever this poor cop was. If Sarah didn’t turn up alive and well – and really, what were the chances of that; she’d been exhausted, didn’t know the area, and didn’t have a vehicle – he was going to have to live with that guilt for the rest of his life. Forget his career, which would go nowhere even if he managed to keep his job. But knowing that his moment of laziness may have cost a young woman her life would never leave him.

  “No sign of her?” My voice sounded funny to myself. Harder than it had been in a while. Maybe it was my wonky hearing, but the voice I heard was the one I used when I was on my rampage months earlier. The voice that had softened, in the past couple of months of recuperating at Skip and Marie’s, and then being here.

  Des shook his head. “We’ve got teams searching everywhere. We’ll have volunteers searching by nightfall.”

  “Where?” I said. “Where are you looking?”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it,” he said. “We’ve got very little. This place, and the area at the lake around Dickie’s cabin. The area around where she was probably taken.”

  “There’s a fair amount of wild land around here,” Colin said.

  I looked at Laurence. “This ends now,” I said. “No more.” Laurence locked eyes with me. He knew what I meant. He knew I’d decided to do whatever I could to stop this. Just like I could read his body language, he knew me inside and out. I could feel that my posture was different. My breathing, even. I twirled my bad ankle around a bit as I stood there, testing how strong it was, what I could make it do. I was glad I’d been running and improving my cardio a bit. All of this went through my mind in the time it took me to say the words.

  No more death. No more chaos. No more killing. Not around me and mine.

  Luckily, no one else standing there, on that beautiful day, could read me like my brother could.

  “Maybe you two could join the search later today,” Des was saying. “We’re going to need a lot of volunteers.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Count us in.” I started walking toward the back door.

  “Where are you going?” Mary said. “I think we should be on a buddy system. Nobody should go anywhere alone.”

  I smiled at her. “I’m going to get dressed and see if there’s some food left in the dining hall,” I said, nodding at the smaller building about two hundred feet from the dorms.

  “I couldn’t eat a thing,” Mary said. “I’d like to throw up. All this…”

  “Get something to eat, Auntie,” Colin said to her. “You need to keep up your strength.”

  “Listen to him, Mare,” Laurence said, as I strode toward the back door. “We’ll meet you over there in a bit. I’m going to take care of some things while she gets changed.”

  Laurence followed me inside and when we were alone in the kitchen, I turned to him. I spoke in a low voice. “Quickly. Grab a few sharp knives, but not too big, and preferably ones that have sleeves or sheaths, if you can find them. Put them in your pockets, but make sure nobody sees you.” I headed toward the stairs and turned. “And a corkscrew if there is one,” I added quietly. “If they have more than one, grab them all.”

  “You want wine at a time like this?” he said. “Danny.”

  “No, fuckbrain, I don’t.” I turned and looked at him, and just nodded.

  I took the stairs two at a time, and went to get ready.

  TWELVE

  I was grateful, looking through the things I’d thrown into the drawers in my room when I’d arrived, that I was a little high when I got packed, and angry at the people who had broken my family. Since I’d been at Rose’s I’d been living in leggings, band tees, hoodies, and my running shoes. But I’d also packed jeans and Docs and some fighting gear – wraps and gloves and even shin guards, in case I found a decent gym in the area.

  Or in case I needed to fight.

  A two-minute shower with a shim firmly under my locked bathroom door, then I threw on black cargo pants and steel-toes and a tank with a long-sleeve shirt over the top. Layers aren’t only good for changing weather, but can protect you from things that can slow you down; anything from cuts and scrapes to providing an extra layer of padding in case of any kind of hand-to-hand combat. Not to mention, I didn’t know what kind of terrain I’d encounter in the search for Sarah. This area had everything from rocky beaches and boggy marshes to green farmland and dense woods going up the mountains that bracketed the Valley. Versatility was the order of the day.

  I was aware, when packing, that everything I brought would be carefully inspected when I got to Rose’s Place, a rule of thumb at any detox or rehab: Addicts are creative about where they hide their emergency stash. I threw in some fighting gear I doubted I’d use or need,
because I had also packed some weighted gloves that Jack had given me years ago, regular-looking work or gardening gloves made of Kevlar – impervious to knife strikes – with about eight ounces of steel across the knuckles of each glove to pack that extra punch. And to top it all off, a black baseball cap that, though it looked as streamlined as any normal cap, was engineered to act as a sap, a weapon, if I took it off and hit somebody with it.

  Should I need it. Or get a chance to use it against whatever axe- or machete-wielding crazy person I might encounter in this peaceful little valley. Sarah was now missing. The odds of me finding trouble – especially since I was going to be looking for it – seemed high.

  Fully dressed, I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror. Definitely not as scrawny as I was six months earlier, some of which had come from lying in bed being fed by Skip and Marie in Maine, maybe a bit added since I’d been at Rose’s. The food was fantastic here: healthy, insanely good, and plentiful – it wasn’t a fat farm, so the portions were suited to compulsive addicts who needed an alternative to their drug of choice. I’d never actually seen the chef, but apparently he was some kind of hot-shot in that world, having been a finalist on some chef competition on TV, and according to Mary, he had taken this job so that his kids could live in a beautiful, peaceful part of the world. Boy, had he chosen wrong. I wondered if he had decamped to safer pastures by now.

  But here I was, and from what I was seeing in the mirror, I was ready.