Rehab Run

by Barbra Leslie

  * * *

  I was tied to a tree. My shoulder was killing me, but it was secondary to the fact that I couldn’t loosen the bonds. I knew there was something in the woods, something large and evil and worse than anything I had met before. I couldn’t yell. I tried, but someone had taken my voice.

  I knew that if I could smoke some crack, I would be fine. I would be able to handle the pain, and I would have the strength to get away.

  Then Ginger was there. My sister was there, and so was Gene, my old partner in crime from the crack days. I hadn’t seen Gene in so long. But he was with Ginger, and they were going to help me. They couldn’t untie me, of course, because they had no hands. But somehow they managed to light the crack pipe that I had in my mouth, because they knew that was what was important. I had to get out of this myself, but they knew I needed crack to do it.

  The pipe wouldn’t light, or the crack was no good. I was inhaling and inhaling but nothing was happening. And something was crashing through the woods toward me. Gene was gone, and Ginger was crying. “Do what you need to do, Danny,” she said. “You’ll know what to do. Do what you need to do.”

  I needed to get the crack into my lungs. I was powerless without it.

  Then I heard the rumbling, and I looked up.

  A wall of water was coming for me. A tsunami. I could feel the cold of the water as it rushed at me.

  * * *

  I was in a different room. There were glass walls. My throat was coated in broken glass, and my skin felt like it was burning. A nurse put ice chips in my mouth.

  * * *

  Sometime later, Laurence was sitting on the bed, and he looked different. He had a beard. I had never seen him with a beard. I was glad he was there, but it was alarming. Years had gone by. My hand was burning. I tried to speak, but Laurence said something to the nurse, and someone put something in my IV drip. I watched it and closed my eyes, waiting for it to work. Whatever it was.

  * * *

  I woke in the semi-dark and tried to get up. I started screaming when I realized I didn’t have any feet. Then Laurence was there and someone else was there, a nurse, and Laurence held up a mirror and showed me that I had feet.

  * * *

  Then one morning I woke up and I felt different. I felt like I had lost weight, body mass, muscle I didn’t want to lose. My whole body felt floppy and weak. I was in some pain – my hand hurt like hell, but my throat didn’t hurt, at least not much, and I could breathe properly.

  Something else was different, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  And I wasn’t in the glass-walled room any longer. I was in a private room. The curtains were drawn. I wanted the curtains open. Laurence wasn’t there, or Debbie. Or anybody.

  But I was alive, and my hand was no longer invisible under the mummy wrappings. My wrists were still bandaged, so I looked like a failed suicide case, but I could feel my fingers on both hands. And my feet, too. The door to my room was closed, which felt a bit weird. Don’t they usually keep the doors open? Where was everybody?

  I was feeling around for a call button when a flower delivery guy came in with a huge pink and white arrangement.

  “Ms. Cleary?” I watched the man walk toward me and for a second I braced myself to fight, looking around for something to hit him with. But no. I knew that voice.

  I blinked. I thought I must still be in a fever dream. “Dave?” He was dressed in a delivery uniform, with a cap low over his eyes. He put his finger over his lips.

  “No, ma’am, they said they were gonna send Dave but he had a flat, so…” He fiddled with the flowers.

  It was Dave. He winked at me. “This place is lousy with cops,” he said cheerfully. “I guess there’s been a lot of crime lately, so it’s good they’re watching over everybody, miss.” Okay. He thought somebody was listening.

  I had too many questions. I needed water. I reached for it, and Dave poured me a glass. He didn’t give me a bendy straw. I took a long sip, which felt nearly as good as a hit of crack, at that minute. “How are you here?” Had I called him and forgotten? It was possible.

  “Darren,” he whispered, his voice low and quick. “I heard about some goings-on in this neck of the woods, and I’ve been keeping tabs. I got in touch with him. He decided to trust me, probably because he’s been going out of his mind with worry.” He looked at the door. “But I can’t be sure he didn’t change his mind after we talked and called in people I don’t really want to talk to right now.”

  “He wouldn’t,” I said. “I don’t think.”

  “I’m renting a house. Airbnb,” he said. I laughed. Why hadn’t we thought of that when the hotels were all full during the Apple Blossom Festival? Still, the short-term rentals had probably been full too.

  “What’s the date?” I said. Something was odd. Everything was too clear.

  “June second, I think,” he said. “You’ve been really sick.”

  “Am I okay now?”

  “Do you feel okay?” I did. Not much of a headache, a little sore, but I’d been lying in bed for days.

  “Oh my God!” I said. “I can hear!” That was what was different. The hearing in my right ear was back. Normal. Dave smiled at me, and I realized I’d missed him. Despite the fact that he’d conned me and held me at gunpoint once upon a time, I trusted him.

  He smiled at me. “It’s safe,” he said. “The house. I’ve made some modifications to the property.” He scratched his ear and grinned. “Upgraded for the owners.”

  “But it’s all over, isn’t it? They arrested Geoffrey? Mary’s husband? Isn’t it over? Where’s Laurence?”

  “Laurence is fine,” he said. “He’s at my place right now, getting some rest.” Well, that was bizarre. Laurence had not been on the pro-Dave bandwagon. “But, Danny, I’m sorry. It’s not over.”

  Oh, no. No. “What do you mean? Is Mary safe?” I didn’t want to ask if anyone else was dead. I didn’t want to ask what I had missed.

  “I’m sorry, Danny, I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ll tell Laurence you’re awake, and he’ll fill you in, and they’ll let you out soon. You’ll be staying with me, both of you.” He pulled his cap down further and started to leave, but he came back to my bed. He pretended to be moving the flowers to the other side of the bed, in case someone was watching somehow. “Danny, don’t trust anyone. Anyone, not even the cops. Just your brother.”

  “And you,” I said. I hoped so. I hoped so, with every fiber of my being. If this wasn’t over, I was going to need help. The kind of help that my brother, wonderful as he was, couldn’t provide. The kind that came with weapons, fake IDs and a shitload of experience and resources.

  “And me,” he said. He touched my hand lightly, as though by accident, and then he was gone.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I had gotten an infection in my hand after cutting it at some point while in captivity under restraint, some superbug that didn’t respond to the first antibiotics. Combined with the concussion, hypothermia, and being only a few weeks past a not-insignificant crack binge before coming to Rose’s, my immune system wasn’t what it should have been.

  The doctors credited the return of full hearing in my right ear to the heavy-duty antibiotics I’d been on.

  My hand didn’t hurt any longer, or not much, and I could move my fingers. But I still had an odd numbness in the middle two fingers on that hand. It would probably, I was told, heal itself. Or it wouldn’t, and I could look forward to therapy and possibly surgery down the road.

  They’d told me that about my ear.

  I was to be kept in for another day or two, especially now that I could eat solid food. And I had my suspicions that someone had had a word in the doctor’s ear, advising her not to release me yet. I was both a target, if this wasn’t over, and a thorn in someone’s side. Plus, someone else who needed to be protected.

  Not anymore, I wouldn’t. With Dave here, and after having been left to a horrible death, my desire to act, to bring this killer or killers to some
kind of justice, was at a high. My family would have suffered in the last days, wondering if I was going to live or die. Nobody was going to put us through that again. It needed to be shut down.

  The phrase made me think of Debbie MacLean. She had said that to me the day I met her, back at Rose’s. She had wanted me to “shut down” Dickie Doyle. I hadn’t seen her since my fever had broken, and I hoped she was okay. I hoped she had taken a nice long holiday. Quit her job, if that’s what it came to. And Des Murphy – I didn’t know if he had been found safely.

  When I finally had Laurence in my room, alone, with no doctors or student doctors taking my vital signs and bending my hands and feet in various directions, I wasted no time. “Tell me everything,” I said to him. He smiled at me, and the sadness in his face made my heart break.

  “Let’s get you better,” he said. “Then we can get you back to Toronto. The boys made you a video. Let’s just say neither of them is ever going to win a Grammy.”

  “What the fuck? Laurence, please.” I was going crazy with the waiting. I needed to know.

  He looked at me, grabbed my chin, and made me look into his face. “Later. Trust me. I promise. Play along.” He was speaking very quietly, nearly in a whisper. My heart started to pound. We weren’t safe in here. He didn’t think we were safe, in the hospital.

  He started smoothing my sheets and making me sit up so he could, ostensibly, rearrange the pillows behind my back. “You gave us a real scare, Danny. But, you know what? First things first, you need to eat. And I mean eat. You need your protein.” He squeezed my arm gently, my bicep. He was telling me I was going to need my strength.

  “I am fucking hungry, actually,” I said. I was.

  “You must be starting to feel better. First F-bomb in days!” He finished basically taking my bed apart around me in the guise of making it neat and tidy. “God, I can’t stand a mess.”

  Then I knew something was amiss. Laurence was a slob. He said he was like that on purpose, because he couldn’t bear all the gay stereotypes, but really he was just lazy. Doing dishes, he loved, but he once told me he had never, in his adult life, made his bed.

  “Such a queen,” I said. I was trying to sound natural, which of course made me feel like I was in a school play. With a knife at my throat. “Can we get room service or what? In this establishment?”

  “Danny, you are in a hospital, not the Four Seasons. They will bring your gruel around at five p.m.” The clock on the wall said just after three.

  “Let’s go to the cafeteria,” I said. “That must be open. And I have got to get out of this bed. The faster I’m on my feet, the faster we blow this town.”

  “Good idea,” he said. I was hooked up to an IV still, but Laurence helped me get out of bed.

  “Whoa,” I said. I had to sit down again. I hadn’t been on my feet since – well, since I ran from Mary’s house and saw the hood of the Mustang propped open. And had gotten brained, a minute later.

  I stopped and looked at my brother, thinking, wanting to speak.

  Back at Mary’s, I’d heard something behind me, but someone had to have been outside to open the hood, and the house wasn’t so big that I wouldn’t have noticed someone coming and going. And I doubted Mary could have hit me as hard as I was hit. But my head was fuzzy, and the timeline was still a bit unclear. They’d told me my memory of the incident might be gone altogether, or off-kilter, due to the concussion and the trauma after.

  Then I realized that having that concussion might be useful.

  Laurence got me a wheelchair so I could get out of the room and get some solid food into me, before I tried any real walking. He brought me a new hospital gown and a robe to put over the top, so I wasn’t flashing anybody, and I managed to change in the bathroom in my room.

  I tried to avoid looking in the mirror, but, really, there’s not much else in there. I needed to wash my hair and brush my teeth. The right side of my face from my cheekbone down was red and raw from trying to work the duct tape off in the saltwater. My jaw was bandaged; the abrasion there must have been worse. I looked skinnier than I should; my cheekbones and clavicles were too pronounced. I’m not a fan of that look on anyone, least of all myself. I wanted to look strong as well as be strong.

  I looked much like I had when Ginger died – gaunt and sick. I needed food, and a shower, and more food. Still, it was a hospital, and I doubted I was being scouted to be Gina Carano’s stand-in for her next film, so I guessed I’d do.

  The hospital seemed like a new one. There were tons of windows, and everything seemed spacious and fairly modern, considering. “It’s the hospital for the whole Annapolis Valley,” Laurence told me. He wheeled me past some oil paintings that locals had done to raise money for the facility.

  My heart sunk a bit, as I’d been hoping that I’d been taken to Halifax at some point when I was in my fevered state. Somewhere a bit further from the action, in other words.

  I was so hungry, the smell of hospital cafeteria food made me almost giddy with joy.

  “Park me by a table,” I said to Laurence, “and get me one of everything.” He looked at me. “Just get me a lot, okay?” I waited semi-patiently until he brought food over on three trays, taking two trips. There was a Salisbury steak-looking thing, which, despite my hunger, I found I couldn’t touch. I wondered how long it would take me to embrace meat again, after seeing Sarah’s body, or if I was going to morph into a vegetarian. I might. But I ate a plate of French fries with gusto, and an egg salad on whole wheat bread. Plus a bottle of orange juice and a bottle of cranberry juice. Laurence didn’t talk much while we ate. Well, while I ate; he drank coffee and picked at the steak I didn’t want.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Extremely full,” I said. I ate a couple of the peas off his plate, in a concession to having something green. It was the first solid food I’d had since eating a couple of bites of donair and a couple of bites of veggie pizza the night we’d left Rose’s. My stomach was objecting a bit, and I hoped I could keep it down. “Talk.”

  My brother looked ragged, suddenly, as if he’d used up all his energy in the last twenty minutes. “I’m so glad you’re okay, Danny. It was all my fault. We should have left. I put loyalty to Dickie over your safety, and I will never forgive myself. Never.” He started to cry then. Not a couple of tears, but quiet, wracking sobs. One table of people in white coats nearby looked politely away.

  “No,” I said. “I could have forced you. And I don’t blame you. I understand loyalty, God knows.” I squeezed his hand quickly, and let go. I wanted him to collect himself, not send him further into self-flagellation. “And I was so stupid that morning. I put myself in a stupid situation, and I didn’t react the way I should have. I should have fought – my God, the man has multiple sclerosis. Even on one of his good days, I should have been able to do something to defend myself.” I thought of the Glock in my bag and wondered what had become of my things. But we’d deal with that later.

  “Who has MS?” Laurence said. He grabbed a couple more paper napkins from the dispenser and wiped his face.

  “Geoffrey,” I said. “Mary’s husband.”

  “Did you see him?” Laurence asked. He was staring at me and he grabbed my wrist. It hurt, and I pulled away. “Sorry. Danny, did you see Geoffrey?”

  “No,” I said. I remembered the footsteps behind me. They were heavy, sure. I cursed myself for not having looked back. “But I heard him, and it was definitely a man. He was in the house when I was in the kitchen with Mary. And I saw his wheelchair in the hall.”

  “God, I need a fucking cigarette,” Laurence said. He looked at me. “The police think Mary must have helped her husband. Neither of them could have done all this on their own.”

  “No,” I said. “No way. And Mary couldn’t have hit me that hard. There’s no way she weighs a hundred pounds. And I was hit – and I know this, Laurence – I was hit by somebody who was at least my height. I could… feel it.” I pushed the empty tray away. �
�Besides, the Mustang. The hood. I was with Mary every second I was in that house.”

  “Look, I know. I do believe you,” he said. “And really, who would believe that Mary could have transported you and tied you like that? She had to have help.”

  “But… Mary? Are you sure? She was scared, Laurence. She was scared of whoever was in that house.” We sat in silence for a minute. I didn’t ask about Dickie. I knew he would have led with that, if there had been any news, and I didn’t want to reopen that wound just now. “Whatever is going on, Mary isn’t involved. Or at least, she’s a victim too. Somehow.”

  “I’d like to believe that myself,” he said. “But she’s gone. She took the car, and she’s gone. And Geoffrey is gone too. Missing, or gone with Mary. Nobody knows.”

  I let that sit a minute. “Gone? As in, on the run?”

  Laurence chewed on a straw. He wanted a cigarette badly; it was obvious.

  “In the wind, my sister,” he said. “They are in the goddamn wind.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The next day, I was released from the hospital with a prescription for oral antibiotics I was to keep taking. Other than that, I was cleared to go. Debbie had come to visit, again in her street clothes, bringing with her the few personal items Laurence and I had left at her family’s cottage. As far as she knew, Laurence and I were going to take it slow, drive a rental car back to Toronto, and sightsee along the way.

  I didn’t like lying to her. But if I had learned one thing, it was that my instincts about people sucked. Family, I could trust. Dave, I had wound up trusting, but certainly not at the beginning. And I had been so blindly wrong about certain people in the past –Michael Vernon Smith, Harry Miller – that I decided, for once, to follow directions and just be cautious.

  “I’m sorry about your jeans,” I said to Debbie as we chatted in my room. “I don’t know if you’re going to want to wear them after I, you know, spent a day unconscious and restrained who knows where in them, and then wore them in the Bay of Fundy while nearly drowning.”