Rehab Run

by Barbra Leslie

  “Oh my God,” he said, and suddenly he sounded like a man. “Oh my God.” I heard him moving. “I’m coming toward you,” he said. “Please don’t scream again.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Do you have any water?”

  I heard him trying to crawl. I could tell the hole was high enough to stand in, so he must be very injured. “No,” he said. “We drank the last of it a while ago.”

  “How long ago?” I asked. I wanted to know how long he had left.

  “Last night, maybe. I’m not sure. How’s Laurence?”

  I nearly laughed. Such a normal question. We could be running into each other at the bank.

  “He’s here,” I said. “Well, not here. But he flew up. You knew that, right?”

  “I knew he was coming. But they took me.”

  “Dickie, Mary has a bottle of water in her hand,” I said. “I don’t know if she’s still, uh, with us.” The tears were making their way freely down my face now. I tried to stop them. I couldn’t afford to lose any liquid. “But I have a high fever.” I was trying to speak as clearly as I could. I couldn’t hear my own voice in my head. My vision was doing that funny thing again, where I could see little sparks of light at the corners of my eyes. “And you need water. We need to make that water last. I can’t get to it.”

  I steeled myself, and looked at my leg.

  Whatever damage the rust was doing to my bloodstream was already done; I doubted I would help matters by pulling it out now, and I was very sure that it would kill me pretty quickly. I would save that, then, if dying from thirst was becoming too painful. I looked at the leg as though it belonged to someone else, for a minute. It was fascinating, looking at it that way. If it belonged to someone else, I’d tell them to get a tourniquet on that, and fast.

  But it was my leg.

  Fight, Danny. You have to fight.

  Ginger.

  For the first time, I felt the leather bag that was attached to my hip, which Lydia had strapped to me. It was the bag that the holster was fixed to, and I knew there was stuff in it, but I had forgotten it.

  Dickie Doyle was crawling toward us, toward Mary, and I didn’t let myself look at him. Something was wrong with him when I looked at him before, and right now I wanted to focus on my body, on stabilizing myself.

  I unzipped the bag. When I felt inside, I thought that if I lived to get out of here, I would take care of Lydia and her uncle for the rest of their lives.

  Antibiotic wipes. A handful of them. A pair of nitrile gloves. Some gum and hard candy. A small bottle of aspirin. And best of all, four pouches of water with electrolytes.

  And a flare.

  For a second I almost forgot about the pain.

  And when I felt my leg, the holster, I realized that it was at exactly the right spot to act as a tourniquet, a few inches above where the piece of metal was sticking out of my leg. I just had to tighten it. Maybe Dave had said that, when he was talking to me, before something had taken him away. He might have been telling me to tie off my leg, but I wasn’t listening to words. I was lost in pain, and just listening to the sound his voice made.

  “Dickie,” I said. “There’s some water in my bag. They put water in my bag.” I wasn’t sure I was making sense. He wasn’t responding.

  I looked up, and by the sliver of light overhead, I could see him feeling for Mary’s pulse.

  “Take a sip of water first,” I said. “Help yourself to that water. And I have candies. They’ll help your mouth make –” I couldn’t think of the word for it “– saliva.”

  I was ripping open one of the water pouches and emptying some of it, as slowly as I could manage, into my mouth. It was warm and slightly salty, but the best thing I had ever tasted. Until I opened the tin of candies.

  I looked at Dickie. He was dressed in what appeared to be a white t-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. He sat down with his back to the wall facing me, as he drank the water, and I saw what had scared me earlier.

  Someone had scalped him. At least, that’s what it looked like. There was blood covering his face. He was missing fingers, more than one, I thought, and the front of his t-shirt was almost totally dark with what must have been blood.

  The tattoo they had cut off.

  He must be in agonizing pain.

  I tried not to react, but he wouldn’t be able to see me well, anyway.

  “Is she gone?” I asked. I shook the aspirin bottle. I couldn’t see it well enough, but I got it open and counted. There were eight pills. “Mary.”

  “I can’t tell,” he said. “Probably.” He sounded odd. But then again, I’m sure I did too. And he’d been down here a lot longer.

  “I have eight aspirin here,” I said. “Do you have any water left?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can you come closer to me? I’ll give you a few aspirin for the pain.” He crawled over to me slowly, and I tried not to look too closely at his face. I’d been right the first time. He didn’t look fully human. But my fever was making everything go from clear and bright to nightmarish.

  He got close enough, and I held out my open palm, with a few pills in. With a shaking hand, he plucked them out of mine, one by one, and swallowed them slowly.

  “Try to stay sitting up for a little bit,” I said. “Let the pills go down.” I swallowed three, wishing they didn’t have a coating so I could chew them. I swallowed the last of one pouch of water, and handed Dickie a couple of hard candies. Then I let myself lean back.

  If the aspirin could reduce my fever a bit, I would be able to think more clearly. I could speak to Dickie more. But he was in much worse shape than I was, and he didn’t look like he had much left in him either.

  I closed my eyes and did a mental inventory. I had three more pouches of water. Two aspirin. However many little candies. The gloves and the antibiotic wipes, which would have been great if I had, say, scraped my pinky finger on the ladder, maybe. But still, they were there. A flare, which I might use if the darkness started to drive me crazy. A bag with a holster strap I was going to try to tighten, as soon as I could.

  And a walkie-talkie.

  “Oh my God,” I said out loud. Wasn’t that how I’d fallen? Reaching for it when there was static or something? I doubted it would work this far underground. I felt my hip, and it wasn’t there. Not in my pockets.

  I had dropped it. It was on the floor somewhere here, and it couldn’t be far.

  It was darker in here now. I could hear rain hitting the metal door up above. An overcast, rainy day, then, which would lead to a pitch-black night.

  I was going to get us out of here. Something clicked, something turned over; whatever survival mechanism that had helped me get the duct tape off my mouth in the Bay of Fundy was going to get us out of this stinking fucking hole and back into daylight.

  I was feeling around on the floor when I remembered one other thing I had, deep in my pocket. The small fold of tinfoil with a wee bit of cocaine. Cocaine is one of the best painkillers there is, and it would help chase the fever fog away. It was only a tiny amount; the buzz would only last a very short time. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen? I decided to wait for a few minutes, wait to see if the aspirin would help at all. But I had to stay conscious and not drift away into a fever fugue again.

  “Who took you?” I said. “Which one of them took you?” I couldn’t see anything now. The rain above seemed to be picking up, and what little light there had been was nearly gone. “Dickie?”

  I crossed my fingers. They couldn’t both be dead. If they were both dead, and I was stuck down here with two corpses, I thought I might go mad. My fingers felt around in the dirt, and I picked up a couple of small bits of what I hoped were pebbles. I chucked one in Dickie’s direction. “Dickie,” I said, more loudly.

  “Rose,” he said. His voice sounded like it was coming from a long way away. “Rose came and got me. We went for a drive.”

  “No, Rose is dead,” I said. “Remember? Rose died. It was her mother, Pamela.” More silence. M
aybe I should just leave him be, I thought. Let him drift away, remembering his wife. What was the point in making him relive all of this again? What was the point?

  I tried to think clearly. Dave wouldn’t have left me down here if he had any choice. He had either been shot, or he was being held. Maybe tied to a tree in the rain. But by whom? Was it really possible Geoffrey hadn’t been shot?

  A headache started, the kind of headache I didn’t experience very often. It was the fever, I knew, the infection in my blood.

  Ned had insisted that only one of us could be on the ladder at a time. He told me it was fifteen feet, when it was clearly much more than that. Could it be possible that my trust in him was yet another one of my famously bad errors in judgment? Could I really be that stupid?

  Or maybe he was working for Michael Vernon Smith, the man responsible for the deaths of the people I loved most in the world, my twin and my husband. Could it be possible that my past had come back to haunt me so soon?

  I had to get out. I was going to get out. I wasn’t going to die wondering.

  I took a breath and started dragging myself, inch by painful inch, to my left, to where I thought the walkie-talkie might have landed. Feeling around on the floor was an exercise in disgust. I felt what were probably the bones of some small, dead animal, and something else that was moving, crawling with worms. I bit in the inside of my cheek and recoiled, knocking my right leg into the floor. I screamed.

  I could hear Mary stirring. Thank God.

  “Mary,” I said. “Speak to me, honey.” My face felt it was soaking wet. Sweat, tears, and drops of rain getting through from above. She moaned. I needed to get more water into her. “Dickie! Wake up!” I picked up a handful of whatever I could find and threw it in his general direction. I think there were worms in there, but I didn’t care. “Dickie!”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m here. I’m here.”

  They were both alive. I was going to keep them both alive. And myself. I was going to keep us all alive. “Dickie, is there any water left?” Silence for a second.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I need you to get it to Mary. Try to get some water into Mary.” Dickie was moving in her direction, and I renewed my frantic patting of the ground and inching left, trying to get to the walkie-talkie.

  This was the moment. I stopped and took the square of tinfoil out of my pocket and carefully unfolded it. I didn’t have fingernails or keys to snort it with, so I just brought the tinfoil to my face and snorted.

  I figured neither Dickie nor Mary were in any position to either notice or care.

  The rain stopped, and a minute later, a bit of daylight came streaming down into the hole.

  Dickie was supporting Mary’s head and slowly streaming water into her mouth. She looked like a tiny bird, but she was getting water. I’d had a tiny bump of coke. Baby steps. We were going to get out of here. I just had to figure out how.

  In the light, I could see all of Dickie for the first time, and I saw why he was crawling.

  They had taken one of his feet.

  I forced myself to try to make sense of what I was seeing. I was pretty sure the fever had subsided somewhat. The aspirin had done something, anyway. Dickie’s leg ended in a large bandage. A large dressing that had at one time been white, but was now just brown with dirt and blood. How could he have survived that, down here? They couldn’t have done that right away; he would have died of shock or infection, something. Had they kept him in the cabin some of the time, on an IV?

  “Did they put dressings on your chest as well?” I said to Dickie. “Where they sliced off your, uh, tattoo.” They hadn’t made any attempts to do anything about his head, which looked like it was missing the top couple of inches. I closed my eyes for a second. It felt like every word I said cost me, like I had a finite amount of breath and energy and it was running out.

  But I had to talk.

  “My tattoo?” Dickie said.

  “The R,” I said. “For Rose.”

  “Oh,” he said. “My tattoo. Rose hated that tattoo, you know.”

  “Did she?” I said. I wanted to keep him awake, keep him verbal, but I thought if I heard another word about Rose fucking Doyle I was going to kill somebody.

  “He never stopped loving her,” Dickie said. “All those years. She told me it was over, but I don’t know if it ever was. Not really.” He sounded drugged. He must have been drugged; no one could manage the kind of pain he would be feeling otherwise.

  The yearbook. “Des Murphy,” I said. Oh God. Oh my God. “Sergeant Desmond Murphy.”

  In the faint light, I could see Dickie look at me quizzically. “Yes,” he said. “But it was me Rose came back for.”

  Des Murphy. Rose’s high-school sweetheart, the captain of the hockey team.

  Oh, no. “Dave,” I whispered. And Ned.

  And then I heard the sirens. Even from deep in this hole, I heard the sirens. As soon as they stopped, it sounded like close by, I started yelling for help. Dickie tried, but he didn’t have the strength, and Mary was barely alive. I screamed until my sore throat nearly exploded. I screamed until I saw stars.

  Then the doors opened, and there was light.

  I looked directly up and I saw white, and then I could make out more than one set of feet and blue uniform pants.

  And then Dave’s voice. I had to shield my eyes against the direct light, but it was his voice. It sounded funny, nasal, but it was him.

  “Dave? Are you alright?”

  “Am I alright?” His voice did sound off, but not enough that I couldn’t tell it was him. He sounded almost like he’d been crying. “Oh my God. Thank God.”

  “Get us out of here,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood for a long conversation.

  “Just a minute, Danny,” he said. I could see other faces and heard people talking behind him. “They’re figuring out the logistics up here.”

  “Get us the hell out of here, fuckwads,” I yelled up.

  “Thatta girl,” Dave said. He was laughing. But I thought he might have been crying, too.

  Idiot could have been a Cleary, I swear.

  I heard people above moving around, getting ready to get us out, and fuck the cynics: Heaven is for real.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  If there is any more blissful feeling than knowing you’re going to be rescued when you think you’re going to die, when you are absolutely sure that your life is going to end in a dark hole in the ground, then I don’t know what it is. Better than crack, even. Although having a paramedic descend from the sky and inject a kick-ass dose of morphine into your veins before you’re lifted onto a gurney and pulled into the daylight is a close second.

  Seeing Dave’s concerned face when I was being carried into the ambulance was pretty great, too. Even though his face was so swollen he looked like Al Pacino in The Godfather after he’s had his jaw broken by the crooked cop, and he had his arm in a sling. But he was smiling that goofy smile, and I was on a morphine cloud, and the pain in my leg and in the rest of my body from the fever was fading away. I was on a boat, waves lapping at the sides, my hand dipping in and out of the water, and the pain was back at the shore.

  And then my brother Laurence was with me; he was crying, really crying, and I was so happy because he was fine, nobody had gone to the safe house to chop his feet off, and I had found his friend for him. “Dickie is alive,” I said.

  “I know, Bean, I know. But the most important thing is that you’re alive.”

  “We’re all alive,” I said. I was so happy. I loved everybody.

  But I was forgetting something important. I knew I was.

  Laurence was with me in the ambulance. According to him, I was singing “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.” I don’t know whether to believe him or not, as his poker face is pretty good.

  I was lucky Laurence was with me at the hospital.

  When I was a kid, my nervous parents would call an ambulance when I fainted – until epilepsy was ruled out, two separate MRIs
had shown that there was nothing wrong with my brain (at least, no diseases that would cause spontaneous fainting and vomiting). Some neurologist told my parents I probably had a rare form of migraine that doesn’t present with headaches, but with blacking out. Another doctor told them that I was just high-strung. Whatever it was, after a certain point, the syncope – my “fits,” as my family called them – were just a genetic quirk and nothing to worry about. (They felt the same way when Laurence told them he was gay. We were lucky in our parents. They were pretty normal people who both had a dark sense of humor, and we were all taught not to take ourselves too seriously.) In any event, I had my share of doctor and hospital visits as a kid, and then later when I was training and fighting, I had a few trips to the ER with injuries here and there. While I wasn’t a fan of pain, I’d always seen it as part of life, part of the package if you wanted to pursue certain things. I knew I could take physical pain. In the same way, my split with Jack and my ensuing affair with crack cocaine had taught me that I can’t endure emotional pain. Stab me in the gut before you hurt anyone I love; it’s much easier for me to bear. This is not because I’m heroic or impervious to physical pain, it’s because I am more equipped to handle it than the emotional kind. I’ve lost both my parents, my husband, and my twin sister. This, I know.

  Physical pain is a message from the brain that something is wrong. For a time, that message can be ignored, if necessary. Adrenaline does a good temporary job with that. Trying to defend yourself or someone you love also works well. But when the immediate danger has passed and you and your loved ones are safe, that pain will come back and tell you what’s what.

  When the hefty dose of morphine that had been used to get me out of the hole and into the ambulance started to wear off, I knew I was in for trouble. Not only was the physical pain getting worse, but the urgency with which I was being prepped for surgery made me realize that this might be a bit more serious than a broken ankle.

  But Laurence kept a steady stream of love in the form of dry humour coming my way. He told me that Darren, Matty, and Luke were in the process of doing another homemade music video about my time in the hole, and the hole in my leg. They were calling it, fittingly enough, “The Hole.”