Blood Highway

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  I was in the kitchen, holding the phone. It was squawking at me: “Are you there? 9-1-1, what is your emergency? Hello?”

  The words dropped into my mouth, so welcome: “My mother killed herself. Please send someone.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Please send someone.”

  “I’m sending someone right now. Are you sure she’s dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you check for a pulse?”

  This croaky awk sound I emitted subbed in for “No, but the water is colored like a rose.”

  “Miss?”

  I put the phone on the counter. It kept talking while I was walking toward the front door. I glanced in the living room, duded-up for Christmas. Our tree was fake, but a good fake. Fake pine with fake frosting, like somebody’d gone ape on it with liquid paper. There were presents underneath, the same empty boxes Mom set out every year. She rewrapped them every year. She took a whole day to do it. I went and plugged in the Christmas lights.

  I meant to go outside and wait. I was going, but my feet were moving like they were in quicksand. Why do we call it quicksand when it slows us down?—because you sink so quick, dummy. On our lawn, snowflakes fell to the dead grass. The snow was sticking. That meant it’d get bad soon.

  “You’re doing this,” I said, and went outside and sat on the stoop, pawing for my Marlboro pack. I did a drag that probably put lung cancer in my toenails. Blowing out the poison took most of my terror along with it. I chain-lit, which I never do.

  I had one Red left. I had eleven matches.

  The world around me was a shaken-up snow globe, and not in a good way.

  “Calm down. You’ve got eighty bucks. You could get more and get a hotel. A nice one if you want, downtown and ritzy if you want. Order room service, have a hot b— Have a hot shower. Get some sleep and pick up the plan where it dovetails with tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow. I was abuzz with the luxury of tomorrow. How I had one, now that she didn’t.

  I got up and tamped my cigarette in the fallow dirt of her planter, ready to blow this Popsicle stand. Except I set one foot on the snowy grass and saw a police cruiser doing about fifteen per, slowing for my driveway.

  It moseyed right up to our garage door and parked. The engine cut. A cop got out. He wore a uniform, no hat. The closer he got to me, the more I could tell my appearance had conferred its usual set of advantages and disadvantages: adult male meets adolescent girl with big lips and a lot of hair and is titillated, so he’ll be nice out of shame but he’ll also fight a flare of anger, sweetmeat he knows he won’t get to taste. Guys in my age group did the same thing once they found out I had intelligence and self-respect and didn’t need their attention in order to feel validated, making it unlikely they’d get to stick their dick in my pie just for telling me I had pretty eyes.

  He was a few inches taller than me. Six feet. His brow wanted to furrow. “Why aren’t you crying?” it said.

  “You make the call?” His vowels were funny. Not Minnesota-funny: we talk like toddlers experimenting with beginner-level phonics. This guy sounded—I don’t know. Pissed.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You move her at all?”

  I shook my head.

  “Stay here,” he told me, starting inside. He rocked back on the foot that hadn’t moved. “You can get in my car. It’s warmer.”

  “I’m fine.”

  This time, he stopped before he’d fully bent his knee. “You’re all right here? By yourself?”

  “I’m good, yeah.” But he wasn’t looking at me. He was inside the house, looking at the dark hall ahead. I didn’t believe in auras, but this guy’s anxiety was palpable. “Straight ahead,” I said. “Right at the stairs. You’ll see it.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed. He went in. When he turned the corner, I folded my arms and legs, going pencil-thin, holding my heat. I took out my matches, counted them. There were still eleven. I frowned at the stairs as the cop reappeared beside them. “How’d you get here so fast?” I said around a filter. I popped a match, but an icy breeze blew it out.

  His shoulders settled lower as he crossed the threshold outside. “You old enough to be smoking?”

  I threw my last Red to the ground.

  “I was kidding,” he said.

  “No, you weren’t.”

  He leaned opposite me, back propped in the doorway. I took a good look at him and . . . Nothing to really hang your hat on. No gap in his front teeth or ears that stuck out or a hank of hair that went all Alfalfa in back. This cop was what my friends and I called “blandsome.”

  “I am now,” he said. “Have at ’em. Really.”

  I squatted and retrieved the cigarette. I licked my lips at it, but the filter was wet and muddy.

  “I meant a fresh one,” he said.

  I crumpled my pack to demonstrate its emptiness. “You should be more specific with your instructions, Officer.”

  “Blaine.”

  “What?”

  “Not ‘Officer,’ not ‘Sergeant.’ Just Blaine.” He nodded at the Collins house, next door, with its gaudy, blazing display of Christmas lights. “They ever get cited for the wattage they’re using?”

  “They’ve got a dimmer. They throw it whenever the cops come, then turn the lights back up once you’re gone.”

  He was staring.

  “Yes?” I said.

  Blaine didn’t seem bothered. In fact, I thought he might be fighting a smile. “You got a name?”

  “Rainy Katherine Holly Cain.”

  “Two middles or two lasts?”

  “Just Rainy.” I’d been chewing on a hangnail and right then peeled the wedge of skin free. It started to bleed. “Great.”

  “You need a Band-Aid?”

  “I need a cigarette.”

  He sighed. It made a cloud. He patted his breast pocket and hip pocket, held out two items: a half-empty pack of Parliaments and a gold lighter. I glared at his offerings like they were a mean joke.

  “Go ahead.” He shook them at me. I didn’t take them. His hands fell to his sides. “Think fast!”

  I reached on a reflex and caught the pack. He threw the lighter a second later; I let it drop. It landed in a tuft of snow by my right sneaker. Blaine didn’t pick it up, and neither did I.

  I used a match, successfully this time.

  “You and your mom didn’t get along.” Not a question. Blaine pointed at his own cigarettes, asking to bum one.

  “I’ve got an alibi,” I said. “I was in prison.”

  Blaine picked his lighter from the ground and used it. Waited.

  “High school.”

  He inhaled wrong and coughed.

  I was proud—he didn’t strike me as an easy laugh. My mother’s dead body sat thirty feet away, but I couldn’t scrounge up the right response; there were too many to choose from. I couldn’t fathom what the correct act might be, so I wasn’t acting. It was frightening and exhilarating, and adding those to my neurochemical gumbo only got it spicier. Spinnier. I was getting dizzy.

  “Are we waiting for something?” I said.

  “Detectives.”

  “Why detectives?”

  “CYA,” he said. “You got any family we can call?”

  “Nope.”

  He dropped his filter and ground it with a shiny black shoe. I pinched and pocketed mine for a puff later. I chewed on my fingers some more, though my chattering teeth complicated the process.

  Blaine peeled his back off the wall and leaned forward, almost bowing. “Listen, we can wait in my cruiser.”

  I shook my head.

  He hopped off the stoop, beelining for his car. I didn’t want to get in there; I didn’t want to sit in the back, where purse snatchers and serial killers had left their purse-snatcher and serial-killer germs. The dome light lit Blaine rooting around in his glove compartment. I guessed he was going for cuffs. He’d cuff me, put me in the back. I’d resist—I’d go to prison for resisting arrest.

  When
he slammed the door and I saw a box of Band-Aids in his hand, anger stuck in my brain like a long, sharp pin. I wanted to hit him. More than that. I wanted to beat him up, beat him until he was a stain on the sidewalk. It was alarming how bad I wanted it, but it was also outright comical. He had fifty pounds on me. And he was getting me Band-Aids because my finger was bleeding.

  “You’re doing this—”

  “What?” Blaine said.

  But was I? Was I really doing anything, or was I sitting in a seat, on a roller coaster, screaming for somebody to stop the ride and let me off?

  “What’d you say?” he said, close now.

  I needed to move. I went inside. I was gagging, my tears mixing with snow. I kept my eyes open wide. This wasn’t the time to cry. Though why this wasn’t the time, I had no idea. I only knew it would be a failure.

  The front door closed. Celine wasn’t singing anymore.

  “You killed the groovy tunes,” I said.

  “One suicide’s enough.”

  I laughed. It was like a rocket blast in the silence. “Want the grand tour?” I hit the living room light. Passing the tree, the purple sofa, I hung a right to the dining room table. I hit that light, too, and the table big enough for four bragged its one chair. High knobs of dark wood she polished every Monday.

  “Want a snack?” I said, hitting the light for the kitchen, going to the fridge.

  “Wait, that’s—” He went silent when I tugged on the fridge handle and the padlock caught. I yanked on the freezer, and that lock caught. I pulled a few padlocked cabinets, to stick with the theme.

  “Wanna see my room?” I was on a roll. I ran up the stairs, to my door. I dug down the neck of my shirt and took out the key that hung from a shoelace, unlocked my dead bolt. When I pushed inside and turned on the light, a voice in my head asked very politely what the hell I was doing.

  “Holy.” Blaine didn’t mean the mess. That was at about a category 2: clothes in senseless piles, books arranged in stacks by library due date, the mattress on the floor only semimade. He meant the walls. I’d covered every square inch, ceiling and closet doors included, with photographs of the ocean at sunset. It’d taken me three years of slicing pages from the travel mags at the library. My rules were: there couldn’t be any people in the pictures, and there couldn’t be anything man-made.

  Good rules. Specific.

  My blinds were open. Red and blue lights revolved out there, whirling. I noticed with detached interest that I was close to passing out.

  “Took ’em long enough,” Blaine said. “Wait here.”

  I followed, of course. We passed the guest bathroom. What had she believed about the monster or poltergeist who showered there? What had made her decide her daughter wasn’t real? I almost stepped on his heels. Blaine turned and saw me following, and that’s why he caught me when all sensation left my body. “Whoa. Whoa, easy.”

  My deadweight slid to the floor, with its natty indoor-outdoor carpet. Mom redid downstairs to soft plush, but she’d left this. Nobody ever came up here. Because of the locked room, where some wicked thing lived. The thing that used to pilfer from the kitchen, until she locked the kitchen up.

  Sometimes, in the night, she came and checked on the monster. If it dropped something, or if it had music on. I’d be on my mattress surrounded by homework. I’d hear her approach on creaky stairs, watch her arrive in the shadow under my door. Sometimes, she’d lie flat to the floor to look under the gap.

  What did she see? A demon where I sat? Objects in space, moving of their own accord? Could she discern the photos on every wall?

  “It’s Rainy, right? Hey, Rainy, come on back.”

  Is that why I put them there? To assure myself whenever I walked in that I was a real person? That I existed?

  Three

  Oxygen tastes gross. Counterintuitive, but there you go.

  “Deep breaths. Try and relax.” The paramedic hovered. He’d secured the oxygen mask’s band around the back of my head. It contained the plastic stink of bygone vomit and sterilizing alcohol, and I’d have been rabidly uncomfortable if I didn’t remember Blaine carrying me out the front door, his voice custom-made for ripping this guy and his partner about seven new sphincters each. “What part of ‘I need a medic’ don’t you understand? Shut your fucking mouth and help me get her on the stretcher.”

  It was cruel of me to be delighted by this, but I was. I could still hear him a ways off. His specific words were mush, but the cadence of them, the bent, angry staccato—it stuck out from other sounds. Sounds of more vehicles arriving. Sounds of men. Men tasked with knowing what to do, or at least knowing how to pretend they knew what to do.

  Sounds of women. “Is everything all right?”

  Yes. Yes, everything’s stellar, because that’s when you call the cops and the paramedics and the coroner’s van.

  “Relax,” the paramedic told me. “Your pulse is jumping. Just try and relax.”

  “Jer,” a man said. “We’re gonna need your help inside.”

  The paramedic put my arm down. He climbed out of the rig, and I was left to count how many compartments an ambulance had. Next would be a hospital, and I didn’t want to go to the hospital. I hated the smells.

  I slid the mask off, inhaling the clean scent of winter, seeing that my neighbors were maintaining what I’m sure they thought was a polite distance. The crowd’s nucleus was five women in homey wool, clasping each other’s plump fingers for mutual support. They were the neighborhood’s knitting circle. They invited my mom to join them every couple of years. She’d plead hopelessness with a needle, watch them leave through a gap in the blinds. I pegged the “Is everything all right?” inquiry as having come from that group, specifically from the woman in the middle. Sheila Knell. The lenses of her square witch glasses shone at me.

  Another guy was making a circular gesture that encompassed my house, explaining something to his wife. He was a compulsive explainer. Last summer, I’d been reading Einstein’s Dreams on my lawn while he was walking their collie, and he’d stopped and launched into a forty-minute explanation of thermodynamics.

  I knew eight other people by sight. They congregated in a messy mass, forming twosomes and threesomes, breaking up again. A cop stood in front of them. As near as I could tell, his purpose was to keep the rabble on the sidewalk, but he was busy watching my house, same as the crowd he was supposed to control.

  My legs weren’t quite roadworthy yet, so I knee-walked out of the ambulance. I paid close attention to moving steadily as I sat on the rear bumper. I took out the Parliaments and struck a match, smiled at the gathering. Silent gasps washed over me. Sheila hissed at her knitting groupies. I couldn’t hear her, but I could guess the content: “How can she smile at a time like this?”

  I chain-lit, remembering Ally’s kitchen at sunup. Maybe school wouldn’t hear about it right away and I could tell the girls goodbye. I checked left. Two boy shapes were at the Krenelkas’ b-ball hoop. Meaning Kyle would hear, meaning Kyle would talk, meaning the news would have permeated Dewey High as fast as poison gas by first period.

  A shadow cut the streetlight and stood over me. “Really?” Blaine meant the cigarette.

  I’d made eye contact with Sheila. She took the challenge and squinted. I let her scrutiny break around, flow past. I was a stone.

  At the edge of my vision, Blaine turned from me to the crowd and back. His voice hit that extra-pissed timbre I found so oddly tranquil: “Burke, c’mon!”

  The crowd controller jumped.

  “I want everybody behind the sidewalk.” Blaine waved his hands, shooing them. I wondered where he’d put his coat, then realized I was wearing it. “No more blocking the street. Have some respect, back up.”

  Sheila said, “We have a constitutional right to assemble—”

  “Here’s my badge number.” Blaine tilted it into the streetlamp. She actually took a pen from her purse and started writing it on her palm. “Sergeant Blaine Clay, Fourth Precinct, under John Kunz. Y
ou file a complaint, tell him your constitutional rights.” Blaine paused, waiting for her to finish, then took a step back and swept everybody with a very police-y glare. “Listen up. I want you all to try something. I want you to try and put yourself in someone else’s shoes. If you do that and you’re not ashamed of yourselves for standing here like this is a goddamn football game, try again.” A few people split off from the crowd. “Very good. How’s it going for the rest of you? Still feeling all right about yourselves, standing here?”

  The center began to give.

  “I will make that complaint.” Sheila’s group proceeded south, toward cider and trash talk.

  “Can’t wait,” Blaine said, and said to the other cop, “Think you got this now, Burke? Think you can manage?”

  Burke nodded, his face red.

  Blaine marched to me, pointed at his cigs in my hand. I held out the pack. He took a seat and lit up with that gold lighter. Fury made him stiff, deliberate.

  I should’ve been afraid of him. “Are they getting her out of the tub?”

  “Yeah, they are.” He set his head against the ambulance’s tall frame. “You wanna wait for her or leave now?”

  “Where’d you get your accent?”

  “Brooklyn,” he said without hesitation. “My parents moved to Minneapolis when I was twelve, but it never went away.”

  “How old are you?”

  “How old are you?” he said.

  “Eighteen in February.”

  Blaine blurted a word, a startle-whispered “Jesus.”

  I’d have offered to show him my license, but which one? Did I want to be nineteen, twenty-two, or twenty-six? I didn’t even have one with my real info on it. Priorities. “You look twenty-five,” I said. “Max.”

  “I’m twenty-seven. Why’s it matter?” The snow was coming down in enormous feathers, laying a down blanket on the dirt. “We can wait in my car. The van’s blocking me, but once—”

  Once your mother’s loaded in like a high-class dessert tray, we can paint the town.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re shivering.”