I nodded like I knew all about the streets flooding at high tide in Venice when you were trying to finish your drawing.
The last frame in the room, beside the front door, wasn't a drawing but a large photo of a family of four, with clothes and hair that would have been fashionable in the late nineties. Printed in black and white, the way people displayed photos that were really special. Blonde mother, dark father. The blond little boy with the dark eyes was John. The blond teenager with longish hair must have been his brother. Other than light eyes, he looked more like John than John.
"Does your brother live here in town?" I asked. Water ran in the kitchen. John was washing his hands. He dried them on a towel and looked at them. "John?"
He washed his hands again.
I used my best guilt-ridden murderess voice. "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!"
"Macbeth. Tenth grade." He dried his hands.
"Does your brother live here in town?" I repeated.
"No, he left." He unbuckled his gun belt and laid it on the kitchen table beside the holster from his leg.
"Can I touch it?" I crossed the living room, into the kitchen, and peered at the guns in their holsters. "Do you think I'll shoot you?"
He watched me with an amused smile. "Actually, I was thinking I should show you some basics, as part of your education this week. Or in case I get knocked out in the next twenty-five hours, and you're left in the vehicle with an unconscious police officer and a loaded weapon."
I hadn't expected him to agree. "You can't be too careful with guns," I reminded him.
He picked up one of the pistols and showed me some basics anyway. How to take out the clip of bullets, and how to check for a bullet in the chamber. He seemed to be concentrating on the gun. But there was no way he missed the way my hands shook on the table as he went through these motions so familiar to him.
I didn't want to see his sympathetic look for a frightened girl. I hated myself for being frightened.
He offered the gun to me, with the muzzle pointed toward himself. "No bullets," he said. "Safe."
I held out my shaking hand, and he placed the gun in my palm.
"Heavy," I said. Foreign. Strange to hold it in my hand. Warm from his body.
I held it as long as I could stand it, then offered it back to him—with the muzzle pointed toward the door, not myself. "Okay, I'm through with it."
"So soon?" He took the gun gently back from me. Click, click, pop, and it was together again.
"I am full of fear."
"Of a gun?" He cocked his head to one side, watching me. His voice was honey as he guessed, "Of 6:01 a.m. Thursday."
I’d never been scared of sex. It was what might come after that terrified me, tethers tying me down here. I shivered.
He touched my shoulder. "God, here I am worried about what I look like to suspects when you're soaked, too. Come with me."
I followed him through the living room and into his bedroom. More drawings covered the walls. On his bedside table sat a police scanner, humming, occasionally crackling with Lois's voice.
He disappeared into his closet and brought out a long-sleeved T-shirt emblazoned with the words To Protect and Serve.
I took it from him. "Wow, I've crossed over." He disappeared again and brought out another leather cop jacket.
I took it. "Does this mean we're going steady?"
He gave me the one-dimpled smile before looking in the closet once more for a clean, pressed uniform on a hanger. "Re right hack." He walked into the bathroom and closed the door.
I could have secreted myself in the closet to change. But since I was me, I shed my wet jacket and shirt there in his bedroom. I paused just a few moments in the hope he would (gasp!) catch me in my bra. But even if that happened, that's all that would happen, because it was not yet 6:01 a.m. Thursday, and John went By The Book. I pulled on his warm, dry shirt and jacket.
I started my circle around this new room of the art gallery. One of the first drawings I came to was of the Devil fountain at Five Points, with several of the animal statues coming to life and wearing hats. Then more angles of the artsy section of Birmingham, ornate mansions next door to dilapidated apartment buildings.
And then, across from his bed, right where he could see it first thing when he woke up each morning (or afternoon), was a large drawing of the bridge.
With no green aliens in it, no hat-wearing animals. No people.
Just the bridge, a stark shape against the too-blue sky.
He burst from the bathroom. At least, you would think he had, the way I jumped back from the drawing.
While he stepped into clean boots, I crossed to the dresser like nothing had happened, uncapped a bottle of cologne, and sniffed. That wasn't it. I picked up another. That wasn't it, either. If his scent of cologne was really laundry detergent or deodorant or even aftershave. I would be disappointed.
He reached past me for the last bottle and handed it to me. "It's this one."
I unscrewed the top and wet my finger with cologne. I half thought he would kick me out of his apartment, never to return, not even at 6:01 a.m. Thursday, for what I did next. I did it anyway. I reached up to touch his neck. Sliding my hand past his dark collar, I rubbed my finger across his collarbone.
He looked down at me and put his big, warm hand over my hand.
The scanner buzzed to life with Lois's voice. John didn't move, but those worried creases appeared between his eyebrows.
"I don't understand Lois's code," I whispered. "What is it?"
He dropped his hand and stepped away from me. Picking up my soaked clothes from the floor, I followed him into the living room, where he was already putting on his gun belt. "A fatality at the Birmingham Junction," he said. He bent to strap the other gun onto his leg. "What we've been waiting for."
I trailed him through the wake of his cologne. Out the door, into the fog that had replaced the rain, down the stairs, and into the car. He radioed to Lois that we were close by and could respond to this call. Which didn't matter, because every siren in town was already wailing.
I drew the seat belt across my chest and fastened it like a good girl. The past few nights I'd gotten used to wearing it. I hardly ever felt faint. Now I was back to the panicky feeling. I knew what John had meant when he said we'd been waiting for this wreck. Finally, after holding their breath responding to crashes at the dangerous intersection, the emergency response personnel had the fatality they'd dreaded. It was The Big One. And John wanted me, Tiffany, and Brian to get an eyeful.
I was scared. And tired of being scared.
As he checked both ways for nonexistent traffic and pulled onto the main road, I said, "My favorite drawing wasn't the one of Venice. It was the one of the bridge. Your bridge."
He took a deep breath and sighed through his nose: Here we go again.
"But the view you should draw isn't the view of your bridge," I went on. "It's the view from your bridge."
His jaw hardened. "That's illegal, as we've established."
"Sometimes breaking a rule is worth it. You're so obsessed with this bridge. Haven't you ever longed to see the view from the other side?"
He made one final turn, and the red and blue lights came into view, flashing long on the wet pavement. "Why are you doing this?" he asked so quietly that T could hardly hear him over the sirens.
"Because of what you're about to do to me."
It was a one-car crash. A circle of cop cars, fire trucks, and ambulances surrounded the car. It had crumpled against a round pillar holding up the interstate. "How do you even have a wreck like that?" I asked.
"Drunk. Poor judgment." He opened his door. "Come on."
Normally I would have jumped at the chance to get out of the cop car with him on a call. Brian and Tiffany were there already. They stood on either side of the mangled car, far apart from each other, both with their arms folded. But I hung back against the hood of the cop car, trying to tamp the panic down.
John crossed the accident scene and talked to a couple of firemen in their long coats with their helmets on and face shields down. He slid an engine enclosed in a cube-shaped metal frame off the fire truck and set it heavily near the wreck. The firemen screwed some hoses into the motor. They attached the other ends of the hoses to what looked like an enormous set of pliers.
Quincy the paramedic passed by me. I called out to him, "Are those the jaws o' life?"
"Yeah. A little late for the life part. You can see no one's in a huge hurry." He kept ambling on his way.
The jaws o' life engine started up with a racket, and the firemen set to work spreading open the collapsed space that used to be the car's front door. Broken glass and shards of metal flew into the air, bounced on the hood of the car, and cascaded to the pavement.
John beckoned me forward to the crumpled car.
My heart raced. My fingertips tingled. Red lights flashed behind my eyes. But I had to do what John said. If I didn't, I wouldn't put it past him to throw me in jail again, 6:01 a.m. or no 6:01 a.m. I took a few steps forward.
Brian put himself in my path. He shook his head at me. "Meg. You don't want to see this."
Behind Brian, John still motioned to me. He called, "Come on."
Brian walked over to John. "Don't make her." He put his hand against John's shoulder to stop him.
John flinched away. "Do not touch me while I'm in uniform," he shouted.
Brian ducked back.
John walked toward me, grasped my wrist, and pulled me. By now my face felt like a mask, with no blood pumping to my skin. I knew I was as good as gone, but I'd lost the strength to fight. I stumbled after him toward the wreck.
The noise from the jaws o' life was so loud, I didn't see how the firemen or anyone else could stand over here. It pulsed loud enough to hurt, like a motorcycle twice as big as mine with no muffler. I felt the concussion of every pulse in my chest, throwing the rhythm of my heartbeat off. As the scene collapsed into tunnel vision, the pulse of the engine melded into one long scream.
The interstate lights glared off the firemen's face shields so I couldn't see their expressions. They looked like aliens in space suits. At a signal from John, they backed away from the car to let us see inside.
She was twisted in a way the human body did not twist, in a very, very, very small space.
For me to hear him over the jaws o' life, John must have shouted. But in my head his voice sounded smooth and hollow and sinister, like a doctor in my hospital room after I'd been sedated.
"This is what I wanted you to see."
Chapter 12
I wasted away. My flesh shrunk so quickly, I seemed to melt, to collapse in on myself. Through my transparent skin, my bones showed. I wiggled one finger back and forth, watching the bones grind together underneath.
The ammonia lodged in my nostrils like two Q-tips.
I meant to cross my right hand to my left arm and pull out the IV. I missed, and my hand bounced off my shoulder. I slid my hand down my arm, feeling for the needle. No IV.
I sniffed more ammonia, trying to get it past the Q-tips and into my brain. I couldn't wake up. I couldn't open my eyes.
"Do not stick a needle in me," I mumbled. "Whatever you do, do not start an IV. I would rather die, do you understand? Go ahead and let me die."
"You're not dying," came Tiffany's voice. "And you're crazy if you think they'd let me start an IV. I'm lucky I got to take your blood pressure. Which is very low, by the way, so don't sit up yet."
I took one more big whiff and sat up. Outside the open square of the back of the ambulance, John stood chatting with Officer Leroy and another cop and Quincy. John was smoking a cigarette.
Bastard.
Bastard!
I moved toward him. Fell.
Off the ambulance? Heard Tiffany shriek.
Found myself lying on my back on the wet highway, the shock of the fall still rippling through my muscles.
John lifted me under the arms and stood me up against the ambulance bumper. "Watch that first step. It's a doozy," he said around the lit cigarette hanging from his up."
I shoved him. His chest was solid under the dark uniform, and he didn't budge. I shoved him again, as hard as I could, but only shoved myself back against the ambulance. I screamed at him, "I had cancer, you fuck!"
The other cops and Quincy crowded around. Suddenly I could see myself the way they saw me. a blue-haired girl screaming for no reason. I was about to get taken to jail for assaulting a police officer.
John's cigarette dropped onto the wet asphalt and steamed there. I didn't look up at him to see whether he was gaping at me and the cigarette had fallen out of his mouth, or he'd thrown the cigarette down on purpose. I didn't want to know whether I'd mortified him in front of his macho coworkers. I didn't care.
"I'm hitching a ride on the fire truck back to my motorcycle," I told the cigarette. "I've had enough of what you wanted me to see. I'm done for the night."
My legs wobbled underneath me as I staggered to the fire truck, but no one offered to help me, not even Tiffany or Brian. Keeping my head turned away from the wreck, I pulled myself into the roomy cab of the fire truck. I curled up like a cat next to the giant pliers from the jaws o' life. Which was probably a good thing. I would need them to extract me from this fix I'd wedged myself into with Johnafter.
I HAD CANCER, YOU FUCK.
I was so tired. I'd almost finished my daily five-mile run in the park. And I hadn't been to sleep yet. Well, except for a half-hour catnap in the front of the fire truck before the emergency response personnel dropped me off.