Hitchers (9 page)

Before I could answer a buzz of excitement rose through the diner. I leaned around the waitress to see the door.

There he was. Unmistakable, speaking into the other waitress's ear, a hand on her shoulder. He still had the spiky blonde hair, and his outfit, though not particularly loud or flashy, announced that he was someone of note: black-rimmed hipster glasses, expensive leather jacket, jeans. He wasn't wearing a mask—the only person in the diner.

I waved. He spotted me, gave me a two-fingered salute, sauntered over wearing a big smile, his hand outstretched. I met him partway and we shook, then he clapped my shoulders as if making sure I was real.

A young woman was hovering behind him, clutching a pen. I motioned to Mick. He turned, exchanged a few pleasantries with the woman as he signed her napkin.

A few other admirers left their booths to meet him. Mercury gave his attention to each of them in turn, listened to their brief testimonials—how they'd seen him at his first Atlanta concert, what this or that song meant to them. He seemed to enjoy himself.

When an elderly woman came forward, her hand outstretched, Mick blurted, “
Mom, not in the middle of my show.”

The woman let out a startled “Eep”; others gasped in surprise.

“Sorry,” Mick said, holding his palm over his mouth. “Been working on a new vocal style. Thinking I might try crossing over into some of that Goth vampire music.” He grinned brightly, eliciting a few nervous chuckles. “Finn and me are going to have some breakfast now, so if you don't mind...” He gave everyone a gentle “shove off” gesture.

When everyone was back at their tables, Mick and I settled in.

“So. What the fuck is wrong with us?” Mick murmured.

I took a quick sip of water—my mouth was dry. It was jarring, to realize I was sitting with a rock star. I found it impossible to look across the table at Mick Mercury and see nothing but another guy. It was Mick freaking Mercury.

“Seems to me it's got to be connected to the anthrax,” I said.

Mick pointed at me, nodding emphatically. “That's what I said,
but the doctor said it ain't possible.”

The waitress came over. I stared at the table, still embarrassed by my outburst, and it seemed as if she was standing a lot further from the table than she'd been before. She was wearing gold sneaker-shoes with Cleopatra's face on them.

She gave Mick a level look. “Just so we're clear, I'm not going to ask for your autograph or anything juvenile like that.” She shrugged. “But if you happened to sign that place mat for some reason, that would be okay.”

Mick grinned. “I've done stranger things.”

“Yes you have,” the waitress shot back, prompting Mick to cackle madly.

True to his word, Mick ordered a scotch with his bacon and pancakes.

When the waitress had gone, I said, “The doctor told me the same thing. But it's the only thing that connects our cases. That and the fact that we both died for a few minutes.”

We compared notes. The things we were blurting were similar in some ways, not in others. I recognized a lot of what I said—it had to do with the strip, people and places I knew, and especially my grandfather. Mick recognized some of what he said—about his music, the lawsuit he'd fought with his collaborator, and so on. Other things weren't at all familiar, like the beauty he'd just uttered.

“Sometimes it's like I got a bleeding anorak in my throat. Programs on the telly, comic books. I go on and on about the most trivial dross.”

It definitely didn't fit with my psychiatrist Corinne's theory that my blurting was the result of unresolved issues with my grandfather. If that was it, why would Mick Mercury have the same problem?

“Let me ask you something,” Mick said, leaning forward, his elbows on the table. “You much for getting trolleyed?”

I shook my head, totally lost.

“You know, do you like to get pissed?”

It took me a minute, then I remembered that pissed was British for drunk. “Oh sure, I like a few drinks now and then.”

Mick nodded, looked around, as if afraid some of the patrons might be undercover paparazzi. “But when you're done having those few drinks, do you have a few more?”

“When I was in college, maybe, but now it's mostly two or three max.” I wasn't sure where he was going with this.

“Harder stuff? Pills and powder?”

“None of that. Why?”

Mick waved it off. “I thought maybe it was from brain damage. You know, brain atrophy and that.”

Mick's cell phone rang. He checked it, then held up a finger. “Just a sec.”

“My guardian angel! Yeah, I'm with him right now.” He nodded at me. “Nah, he ain't angry. He says to say thanks.” Pause, then Mick laughed. “I bet, I bet.”

The person on the other end—Mick's mole receptionist in our doctor's office, I assumed, said something that lit his face with surprise. “No kidding?”

She went on; Mick fumbled in the pockets of his jacket, then covered the mouthpiece of his phone. “You got a pen?” I handed him the sketching pencil I always carried. He pressed it to the back of his menu. “Can you give me a name?” He rolled his eyes toward the hammered tin ceiling. “I promise, you won't get in trouble. I'll be very discreet.” A moment later he jotted a name and number on his napkin. “Thanks. You're an angel from heaven! You've no idea how much this means to me, and Finn Darby too. He just said to give you a big wet kiss for him.” Mick winked at me, grinning, as I pressed my hands to my cheeks and shook my head. I'd have to face her again, whoever she was, next time I went to Dr. Purvis's office.

“Jesus flipping Christ,” Mick whispered as he closed the phone. “You ready for this?”

“What?”

“Dr. Purvis saw three more cases like ours in the past twenty-four hours.”

I wasn't sure if that was good news, but it felt like good news. Mick and I smiled grimly at each other.

“You ever see
Planet of the Apes
?” Mick asked. “The original, not that shit remake.”

“One of my favorites,” I said, pleased that Mick and I liked the same film.

“‘Where there's one, there's another, and another, and another,'” Mick quoted.

I recognized the line: Three stranded astronauts, crossing a lifeless desert, come upon a single scraggly weed in the rocky soil. I nodded understanding. We weren't alone. We weren't freaks. It was a relief, even if it didn't explain what was wrong with us.

The waitress was back with our food.

“You ever see
Planet of the Apes
?” Mick asked her. “The original, not the shit remake.”

“Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape,” she said.

Mick and I burst out laughing, drawing curious looks from the other tables.

“I bet that line comes in handy for a pretty bird like you, eh?” Mick said.

The waitress just smiled, refilled our coffee cups.

When she'd left, Mick asked, “How long were you, you know, dead?”

“Ten or fifteen minutes, as well as I can figure.” Out of the corner of my eye I watched the waitress duck behind the counter, feeling a longing to get to know her, knowing that wasn't going to happen as long as my inner zombie was with me.

“It's something, ain't it? To know you were dead, that you weren't in your body?” Mick said. He seemed to be watching my reaction, peering over his scotch.

“I definitely wasn't in my body,” I said.

His eyebrows shot up. “When you were dead, you mean?” He paused, searching for words. “What was it like for you? Do you remember anything?”

“Hell, yes.” He was prodding, and I thought I knew why. “It was like I was watching from behind someone else's eyes, seeing what they were seeing.”

Mick slapped the table, pointed at me, shouted, “That's
exactly
what happened to me.” He didn't seem to care that people were glancing his way. “Christ, I'm not off my head.”

“What did you see?” I asked.

Mick pressed his hands to his face. “I was inside my ex-wife, Blossom.” He lowered his voice. “She was, you know, having a romp with her latest beau.” He made a sour face. “So there I am, dead, inside my wife while this bloke Peter is
also
inside her, in a manner of speaking. It was a miserable four or five minutes. Absolute torture.”

The pain in Mick's expression made me grin.

“Oh, sure, laugh. You didn't have to go through it.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I wasn't smiling at what happened, just your expression.”

“It's all fixed, I'm telling ya. They vote for their friends
,
”
I added. The elderly woman who had been talking to Mick during his first outburst dropped her fork onto her plate. Struggling not to stare she scooped the napkin out of her lap and pressed it against her mouth.

Mick ignored it completely. He gestured at me with his chin. “How about you, eh?”

I described what I'd seen in Lyndsay's apartment.

“Do you suppose this is connected to the voices?” Mick asked when I'd finished. He waved to get the waitress's attention, pointed to his empty drink.

“I've thought about that. Maybe we're somehow still connected to the people we were inside. The problem is, some of the things I say are about people I know, but this woman doesn't. I just don't see how she fits in.”

“Right, right,” Mick said. “That doesn't work.” His eyes took on an empty glaze, and he added, “
I've got to get it perfect. It's got to be perfect
.” Ignoring the stares, Mick swirled his drink, gazed thoughtfully into the glass.

His suggestion got me thinking. I had been focusing on mundane explanations for the voice—a physical illness that had screwed me up neurologically, or a psychological problem. But there were those few moments when I was dead, how I learned the attack originated in the subway. Maybe I was looking for answers in the wrong places. What happened when I was dead didn't have a logical explanation, so why should the voices?

Mick looked at his watch. “I'd best get going.”

I felt a wash of disappointment.

“Let's keep in touch,” he added as he pulled a bill from his wallet, “compare notes on how this thing plays out, yeah?”

I told him I thought that was a good idea.

“I got this,” he said, pointing at our plates. “Good choice, by the way. Top-shelf pancakes.” Our waitress was behind the counter; Mick went right on back there without hesitation, put a hand on her shoulder as he fished a bill out of his wallet. She laughed at something he said, and that feeling washed over me again, a longing to talk to her. Once I figured out how to stop the vocalizations, I planned to return to the Blue Boy often.

T
he granite steps outside Corinne's building looked blurry from the tears I'd shed during our session. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve, hoping no one would notice.

Digging up these memories is painful,
Corinne had said at the end of the session,
but it's like digging up a splinter
:
you'll feel better once it's out
. The thing was, I felt like I'd already dug up and reburied Kayleigh's and Lorena's deaths a thousand times.

I tried not to set Kayleigh's and Lorena's deaths side-by-side and examine the similarities. One at a time was plenty. Sometimes it was hard to resist, though. They were the two most important people in my life, both died on water, and I carried legitimate blame—and terrible guilt—in both cases.

You hear about people who are racked with guilt because they created some benign circumstance that led to the death of a loved one. A woman sends her husband to the store for eggs to finish a batch of brownies, and he's crushed by a semi on the way home. She finds broken eggshells scattered in the car, and thinks, If only I hadn't sent him to the store he'd still be alive. I wish I had to go
through such a contorted string of logic to assign myself blame for Kayleigh's and Lorena's deaths.

I don't assign myself all the blame. Sometimes I think I'm more to blame for Kayleigh's death than Lorena's; at other times I give myself a partial pass on Kayleigh's because I was only twelve, and then I think I'm more to blame for Lorena's. Both had to take some of the blame themselves, although they weren't around to do so. It's difficult to apportion blame. It's not an exact science.

Sometimes I wondered what my life would be like if I had backed down from Kayleigh's dare to jump off that pier. If I hadn't jumped, Kayleigh wouldn't have had reason to stay behind on that awful night and try to prove she could do it, too. What would I have done with all of that mental space taken up by guilt?

Lorena's Toyota unlocked with a cheerful bleep-bleep and I hopped in.

I was beginning to wonder how any of this was connected to the voice. I was blurting more than ever; maybe I was digging up all of these painful memories for nothing. Goodness knows I had enough, more recent painful shit to deal with without digging through my past for more.

I turned on the radio to get an update on suffering that put my petty grievances to shame.

The six hundred thousandth victim had been counted. Anyone who hadn't known the population of greater Atlanta before the attack certainly knew it by now. Five million. More than one in nine Atlantans had died. Entire families had been wiped out. Entire blocks, almost. With those six hundred thousand victims had gone all laughter, all joy. The people I passed looked grim, tired. All business. On the plus side the traffic was thinner, the other drivers less ruthless. There was the occasional honk, but it was nothing like the incessant hooting and bleating that had been the background Muzak of the city's downtown both night and day.