The Next Time You See Me (27 page)

“Is that supposed to be a pep talk?” Susanna said. “ ‘Stay with your man’? ‘He could be worse’?”

Her mother shrugged. “Since you’re such a modern woman, and since you already know more about the world than I ever did, let me put it another way: if you’re going to leave what you’ve got, you better know what you’re getting.”

Chapter Eighteen

1.

The hospital lobby was chilly from the opening and closing automatic doors, so Sarah brought Wyatt’s wheelchair to a rest by the gift shop, where they still had a view of the front drive. Morris Houchens had gone to the parking lot to bring around his truck. Wyatt, to his surprise and deep embarrassment, was getting blubbery again.

“Oh, hush,” Sarah said. Her hands left the handles of the wheelchair and rested on his shoulders. “You’re supposed to be happy to leave the hospital. You’re going to sleep in your own bed tonight. You’re going to see your dog.”

“I know,” Wyatt said hoarsely.

“And you know I’m coming over to visit just as soon as my shift ends,” she said more softly. “You know that, too, right?”

Wyatt nodded hard and with his mouth pinched closed, as a child would.

“It’s the medication. It has your chemistry all out of whack.”

And that was probably true. But what Wyatt was feeling, on this threshold between his hospital room and the waiting world, was the terror of exposure. In the bed, plugged into machines and drips and watched over by Sarah, he had been protected—hidden. This homecoming was too much, too quick.

A red Chevy pulled up and stopped. A few seconds later, Morris crossed in front of it and opened the passenger-side door.

“Here we go,” Sarah said, rolling the wheelchair forward and out the hospital doors. Wyatt hastily wiped his eyes with his shirt cuff.

Wind was whipping hard through the cul-de-sac out front and whistling against the shelter roof above them as Sarah locked the wheels of the chair and gave him an encouraging, motherly thump on the back. “OK, do what God gave you legs for,” she said, and Wyatt placed his palms against the wheelchair arms and his feet between the footholds, then trembled to a stand. Morris was holding out an uncertain arm.

“You got it?” Sarah said in her bright, no-nonsense nurse’s voice.

Wyatt removed his steadying fingertips from the arms of the chair and took a small step forward. “Yeah,” he said.

He felt weak, and his joints ached from so many nights in that stiff bed, where the tubes and wires chained him from rolling over or making adjustments for comfort. But he was doing better now than he had expected to be. He had walked a few moments each day in the hospital, dragging the IV rack behind him, and now he was walking to Morris’s truck, and the process was still just putting one foot in front of the other. No more and no less than that. He was even stepping up, climbing into Morris’s elevated cab. Life went on.

Sarah leaned close to him as Morris was striding around to the driver’s seat, and Wyatt inhaled, as if he wouldn’t be able to again, her vanilla perfume. “I’ll see you before you know it. Keep a light on for me.”

“I will,” he said.

She stepped back and closed the door, then wiggled her fingers in good-bye. The cab of the truck was toasty warm, and Wyatt put his hands out in front of the vents, sighing a little at the small pleasure. They were pale hands, almost translucent, with blue and yellow bruises from the IV needles.

“She seems nice,” Morris said. “Seems like y’all know each other from sometime before.”

“A little bit,” Wyatt said. He hesitated, not wanting to mention Nancy’s Dance Hall.

“That’s good,” Morris said. “It’s good to have people when you’re going through a tough time.”

Wyatt watched the town unfurl outside his window, marveling at how alien it all seemed, as if he had been shut away for months rather than a bit less than a week. They passed the country club’s golf course, which was predictably empty on a day as cool and gray as this one, and the warehouse housing the aluminum recycling facility. A dump truck outside of it belched black smoke. They passed the town’s main cemetery, which stretched a few acres back on both sides of the road. They passed the Roma Dairy Dip, where Wyatt sometimes picked up a sack of burgers after getting off of work. He could smell, even through the closed window, its distinct fragrance of frying grease and grilled meat, and his stomach rumbled in a way that might have been hunger or nausea.

“What I figured,” Morris said, breaking the silence, “is that I could drop you off at home, then go back out to pick you up whatever groceries and things you think you need.” He was restating the plan they had already made, just trying to fill up dead air. Wyatt opened his mouth to agree, then closed it again. Then he said, “Can we run back to the Dairy Dip for a minute? I have a hankering for a milkshake.”

“Well, OK,” Morris said. “You sure you ought to have anything like that right now?”

“It won’t kill me,” Wyatt said wryly. “And I guess I just want to stretch my legs and get some air before being shut up again.” That much was true. He felt something like sorrow at the thought of handing Morris his shopping list with its doctor-approved choices of steel-cut oats and skinless chicken breasts and green vegetables that he wasn’t even sure how to cook if they didn’t go into a pot with a ham bone and a hunk of butter. He also felt a deep dread at the thought of his house and even of Boss. Of the prospect of hours alone.

Morris parked in a spot close to the order window. “You sure you don’t want me to get it for you?”

“Nah,” Wyatt said. “I’ll be all right.”

He climbed down carefully from the cab of the truck and walked to the order window, unfolding his wallet as he went. A teenage girl slid over a glass partition and spoke to him through the opening. “Help you?”

“Yes, please. I’d like a—” He scanned the menu. “A banana milkshake, please, miss. A small.”

He put a dollar and a quarter through the opening, and she handed him a nickel’s change. She turned her back to him and pressed a silver handle, measuring a ribbon of soft-serve ice cream, turning the RC Cup with brisk efficiency. Wyatt’s gaze wandered to his left, where business cards and advertisements had been taped to the inside of the glass.

What he saw almost immediately was his own face.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?
spanned the top of the sheet of paper in bold print, and below the image, in smaller letters, it read, “Person of interest in the disappearance of Veronica ‘Ronnie’ Eastman. Seen together at Nancy’s Dance Hall in Sylvan and the Fill-Up gas station in Roma on October 23. Age: 50–60. Height: 5'8"–6'. Weight: 190–230 lbs. Wanted only for questioning.” An officer’s name and phone number followed.

Wyatt started shaking. The image—it wasn’t exactly right; even in his panic he could admit that. The person who had drawn it had exaggerated his receding hairline and elongated his face. His mustache was thicker than he normally kept it. But the artist had also captured something recognizable and true about Wyatt, and the sight of the face with its sad, haunted eyes and its pursed, self-pitying mouth made Wyatt want to rip the poster down, run, hide. The young woman came back with his milkshake and thrust it through the open partition at him. Her expression was blank, disinterested. When Wyatt did not at first take the cup, a flicker of irritation, evident in nothing more than a microsecond’s tightening of the brows, flashed across her face.

“Sir?” she said, shaking the cup a little, and he took it from her. Then she slammed the partition closed.

2.

Think. Think.

He was home. Morris had already been to the store and back, and the groceries were stowed neatly in the cabinets and refrigerator. Boss was stretched out in the middle of the living room floor, napping, amiable enough—as if Wyatt were a roommate that he got along well with but wasn’t all that close to. Sarah had promised to walk him when she came over later. The milkshake, still mostly full, was sweating beads onto a coaster near Wyatt’s right hand. Any appetite he had was long gone.

Think, goddamn it.

But thinking was hard with the exhaustion and the meds. What he wanted to do was recline his chair, shut off the lamp, and nap until Sarah arrived. His brain was hostage to his body. What it registered was a panic that occasionally leveled into blurry anxiety as he momentarily forgot the source of his problem. Then the drawing of his face on that poster would come to him with full force, and he set back out on the same uncertain mental zigging and zagging, wondering if the time hadn’t come for him to simply get in his truck and drive out of town. But Sarah—what about Sarah? Any life without her, he decided, was not a life worth preserving.

He rose, walked as quickly as he could to the kitchen, and bent over the sink. He splashed cold water on his face. Without bothering to towel himself dry, he pulled a glass from the cabinet and found, in the back of his refrigerator, a half-full two-liter of Coca-Cola, probably already flat. He poured a couple of inches into his glass and knocked it back like whiskey, grimacing at the sweet blandness. Then he went to the window and shoved it up a couple of inches, so that some cold air could leak in. At last—perhaps as much for rousing himself with the motions as the actions themselves—Wyatt’s mind cleared a little. He remained standing by the window, legs trembling, and thought.

It was three
P.M
. now. Sarah had told him that she would come by
at ten
P.M.
, as soon as her shift at the hospital ended. Seven hours. Plenty of time.

He began to assemble the things he would need. There was a strange pleasure in these preparations, in this discovery of his instinct to survive. He had always thought himself weak, but here he was, scheming to protect himself, proceeding despite the risks. There was something manly about it, and he thought that he was perhaps no longer the person who had submitted to so many indignities at the hands of Sam Austen and his gang. That if Sam were to call him Tubs now, he might be in for a surprise.

3.

That night at Nancy’s, the woman who paid his tab had said, “Well, train’s leaving the station. Come on if you’re coming.”

He followed her outside, knees quivering, trying to avoid the bodies swaying around him. He scanned the crowd for Sam and Gene, still not quite believing that they would have deserted him. OK, Sam would have, but
all
of the rest of the guys? Both trucks? And it was early yet; even Wyatt could make that out. Not even midnight. They’d all been dancing, talking to pretty women, ordering shots—having a good time. Why would they all have left? Without him?

A prank, he realized.

“I’m this way,” the woman said. They were outside, and the cool air was clarifying. He felt now the suggestion of a headache, just a little twinge behind his eyes, and he focused on the wink of the woman’s light-colored shoes in the darkness. His senses were heightened unpleasantly; he could feel in the cup of his ear the rasp of her sneakers against the gravel, could make out the trail of her perfume, which was muskier than that of the woman he’d danced with. Where Sarah’s vanilla had suggested a kitchen table and oven-warm cookies, this woman’s cologne was wilder, spicier. There was something in it that reminded him of the way Boss smelled when he came in from
exercising—not sweaty, but like he’d carried in some of the outdoors, the smell of damp earth and tree sap, the spirit of his own exertion.

Wyatt bent over double, hand pressed against a nearby truck for support, and vomited the hamburger he’d eaten earlier. Sweat popped against his neck and forehead, and his bowels felt loose.

The grind of gravel halted. “Better?”

He paused, assessing. His skin stopped prickling, and he took in a gulp of clean air. “Yeah.” He nodded, too, for emphasis, then stood, wiping his mouth with the cuff of his shirt. It was his good shirt, bought at Dillard’s for $25, marked down from $40. It was a deep blue, subtly pin-striped, with a nice, fine weave. He wore it tucked into a pair of khakis, with his old brown belt and his wingtip shoes, a pair he’d bought over thirty years ago for the high school graduation he would never attend and had carefully preserved with polish and a single resoling. He’d thought, assessing himself in the mirror earlier that night, that he looked good. He’d combed his thinning hair over, rubbed some pomade between his hands, patted the flyaways into place. He’d used a fresh Bic razor to carefully shave his cheeks and chin and neck, managing not to nick himself, and then he’d trimmed his mustache neatly with a little pair of scissors. He could still pluck the gray hairs from his mustache; the hair on his head he touched up every few weeks with a Just For Men kit.

“I ought to be ashamed,” he said. He didn’t want to make eye contact with the woman. But she came up to him, took his hand in hers, squeezed it, and he couldn’t help looking up at her. He tried to smile, bashful, and he noted with surprise how young she was, despite the raspy voice and the bravado. Her hair, which seemed to be brownish or dark blond in the dim lights outside the bar, was clipped short, boyish, but ruffled up in the front and hairsprayed, lending her a touch of femininity. She had wide, startled-looking eyes, the effect heightened by heavily applied mascara, and her full, painted lips anchored an otherwise absent chin, giving her an aspect of almost homely cuteness. She was pretty, but in a way that defied the individual parts that comprised her.

“Now stop that,” she said. “We’re all entitled to a little embarrassment. I’ve had my share tonight and then some.”

“You have?”

“Yeah.” She dropped his hand. “Do you want this ride or not?”

“Please,” Wyatt said.

“All right.” She pointed to a dark-colored Camaro. “If you think you’re going to puke again, though, you let me know in time to pull over. You puke in my car and I’ll kick you out right there and then.”

“OK.”

She drove with her window rolled down, the air biting but fresh, and Wyatt noticed the way she flew her left hand along outside, letting it roll in waves. She was propped on an extra cushion for lift, but even so she had to perch at the end of her seat to reach the wheel and the pedals and the stick shift, and she seemed to be constantly in motion, switching off hands on the steering wheel every time she had to put the car into a different gear, hips flexing as she pumped the brake and the clutch, eyes on the road, then her rearview mirror, then on Wyatt. She made the process of driving seem difficult, her own efforts heroic. They might have been riding in a time machine to Roma instead of a Camaro.