The Next Time You See Me (29 page)

“Morning, Tilly,” she said, checking the board. “I see you saved Mr. Anderson for me.”

“Morning, sweetie.” Tilly spun around in her chair and looked at the board, too, as if surprised by what she herself had written there. “So I did. Well, you know, it’s probably because you have such a way with him.”

“Way with him, my ass,” Sarah said, but even the thought of drawing blood from a cranky seventy-five-year-old couldn’t dampen her spirits this morning. “Coward.”

“That’s me,” Tilly said. She rose and stretched her arms above her head, sighing deeply. “Whew. Long old boring night. I tell you.”

“Wouldn’ve been so boring if you’d gone to Mr. Anderson’s room in the middle of the night to stick him.”

Tilly laughed. “That’s not my kind of excitement.” She stood and shouldered a leather handbag. “I’ll see you on Thursday, hon. You be good.”

“What fun is that?” Sarah asked, waving a little good-bye. She realized she was grinning to herself as she went to the supply closet to load her cart for morning rounds. The room smelled like rubber and the memory of alcohol. She sang under her breath as she gathered syringes, vials, probe covers for her new digital thermometer, making tick marks on an inventory sheet as she went. It was a Mariah Carey song that you couldn’t turn the radio on without hearing—not normally her speed, but she found herself repeating the chorus softly under her breath, smirking a little around the silly words about a dream lover and getting rescued. Jan, if she saw her like this, would say, “Girl, you’re
gone
.” Sarah reckoned she was. This thing with Wyatt had come as an utter surprise to her, especially after the way they’d left one another that night at Nancy’s, and she hadn’t felt this glad in a long while. Gladness, that’s what it was. Because she hadn’t been unhappy before, exactly, or even lonely; she had both her parents, still, and they were in good health; she had her brother, Daniel, his wife, and two sweet little nieces; she had several close friends. But romantic love was different, and she was remembering finally why it was different, why it was a thing worth craving. She thought about the warm pleasure of feeling Wyatt’s legs tangled up in hers, her ear pressed to his chest. She thought about his kindness and seriousness, about his strange core of sadness, and how her presence seemed to turn on a light in him. Sarah had devoted her life to making people well, and she thought that she often succeeded, that she caused much more good than harm. But this was more than that. This was love as medicine, and she didn’t think there was another person in the world that she could heal through loving. Not even her
parents, whose devotion to one another had always, she suspected, transcended their devotion to her and Daniel.

“Sarah,” a voice called from outside the supply room. Jan. “Are you back there?”

“Yeah,” she called back.

“Get out here. You’ve got to see this.”

Sarah finished stocking her cart and wheeled it out to the nurses’ station, thinking, as she did every morning, that she really needed to get some WD-40 on that squeaky wheel. “Nice of you to show,” she said to Jan, pushing the cart out of the way into a relatively uncluttered corner, and Jan waved her over impatiently.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Five minutes, sue me. Get your fanny over here.”

“Jeez, Jan, what is it?”

She had a copy of the local biweekly newspaper,
The News Leader,
folded so that only the top half was displayed. “Special Early Edition,” it read, followed by a headline in a large, blaring font:
LOCAL WOMAN GOES MISSING, POLICE SEARCHING FOR SUSPECT
. Beneath that, in italics and slightly smaller font:
Community Meeting to Be Held Tonight at First Baptist.

Sarah scanned the first couple of paragraphs. “That’s terrible. I hadn’t heard.”

“Yeah, it’s terrible,” Jan said.

Sarah read a bit farther and then handed the paper back to Jan, trying for an appropriate level of somberness. “Well, thanks for filling me in. I’ve got to hustle, or Jill White’s IV is going to start beeping.”

Jan clutched her arm. “Wait.” She turned the paper over to the front page’s lower half. “Look at that. Look at that and tell me what you think.”

The bottom of the page was dominated by two images. The first was a photograph of a woman, the missing woman. Sarah didn’t recognize her, and the name, Veronica Eastman, didn’t ring any bells either. The second image was a drawing of a man’s face, and she lost her breath for a moment, pulled the paper closer, and quickly read
the caption underneath: “Police sketch of man last seen with Veronica Eastman. Detective Tony Joyce called him a ‘person of interest’ and hopes that he will come to the station voluntarily for questioning.”

“You see it too, don’t you?”

Sarah cleared her throat and dropped the paper on the desk. “What do you mean?”

“It looks like that man who was in here last week, doesn’t it? The one who had the heart attack? Powell, right?” Jan pulled out a drawer and walked her fingers along the top of the hanging files; her right hand dipped down suddenly and emerged with a folder. “Yeah, Wyatt Powell. Dr. Patel performed an angioplasty on him last Wednesday.”

Sarah forced herself to consider the sketch again. “I guess there’s some similarities. It’s a pretty generic picture, though.”

Jan, paging quickly through the file, seemed almost giddy with excitement. “Generic! No way!” She waved her fingers around her face. “He had the eyes and the mouth and all that. You know what I mean. I think we should call the cops, maybe.”

“Now, that’s just silly,” Sarah said. She went to her cart and grabbed the handle roughly, bearing down on it with both hands so that she wouldn’t shake. “The man just had a heart attack. The last thing he needs is the cops beating down his door.”

Jan’s eyes bugged out. “He might be a murderer, Sarah. We might have had a murderer in this very hospital. We might have been treating him and making him better, for God’s sake.”

“Which is our job, as a matter of fact.” Sarah pushed the cart and lifted her eyebrows when Jan wouldn’t clear the path. “You mind? One of us is going to have to check on patients, Nancy Drew.”

“You really don’t think it could be him?”

“It could be him or a thousand other men. I don’t feel qualified to say.”

Jan slumped a little. “Huh. Maybe you’re right. You spent a lot more time with him than I did. I guess you’d know.”

Sarah made it to the hall, then stopped. She felt a sharp ache arcing from her throat down to her stomach, as if she’d swallowed an
aspirin without water, and turned back toward the nurses’ station. “I don’t want to keep you from calling the police,” she said in as natural a tone as she could manage. “I could be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. So you should do whatever seems right to you.”

Jan looked from the image to the folder, then back again. “I guess I won’t. For now, anyway.”

“OK,” Sarah said. Her knees were so weak that she didn’t know if she could stand on them. She was thinking about something she had noticed after Wyatt was transferred from the emergency room to her wing, when she and Shurice were attaching electrodes and hooking Wyatt up to an IV: how he’d had scratches on his forearms and neck, one long enough and nasty enough that she’d applied some antibiotic cream to it.
Cat get ahold of you?
she’d asked him at some point in the week, and he’d gotten a funny expression on his face, like he was embarrassed, and said,
I don’t know where those came from. I must have done it in my sleep. It must’ve been a bad dream.

Chapter Twenty

1.

There wasn’t room in the ALC trailer for all of the food-fight offenders, so Principal Burton placed the girls there, including Leanna, and spread the boys out in locations on opposite ends of the campus, as if they would otherwise try to climb through the air vents to get to one another and stage a coup. Christopher, branded the leader of the mob, had gotten the worst possible real estate: a supply closet in the back of Mrs. Mitchell’s classroom. Christopher felt sure that he would have been able to charm his way into allowances from any of the other teachers, but Mrs. Mitchell had been holding a grudge against him from the start, and Christopher thought that she took no small amount of pleasure in showing him to the cramped desk, which was tucked between dusty boxes of old textbooks, and explaining to him that he was to complete a ten-page essay on
A Separate Peace
if he hoped to emerge from the supply closet before Christmas break—that on top of all of the assignments he was otherwise expected to complete for his other courses.

There was one dim overhead bulb, a reading lamp brought in from outside (the one show of something other than outright austerity), and a foot-by-foot window on the door with a grid-work of metal mesh across it. No clock. Barely room enough to stand and spread his
arms out wide. Mrs. Mitchell had left him with a glass of water and instructions to hold his bladder until she came to fetch him: once in the morning, once at lunchtime, and once in the afternoon. A couple of hours into his internment, so bored that he couldn’t even fix his eyes on his textbook, he started to feel the uncomfortable press of his bladder, and with nothing to do but think about it, the sensation intensified. He would have relieved himself in the corner, on a stack of copies of
Literary Journeys,
if he hadn’t felt certain that his punishment would be an extra day or days trapped in Mrs. Mitchell’s special hellhole. His father had been right about suspension—even with his mother’s chores, it had been a vacation compared to this.

The doorknob rattled and turned, and Christopher blinked stupidly in the onslaught of bright daylight.

“It’s ten o’clock,” Mrs. Mitchell said. “I’m going to walk you to the boys’ restroom. You aren’t to talk to anyone we pass. If I see you even make a funny face I’m going to keep you in ALC for an extra day. Got it?”

Christopher nodded.

He followed her through her empty classroom, making an exaggerated, unseen grimace at the sight of her hips moving beneath the cloth of her shapeless khaki jumper. To think, he grumbled inwardly, that she was married—that a man did it with her! She even had a kid to prove it. Christopher had seen them together once at Wal-Mart: the little girl pretty much like any little girl, Mrs. Mitchell mortifyingly clad in blue jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt. His own mother wouldn’t ever wear such garb; even to prune the roses she was pulled together and slim, made-up enough to face the world. Christopher had never been embarrassed by her.

He dragged his feet in the hallway, despite the throb in his groin. It felt good to stand and walk, to hear his footfalls on the shiny, speckled tiles in the hallway. The air, slightly ammoniac, was still fresher out here, and sun shone brightly through the skylights. He lifted his face to it. He had always liked being in the hall while class was in session, liked the hush, the neat line of closed lockers, the little
glimpses he caught of his peers through the narrow windows on the classroom doors. If he were patrolling the halls alone, armed with Mrs. Hardoby’s hall pass (a mini-chalkboard, its surface painted in white letters with exaggerated decorative serifs, like a vacation Bible school project), he would stop and hover near one of these windows, angling himself so that the teacher was out of view, and mug until one of his friends saw him. He could always get Monty Higgins to laugh out loud just by pulling up the hem of his shirt and rubbing his belly, and when he did, he would slip quickly down the way and around the bend, gone before the door opened behind him, before Mr. Grimly or Mrs. White could step out and crane their neck in search of a disturbance.

But Monty Higgins was tucked away in his own supply closet somewhere, and Mrs. Mitchell kept turning around to frown at Christopher, hoping, he bet, to catch him doing something she could punish him further for. She seemed to be in even worse a mood than usual—maybe because of her missing sister. Word had spread quickly over the weekend, and Christopher had heard his parents talking about the disappearance in hushed tones:
They’re saying that she was completely wild,
his mother had whispered, and even Leanna had circumvented her punishment of a week of lost phone privileges long enough to get a call in to him:
Hear about Mrs. Mitchell’s sister?
she had said almost gleefully.

“Pick up your speed, Christopher,” Mrs. Mitchell said. “If you don’t need to use the facilities we can go back to the classroom.”

“I do need to go,” he muttered.

“Move it along, then.”

They reached the door to the boys’ room, and she stood beside it like a guard.

“Don’t dawdle, or I’ll come in after you.”

He huffed a loud sigh and went in, choosing a stall over a urinal in case she kept her promise.

The hours between that first break and lunch were just as slow and mind-numbingly dull as the previous couple had been, and the
hours between lunch and late afternoon were worse. Christopher thought about just putting his head down to nap, but even napping felt like effort, hunched uncomfortably in the small desk, hearing the murmur of Mrs. Mitchell’s fifth-period class outside, and he still had all of that work hanging over him—including the paper on
A Separate Peace.
Mrs. Mitchell had told him, with a meaningful look, that she wanted him to write about the theme of peer pressure and adolescent cruelty. “The book’s defining action is when Gene jostles the tree branch and causes Finny’s fall,” she told him. “I want you to trace the causes of that action and the consequences of it, and I want you to think about what Knowles was trying to say about guilt and redemption.”

Christopher thought, but wouldn’t say, that Mrs. Mitchell was wrong about the book. He had read it, though he’d taken delight over the last couple of weeks in giving her every possible reason to suspect that he hadn’t, and he’d even, begrudgingly, liked it—Finny’s pink shirt and all. Actually, he was a lot like Finny: a leader and a trendsetter, the kind of guy who could get away with a pink shirt because he would know better than to doubt himself in it. He thought, too, that the book wasn’t about adolescent cruelty or peer pressure or any of those stupid catchphrases from after-school specials. Gene hadn’t jostled that branch because he hated Finny or merely because he was jealous, and he hadn’t jostled it thinking that Finny would fall and become a broken version of his once glorious self. He had done it because there was something about Finny that made him ache, something that he desired, and the desire terrified him, made him weak. It was typical for Mrs. Mitchell to miss that, to see only the obvious.