The Next Time You See Me (44 page)

She is considering going by her brother’s, because her nieces almost always lift her spirits, when she hears the distant whine of sirens—multiple sets, if she isn’t mistaken. The sound cuts through her mental fog, barely; it stimulates something, causes the faintest twitch: of curiosity, of concern. It is like desire. There will be stretches, weeks and weeks, when it is easy for her to not think of sex, easy for her to accept that sex isn’t something she needs or even cares about. Then, out of nowhere, something will light her up, spark that dormant thing within her, set her to aching. What she feels now is a different kind of desire, but she acknowledges it, tries to hold on to it. Any old lifeline out of this gloom that has descended on her, she’ll take.

The ambulance rolls into the parking lot, quivering a little with the speed of its turn, and Sarah presses back automatically against someone else’s car. The ambulance she expected; the two cars following it, both with lights flashing, one a marked Roma police car and the other unmarked, she did not. The three sirens overlap and vibrate so that Sarah feels the sound in her teeth, and she puts her palms over her ears. It’s not completely unusual for a police car to accompany an ambulance in, especially when there’s been a car accident and suspicion of DUI, but at five o’clock on a Tuesday, it makes her wonder. She watches uneasily as the ambulance parks under the emergency canopy. The unmarked car brakes and pulls abruptly into a nearby empty slot; its driver, a tall black man, runs for the ambulance. The sirens stop within seconds of each other, but the lights on the ambulance keep throbbing like a heartbeat.

The pressure on her chest increases.

“Back up, stand to the side,” the ambulance driver says as he emerges from the cab and unhooks the rear double doors.

The man from the unmarked car backs up, lifting his hands a little as if to say sorry. Sarah, meanwhile, starts back across the parking lot toward them. She watches as the driver starts to pull out the stretcher. The wheeled legs drop, accordion-style, and the EMT in
the back of the ambulance unhooks the safety latch, then jumps down after the stretcher to help roll it into the emergency bay. By now a couple of nurses from the emergency room, Marjorie and Ricky, have come out to assist, and the EMTs pass the stretcher on to them. There is an oxygen mask over the person’s mouth, so she can’t see his face, but a pair of shiny black cowboy boots with red stitching make a jaunty V at the end of the stretcher, as if the man they’re attached to is just kicked back in a lawn chair, napping after a barbecue.

There’s something familiar about those boots. She knows them.

The men walk more slowly back to the ambulance, where the tall black man is waiting and looking through the gaping double doors. Sarah approaches them, and they seem at first not to notice. The man from the unmarked car points inside to a second gurney.

“What about him?”

“I had to call it,” the EMT who’d been riding in the back says. “His heart stopped. There wasn’t any kick-starting it. Oh, hey, Sarah.”

She nearly jumps. She recognizes him now, but it’s been years since she put in hours at the ER. She can’t place his name. “Oh, hello.”

“You working ER today?”

“No,” Sarah says. “My shift just ended. I was on my way out when I heard the ruckus.”

The driver is shaking his head. “I just loaded this guy up last week out at Harper Hill. I’ll be damned.”

It is as if she has known all along that Wyatt is dead. “Harper Hill?” she manages.

“Yeah, had a heart attack. I can’t think of his name.”

“Wyatt Powell,” Sarah says, and the black man looks at her sharply.

“You knew him?” he asks.

She nods hard, unable to speak. She swallows past a sharp ache and feels her eyes well up with water, but she doesn’t blink, and the tears do not—quite—spill. “I treated him. He was in my wing.”

“Well, he had a screw loose,” the EMT who knows her says. “He beat the living daylights out of that kid we just wheeled in.”

“Lucky he didn’t kill him,” the driver said.

The black man gestures toward the building, and Sarah notices the bags under his eyes. “The young guy. Will he recover? What are his chances?”

“That’s not for me to say. His heart rate’s steady. It might look worse than it is.”

“It looked pretty bad.” The man again—Sarah guesses he is some kind of a cop.

The driver lights a cigarette, waves the pack around, gets no takers.

“His name is Sam Austen,” the cop says. “I’d like to talk to him when he wakes up. It’s important.”

The EMT—Ryan, Sarah thinks, his name is Ryan—hops back up in the ambulance and starts working on the second stretcher, this one on a bench attached to the wall. She can see Wyatt’s fine gray hair move as Ryan jostles the gurney. She remembers combing it into place with her fingertips as Wyatt slept.

“Talk to the doc,” Ryan says with a grunt from inside. “That’s his call.”

The two EMTs get the second stretcher unloaded. Wyatt’s eyes are half-open, the eyes of a child fighting sleep. The gurney straps hit him at the shoulders, stomach, and knees, pressing his arms tightly to his sides. Sarah covers her mouth, pinches her lips together. She can smell his cologne, the English Leather he wore the night they met at Nancy’s and on the evening he came home from the hospital. The backs of his hands are still freckled, the curly hairs on his forearms, visible where the cuff of his shirtsleeve is pulled back, still the color of rust. The EMTs start to wheel him inside, not getting in any hurry about it. She doesn’t reach out to touch him. She doesn’t dare to.

“Are you OK?” the cop asks her when Wyatt—what is left of him—is gone.

“Yes,” she whispers.

“You knew him,” he says.

A tear slips down her cheek, and she backhands it roughly away. “I took care of him.”

“You must be a good nurse,” the man says. “To care this much.” His voice is gentle. She doesn’t think he is being sarcastic. “I bet he appreciated it.”

“You care about some more than others,” she says finally. “I thought he was a kind man. He was kind to me.”

5.

Billy Houchens, like his sister, Emily, is a walker. Once a day—usually at four
P.M
., so that he can time his return home with his father’s arrival from the factory—he makes a circuit of about half a mile, never altering his course, never reversing it. He starts on his street, Forsythia, and takes it until it makes a right angle at Poplar. Poplar he takes to Marigold, a name that always makes him smile, because when he was a little, little boy he thought Marigold was a kind of treasure, but now he knows that it is a kind of flower. From Marigold he cuts through an alleyway between two fence lines to reach Washington Lane, the dead-end street, which is where Emily goes to be by herself in the woods. He has hidden here many times and watched her scurry past the Potters’ barking dog. He does not think he is being sneaky or sinister in doing so; he thinks only of his curiosity about Emily’s comings and goings, a curiosity that has increased these last few weeks. He has not, like his parents, sensed Emily’s sadness; he has not speculated about her loneliness or wondered why she, like himself, doesn’t have any friends. Emily is as she has always been to him: an object of interest and bright, simplistic affection. When Emily was three and he was nine, he was her tireless playmate. He turned the crank on the jack-in-the-box as many times as she wanted him to. He pushed around a Matchbox car after hers. When Emily started kindergarten and came home with books of letters and numbers and pictures of farm animals, he sat beside her on the couch, following her progress from page to page, learning right alongside of her. At eleven he finally started reading for the first time
on his own, and now he can understand comic books—if he reads the dialogue out loud, he can follow how it goes with the pictures—and
TV Guide.
He watches a lot of television. He likes to know what is coming up next.

He likes schedules, patterns. He likes his routine. And so it is not Emily’s changing emotions he has noticed these last weeks but her changing habits: the frequency of her trips into the woods past the dead-end street, her tardiness coming home, her smell—there is something different there, something foul. It makes him want to keep his distance from her. He has been maintaining, in his way, a mental log of her comings and goings, a log that failed to receive its entry last night, when Emily didn’t come home. Not at six, or at seven. Not at all. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it when dinner cooled with nobody eating it, and he didn’t like it when his parents (he always thought of them as “his,” not “their”) started pacing and making scared faces. He didn’t like it when they got on the phone with their trembling voices, or when his father went out alone in the truck, or when the police officer came over and started looking around their house and asking questions. He didn’t like the police officer with the thick mustache. And so he screamed, and he did the good bumping thing, which was how he made his head better. And his parents said, “Quiet, quiet,” then, “Shut up, shut up,” and it wasn’t good anymore, and so he went to bed and slept as long as he could.

It still isn’t good today. He knows now where Emily is: the hospital. He doesn’t like her there, but he likes her there better than nowhere, which is where she was last night, and so he is a little calmer. But his parents are gone much of the day, and his mother doesn’t come home to cook dinner at five o’clock. Instead, his father brings him home a bag with fish ’n’ chips (which aren’t chips, but French fries) from Captain D’s and tells him that Aunt Bonnie will be coming over later to stay the night. He likes Aunt Bonnie, but he doesn’t like her sleeping in his house, in his mom and daddy’s bed, and he doesn’t like eating Captain D’s when no one else is around to eat it with him. He doesn’t like eating at four o’clock, which is when he is supposed to have his
walk, even when his daddy tells him that Aunt Bonnie will heat him up some mozzarella sticks later if he doesn’t give her any trouble.

He doesn’t consider not going for the walk; in his hierarchy of rituals, an outright omission is a greater sin than a shuffling of the schedule. So at five o’clock, after washing the grease from his supper off his fingers, he goes to the kitchen window to check the thermometer: 40 degrees. He trudges to the utility room, chooses his parka with the hood, and slips into it, then dons the gloves tucked into the right front pocket. None of this feels quite right, but going through the motions is calming. He thinks of it as
making even.
In his mind is a scale, and the more right he does, the more balanced the scales. When the scales are off, the good bumping can help, or rocking in his chair can help, and it’s as if he’s jostling the thing that’s off back into place.

It is too dark and too cold out. But he starts walking.

He feels, despite himself, some fresh interest in this new vantage point. It is November; at five o’clock the sun is already low enough in the sky that the houses are illuminated from within, dioramas visible from the road. In the Clemmons house, a woman is stretching—lifting her arms, arching her back—in the picture window. The sight arouses Billy, and he pauses to watch. The stretching woman stops, drops her arms, swings them a little at her sides. Then she moves out of sight.

He moves on, too.

He is on Washington Lane and circling back toward Poplar when a large figure crosses the street in front of him. Billy, unafraid, peers ahead. The streetlights will not kick on until six o’clock, and so the road is washed in shadow.

“Boss?” Billy says.

The dog trots easily toward him, unhurried. Billy holds out the back of his hand, as his mother taught him to do, and grins as the dog sniffs it, enjoying the tickle of its whiskers. When the dog has gotten its fill it snorts out air, then shakes its head back and forth, sending jets of saliva flying. Billy groans and wipes a string of the stuff off his chest with his shirtsleeve.

“Ew, Boss. You aren’t supposed to do that.”

Boss looks up at him.

“Where’s Mr. Powell?”

The dog’s expression is comical. Billy likes Boss. His sister got to do most of the walking with him while Mr. Powell was in the hospital, but Billy and Boss were friends before Emily came home from school. He reaches out to scratch the top of the dog’s head. There is a hard knob of bone, like a knuckle—Billy’s father called it a “knowledge bump.”

If his parents were home, he would go back and ask them what to do. But they are at the hospital with Emily, and Aunt Bonnie is still finishing her shift at Wal-Mart. Billy crosses the street to Mr. Powell’s house, which, like his own, is a white, aluminum-sided rectangle with a big front window and a gravel drive. Mr. Powell has a carport, though, and Billy’s parents do not. This difference interests him. He thinks that Mr. Powell must be richer than his family to have a carport.

There aren’t any lights on in the house, but he knocks anyway. He looks over his shoulder. Boss is still standing in the road. He knocks again. Then he tries the doorknob, thinking that he ought to get Boss to go back inside. Mr. Powell doesn’t have a fence.

The door is locked. He returns to the road.

“I don’t know where Mr. Powell is, Boss. I wonder how you got outside.”

He knows the dog doesn’t understand him, but he likes talking aloud to him this way.

“Well, I’ve got to go home.”

He resumes his walk. He likes the smell out here—the moldy sweetness of damp leaves, a whiff of gasoline from somebody’s running car. There is a head bobbing in the kitchen window of Jake and Lottie Summers, and he wonders if Mrs. Summers is washing dishes. He likes Mrs. Summers. When he walks by here in the summer, and she is sitting out front in a lawn chair, she always says, “How’s life treating you?” and Billy always says, “Fine, just fine.”

He has reached Poplar Street when he realizes the dog is following him. “No, Boss, you need to go home,” he says, making a shooing
motion, and the dog backs up a step. But when Billy proceeds, the dog keeps time, and there is something so appealing about the cheerful clack of Boss’s toenails on the cement that Billy can’t bring himself to protest again.