Ashes ashes, p.10
Ashes, Ashes, page 10
She begins to sob again. I hug her as tightly as possible, as tightly as my belly and the suffocating heat will allow. Her tears, sweat, and snot soil my polo, her words coming in sputters.
“After my dad learned … Learned about the abortion … He quit looking at me. Like … he babies me more than I can ever remember … And he kisses me before bed … But he doesn’t look at me anymore … Not in the eyes … Like, I know my mom and dad are covering for Jeremy but … But I sometimes think that, you know … Sometimes I think they’re actually covering for me more than anyone … They don’t want … They don’t want people to know their son killed a woman … But they’ll do anything to make sure people … To make sure people don’t know I killed a baby … I’m more of a murderer than he is because … Because my baby was their grandchild … While Miss Bonnie didn’t mean shit to them … That’s not right … That’s not right … That’s not right at all, Emma.”
She steps away. Out of napkins, she bends forward to dry her face on her tank top. After she gathers herself, we head back to the ice cream shop. At one point my phone buzzes and she grabs my arm.
“Emma, you gotta promise me you won’t tell anyone. Not your friend. Not Gavin. Not a soul. Promise me. I don’t want anything to happen to Heath. Or to Jeremy. He made a terrible mistake but if word got out about what he did it’d be all over the news. Please, Emma. It could destroy the family. It could destroy the dealership and everything our family’s worked for. That’s how I gotta look at it. Otherwise … I wish it would all just go away. Can you promise me?”
I don’t reply. I’m burning up and hungry again and my bladder’s full. After using the shop’s bathroom, I dab my forehead with a paper towel dampened with cool water.
She’s waiting for me in the SUV. Before starting the vehicle, I say, “I won’t patronize you by telling you what the right thing to do is. You’re a smart young woman. You already know. And you’re asking me to do the wrong thing, are you?”
“But Emma—”
“Honey.”
“Just, people can’t find out. They just can’t, Emma.”
“I can’t live with knowing what I know now and not doing something about it. I’m not gonna let you do that, either. If what you said is true, he needs to be held accountable. Our family needs to be held accountable. You can be mad at me if you want. No one needs to know about your decision to end your pregnancy. But, Monica, you did the right thing talking to me. You can always talk to me.”
The car ride back to the party is quiet. She examines her reflection in the visor mirror, sniffles, then flips the visor up and leans her head against the window.
I park in the lot behind the dealership, and she jumps out without a word and hustles inside.
I have a missed call from Dorian. I text him, You still at the house? I have to talk to you.
Call you in a bit. I’m at the hospital with Heath.
Dorian, what happened?
Surgeon is trying to save him. He hurt himself bad.
On my way.
***
There are only a few other people in the waiting area outside the emergency rooms. The nurse at the front desk has a crooked smile and one honey-blonde braid slung over her shoulder. A badly sunburned child moans. A middle-aged woman holds a blood-soaked paper towel around her pointer finger. A spindly teen whines about the hornet stings on her legs. Dorian and I sit side by side on a plush green bench in the back corner of the room, where no one can overhear me telling him what Monica told me. I apologize for my rudeness, for being so defensive of my family. He nods yet doesn’t reply, his gut smeared crimson, his face sickly, dour. Gavin calls twice. I don’t answer. Dorian’s eyelids are heavy. He perks up only at the trill of the front desk phone and the whir of the opening mechanical double doors behind the desk. There’ve been no updates regarding Heath.
In the silence something occurs to me.
“It was a little odd, how Monica opened up. At first she said she didn’t wanna talk. But as soon as I brought your name up, she really spilled her guts. I don’t know what to make of it.”
He’s deep in thought.
“What are you gonna do, Dorian? Tell me. I wanna help you.”
He sits up straight, folds his hands over the blood stain on his stomach, and shakes his head. “I have the strangest memories. I mean, because there was nothing strange about it at the time. That’s just the way it was. Nothing weird about it. Now, I can’t imagine opening up my apartment to a bunch of kids I only just met.”
“She was an extraordinary woman.”
His voice is urgent and stern. “Before Miss Bonnie’s, I was at this place. One of the older boys there used to pick on this tiny little foster sister of ours. One day he sat her down on the gas stovetop. I couldn’t have been ten, I’d say she was eight. He turned the burner on. Maybe the whole house was there watching it, or maybe it was just me, I don’t remember. I wanted to do something to stop him. I should have but I didn’t. Half a minute in, you could smell her jeans burning. He held her down until smoke came up from below. Not much. Enough to see and smell. He didn’t even help her down. He just walked away, and she hopped down on her own and ran out of the kitchen. It took me over a decade to realize how goddamn insane that was. I knew it was wrong when it happened, I wanted to put an end to it. But just how sick and horrible it was. I didn’t understand.”
He fills his lungs and continues.
“I went to see the girl later. I’d found out where she worked. At a hotel in Walker, not far from the casino. Heard she went by Sally, so that’s who I asked for. I recognized her right away, even though I hadn’t seen her in years and she’d dyed her hair pitch black and pierced her eyebrow with a bolt. She knew who I was too, except she didn’t say anything. I apologized for not doing anything and I told her how mad I was that it’d happened. I was mad. I still am. I’m furious. She was caught off-guard. She said that it wasn’t her and that I was mistaken. ‘Let’s just do this, huh,’ she kept saying. She was naked by then, kissing my neck, hushing me. It wasn’t in me to … I just paid and she kissed me on the cheek, and she hugged me hard because she was grateful, I think … I think she was glad someone remembered what’d happened that day and had at least told her it wasn’t right. What else could I do for her after all those years?
“I felt good after that, though. I was ready to get clean and clear my head and start over. But the only way I could do it was if I forgot about Sibley for a while. Forgot everything. You, Miss Bonnie, Sibley, school. So that’s what I did. It worked. I am clean and my head’s right. But I never came back home to thank her for all she did for me. To see if there was anything I could do for her. I had these daydreams of helping her with her house. The shingles look like hell. Who was there to ask her if she needed anything? Maybe she had some demons she wanted to talk through. Maybe she had nightmares and withdrawals of her own. When you’re wounded you take time to heal. And all that time you take healing you can’t help anyone else get better.”
“It’s okay, Dorian. She understood all that. I promise she did.”
He frowns as if awaiting the right words. “I get to thinking sometimes that the world is horrible. But it’s not true. Just, the worst parts are loud about it. All the good stuff is quieter. Harder to notice. That’s what I think of when I think of her.”
He reminisces about Miss Bonnie, how she sang along to the radio, how she washed the little ones’ faces with a wet, soapy washcloth after meals, how she drove everyone to Murphy’s football games in the fall. She’d back her van up to the fence, open the trunk lid, and lay a blanket down in the cab for them to sit on. She packed plastic baggies of tuna sandwiches and barbecue chips and cubed watermelon. And she’d drink boxed wine from a thermos and munch down graham crackers half a sheet at a time. Whenever the front desk phone rings he pauses and raises his head expectantly.
All the while something pesters me, something I do and don’t wanna say, an impulse I do and don’t wanna act on. Chalk it up to Marybeth and the extra blood in my veins, the heat, my exhaustion, the torrent of information Monica rained down on me. To these circumstances, a family, my family, involved in some plot to aid a privileged boy in evading justice while a deprived one fights for his life in a room down the hall. To Dorian, shoulders thick, cheeks sunburnt, auburn eyes clear and stern, knitted long-sleeve bloodied up, with his principles, his stubbornness, his self-righteousness. Dorian, whose way of seeing the world has proven him right so many times he must be awfully tired of his own decency, who asks for nothing and empties me all the same, who’d leave a woman wondering whether she’d still love him were he to finally accept that love, because who’d he be without his commitment to never breaking up a happy home? Who’d I be, for that matter?
Chalk it up however I please, it’s as if I were someone with scarcely a past, the trajectory of my future awaiting these moments here in the waiting area, that I might amend its course. It’s an eerie thing, to be unsure not of what to do or whether you have the stomach to do it, but of what you’ll be in your eyes afterward, courageous or spineless, despotic or powerless, sinful or pure. Right now, I can’t think of a reason not to do as I please.
Fighting this impulse, I ask, “Is that why you never wrote me back? You were taking time for yourself?”
“I didn’t write back because I thought I wasn’t good enough for someone like you.”
I know this. I’ve always known this. What good is a truth like this? I’d rather be bullshitted, if only he could manage that for me. “You know better now, yeah?” I reply.
“Most days, I do.” Abruptly he adds, “If he pulls through, I’m taking him home with me where he’ll be safe. He and I can talk to the county sheriff, call whoever else, I don’t know what. We’ll do something. If he doesn’t, then I’ll do what I can on my own. It could get ugly here and I’m sorry about that.”
“I understand.” Gavin is my husband. I’m married to Gavin. “Please let me talk to Gavin first, though. He’ll help us out. He might even know who we need to talk to at the sheriff’s office.”
He clears his throat.
“Dorian, he’s not like he used to be.”
He lowers his voice to a hoarse whisper. “I only care about the kid, and I won’t put him in any more danger than I have to.”
“I don’t wanna endanger him, either. I was insensitive back at my office and I’m sorry. He’d told some lies to our family, to Monica, so I didn’t believe him. Now that I know he’s telling the truth—”
“You might not have been so casual if this was about another kid, not a foster child.”
“Why do you think I’m here now?”
“Same reason I am. Guilt.”
“Fine, ‘I’m callous white trash, just like everyone else, and I don’t give a damn whether he lives or dies. He’s an orphan after all, so fuck him.’ I was wrong to be glib back at my office. I was shocked by it all. But I’m here now. Here for you. I’ll pray with you if that’s what you want. Or I’ll just sit here and shut up or wait in the car or go back to the barbecue and tell them I had an errand to run. It’s your choice …”
“Fine,” he says, grinding his knuckles into his eyes.
“Fine what?”
“Sit with me until the doctor comes.”
“I can do that.”
He yawns. “Thank you. I’m sorry.”
“What the fuck for?” I ask.
“For despising you all so much.”
“After this I can’t blame you. Gavin called me a few times. I’m sure he’s wondering where I am. Dorian, let him help us. Whether you like him or not, his family has a lot of respect for him, even his uncle Travis. Doleman, too. Gavin didn’t know Miss Bonnie well but I promise, promise, after I talk to him he’ll be as upset about it as I am. Please, Dorian. Why don’t you come by for dinner tonight? When Derek goes to bed, we can talk things through.”
“I can’t leave the hospital. I need to be here when he wakes up.”
“What about breakfast at our place? Is seven too early? Actually, if you need a place to stay …”
“I don’t.”
“What, you’re gonna sleep here in the waiting room?”
“Maybe.”
“The offer stands. Either way we’ll see you at breakfast?”
“Fine, breakfast.”
“Okay, then. Good.”
We fall silent. For the next few hours, we converse little, how much and how little there is to say. The impulse stays with me, with it these laden moments, that eerie feeling. I can’t shake them. Twice I trek across the hospital to the cafeteria, returning with coffees and muffins on the first trip, with chicken noodle soup on the second. Every twenty minutes he crosses the waiting area to speak with the nurse, who sends him back without additional information. Soon he doesn’t seem to notice the phone ringing or the doors to the emergency room hallway opening. For some time, he seems to be on the brink of sleep.
“And you three are … You’re happy?” he asks.
“Four. Yes.”
“Four, right. That’s good, Emma. That’s all that matters. A name for the baby yet?”
“No. Still thinking.”
“Derek’s a nice name.”
“I love it. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“How are you?”
He leans forward, resting his elbows on his thighs, his hands hanging down toward the floor. When he senses me glancing at his forearms he sits up, crosses his arms.
Fuck it, I tell myself, fuck it. I whisper, “Let me see.”
We remain out of earshot of the others in the waiting room, so there’s something conspiratorial about the request. I turn his hand palm-up, tug his sleeve up to his biceps, and touch him. I’m cautious, my movements close to but not quite sensual. Braille that I might read his soul. Mutilation, needle pricks and haphazard slashes, impromptu tattoos poorly crafty and arbitrary and heinous, so unlike him. Nor are these scars the ones I felt by moonlight so many years ago. Today there are more. Yet they’re old and healed, which is reassuring. Good, I think, now we’re even. And no sooner do I think this than say, “I used to wonder if you’d ever stop breaking my heart.”
He just bites his bottom lip.
Then they’re over, those grave and vital moments are gone. I am a married woman, a pregnant wife.
I’m grateful for this new present. As grateful as I’ve been in some time, grateful in a way that recalls me to the past, my home, my family, my life. It’s over.
When I release his arm, he pulls his sleeve down to his wrist.
Minutes later the nurse waves at us. Beside her, a man with curly black hair and bushy sideburns rubs his hands together. Dorian rushes over and I trail him cumbersomely.
“You’re the one who brought Mr. Reynolds in?” the man asks.
“Yes.”
“I’m Rory and I’m the nurse who’ll be looking after him tonight.”
Rory leads us through the double doors and into a long white hallway. After a few feet he stops and explains, “We need to keep him overnight. We moved him to Recovery so we can look after him.”
“He’s gonna make it, then?”
“We believe so.”
“That’s great news. Thank you. Thank you.”
“Is he your son? Brother?”
“Brother,” Dorian replies.
“You found him?”
“Yes.”
“Just in time. Fortunately, he missed the femoral artery, but he severed some smaller arteries in the thigh. Lacerations were severe enough to cause significant blood loss. And you must be the sister-in-law?” he asks me.
“Just a friend of the family.”
“Can I see him?” Dorian asks.
“He’s asleep, so you can’t talk with him, but yes. We have some resources here at the hospital that I think you might be interested in. Psychiatric and psychological out-patient services, social workers. Has he exhibited self-harming behavior before?”
“I … I don’t actually know,” Dorian says.
“He’s never been treated for anything, as far as our records indicate. It might be worth checking with your parents about that. Anyway, he’s a minor. We need their consent for …?”
“He doesn’t have parents, as far as I know. We’re foster brothers, actually.”
“I see. You’re his guardian …?”
“No. I’ve been checking in on him, though.”
Rory shifts his tone instantly. “I apologize. I should’ve clarified your relationship to Mr. Reynolds earlier and I shouldn’t have told you about his status without first … I need to ask you both to please return to the waiting area.”
“I don’t need any more information, Rory. I just want someone to be there with him when he wakes up. There’s no one else.”
“Excuse me, sir, ma’am. You—”
“Rory, you must have a supervisor we could speak to about this,” I interject.
“George Walters is his name,” Rory replies, haughty now, “and he’ll tell you the same thing I just told you.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and get Walters anyway, Rory? Tell him Emma Spencer would like to talk to him. If he doesn’t recognize that name, tell him that my uncle is Travis Spencer, the Fire Captain up in Sibley, who’s best friends with Judd Doleman, Police Chief in Sibley. Tell him Judd Doleman is best buds with Chief Carter here in Brainerd, who knows Mayor Puntzer quite well. If he doesn’t know already, tell Walters that Puntzer meets regularly with the administrators at this hospital.”
“Ma’am—”
“Or maybe you want your name to come up at one of these meetings? Because it seems unavoidable at this point since you’ve either disclosed confidential patient information to someone you shouldn’t have, or are withholding viewing rights from an authorized loved one. Not to mention the stress you’re putting Mr. Spencer’s pregnant niece through.”
