A Night at the Asylum (14 page)

What had Jamie been saying about pockets?

I gasped. Someone – it had to have been her –
had packed my jacket full of little boxes that read glucagon on the
side. They contained a vial and a syringe, wrapped in plastic. “For
use in the emergency counteraction of hypoglycemia” the insert
read. I cried out in relief, holding them up like I’d just stumbled
upon the Holy Grail.

Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, I prayed. Thank
you Spirit Guides, or Satan, or whoever it was that allowed Jamie
to have the wonderful foresight she so obviously had. The foresight
to illegally snatch these little boxes off the shelf at the
pharmacy and later stuff them into my jacket pockets before making
sure it was returned to me. Creepy, dark, amazing, whatever it
was…I was grateful to the ends of the earth for what my best friend
knew.

I scanned the leaflet that came with the
vial, double checking the symptoms. Sweating. Tremor. Unsteady
movement. Disorientation. “If left untreated, can lead to
unconsciousness, seizures, and death.” Emmett was already a third
of the way there. I triple checked where I needed to inject the
stuff: arm, buttock, or thigh. Of course.

I put the syringe into the vial, drawing out
the liquid.
Please just let me not kill him
. I reached under
his sweatshirt, feeling like Chester the Molester, and pulled his
arm out of his sleeve.
Forgive me for this, Emmett,
I
thought. His skin was too warm. I was surprised to see that from
his shoulder to his elbow, his arm was covered in black tattoos
that he kept well-hidden under his clothes. Perhaps he preferred
self-mutilation over violence? This guy really was a mystery.

Focus,
I swore at myself. He moaned a
little and tried to sit up, but collapsed against the passenger
side door. It was almost inevitable I was going to mess this up,
but unless I tried, he didn’t have a chance. I had to pay
attention.

Clamping my eyes shut, I gritted my teeth and
stuck him with the needle.

He awoke with a twitch, and I screamed and
dropped the syringe. His eyes were wild, full of terror. He
clutched my arm, dragging me closer to him. “What did you do to
me?” he whispered.

“It’s glucagon, Emmett. It will help you. You
have to go to the hospital. You have to –”

“No!” he gasped. “You can’t take me back
there. Please, Sara.”

“Emmett, you’re going to die if you don’t get
help.” I was half-crying, half-pleading. My nerves were completely
fried. “You can’t help me if you aren’t here with me.” Did that
mean anything to him? But it wasn’t the only reason I refused to
let him just lie here and die.

He was breathing hard now, barely awake. He
pulled me so close to him that his breath was warm on my lips, his
emerald eyes forcing me into submission. “Please promise me you
won’t let them…” his voice became a soft sigh for a moment, and he
started again. “Please promise me you won’t do that to me."

My heart was cracking in two. “I promise,
Emmett.” A ghost of a smile crossed his face. He released my arm,
slipping quietly back into unconsciousness. I stifled a sob, wiping
my face with the back of my hand.

The anticlimactic moments that followed
consisted of me pulling his arm back through his sleeve and
climbing into the front seat again, only to stare numbly out the
windshield. The leaflet had said to give him another injection in
15 minutes if he wasn’t awake. I looked down at the dashboard clock
to start the countdown. There was this quiet moment that passed in
that space, where the sun was shining through the windshield from a
morning in full swing, the muddy grass glistening at the side of
the road. There was a storm inching forward on the horizon. I put
my head in my hands. There was just too much to try to understand,
too much to deal with.

Everything that had happened over the last
seven hours had scarred me, had me questioning every single thing I
believed in. My brother had contacted Jenny. Was he trying to
contact me? And Jamie was some sort of psychic. It had to be true.
What else could explain everything she knew? And Emmett…had she
appeared to him in his dreams? Had she appeared to me? How could I
wrap my head around all of this?

There was a passage Tommy had written in his
notebook about consciousness being the greatest reality, though not
perceived by the senses. It said that people think of themselves as
bodies possessing a temporary mind, but the true reality is that
people are spirits, possessing a temporary body.

What if the only explanation was that
everything I thought I never believed in was real?

I reached for Emmett, still crumpled on the
back floorboard of the car. I tried to keep my thoughts positive.
He did not want to die at the hands of his father and brother.
Instead he was here with me. That
had
to mean something. His
heartbeat was steadier now. I closed my eyes then and prayed,
harder and more sincerely than I had prayed in a long time. All I
asked was for him to be safe, and that I could see the truth – no
intermediaries, no more dreams. Just to see it with my own eyes.
What had Jamie said in my dream? “Emmett knows the truth.”

My cell phone rang again, interrupting itself
with the “low battery” chime. I flipped it open. “My battery’s
about to die, Jamie, but you may have just saved Emmett’s life.
Again. How the hell did you—”

“It’s not Jamie, Sara, this is Cole.”

“Oh.” He sounded weird, too quiet. “What’s
up?”

“Something’s wrong with Jamie,” he said, and
there were strange noises in the background, shuffling, garbled
voices. “Is she epileptic or something?” he asked. I realized he
was speaking softly to keep someone near him from hearing his
conversation. “You’ve got to get here right away.”

“What’s going on?” I demanded, and I heard
Cole cry out as the phone was snatched away from him. There was a
loud hissing sound, followed by a low growl and some extremely
creepy giggling. I had to hold the phone away from my ear to save
my eardrum.

Cole was back. “See what I mean?” he
asked.

“What the hell is she doing?”

“She’s not
doing
anything,” he
answered. “Sara, I know I don’t know her very well, but I’m telling
you right now…whatever this thing is…it isn’t her.”

He wasn’t making it up. There was complete
horror in his voice, disbelief, helplessness. “I’ll be right
there,” I said, and the phone shut off on me. “Shit!” I screamed. I
remembered the extra battery Jamie had bought me and finally tore
it open and switched the power supplies out. It was just faster
than waiting for the thing to charge.

The short bleat of a siren made me look up
into the rearview mirror.

A police car had just pulled up behind
me.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I swore.

It could have been Roy or anyone. The bottom
line was I could not let them get close enough to find Emmett in
the backseat. I had made him a promise and I was not going to
betray him. As I took deep, gulping breaths to calm myself, that
decision tortured me, and to the deepest core of my soul I
questioned it. I could demand to go with him, try to make sure he
was safe, but then what about Jamie? The seconds ticked by while I
agonized away, chewing my bottom lip as the door opened on the
police car. Maybe I could explain things to Emmett later. At least
it might mean he would live.

As I watched in the rearview mirror, the
police officer climbed out of the cruiser. I saw his short
reddish-blonde hair, the pointed nose, noted the unmistakable
swagger and the empty gun holster. And I recognized Ead Sutter’s
face.

Like I said, irony has a way of making me its
bitch. Irony was standing behind me now, waiting in the shower as I
bent over for the bar of soap.

Fresh out of his interrogation with Bonita’s
attorney father, his own daddy scrambling to cover up for him, Ead
was looking more cavalier than ever as he closed the car door and
sauntered toward me. His tinted aviators couldn’t fully conceal the
smack down Jon had put on him. I watched his tall thin form move
closer to the back of my mother’s car, riveted in sick fascination
to his hands, covered with black leather gloves. Maybe I could deal
with him. Even after everything, maybe I could just play stupid and
he’d let me go.

I like to think that fate, or God, or Tommy,
or whatever good thing was watching over me that day gave me a
little helpful kick in the ass right then. Because it was then that
I saw the flash in my mind.

It was like nothing I'd ever experienced
before. It was like someone had taken their thoughts, their
memories, and simply plucked them from their own brain and placed
them into mine. I saw Ead's thin face, twisting in an expression of
rage. His beady blue eyes were flaring, somehow furious and empty
at the same time, watching the life drain from my body. The vision
was so clear, so volatile, that
this was happening to me
. It
blotted out all reality and replaced it with one that was
horrifying and uncontrollable, like a silent movie on a broken
reel. Paralyzed, I could only watch.

His hands, those gloves, squeezed and twisted
against my neck. Squeezed until all the breath had been pushed out
and my throat was crushed so violently it wouldn't allow more in,
even after he let go. His howls of fury, of panic, rang in my ears
as he tried to figure out what to do with my dead body when it
slumped to the side. My necklace, a tiny gold cross given to me by
my mother on my twelfth birthday, caught around the window handle
and was plucked from my neck when he pulled me out of the passenger
side of his car.

He’d been so angry that I’d rejected him. But
no matter how much I’d told him no, he still took what he wanted
and threw me away, discarded me like a piece of trash.

I watched my body being rolled into a tarp.
Pushed into a hole. The smell of mildew, rot, decay…

I came out of the vision, clawing at my
throat, gasping for air. The scent of mold was still in my
nostrils. Only half a second had passed, and I could see in the
rearview mirror that Ead was still walking toward the car.

Nothing like that had ever happened to me
before, but I knew without question this time that it had been
completely real.

Eadonthehiway.

He had murdered her. I’d seen it myself.

Fate had presented me my choices.

I chose to believe what I saw, what I felt,
what I knew.

I chose to believe Jamie. I chose to believe
Tommy.

I chose to believe Emmett.

I stomped the gas pedal, spewing gravel in
Ead Sutter’s face. The car moved at such an incredibly slow pace,
its gears shifting reluctantly. As soon I was moving at a normal
speed again, I spotted Ead in the rearview mirror, only just then
climbing back into his car.
God help me,
I thought. I was
going to jail and to hell. And all in my mother’s Buick.

****

Eight O’Clock

I pulled into the parking lot of the church
across the street from the asylum, yanking the sleeves of my jacket
over my arms. I could smell rain in the air.

The daylight was piercingly bright and the
lot was packed with the vehicles of onlookers, protesters, news
reporters, and even rescue in case someone got hurt during the
white trash hullabaloo. I wondered if Jamie’s EMT friend was here,
too. Not that it would make a difference. I pulled into a space,
praying none of the cops that lined one side of the street were
getting a radio from Ead about a Buick that had just gone AWOL on
him. Hopefully his plans with me were so nefarious they weren’t fit
to be reported to dispatch.

I reached back and felt Emmett’s pulse again
and it had gone weak, arrhythmic. It had been 17 minutes since the
last shot of glucagon I’d given him. His face was ashen, his
breathing so shallow I could no longer see the rise and fall of his
chest. I climbed over the front seat into the back with him and
tried to shake him awake once again. He murmured incoherently. I
grabbed another vial and syringe and pulled his jacket to the side
to stick him again in the upper arm. His skin was damp with a cold
sweat.

I'd never felt so devoid of hope in my life.
I choked back a sob as I pulled his sweatshirt back down over his
pale stomach. Knowing there was an ambulance less than a block’s
length away that I could not run to for help killed me inside, but
I had promised. I would not let Emmett be handed off to his
homicidal family.

Brad Sutter was, in fact, standing only a few
feet from the EMT station. He was trying to fight his way through a
crowd of protesters and state troopers, who had formed a
disorganized human chain at the top of the hill. It was anybody’s
guess what exactly was going on there.

With a string of expletives escaping my lips,
I grabbed the Styrofoam cup full of soda I'd brought from the
restaurant and a sharpie out of the console. I wrote “Drink Me”
across it in huge letters, placing it in the cup holder nearest
Emmett’s head. It had to be the first thing he saw, the first
command he obeyed, when he awakened.

If
he awakened.

Wiping my face again, I cautiously climbed
out of the car, careful not to be seen. I popped the trunk, taking
out a large quilt that was folded on top of the spare tire. Then I
climbed back into the backseat and pulled the quilt over Emmett,
covering his body completely. If Ead was following me, he'd surely
look in the car for me first. I didn't want him to touch Emmett, to
hurt him, ever again.

I paused, my hand resting against Emmett’s
feverish, scruffy cheek. This might be the last time I ever saw
him. He seemed so far away now, his face so calm and still. The
anguish I felt was excruciating and strange, because I’d never
known him, really known him, before now. Yet he’d leave such a hole
in my heart if I returned and found him gone.