Cornerstone (6 page)

I drop my forehead on Garrett’s side window with a thud. I wish I could pass out, but instead I have to watch my life being pulled wide open from his front seat.

The light from our apartment spills from the doorframe and over Garrett’s body, making him a silhouette against my mother’s glowing figure. His hand goes to his forehead like he’s rubbing his temple. They only talk for a second before my mom darts away, leaving the door open wide. The blinding avalanche inside enhances the light that flows onto the porch. It’s not like I can’t imagine what he is thinking, standing on the threshold of all that paper.

The car window gets slippery under my cheek as I watch Garrett step one foot into my house. He can’t go any further. He stands on the tiny patch of clear space where we kick off our shoes. His head does a slow arc of surveillance and his hand stays on the doorknob. My mother appears again with her purse, shooting past him, down the steps. Garrett twists the lock on the door and pulls it closed behind him.

~ * * * ~

My mom is so busy hyperventilating on the way to the hospital that Garrett spends most of the time trying to calm her down. I watch his smooth profile as he speaks to her, which helps to keep my thoughts from tumbling back to the man in the woods. The smell of the man is still in my nose. I concentrate on Garrett’s voice, controlled and deep, in order to shoo the other voice from my head. My arm has gone mercifully numb, except when Garrett brakes at a light. The forward lurch, before the car completely stops, makes it feel like my entire limb is being pulled off.

“Tell me again how this happened.” My mom prods from the back seat. She is leaning forward with her torso nearly wedged between us, her fingers rubbing light circles on my good shoulder.

“She was in the woods...” Garrett begins for me. My mother sucks in a frantic breath, turning her head toward me.

“What woods? Why were you in the woods?”

“There’s a shortcut to the library...” I say and Garrett mercifully chimes in, “She was going home...”

My mother turns back to him. “You were with her?”

“Uh...” Garrett hits the brakes so we don’t run through an amber light and the car rocks forward slightly. The momentum is excruciating, even though I’m holding my arm against me. I grit my teeth and groan.

“Are you alright?” The two of them ask at once. I nod.

“We’re almost there.” Garrett says. I’m not sure if he’s assuring me or my mom or himself. He probably just wants to dump us both and run. I figure he’s kicking himself right now, for ever having sat down at my library table at all. The light turns green and he accelerates, slow and steady, glancing over to gauge how I’m doing. I try to look like I’m in control. Strong. But I keep thinking of Garrett scaring off the shadowed man and my head fills with the man’s husky voice. I try to shift my focus to my mom’s interrogation instead.

“How did your arm get hurt?” My mom swallows. I can tell she doesn’t want to say broken. She’s trying to hold it together for my sake and it is barely working.

“There was a man in the woods.” I say. “I think he hit me with a shovel.”

“A man!” she shrieks in my ear. “You
think
he had a shovel? You didn’t see it? What did he look like?”

“I couldn’t see anything, Mom. It was pitch black.” A sour knot boils in my stomach and I add, “I touched his face. I think he was wearing a ski mask.”

“Didn’t you have your flashlight?”

When Garrett hits the brakes to turn into the hospital’s emergency entrance, I am grateful to let out another groan instead of an answer. It is enough to shut my mother up. I don’t want to lay out the entire story of how I was eavesdropping on Garrett and Jen’s conversation and how I ran away from Jen, ditching my backpack to get away. I can feel my face flush with heat in the dark as I wonder again about how I got from the woods to Garrett’s car, until my mom starts squawking that she wants us dropped at the Emergency entrance.

“No, I’m not getting wheeled in.” I glare at her. “I can walk just fine, Mom.”

“You shouldn’t be moving that arm any more than you have to.” she insists.

I look past her to give Garrett my best pleading glance and he winks at me, but then he pulls up in front of the emergency doors. He smiles with an apologetic shrug as a guy in scrubs appears beside the car door with a wheelchair.

“I don’t want you passing out when you get on your feet again.” Garrett says, reaching over me to unlock the door.

~ * * * ~

Garrett stays in the waiting room while my mom and I are escorted into one of the curtained pods inside the emergency room. I am sure he will not be there when we come out. Whether or not all that stuff he said about
knowing
or
understanding
still applies, he’s also had to drag me out of the woods and drive me and my hysterical mother to the hospital. And none of that even takes into consideration that he’s had a glimpse inside our house.

The doctor comes in and takes a look at my arm. He’s short and smells like garlic and he excuses himself after he asks how this happened and I tell him about the man in the woods.

When I come back from being x-rayed, there is a cop waiting with my mom in the pod. He’s got out a notepad and wants to know how much pain medication I’ve had.

“None.” I shake my head. “I can’t feel it. Everything’s just numb.”

“I’m going to need to ask you some questions then.” The cop says. His upper body is as broad as he is tall and wherever he stands in the pod, it feels like he’s hovering over me.

“She was attacked in the woods behind the library off Main Street.” My mom blurts and that’s where it begins. He asks a zillion questions about how I got in the woods and how long I was there and how I met Garrett and how long we’ve known each other and when did Garrett get into the woods. Then he asks me a million more times to describe the man and I can never do any better than saying he was a big shadow in a ski mask.

“Why do you think it was a shovel that he struck you with?” he asks.

“It sure felt like one.” I say. It was a lame attempt at humor. The cop dodges a glance from his pad to me and doesn’t crack a smile. I frown and clarify, “It sounded like he was dragging a shovel on the ground.”

“Did the man say anything to you?”

“Yes. He said he wanted me to stand still...and he told me it would be over before it hurt. And he said I was making it harder than it had to be.” I get a shiver down my spine that explodes like needles inside my arm. I wince.

“Did he attempt to touch you?” the officer asks. He lowers his pad and stares at me straight. “In a sexual way?”

I glance at my mother who is biting her lip so she won’t cry. I hadn’t thought of it that way and now it feels extra creepy to have to think of all the possibilities under fluorescent lights. Especially since I’m being asked by a complete stranger in front of my mother.

“No. He was grabbing at me like he wanted to catch me.” I say. “But I couldn’t really see him in the dark.”

“Is there anything else you remember? Anything at all?”

Remember. The word tickles my brain.

“Yes.” I say. “He told me no one has to remember any of it...or anything...no one has to remember anything. Something like that.”

My mother gasps. The officer turns to her.

“Does that mean something to you, Mrs. Maxwell?” he asks. She bites her lip again.

“No. No, it doesn’t.” She straightens herself up in the seat. “But do you think this man was trying to...” Her sentence fades and she puts a finger over her mouth.

“We won’t know anything until he is apprehended and we have a chance to talk with him.” The officer says. He looks at his pad and taps it with his pen before looking back at me. “However, I would suggest that you choose better routes to the library than through unlit woods. You said your friend Garrett found you. Is he still here?”

“He’s in the waiting room.” my mom says. “He’s a nice kid. He’s waiting to drive us home.”

“I’m going to go have a word with him.” the officer says. “I’ll be contacting you if I have any more questions.”

“Great.” I mutter as he leaves.

An officer talking to Garrett is just what I need. They might as well just wheel me down to the morgue right now. I don’t know how I’m ever going to talk to Garrett again, much less, ever go back to school with the rumors that Jen is probably constructing at this very second. Especially if she saw what happened.

“You told him everything you could.” my mom grumbles more to herself than to me. She smoothes my hair at my temple and I relax to her touch. I am suddenly exhausted and want to fall asleep beneath her palm. “You can’t tell him what you don’t know.”

“What don’t I know?” I murmur.

The curtain pulls back and the doctor walks in with the gray sheets of my x-rays.

“Today’s your lucky day.” his voice booms and I’m wide awake again. “You’ve got a clean break and there isn’t much swelling, so we’ll be able to cast it for you and get you out of here.”

My mother whispers, “Thank you, God.”

~ * * * ~

My mom reluctantly agrees to letting me have the pain meds after the doctor said that without them, setting my bone would be excruciating and verging on child abuse. I don’t think the meds kick in right away because it is still excruciating, but I’m woozy by the time we’re back in Garrett’s car. Or maybe it is because it is two in the morning and he’s driving us home. I’m curled up in his backseat with my head in my mom’s lap, fighting the blur because I want to remember what it is like to be in Garrett’s car.

“Thank you for everything today.” My mom tells him over the seat.

“It’s no problem.” Garrett’s voice is milk. Warm milk that makes the woozy even woozier. Garrett’s got the heat on full blast and the rumble of the engine is soothing. My arm is asleep in its cast and my mind goes hazy around the edges. I try to listen to them talk, I’d like to hear every word that Garrett says, but my thoughts drift like feathers in a fan.

“I deeply appreciate the extension of help. Even if she isn’t Alo.” My mom says. Extension? My mind scrambles up an extension ladder and at the top rung, looks around and can’t place what it’s doing there.
Uh low
…did she mispronounce a plant? The ladder disappears in a poof, replaced by healing plants. I am rooted to the seat. My mind connects seat to feet and then I’m off again, thinking of whether or not I’m wearing shoes because I can’t feel them.

“It’s no problem.” Garrett assures my mom again. I close my eyes and dream of milk. Enough of it to fill an ocean.

~ * * * ~

I sleep all the way through school the next day and wake up about a half hour after the final bell would have sounded. Thank you, God.

The cast is heavy. My bones are telegraphing a constant throb from inside the plaster and my fingers, poking out the bottom, are chubby and purple. My mom calls the hospital twice to ask if it’s normal, her voice high and argumentative. They tell her pain and swelling and bruising is all normal and suggest, both times, that she fill the prescription for pain medication. My mom thanks them for the advice, but I sit on the couch with a bag of frozen peas on my fingers instead.

“Sorry, this is the best we can do.” my mom says.

I know I’m going to have to grit through the pain because she won’t fill the prescription no matter how bad this gets. She’s preached to me, since I was a little kid, about how medicine just masks symptoms and disrupts the body’s natural defenses. She’s got all sorts of hippy beliefs about how important it is to keep energy rhythms unaltered so that the body can do what it needs to. However, believing that has never stopped her from hovering over me with a scrunched up brow, looking scared out of her mind that maybe, this time, she could be wrong. So what I rely on now is not my mom’s speeches but the fact that I’ve always pulled through before. I’ve got good odds.

“Do you remember anything else about yesterday?” she asks after she’s microwaved soup for me. That’s her answer for the flu and colds and broken bones. Chicken noodle from a can.

“Not really.” I say. She trades me a big mug for the bag of peas and sits on the cushion beside me, watching me drink down the soup. She’s got dark circles under her eyes from staying up all night, writing. My broken arm probably put her back another fifty pages. She doesn’t complain about it, but says she can’t sleep unless she’s written everything on her mind. I worry about how crazy that seems when she’s draining herself to do it.

“So, are you going to tell me about Garrett?” she asks.

“Garrett?” I smile saying his name. “I don’t know what you want to hear. He’s a guy from school.”

“Who likes you.” she adds. I can’t help but smile again.

“Do you think so?”

“Seems like it to me.” she says. “Doesn’t it to you?”

“I...well, I want him to.” My relentless grin feels goofy. My mom grins back. “I just met him for the first time a couple days ago. He showed up at my table in the library. He was the one who was asking about me at school. I figured once he heard all the rumors, he’d be toast, but he came back again last night.”