Echols, Jennifer (13 page)

I took it from him. "Wow, I've crossed over." He disappeared again and brought out another leather cop jacket.

I took it. "Does this mean we're going steady?"

He gave me the one-dimpled smile before looking in the closet once more for a clean, pressed uniform on a hanger. "Re right hack." He walked into the bathroom and closed the door.

I could have secreted myself in the closet to change. But since I was me, I shed my wet jacket and shirt there in his bedroom. I paused just a few moments in the hope he would (gasp!) catch me in my bra. But even if that happened, that's all that would happen, because it was not yet 6:01 a.m. Thursday, and John went By The Book. I pulled on his warm, dry shirt and jacket.

I started my circle around this new room of the art gallery. One of the first drawings I came to was of the Devil fountain at Five Points, with several of the animal statues coming to life and wearing hats. Then more angles of the artsy section of Birmingham, ornate mansions next door to dilapidated apartment buildings.

And then, across from his bed, right where he could see it first thing when he woke up each morning (or afternoon), was a large drawing of the bridge.

With no green aliens in it, no hat-wearing animals. No people.

Just the bridge, a stark shape against the too-blue sky.

He burst from the bathroom. At least, you would think he had, the way I jumped back from the drawing.

While he stepped into clean boots, I crossed to the dresser like nothing had happened, uncapped a bottle of cologne, and sniffed. That wasn't it. I picked up another. That wasn't it, either. If his scent of cologne was really laundry detergent or deodorant or even aftershave. I would be disappointed.

He reached past me for the last bottle and handed it to me. "It's this one."

I unscrewed the top and wet my finger with cologne. I half thought he would kick me out of his apartment, never to return, not even at 6:01 a.m. Thursday, for what I did next. I did it anyway. I reached up to touch his neck. Sliding my hand past his dark collar, I rubbed my finger across his collarbone.

He looked down at me and put his big, warm hand over my hand.

The scanner buzzed to life with Lois's voice. John didn't move, but those worried creases appeared between his eyebrows.

"I don't understand Lois's code," I whispered. "What is it?"

He dropped his hand and stepped away from me. Picking up my soaked clothes from the floor, I followed him into the living room, where he was already putting on his gun belt. "A fatality at the Birmingham Junction," he said. He bent to strap the other gun onto his leg. "What we've been waiting for."

I trailed him through the wake of his cologne. Out the door, into the fog that had replaced the rain, down the stairs, and into the car. He radioed to Lois that we were close by and could respond to this call. Which didn't matter, because every siren in town was already wailing.

I drew the seat belt across my chest and fastened it like a good girl. The past few nights I'd gotten used to wearing it. I hardly ever felt faint. Now I was back to the panicky feeling. I knew what John had meant when he said we'd been waiting for this wreck. Finally, after holding their breath responding to crashes at the dangerous intersection, the emergency response personnel had the fatality they'd dreaded. It was The Big One. And John wanted me, Tiffany, and Brian to get an eyeful.

I was scared. And tired of being scared.

As he checked both ways for nonexistent traffic and pulled onto the main road, I said, "My favorite drawing wasn't the one of Venice. It was the one of the bridge.
Your
bridge."

He took a deep breath and sighed through his nose:
Here we go again.

"But the view you should draw isn't the view
of
your bridge," I went on. "It's the view
from your
bridge."

His jaw hardened. "That's illegal, as we've established."

"Sometimes breaking a rule is worth it. You're so obsessed with this bridge. Haven't you ever longed to see the view from the other side?"

He made one final turn, and the red and blue lights came into view, flashing long on the wet pavement. "Why are you doing this?" he asked so quietly that T could hardly hear him over the sirens.

"Because of what you're about to do to me."

It was a one-car crash. A circle of cop cars, fire trucks, and ambulances surrounded the car. It had crumpled against a round pillar holding up the interstate. "How do you even
have a
wreck like that?" I asked.

"Drunk. Poor judgment." He opened his door. "Come on."

Normally I would have jumped at the chance to get out of the cop car with him on a call. Brian and Tiffany were there already. They stood on either side of the mangled car, far apart from each other, both with their arms folded. But I hung back against the hood of the cop car, trying to tamp the panic down.

John crossed the accident scene and talked to a couple of firemen in their long coats with their helmets on and face shields down. He slid an engine enclosed in a cube-shaped metal frame off the fire truck and set it heavily near the wreck. The firemen screwed some hoses into the motor. They attached the other ends of the hoses to what looked like an enormous set of pliers.

Quincy the paramedic passed by me. I called out to him, "Are those the jaws o' life?"

"Yeah. A little late for the
life
part. You can see no one's in a huge hurry." He kept ambling on his way.

The jaws o' life engine started up with a racket, and the firemen set to work spreading open the collapsed space that used to be the car's front door. Broken glass and shards of metal flew into the air, bounced on the hood of the car, and cascaded to the pavement.

John beckoned me forward to the crumpled car.

My heart raced. My fingertips tingled. Red lights flashed behind my eyes. But I had to do what John said. If I didn't, I wouldn't put it past him to throw me in jail again, 6:01 a.m. or no 6:01 a.m. I took a few steps forward.

Brian put himself in my path. He shook his head at me. "Meg. You don't want to see this."

Behind Brian, John still motioned to me. He called, "Come on."

Brian walked over to John. "Don't make her." He put his hand against John's shoulder to stop him.

John flinched away. "Do
not
touch me while I'm in uniform," he shouted.

Brian ducked back.

John walked toward me, grasped my wrist, and pulled me. By now my face felt like a mask, with no blood pumping to my skin. I knew I was as good as gone, but I'd lost the strength to fight. I stumbled after him toward the wreck.

The noise from the jaws o' life was so loud, I didn't see how the firemen or anyone else could stand over here. It pulsed loud enough to hurt, like a motorcycle twice as big as mine with no muffler. I felt the concussion of every pulse in my chest, throwing the rhythm of my heartbeat off. As the scene collapsed into tunnel vision, the pulse of the engine melded into one long scream.

The interstate lights glared off the firemen's face shields so I couldn't see their expressions. They looked like aliens in space suits. At a signal from John, they backed away from the car to let us see inside.

She was twisted in a way the human body did not twist, in a very, very, very small space.

For me to hear him over the jaws o' life, John must have shouted. But in my head his voice sounded smooth and hollow and sinister, like a doctor in my hospital room after I'd been sedated.

"This is what I wanted you to see."

Chapter 12

I wasted away. My flesh shrunk so quickly, I seemed to melt, to collapse in on myself. Through my transparent skin, my bones showed. I wiggled one finger back and forth, watching the bones grind together underneath.

The ammonia lodged in my nostrils like two Q-tips.

I meant to cross my right hand to my left arm and pull out the IV. I missed, and my hand bounced off my shoulder. I slid my hand down my arm, feeling for the needle. No IV.

I sniffed more ammonia, trying to get it past the Q-tips and into my brain. I couldn't wake up. I couldn't open my eyes.

"Do not stick a needle in me," I mumbled. "Whatever you do, do not start an IV. I would rather die, do you understand? Go ahead and let me die."

"You're not dying," came Tiffany's voice. "And you're crazy if you think they'd let me start an IV. I'm lucky I got to take your blood pressure. Which is very low, by the way, so don't sit up yet."

I took one more big whiff and sat up. Outside the open square of the back of the ambulance, John stood chatting with Officer Leroy and another cop and Quincy. John was smoking a cigarette.

Bastard.

Bastard!

I moved toward him. Fell.

Off the ambulance? Heard Tiffany shriek.

Found myself lying on my back on the wet highway, the shock of the fall still rippling through my muscles.

John lifted me under the arms and stood me up against the ambulance bumper. "Watch that first step. It's a doozy," he said around the lit cigarette hanging from his up."

I shoved him. His chest was solid under the dark uniform, and he didn't budge. I shoved him again, as hard as I could, but only shoved myself back against the ambulance. I screamed at him, "I had cancer, you fuck!"

The other cops and Quincy crowded around. Suddenly I could see myself the way they saw me. a blue-haired girl screaming for no reason. I was about to get taken to jail for assaulting a police officer.

John's cigarette dropped onto the wet asphalt and steamed there. I didn't look up at him to see whether he was gaping at me and the cigarette had fallen out of his mouth, or he'd thrown the cigarette down on purpose. I didn't want to know whether I'd mortified him in front of his macho coworkers. I didn't care.

"I'm hitching a ride on the fire truck back to my motorcycle," I told the cigarette. "I've had enough of what you wanted me to see. I'm done for the night."

My legs wobbled underneath me as I staggered to the fire truck, but no one offered to help me, not even Tiffany or Brian. Keeping my head turned away from the wreck, I pulled myself into the roomy cab of the fire truck. I curled up like a cat next to the giant pliers from the jaws o' life. Which was probably a good thing. I would need them to extract me from this fix I'd wedged myself into with Johnafter.

I HAD CANCER, YOU FUCK.

I was so tired. I'd almost finished my daily five-mile run in the park. And I hadn't been to sleep yet. Well, except for a half-hour catnap in the front of the fire truck before the emergency response personnel dropped me off.

Even on my last leg, I managed a burst of energy, trying to outrun the memory of my own words.

I-had-can-cer-you-fuuuuuuuuu—

Part of me wanted to take it back. I hadn't looked at John's face when I shouted at him. I hadn't seen the dark look of pain. But I could imagine. This macho pride thing was very fragile, I knew. I'd hit him where it hurt, in front of the older men he was trying desperately to be like.

Then I remembered the twisted body in the very small space of the mangled car, and I wanted to shove John harder.

Done.
I reached the wall of handprints and walked around it to cool down. I half expected the ghost of Johnafter to round the bend toward me.

We hadn't met in the park since that first afternoon. One night I'd asked him whether he was trying to avoid seeing me there. He'd responded like the honest do-gooder he was. Sometimes he had to stay late at the police station to finish paperwork for the arrests he'd made and reports he'd taken that night. So he didn't get to bed until mid-morning. He was still asleep when I went running.

He ran later in the afternoon, when he woke up. I wasn't willing to stay later and lose sleep to see him, any more than he was willing to get up early and lose sleep to see me. I guess we both understood that our relationship was built entirely on witty repartee, and neither of us thought we could be witty on four hours of shut-eye.

Wait a minute—what was I thinking?
What
relationship? We probably didn't even have an appointment for sex anymore. John was gone, back into the yearbook from whence he sprung. And I didn't look forward to spending my last night on patrol with Officer After.

My cell phone rang.

"John!" I exclaimed, sprinting to my motorcycle at the edge of the parking lot and pawing through my bag. We'd exchanged numbers in case another suspect tried to bash the door of the cop car while John wasn't around. "Hello?"

"Hey!" Tiffany said. "I was afraid you'd be asleep, but you sound wide awake."

I tried not to huff out my disappointment. Wiping wet blue strands out of my eyes, I said, "I just finished my run."

"You're running this week, even with everything else going on?"

"Have to."

"Well? Do you have leukemia?"

I held the phone at arm's length and frowned at it. If Tiffany knew why I ran, I was even more transparent than I'd thought. I brought the phone back to my ear. "Not today."

"That's good. How about last night? Were you okay last night? I've never seen anyone that mad."

I kicked my handprint on the wall. "Thanks to John." I should have been kicking John's handprint, but it was too high.

"He went after you, you know. On your way to the fire truck, you looked like you were about to fall over those orange cones. But I called him back. I was afraid you'd hit him again and get in trouble."

"I'm a threat, all right." I felt my face flush at the thought of John coming after me. He cared, he cared! He cared so much that he made me faint on purpose! I was pathetic.

Tiffany cleared her throat. "Listen, I wanted your advice on something."

I laughed heartily. "Yeah, I'm a regular Dear Abby. Shoot."

"Brian still isn't speaking to me. He won't return my calls. But right before we went to the bridge, he had started hinting every other word that he and I should have sex—"

I knew what she was getting at. "No."

"—and he was trying to convince me to do it. But I didn't want to." "No."

"Now, to get back together with him—"

"No."

"—I thought I might tell him I've changed my mind." "Earth to Tiffany!"

"Why not?" she exclaimed. Translation:
If you can have sex with a drug offender, why can’t I have sex with the salutatorian?