In the Dead of Summer (30 page)

He didn’t. No problem, then, except finding a parking space.

I circled his block and the next one twice, which produced no result except to annoy the hell out of normal-speed drivers. There are people who were probably always courteous about hitching their horse and wagon in a previous life and who now have good parking karma. I am not one of them. God knows what parking sins I committed in past lives, because in this one I am condemned to spot a space opening up one half second after someone else has executed a wild U-turn in order to cover it.

I almost always have to stifle an urge to solidly ram the good-karma cars in their parking spots, which should earn me an even worse parking karma in the next life.

For the third time I made my way toward the shingled house, creeping down the street, certain that if I were very attentive, something would open up at the last minute. I glided along, then slid, as softly and slowly as if on ice skates, into the vicinity of Bartholomew Dennison the Fifth’s apartment. I’d have to double park and run up. One foot on the brake, I reached over and relocated a bouquet from the passenger seat to the ledge in the back that is only jokingly called a seat.

I had dithered over a gift. I’d thought of a book, but realized that Woody had been operated on both hands and couldn’t use them for a while. I didn’t want to provide unnecessary frustration. I would never presume to pick music for a teen, and so flowers it was. Flowers for the young man hiding inside the glowering hostile student—a young man who just might be delighted—secretly—by being given something beautiful and perfumed.

I turned off the radio, doused the lights, put my hand on the car keys—and felt the door beside me yank open. Cold metal pressed on the side of my forehead.

“Get out,” a voice growled. “Get out and leave the keys.”

My hand froze. I couldn’t believe it. I was in a university neighborhood, in front of a friend’s house.

“Move it!” he shouted. “You want to be killed?”

Killed?
What was wrong with him? What was wrong with me? I was paralyzed, sure there was something I should be doing—look at him so I could ID him, maybe? I turned my head, and screamed. A gorilla aimed a gun at my head.

The mask was terrifying, gorilla mouth half open, full of teeth. “I said
move it
!” he snarled.

Oh, and I should, I knew I should.
That
was what you were supposed to do—go along, don’t annoy, don’t build the tension. Wasn’t that it? But instead of moving, which I couldn’t, I screamed again. “You can’t!” I heard myself insist stupidly. “This is
my
car!” sounding like a two-year-old fighting over toys. And then I remembered the H word. “Help!” I screamed. “Help! Help!” And my muscles regained their strength and I turned the key and tried to grab the gear shift and remembered that I hadn’t released the brake so I reached with that hand, too—

That was close to the last thing I remember. That and the sound of my own voice, the feel of a large, gloved hand slapping mine away from the brake release, yanking my hair, pulling me sideways and hitting me—all in a split second while my scream was still in the air, hitting me again on the side of my head while my car sputtered and I felt the shock of the earth by the curb—hard on my shoulder and arm, even the tufts of grass—and then he hit me again.

And that was that. No flashing lights like in the comic books, no tweeting birds. Nothing, except deathlike darkness.

THE HAND WAS ON ME AGAIN. ON MY SHOULDER. BE
HIND ME.

I screamed for help.

“I
am
help. Mandy, are you all right?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer. What was I doing in a patch of weedy dirt by a curb, my head against a tree, my feet in the street?—and I felt damp, even wet, and terrified what that might mean. Blood? I took a deep breath and put my fingers to my cheeks, then looked at them. It was dark—how much time had passed? Then I heard thunder and noticed that the pavement was wet, that rain was falling, and felt a little calmer. I was hurt, confused, and wet, but not necessarily bloody.

Was that the same as being all right?

“I was afraid to move you, or leave you, but I’m going to go away for a second now and call nine-one-one. Okay? You understand what I’m saying?”

I tested my neck’s ability to rotate, half expecting my head to fall off as a result. Something wasn’t right with me. However, it wasn’t my neck, which creaked and groaned but worked. Now I could see to whom the voice belonged. “Five!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here. You were picking me up, don’t you remember? We were going to visit Woody in the hospital.”

“What happened?”

“I hoped you could answer that. I heard honking, then somebody screaming, and when I came out to check, you were on the curb and you wouldn’t answer me. Listen, I really should call the ambulance, so don’t move and—”

“No.” I was surprised at how sure I felt of this. I was positive that if I were seriously damaged, I’d have a sense of it at the core, know that my wiring was down, a feeling like that. But I felt only achy and bruised, superficially bashed, and I couldn’t bear the idea of being handled by paramedics, being strapped on a gurney, any of it. “I’m fine,” I said. “I don’t feel up to visiting Woody, though. I think I’ll just go home and take a warm bath.” I was filthy, in addition to achy. The earth around me was slowly mixing itself to mud, and I was a smeared mess.

“You’re not fine at all. You’re bruised and you’ve been unconscious. Of course you can’t visit the boy. You’d scare him to death. You obviously don’t remember what happened.”

I remembered all-encompassing, near-paralytic fear. I remembered hurting, and falling.

“That kind of amnesia means a concussion,” he said. “And your face is scraped and about to turn the color of spoiled beef. I can’t let you drive in this condition.”

I understood his logic. But his words also produced a sharp-edged sliver of hazily remembered fear. “I drove here,” I said. “They fixed my car.” I listened to my own words, knowing they were important, worth another experiment with head and neck motion. I felt a little more able to move this time, but the results were dismaying.
“My car!”
I cried out, understanding. “Where is it?”

He shrugged. “I thought maybe you’d parked it somewhere I couldn’t see.”

“They
took
it! They
stole
it!”

“Who are
they
?”

I shook my head. It wasn’t a great idea. I was suddenly very aware of the shape of my eye sockets, and of a rare variety of headache—socketache—rimming them. “A gorilla took it!”

Five said nothing. I could practically feel his anxiety skyrocket.

“Somebody in a gorilla mask, I mean.”

His relief was audible, exhaled breath and something near a chuckle of released tension.

“I was coming to get you,” I said, “and I opened the car door to get out and somebody—maybe several somebodies—hit me, and that’s what I remember.”

“You were carjacked.”

Carjacked is such a modern-sounding, almost romantic concept. Echoes of the frontier, masked bandits—not gorilla masks, either—Wells Fargo bags of gold, stagecoaches, hooves pounding in the night.

Being jacked sounded a whole lot better than being robbed. My car had been jacked. Had I also been jacked? Was that what these bruises were called? Why
Jack
?
Who was he?

Something dreadful had happened, and I was mulling semantics. Maybe I had suffered brain injury, after all.

“I’ll drive you to the police,” Five said. “After we visit the emergency room, and if they say it’s okay.”

I sputtered a protest. “I want to go home. Please. Now.”

“Go home? Can you?”

I stared at him blankly, which probably didn’t help the case for my mental okayhood. “Is this an existential surprise quiz? Or like Thomas Wolfe? As in I can’t go home again? I’m too tired for literary—”

“Do you have a house key?” he asked in the long-suffering voice of a wet and tired Good Samaritan.

“Sure. Why?” They had thrown my pocketbook out after me, and it lay in the dirt a few inches away. I groped for it, moving my head and body as little as possible. But before my fingertips made contact with the leather, I stopped trying. They’d taken my car, with the key still in the ignition. The key that was on a ring of all my keys, including the one to my front door. I felt still further violated. Robbed, jacked, battered, and locked out—while they, whoever they were, could get in and out of my home at will.

“Should I call a locksmith? Or a friend who has a spare?”

“I have a spare in the window box. In a little metal box in the dirt.”

He nodded. “Okay, then.”

“So I can go home?”

He shook his head. “Let a doctor look at you, take some X rays. I didn’t think women played macho games like this—don’t be a fool and run a risk like that. What if you’re bleeding internally?”

That is how we wound up at our original destination—University Hospital—after all, but in the emergency room, not Woody’s. Luckily, this was a different hospital and emergency room than I’d visited yesterday, although I was questioned about my scratched cheek and peculiar eyelashes. The E.R. doctor, a cute Malaysian with a great deal of energy and an indecipherable accent, cleaned my cuts and bumps, scanned and probed and looked through my skull via my eyes, her eyes, and a great sci-fi scanning machine. I tried not to think what portion of this high- and low-tech attention my insurance might pay because I already had several contiguous headaches and I didn’t need any more.

“She was unconscious,” Five said.

The diminutive doctor nodded. “Finned hullbet.”

What relevance had halibut, or any fish for that matter?

“Fainted!” Five finally said, his voice filled with the excitement of discovery. “Is that what you said? That she fainted?”

The doctor nodded vigorously. “Hull real bet. Scare.”

Scared. I’d fainted when I was hurt real bad. Got it.

“Bet!” she said again, looking sternly at Five. “Real bet! Cheek bet, too.”

“No,” I said. “Like I said, the cheek happened…another time.”

“Too much times!” She glared at him.

It took me a while to get it. “He had nothing to do with this!” I said. “He
rescued
me.”

“Good,” she said. Or maybe it was, “Like I really believe that. Another fool defending her abuser.” But she declared that I was only superficially damaged and I could go home. Or that’s what I think she said. Either that or she warned me that I only had a few minutes left to live and I might as well enjoy them in familiar surroundings. In either case, she let me leave, and she gave me a prescription for an enormous amount of painkillers. She was either setting me up as a drug dealer or assuming I was going to be around, feeling rotten, for a long time. Both options translated into having a future.

“You should get a second opinion,” Five said when we were back in his car. “They shouldn’t let doctors who can’t speak English deal with the public. Injured people need to know what’s going on. And who knows in what godforsaken rice paddy she was trained?”

“I got the message. I’m alive and likely to stay that way,” I said. “That came over loud and clear. And she had to pass her boards here, didn’t she?”

“I still don’t think she knew what she was doing,” he said huffily.

“Is that the sound of sexist horror? As in what could a girldoc possibly know?” I asked. Maybe it was ungrateful of me, given his TLC, but my knees—and their ability to jerk at the sound of a putdown—hadn’t been injured at all. And the rest of me was too weak to stop them.

He gritted his teeth and drove on. Right to the police station.

“Now this is silly,” I said. “Can’t I call this one in? Don’t they come to your house, like in the movies?”

“Old movies, I think,” he said. “Besides, we’re here. Get it over with. The sooner they know, the faster they can find it.”

“It’s a collector’s car,” I said sadly. “One of the most stolen models. I’ll never see it again. And I just paid the body shop. In cash.” But I nonetheless followed him in.

“Carjacked,” Five said from behind me. “Assaulted, too. You can see.”

“License number?” the policeman asked.

Oh, boy. I had always meant to learn it. I remembered a Z, and maybe a four. But I wasn’t really sure of either. Words make sense. Numbers and isolated letters don’t, didn’t stick even in my preconcussed brain. I’ve thought of getting a vanity plate just so I could remember the thing, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Much to my mortification, I had to dig through my wallet. I pulled out my driver’s license, which didn’t tell me what I wanted, and finally found my owner’s registration card. “There,” I said, pointing to my license number.

“You’ve had the car for how long?” Five asked as the cop filled in the form.

I tried to remember. It had been my brother-in-law’s in an early phase of his devolution from an interesting young man to a staid suburban lawyer. So how long ago was that? My injured head resorted to my mother’s no-numbers calculations. Had Sam sold it to me before my niece was born? Yes, because my sister was still working at Bloomingdale’s, getting her employee’s discount, and I bought a leather skirt through her just before I bought the car, which I remember, because of a guy I was dating then who… “Eight years, give or take a few,” I finally said. “A while.”