Sisters of the Road (2 page)

I nodded, numb, and watched him disappear through the door with Rosalie. “Come on,” I said to Trish. “Come with me and tell them how it happened.”

“I’m not talking to the police,” she said, squeezing herself fearfully away from me.

“You listen to me.” I blew up suddenly. “Your girlfriend’s seriously hurt… for godssakes, why didn’t you tell me right away something had happened to her, instead of waiting until we were halfway to Seattle?”

She said nothing and refused to look at me, but blackish tears ran down her face. I got into the back seat. “I don’t mean to yell at you, Trish, but it’s important. Were you with her when it happened? Was it a… customer of hers? If you could give them a description, anything, a car license number—they could look for him…”

“You the lady who brought the girl in?” asked another orderly outside the car. “Can you come to the desk and answer some questions?”

“You stay right here,” I told Trish. “I’ll be back in a minute and we’ll talk some more.”

I went back into the emergency room and gave my name and address. I told them where I’d picked up the two girls and that I hadn’t known Rosalie was hurt until at least fifteen minutes later.

“Just off Pacific Highway South,” repeated the nurse and looked at me. She knew about the Green River murders too. “The police should be here shortly. And what about the other girl? Is she all right? She wasn’t hurt at all?”

I realized I didn’t know. “She seems kind of stunned,” I said. “She doesn’t want to come in, or talk about it.”

“We can give her something,” said the nurse. “What’s her name?”

“Trish.”

“Age?”

“Seventeen?”

The nurse looked depressed. “I hate to see it.”

The orderly who’d first brought Rosalie in came through the swinging doors that led to the procedure room. I went over. “How is she?”

“Not good,” he said, with a blank kindness that showed he’d been running on high for too long. “She hasn’t come to and she’s lost a lot of blood.” He went to the desk and said something in a low voice to the nurse. Then a new ambulance roared up with lights flashing and sirens wailing, and he was out the door.

For the first time I looked around the waiting room. It seemed full of elderly and homeless people seeking medical attention, or just trying to get out of the cold. They sat in their worn, ragged coats and tired shoes, with plastic bags and stuffed pillow cases at their feet. More anxious, more restless were the friends and relatives of victims, who paced back and forth, looked at their watches, said the same reassuring things over and over to each other and kept going up to the desk to ask if there was any news yet.

“Are you Miss Nilsen?” A uniformed cop and a plainclothes detective had come up behind me. “Mind if we ask you some questions?”

There was nowhere to sit so we stood in a corner. Such was the fear, worry and depression in the room that hardly anyone bothered to pay attention to us.

I told them what I’d told the nurse—that I’d taken my sister to the airport, stopped to get some gas and had made a wrong turn. It was a couple blocks off the strip. The Bella Vista. I didn’t know what room the girls had come out of.

“Any other cars around? Any people?” They pressed me quietly and thoroughly.

I asked, “Do you think this may have some connection to the Green River murders?”

The cop shrugged. “You never know. It may have just been some guy who was mad at getting ripped off by two teenage hookers. They were working together, it looks like.”

“You’re suggesting that maybe she deserved it?”

The more politic detective said somewhat wearily, “No, of course not.” It was clear he’d pegged me as some kind of commie feminist and didn’t want to argue. “Can we see the other girl now? She’s still in your car?”

“Yes.” But I felt protective of Trish suddenly. What if they wanted to take her down to the station? What would happen to her there? She’d been so upset—she needed kindness and sympathy—not an insensitive, offensive grilling. I’d just have to stay with her somehow.

Through the darkness and falling snow I pointed out the Volvo. The headlights were still on, but it looked empty. “She must be lying down,” I said, flinging open the back door. There was plenty of blood, but no Trish. And my bag, with my wallet and everything?

“Looks like she’s skipped,” said the cop.

“Lose anything?” asked the detective, watching my face.

Damned if they were going to get the satisfaction of knowing that Trish had ripped me off. “No.” I turned off the lights and noticed with relief that at least the keys were still in the ignition. I took them out. What a fool I’d been. Driver’s license, checkbook, Sears credit card, and two tickets to the Laurie Anderson concert … at least I still had my glasses; they were on my nose. Most depressing was the loss of the day’s bank deposit for Best Printing. In the frenzy of helping Penny get ready to leave I hadn’t managed to get to the bank in time. It wasn’t a lot of money, but we still couldn’t afford to lose it. I’d have to make the cash up myself and put stops on the checks tomorrow. June wasn’t going to be too pleased.

“We may be getting in touch with you again,” said the detective, and read me my address and phone to make sure he’d gotten it right. “And if you run into that girl again—see if you can get her name. Or give me a call and tell me where you’ve seen her.”

“Or if you want to report anything stolen,” said the cop.

I went back into the hospital, shivering. The waiting room was even more crowded than before, and had a wet, rank smell to it. I asked for news of Rosalie and got nothing, so I went to the pay phone and called Miranda’s floor upstairs. She came down right away, sympathetic, but with that same supercharged, overworked but holding-it-all-together efficiency I’d noticed in everyone on the staff.

I told her what was going on.

“All this has happened since I saw you at the airport two hours ago?” For a moment she was the incredulous girl Penny and I used to tease on the grade school playground, then she became Miranda the nurse again, impervious to bad news. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

She went to the desk and exchanged a few words with the nurse, then slipped through the big swinging doors. In five minutes she was back.

“She was hit on the back of the head with a heavy blunt instrument, a crowbar or tire iron, something like that. Her skull is fractured and there’s severe trauma to both hemispheres of the brain. I’m afraid that if she does survive…” Miranda didn’t finish, and I filled in the words to myself: paralyzed, a vegetable.

Miranda put an arm around me. “I’m so sorry, Pam—but you should know that even if you’d called an ambulance right away, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Does she have any family?”

“No one knows what her last name is. She didn’t have an ID.”

“What monster could have done something like that?” She shivered. “I’ve got to get back to my floor, it’s busy up there. If you want to stay, give me another call in an hour and I’ll come down.”

“Thanks, Miranda.”

I paced at first, then found an empty seat next to an old woman who was mumbling something about canaries taking over the world, and who stank of urine and unwashed clothes. It wasn’t so much that I thought Trish would come back—though I certainly didn’t quite stop hoping she might, as much for my wallet and the deposit as for wanting to know she cared about Rosalie—but that I obscurely and tenaciously felt Rosalie needed someone there, sending her strength, mourning the loss of her future. If it couldn’t be her mother or father, sisters or brothers, it would have to be me, a stranger she hadn’t even been able to talk to.

I waited forty-five minutes and was just about to call Miranda when the brisk orderly came through the swinging doors and looked around. I sensed somehow he was looking for me and I went over to him.

“I’m sorry to tell you,” he said, and then paused uncharacteristically. Pain surfaced in his eyes and then was controlled again. “The girl you brought in. She’s dead.”

B
Y THE TIME I GOT HOME
it was past two in the morning. No one was up to greet me, just as there had been no one to call and tell I’d be late. At the late age of thirty, I was living alone for the first time.

Last summer I’d moved out of the home I’d shared for years with Penny and our two housemates. At first it had been exciting to set up house by myself. The apartment I’d found was a spacious one in an old ivy-covered brick building on Capitol Hill. It was on the fourth floor and the living room window had a lavish western view of Queen Anne Hill and Elliott Bay. I’d watched sunset after sunset all through the summer and fall, and life had seemed, if not perfect, then more than tolerable. The space and the sunsets went together with a sense of independence less tinged with melancholy than I’d dreaded. I’d bought plants and put up posters and learned to cook for one from the section in the
Enchanted Broccoli Forest
called “Light Meals for Nibblers.”

But by the end of fall my solitude no longer seemed quite so adventurous. Starting in November I found myself going through an unusually promiscuous phase. My affair with Hadley last summer had removed me from my old circle of heterosexual friends, and I threw myself into a string of one-night and one-week stands with women, out of curiosity and need, and as if to confirm all my worried sister’s worst fears about lesbians and their rampantly unstable sex lives.

Over a period of two months I slept with four women—well, maybe that wasn’t so promiscuous; for plenty of people that was a way of life. For Carole at the shop for instance, who went through relationships like new breakfast cereals. But for me, with my vague ideas about commitment, who’d had maybe four boyfriends and Hadley my whole life, it felt pretty daring. I didn’t regret it—I’d learned a lot—but I was thinking about taking a breather. For one thing, it was all so complicated: not starting up, no that was easy, but maintaining an interest, and even worse, breaking off.

Not that most of the women weren’t very nice people—Betty was a classical guitarist and played me a little Bach chaconnes and gaviots while I ate my breakfast; Andrea made me wholewheat pastries and breads until I felt like a grain terminal (batches of muffins still kept turning up forlornly on my doorstep); Dandi gave wonderful massages and Devlin told great stories. But somehow none of them were quite the ticket. After a shorter or longer period I’d find myself yawning and struggling to keep a conversation going, avoiding places where I might meet one of them, and looking around eagerly for someone new, someone who might be
the one.
I was afraid of admitting to myself what I knew was true—my time with Hadley, short as it had been, had spoiled me. Not only was that the sort of relationship I wanted, but that’s
who
I still wanted.

I never talked about her to anyone, didn’t know how to talk about her. I didn’t have the words to describe what I’d felt with her. The nearest I could come was the phrase, “We were so regular together.” Sometimes I wondered if it had ever really happened. I would have liked to ask her, but she wasn’t even in Seattle any longer. Her father had had a stroke and she’d gone back to Houston to help take care of him. A postcard with a skyscraper skyline had arrived one day in December and its message had been as uninspiring as its view: “I miss Seattle, but not the rain. My accent’s coming back with a vengeance. You’d probably laugh to hear me.”

Nothing about giving me the opportunity.

I went around my apartment, nervously turning on lights, trying not to think too much about what had happened at the hospital. But the image of blood running down Rosalie’s face, of Trish’s black-rimmed, frightened eyes wouldn’t leave me. They were so young to be on their own, so young to be using their sexuality, and used for it.

Rosalie was dead now, and Trish was running. From who, from what? From me, because I’d pushed her? I should have handled it differently, should have handled the whole thing differently. But I’d been afraid of them, hadn’t really looked at them. Just hadn’t seen them.

In the kitchen I opened the refrigerator out of habit rather than hunger. In a flash Ernesto was there, roused from whatever deep feline sleep he’d been enjoying by the prospect of food. Ernesto was Ray’s cat and I had promised to take care of him while Ray was away. It had been a weak moment and I was regretting it.

Ernesto was as profusely furred as a mohair sweater and as solid as a tank; big as a dog, but without a dog’s friendly, trusting eyes. Ernesto’s gaze was superior, distant and calculating. Even during the time Ray and I had been involved I hadn’t liked Ernesto much. He had a way of ignoring me when I tried to get his attention that made me feel foolish—and a way of being physically aggressive just when I was least interested, when I was trying to sleep, for instance. Now I faced six weeks of his company, a fact that didn’t seem to excite him either. For when it became obvious that he wasn’t going to be fed, he contemplated me severely and gloomily for a moment before turning and padding heavily back to whatever dark recess of the apartment he’d emerged from.

Next to food, sleep was most interesting to Ernesto—and after a few more minutes of bleakly staring at the contents of my refrigerator—old tofu, an open can of tomato paste, six bottles of salad dressing and three withered carrots—I decided he was right and went to bed.

W
HEN I WOKE UP FIVE HOURS
later the world had that remarkable stillness that comes after a storm, when everything is embedded in a white as soft as cotton. The sky was opalescent with a few rosy clouds and the city had a unified look only a snow cover can give. There was almost no traffic; from the fourth floor I couldn’t even hear the scrunch of boots or the scrape of shovels, just here and there the rumble of an engine trying to start. For a moment, before I remembered last night’s events, I felt only peace and a childish wish to stay home from school and take my sled over to the park.

Then I started rooting around in the closet for long underwear, heavy socks and boots. I found my old yellow-striped knit cap with the white pompom and the blue scarf and mitten set my mother had given me the Christmas before the car accident that had killed her and my father. Penny had gotten a red version; every year our mother gave us some little thing that matched. At the age of five we’d liked our gifts, at ten refused them, at fifteen returned them to the store, and at twenty finally accepted them. Now the blue scarf and mittens reminded me of both my mother and Penny and I was glad to wear them.