The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (46 page)

But before I struck the ground, while I was hurtling through the air, a strange thing happened. Everything slowed, as if I had been plunged underwater. There was even an underwater glow to the early evening light. And I realized at that moment that I had never—in a long life of visiting shady bars the world over—been in a bar fight. I had certainly never been thrown from a bar. I had been asked to leave once while stationed in Turkey, after a friend and I got into an altercation with some Dutch airmen on joint military maneuvers. But there had been no blows, no international incident to answer for. We were insulted, but also outnumbered and still sober enough to be easily persuaded.

Now, as I whispered through the air toward the hardest part of my new neighbor’s lawn, my eyes catching the unmoving POW flag, I thought, This is what it’s like. This is what it’s like to get your ass kicked in a bar fight and then thrown ingloriously out into the street.

I had been lucky until this day. But I would soon look back—to the moment right before she knocked on my door—and realize just how lucky I had truly been.

At the emergency room, business was booming. I hoped they’d see me right away, but once I stepped through the automatic sliding glass doors that opened with a
whoosh
and into the grip of the room, I knew it was hopeless. The place reeked of sickness and injury, and I was right in the middle of it, just another victim. Take a number; have a seat. The oddest thing was the hush of the crowded waiting room. Nothing but muted shuffles and whispers, the faint ringing of phones, and an occasional mewl of pain.

Despite the assortment of faces everywhere, no one seemed to be looking at anyone else, as if doing so would only confirm a dark prognosis. There was one exception, a small boy in a Florida Marlins baseball cap, who sat across from me. He gawked relentlessly at my face with all the wide-eyed, slack-jawed fascination of his first peek at a centerfold. I can’t say I blamed him. I was pressing a dripping baggie of ice onto my swollen jaw. Down the front of my shirt was a smattering of fresh blood. I must have looked like a roughed-up zombie.

“What are you in for?” I mumbled to the boy, trying to be humorous but probably only managing to be terrifying.

The boy turned away and yawned.

Harold hustled over from the reception area, deftly sidestepping a gurney being wheeled recklessly past him. He was holding a clipboard and, after taking a seat beside me, began to scribble in my name and address.

“Did they say how long?” I asked him.

He answered by smacking his lips and shrugging. “There was some kind of accident involving a bus, so it could be a while. Good thing you’re not so bad off.” This more or less matched his medical assessment from the moment he had collected me off the lawn and stuffed me into Vlad’s Fiat Strada, which was the only car in the cul-de-sac not disabled and which Vlad enthusiastically suggested we take because, as he said, “I am not to be involved.”

All the way to the hospital, Harold alternated between complaints about the battered car—“I guess this passes for luxury in Russia”—and a near obsessive insistence that I was going to be okay. His efforts to calm me only added to my concern. The more he said, “Really, you’re going to be fine,” the more I became convinced that I was as good as dead.

I removed the icepack from the side of my head and gestured toward the boy, whose eyes had migrated back to me. “I have a feeling he doesn’t think I’m going to be okay.”

Harold concentrated on the form. “You’re almost certainly not as bad as you feel.”

“Really? Because I
feel
like shit. Like every-bone-in-my-face-is-broken shit.”

“I’m really sorry. I should have expected some resentment on her part, but violence? Very strange.”

“I take it none of your homesick students assaulted anyone after moving onto campus.”

“You’d be surprised. I’ve seen many difficult patients in my day. In fact, the difficult ones were my specialty. There are several cases I’m consulting on now that—”

“Seriously, I think my jaw might be broken.”

He laughed. “You wouldn’t be talking if it were.”

I patted my pockets and realized I had lost my phone during the attack. “Did you call the police yet?”

“Let’s wait until the doctor sees you. My guess is you’re not as bad as you feel.”

“You’ve said that twenty times already.”

“You know—”

A woman screamed. The sound burst mournfully through the whooshing emergency room entrance and was loud enough that everyone in the waiting room collectively jumped. A gurney carrying a small child was wheeled through by two attendants. Running alongside was a woman in shorts, a bikini top, and flip-flops, who appeared to be limping slightly. “Please, someone, please!” she shouted. She was waving her arms and pointing, as if trying to direct the two attendants. All of them were swallowed up by another set of double doors. The waiting room resumed its hushed suffering.

It was the same everywhere, I thought. One of the starkest memories I had of Iraq occurred while I was attached to the medical group at the theater hospital. During a lull in American and British casualties, the local clinic transferred to us a girl of about ten who had been caught in crossfire and had suffered a mortal head wound. The doctors who patched her up said she wouldn’t live through the night. But she hung on for more than a week. Each day her mother was escorted in under guard and had to be told repeatedly that outbursts of any kind were forbidden. Yet whenever she laid her eyes on her daughter, she would scream and chant and pound the mattress for the child to wake.

I remember one night, late in the evening, as I made my rounds through the area, gathering up soiled sheets and scrubs, I paused beside the little girl’s bed. Around her head lay a halo of about a dozen stuffed animals, which a few nurses had left behind. I remember being flooded with yearning. I had never been married and had only dated one woman seriously and for only about six months. I never wanted children and even got a vasectomy when I was twenty-one. This act, I was later convinced, had greatly limited my ability to attract the opposite sex. Even when I stopped telling women about the elective operation, they still weren’t interested in any long-term relationship. The one woman I wanted to be free of, the one whom I had dated seriously for six months, shrugged when I told her I was unable to procreate the species and then asked me to pass the salt.

The taste of blood in my mouth snapped me back to the present. Harold was droning on beside me, and it wasn’t until he said the word
rape
that I perked up. I asked him to repeat what he just said.

“I said, ‘She’ll probably cry rape if you go to the authorities.’ Something to consider. Especially if your injuries aren’t too bad. Which they don’t appear to be. To be honest, contacting the police over this matter is probably exactly what she wants.”

I leaned over and whispered, “Harold, can you hear what I’m saying right now?”

“Of course.”

“Good. I’m going to make sure she’s arrested; then I’m going to sue the fuck out of her.”

I winced, my tongue having flopped over the bloody gap in my mouth where I had lost a tooth. I groaned as I thought about that tooth. How it had traveled with me on many journeys. Over fifty years it had been in my mouth, and now it was—where? In my stomach? On the floor of her house with my phone, the porcelain, and other assorted debris?

Harold sighed. “A shame you’ll have to take such drastic actions against a fellow war veteran.”

“She’s not a vet. Her husband is. He’s deployed, and if it makes you feel any better, I have no plans on having
him
arrested.”

He began to scribble on the hospital form again, but stopped. “We never talked about the war.”

“Why would we?”

“You might be surprised how I feel.”

“Maybe we’d both be surprised. Or maybe neither of us would give a shit how the other one feels.”

“Perhaps.” He set the pen down and adjusted his glasses nervously.

And that’s when it struck me, with the crystal clarity of a long-hidden truth suddenly revealed. “You know her, don’t you? You sonofabitch.”

He grimaced and shook his head. “It’s more complicated than that. Please don’t be upset.”

“I’m not upset. I’m just exhausted and missing a tooth, and my face is broken in about ten places. I mean, what’s there to be upset about? Now what the hell is going on?”

Harold sighed again and told me what he knew, which was a lot more than I did. The woman was a patient of a colleague, a former student of his. She was the widow of a vet—yes, her husband had been killed while deployed—but he didn’t know the details. She had been moved off base and didn’t have anywhere to stay. It was Harold who had volunteered the empty house and helped arrange for her to move in temporarily.

“Can you imagine if your significant other was lost forever?” he asked. “Especially in such a cruel and senseless war. Can you imagine such a thing? And then having nowhere to turn?”

“No,” I said, still struggling to control my anger and pain, “but maybe we should just stop talking about this.”

“Of course. But really, I had no idea she would react this way. In fact, I thought just the opposite.”

I wasn’t seen until late in the evening, having been triaged to the lowest rung of the injury ladder. The bus accident had been serious, but no fatalities. The doctor who examined me was wearing a white coat with a splotch of blood above his nametag that resembled the state of New Jersey. He apologized profusely for the long wait until he found out that I was not in fact one of the bus crash victims. He turned indignant and dismissive, telling me that my wounds were superficial, and offered vague instructions about what to do if I developed symptoms of a concussion.

When I told him I had lost my tooth, he confirmed what I already knew by peering halfheartedly into my mouth. “You bet you did,” he said. “You’ll need to have an oral surgeon look at that. Just don’t let them talk you into a porcelain bridge for any back teeth. Go with metal, and you’ll thank me later.”

After filling a prescription for Tylenol 3, Harold and I were back in the Popovs’ Strada and headed home. “What did I tell you?” he said, as if he’d won a bet. “In and out, good as new.”

“Like it never happened,” I said, trying to lay on the sarcasm.

But he didn’t catch on. Instead he grunted and fought the gearshift, grinding it mercilessly. “Who owns a Fiat these days?” he said. “Honestly.”

“At least the tires work,” I said.

For the next few weeks I simmered, I watched, and occasionally I felt better. I also steered clear of Harold, even though he called frequently and left updates on my answering machine about our neighbor or, as he called her, “my student’s patient.” She was improving, he assured me. She had not missed a single session. What’s more, although she’d clearly become more reclusive, she hadn’t bothered anyone.

I agreed with the reclusive part. Only once since I returned from the hospital had I seen her, and that was just a glimpse of her shadow, staring out the front bay window of the bungalow, watching the comings and goings in the cul-de-sac as though it were the entire world in micro and she its sentinel. And although her features were lost behind the glass, I couldn’t imagine her face with anything other than that huge psychotic grin.

I myself made a few inquiries about her background, calling a flight surgeon friend who turned out to be quite aware of the unfortunate demise of the Marine in question. In fact, he was the last U.S. military pilot shot down over Iraq. The pilot’s call sign was “Buster,” and as the name would suggest, he was a wholesome, stand-up guy and a worthwhile Marine. He had been shot down near Balad while laying down covering fire for a squad of Army Rangers. Before anyone could get to his body, insurgents had swarmed over the wreckage and spirited away most of what remained. The Defense Department had identified him by DNA left at the crash site—mostly blood and shreds of his flight suit.

“What about his wife?” I asked my friend.

He paused thoughtfully on the phone. “Didn’t know he had one.”

“She’s my neighbor.” I almost added,
She beat me up
, but assumed it would invite a whole new series of questions.

“It’s sad,” he said, and his voice turned bitter. “He never had a chance to punch out. Pararescue had boots on-site within twenty miles of the crash. Those fucking
hajis
were just a little quicker. What the PJs could get back wasn’t much, but it was enough to tell he was KIA.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yep. That’s the guy to talk to about it.”

After the call, the picture of a somber funeral with a near-empty coffin stayed with me and cooled my resentment of the woman. I even felt a bit guilty.

That is, until a day later, when one of the Popovs’ dogs turned up missing. Anna arrived at my door in a state, shaking and runny-eyed, her hands clasped together. In broken English, she explained that she had let her dachshunds out into the front yard to do their business. Only one was there when she went to call them back inside. “They are never leaving the yard, never!” Then she shivered and sheepishly extended a torn sheet of paper in my direction. “Please to tell me,” she said. “What does these message mean?”

Scrawled on the paper, in black capital letters, were the words
MANY DOGS HAVE DIED HERE.

“It came in mailbox,” Anna said.

“Anyone could have put it there,” I said, realizing I sounded just like Harold, which prompted me to add, “Even
Harold.
Have you seen the way he drives?”

Still, the look on my face must have given Anna the answer she was looking for. She spun around and ran back across the lot toward her house, whimpering in Russian.

I left a message on Harold’s cell phone to call me.

He showed up on my doorstep the next morning, a Saturday, with two cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I stepped out just in time to see Vlad and Anna climbing into the cab of a U-Haul truck, their surviving mutt yelping from a carrier between them. The day was overcast and windless, which spoke of a coming storm the local stations had been talking up all week. The trees in the yards and at the entrance of the cul-de-sac looked subdued in the gloom.