We Are Here (34 page)

“Tally-Anne.”

So faint. As if the moment of death had thrown the person so far away, and into such blackness, that it had taken him twenty years to haul his way back home again. Traveling on foot, for the most part, even on hands and knees, except maybe for that helping hand over the last part, a ride into Rockbridge in the back of George Lofland’s battered Toyota SUV—a ride from someone the deceased had known and drunk with, back in the day.

“I’m coming,” she said.

She closed the door of the trailer and walked down the road. Skirted the chain at the end and set up along the trail through the long grasses.

It took a few minutes to get to where the track veered left, following the ridge above the rocky sides down to the river. This started off passable but soon became choked with low bushes and tangling brambles. Talia stayed high for the time being, however—until the trees started to gather it’d be easier than finding a way to scramble down the ten-foot slope. It should be easier to spot him from up here, too, whoever he might be.

Who was she kidding? She knew who it was, or who she wanted it to be. Why else would she be out here at night, in her best dress, as the wind gathered above and it started to rain? She walked fast, shoving bushes out of her way. She could feel something, knew there was something up ahead.

“Tally-Anne.”

She started moving faster still. About a minute later she heard another sound, however, mixed in with the wind but seeming to come from the same direction.

It was a laugh, she thought. But if so, it had sounded high-pitched, almost like a woman’s.

Talia hesitated. What if it
wasn’t
Ed’s voice she was hearing? What if some dumb-ass kids with evil intent had come in her home when she was at work, flicked through old diaries, and found the name she used to go by set down in some maudlin recollection of how much fuller her life had once been?

What if this was someone’s cruel idea of a game?

But then she heard her name again. She started to trot, elbowing branches aside as the ridge started to get into the edges of the forest. She couldn’t tell whether the voice was coming from up along the ridge or down from the narrow, jagged path by the creek. It was along here somewhere, though, and she was getting closer, too.

“Tally-Anne. I’m over here.”

She started to run in earnest. Her feet caught in the brambles and she nearly tripped, but she kept running faster through the undergrowth, deeper into the trees. She thought maybe he was down there in the cutting, looking for her, too tired to make it all the way back into her arms and trusting her to get to him. She was worthy of that trust.

Then she saw him.

Thirty yards away, down in the dip. A tall man with long hair. She called out his name, again and again, running even faster, telling him she was coming, waiting for a break in the bushes before she could start to make her way down the slope to him.

But then someone stepped out from behind a tree right in front of her. It was a woman. Tall, painfully thin, with terribly red hair.

She started to smile, some dry, stretched movement of her lips away from dark teeth, and then she disappeared.

Talia screamed and lost her footing and started to slip, and when one leg got caught behind the remnants of an old tree stump, she lost her balance altogether and there was nothing to do except fall.

She fell nothing like a star.

Dreams are real as long as they last.

Can we say more of life?

Havelock Ellis

“I’m fine,” I said.

“John, you are so
not
fine.”

I repeated that I was fine. I was aware I was saying it for something like the fourth or fifth time, and groggily, and that neither was helping my case. Being able to make this simple opinion understood seemed very important, however.

“John … oh Jesus.
Look
at you.”

“I’m fine,” I said. Then I passed out.

When I opened my eyes again Kristina was still sitting by the bed. A nurse—the same one who’d been there all along, I believed, though the room was pretty dark and I wasn’t entirely sure—was standing to one side.

“And … he’s back,” the nurse said cheerfully, checking her watch. “Barely five minutes that time. Your boy ain’t one to take shit lying down, huh?”

“Hey,” I said thickly.

“Tell me one more time that you’re fine,” Kris said in a low, sincere tone, “and I’ll punch you myself.”

“Okay,” I said. “To be honest, it kind of hurts.”

“What does?” asked the nurse.

“Pretty much everything.”

“That’s good.”

She gave me a looking over and got me to follow her finger while she moved it across various planes in front of my eyes and then marched out into the corridor to go about her business, evidently satisfied I was no closer to death than I deserved.

The last thing I remembered before waking up in the hospital was seeing—from my floor-level perspective—Reinhart leaving the restaurant. He had not stabbed a warning finger in my face or delivered gritty parting shots. The guys who do that learned their violence from television and their threats are like muscles acquired from the gym—they look good but lack the steel that comes from being tempered by real life. I was now ruefully convinced Reinhart had served his apprenticeship at the knee of people who were not interested in how things looked, but concerned rather with putting their enemies on the ground hard and fast. On it, or underneath. I knew he would have relented only because that kind of man has the sense to stop short of committing actual murder in front of fifty civilian witnesses—and that he would want very much to finish what he’d started, in private.

Mario’s sister hadn’t waited for an ambulance but drove me the twenty blocks up to Bellevue herself, once Jimmy and Paulo had dragged me out through tables of fascinated diners and laid me across the backseat of her car. She told me this when I woke, briefly, the first time. She also said she’d called Kris and that the nurse believed I wasn’t going to die, probably, so she had to get back to work; it was a busy night and now they were down a waiter, for God’s sake, and when it came to paying the hospital bills I was on my own, of course.

Kris was there when next I surfaced. And, thankfully, still here this third time.

I pushed myself up in bed. “Where were you?”

“I’ll tell you later,” she said. “There’s … there’s a guy who wants to talk to you.”

From my newly elevated position I could see a man in the doorway. I thought for a moment there was someone else out in the dimly lit corridor beyond, but I didn’t get a good look.

“Who are you?” I asked.

The man came and stood at the end of the bed. He pulled out a wallet and showed NYPD ID that said his name was Detective Raul Brooke.

“Okay,” I said. “So what do you want?”

“For you to tell me what happened.”

“I got beat up.”

“That’d be obvious from about thirty feet away, sir. I was hoping for more in the way of detail.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Uh-huh. A witness gave us a name, so I don’t need you to volunteer that. I’d simply like you to explain the nature of your encounter with Mr. Reinhart.”

“Personal.”

“Uh-huh,” he said again. “Your assailant is known to us, Mr. Henderson. You are not the first person to undergo an entanglement with him, though actually you came out of it better than some.”

“I got in his face over something. He came to the place where I work and got the jump on me. That’s all.”

“If you know his name,” Kristina said, “why can’t you just arrest him?”

“Experience has shown that casual witnesses have a pattern of losing their memory when it comes to this man,” Brooke said. “I’m wondering whether your boyfriend might be made of stronger stuff.”

“It was a private disagreement,” I said.

The cop smiled tightly and put his notebook away. “Right,” he said. “That’s similar to what the other three said, the people we know had ‘private disagreements’ with him. One has disappeared. The other is in a wheelchair. He lives in a facility in Queens. His son visits him every week, but his dad has no clue who he is.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Right,” the detective said again. He seemed like a man who’d boiled his vocal responses down to simple units, which he could deploy as and when necessary. He put something on the arm of Kristina’s chair and walked toward the door, but stopped as he reached the corridor.

“The third person died. Hard. Of course, we can’t tie that to Reinhart, or I wouldn’t be here trying to get sense out of the next asshole in line.”

I didn’t say anything.

“This person was a woman,” the cop added, more wearily. “And your friend was smart enough to cut away the parts of her that might have held traces of his DNA. So the bottom line is, we got three people who can’t help get this guy what he deserves … and one who can. You.”

He flicked his thumb at Kristina. “Your friend has my card. She’s probably got the smarts to be able to read the words on it, too. If
you
grow a brain anytime soon, Mr. Henderson, give me a call.”

He left.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“No, you’re not.”

I pulled the sheet off the lower half of my body. This triggered ricochets of pains across my chest and back. My first attempt to swing my legs off the bed did not go smoothly and made me feel nauseous. “Yeah, I am.”

“Stay
there
.”

“Kris, you heard the guy.”

“Yes, I
did
. I was worried you hadn’t. I was wondering if maybe you’d got hit in the head so often that you lost all ability to hear what the hell people are saying to you, you
asshole
.”

Then she had her hands on my shoulder and was either shaking me or trying to push me back down. It wasn’t easy to tell which, but I held her until the first rage or fear was spent and eventually got my arms around her back and pulled her in to me. That hurt too, but it was a different kind of pain, and I held her as long as she’d let me, until she’d stopped trying to shout in my ear and was letting me kiss her on the cheek, and then doing the same thing back, reluctantly, and still angrily, but hard.

Finally she pulled away, and I was shocked to see her eyes were wet. I have never seen Kris cry.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s not your fault.”

“Pushing Reinhart’s buttons today was dumb. But that cop sounded serious and that’s why I’m out of here. It won’t be hard for Reinhart to find out where I am and right now I’m not in a position to—”

“John, you haven’t seen what you look like. You haven’t talked to the nurse. You’re
concussed
.”

“All the more reason to get home.”

“He’s right,” said a voice.

I looked at the door to discover a tall girl in a black coat standing out in the dark corridor, the girl who seemed to have been the catalyst to pull us into all of this, whatever “this” was.

Kristina looked as guilty as hell and I guessed I knew where she’d been that evening. “Lizzie—what are you
doing
here?”

“I followed you,” the woman said. “It’s what we do.”

“John should
stay here
. And talk to that policeman.”

Lizzie shook her head. “Those would be mistakes.”

Kristina went out into the corridor. They went back and forth for a while, which gave me the opportunity to slide awkwardly out of bed, wrench myself out of the gown, find my clothes, and get dressed. Getting out of the gown revealed how bruised and scuffed my chest was. Climbing into my clothes suggested that in my current state I could probably be knocked over by a toddler, or a boisterous mouse. I stuck to the task, however, moving like a puppet with tangled strings. I picked up the cop’s business card and stuffed that in my pocket, too.

“So,” I said when I was done and had lurched out into the corridor to join them. “How do we get out of this place? I’m afraid I have no idea.”

“John, for God’s
sake
…”

“I’m dressed and it hurt and I’m not getting undressed again.” I meant to say more but got light-headed and had to lean against the wall.

“Christ,” she said. “Okay, let’s go.”

The corridor was in night mode, periodically lit by dim lights. There was no sign of the nurse. Lizzie held up a hand to tell us to stay where we were. She hurried to the intersection and looked both ways, then gestured for us to follow. I wasn’t sure why I was taking direction from her, but if it meant I could get out of the hospital I was prepared to go along with it for now.

At the intersection we found a nurse’s station, empty, and a sign pointing down a long corridor toward the elevators. The longest of the corridors, of course.

We started along it, but then Lizzie slowed, twisting her head around in short, abrupt movements, as if listening for something. Whatever it was, she eventually seemed to catch it.

She bit her lip. “Go,” she said.

Kris hesitated, caught between wanting to get me out and wanting to know what was going on. “What is it?”

“It’s … just go,” Lizzie muttered, setting off down the side corridor. “Go somewhere safe.”

But Kristina followed the girl as she hurried away, and I limped after her. Every three yards along this corridor was a door to an individual room. All had been left slightly ajar, presumably to allow monitoring staff to poke their heads in during the night. For no obvious reason, Lizzie approached the door about halfway along and then froze outside, hand held up toward the door as if about to push it open.

She was so unnaturally still that for a moment it seemed as if she could never have moved at all, but was something seen as a layer over the world, like a particular vivid memory or daydream. Then she was in movement again, gently pushing.

We reached the doorway as she stepped in. It was dark inside, with only a low glow from a short fluorescent tube halfway up the far wall.

On the left was a bed. In it lay a man, propped up. He was asleep, breathing raggedly. He was pale and bloated and had plastic tubes going into one wrist and one nostril and it did not seem likely that he was in the hospital for something minor. This was a man whose body was at war against him. His body, and time.