Ryan Thomas: The Summer I Died

Two ambulances arrived shortly after, and the paramedics put both me and Officer Teddy on gurneys and ran around like beheaded chickens trying to figure out the best way to stop our bleeding. As they laid me down, the second cop suggested cuffing me but Teddy talked him out of it, relaying his already-failed attempt to do the same thing. A third, fourth and fifth cop arrived on the scene, then a county medical examiner and a meat wagon. Finally came the chief, who went about waving orders to his men and making sure more ambulances were on the way.

First thing they did was close off the street and cover Skinny Man’s body with a sheet, after which they covered up the body parts I had tossed about. Together, with guns raised, they entered the house and searched for persons unknown that Teddy had told them I said were inside.

A couple of minutes after they went in, bitching about the ghastly smell in the living room, one of the officers came running out and threw up on the lawn. He started screaming, “Oh my God, oh my God.” Then the other cop, the one who’d shot me, came running out behind him with his shirt over his face and his eyes shut, and sprinted to the EMTs.

“Forget them, forget them,” he said, pointing at me and Officer Teddy. “We need you down there right now! She’s still alive. She’s still alive. Hurry!”

The EMTs grabbed their toolboxes full of needles and bandages and took off like they were on the front line. The puking cop walked over to me slowly, and with chunks of half digested food on his chin grabbed my chest and said, “Who is she?”

“Jamie.”

He squeezed my shirt in his fist so hard I could see his arm shaking from the strain. “Why?” he said, his face red from throwing up. He was crying, tears running down his cheeks, though it could have been from losing his breakfast and not the sight of the butchered girl in the basement. “Why?”

I didn’t know why. Because everyone has a purpose, right? Because we’re all part of God’s master plan, a master plan that lets evil men take away the lives of innocent people, that lets some of us live while our friends and loved ones die before our eyes. Or maybe because God’s just up there rolling some dice, using us as tokens in a universal board game. Or maybe it’s bad luck, or maybe it’s good luck, or maybe shit just happens and you deal with it. Or maybe the dice are loaded so your number never comes up, or maybe the game is fixed. Who knows?

Jamie was cut to pieces, chained up in a basement, and I had no answer.

The cop let go of me and walked back toward the house to do what he could. The chief came back and questioned Teddy for a few minutes. I heard them talking about gunshots and bullets and who did what. Teddy pointed to me a lot and pointed to Skinny Man and the dog corpse on the lawn. Then the chief came over to me.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Roger.”

“Roger what?”

“Roger Huntington.”

“You want to tell me what the hell is going on here?”

I told him as much as I could, as I much as I would allow myself to remember, which didn’t amount to a whole bunch. I was mostly non-responsive, my mind still wandering around the West Coast. Teddy finally asked the chief to call it quits and get me to the hospital. But first the EMTs came out with something on a stretcher, something that resembled a giant cooked marshmallow wearing a Jamie mask, all done up with oxygen tubes and IV drips. One of them was carrying a medical cooler, and out of the top of it flopped a hand with painted fingernails. They were moving that stretcher as fast as they could, lifted it up into the other ambulance and sped away with screeching tires.

The medical examiner came out with the other EMTs, the ones who’d been busy bandaging me up, with the kind of stares you see on men who’ve just walked away from a six-car pile up. He came over to the chief and said, “We’re going to need forensics down here, and tell them to bring some shovels.”

Jamie would die two days later in the hospital with my parents at her side, both of them weeping and cursing God. I stayed in the same hospital, but didn’t see them as much, or so I felt. Eventually the story came out about what really happened. Skinny Man’s backyard was dug up and nine bodies were uncovered, though it took several days to match some of the bones to the correct bodies. They found his wife and daughter among them, as well as Mystery Woman, two in hiking gear, some others. They found bones: adult bones, kid bones, lots of bones they couldn’t match up to any bodies. They also found Tooth.

They showed me photos of all the corpses and asked me to identify whoever I could, though aside from Mystery Woman the only one I said I knew was Tooth. I told them how Mystery Woman died and they confirmed the story with the M.E. Then they too left me alone. The only time I left the hospital was for Jamie’s and Tooth’s funerals, which were closed casket. Then I had to come back to the psych ward for more “counseling.”

My dreams were filled with the ghosts of the dead, and I had a lot of trouble sleeping without jumping every time I heard a nurse walk by jingling keys. Many nights I would just lay awake and try not to remember the carnage I had seen, try not to think about Tooth and Jamie. How far away my parents’ bed seemed, or any safe haven for that matter.

I guess to believe everybody has a purpose in life, you’ve got to believe that there’s even a cosmic plan to begin with. Which means you’ve got to believe in God, or some other higher power, something that is working toward an ultimate goal, or at least working toward the continuation of life. And if each person does have a purpose-like those people buried behind the house, like Skinny Man himself-to what end does it serve? I lived, unharmed save for a couple of bruises and some dog bites and cuts, though my mental state was the stuff of comic books. But if my whole purpose in life was to kill the man who murdered my sister and friend, what was left? Was the rest of my life meaningless? Or had I yet to fulfill my true reason for living? Of course, like I said, all this introspection only mattered if you believed in something higher.

This is what I thought about as I lay in that hospital bed, day after day after day. This is what I still think about, as I fight to stay awake most nights, as I try to avoid the nightmares of that summer, pinching myself to ward off sleep. My purpose. All of our purposes. The afterlife. God. Why I am still alive, and why the dice never rolled my number, and why I had even taken them to begin with. I think about superheroes and villains, about good and evil, about strong and weak, always wondering what it means for me. And I think about that other thing, which makes it all the more confusing and urgent. And yet, makes it all make sense, somehow.

When they dug up Tooth’s body, he was wearing his Red Sox cap.