Lisa Unger - Die For You

“Let’s all try to pull it together. Everything’s going to be fine.”

He had four sets of uncertain eyes on him. I saw him muster his strength.

“It is,” he said brightly. “I promise.”

IT WAS HOURS more before I was treated-a deep gash at my temple cleaned, stitched, and bandaged. I had a severe concussion, according to the very young doctor who attended to me. He warned me to care for the wound, take my antibiotics and rest.

“Or pay the consequences. Head injuries are very tricky. Not to be taken lightly.”

He was frighteningly pale, the skin on his hands nearly translucent, the veins beneath, thick blue ropes. He looked as if he lived day and night beneath the harsh fluorescent bulbs.

We were still in the emergency room, but in one of those curtained-off little areas no bigger than a shoe box, that same cop sitting outside. I could see his bulky shadow through the white gauzy barrier. The detectives who were supposed to come talk to me still hadn’t arrived.

“A blow to the temple can be fatal,” the doctor said gravely. “You’re very lucky.”

I didn’t have the will to answer him. My sister sat beside me on a tiny, uncomfortable-looking stool, holding my hand. Erik had taken the kids to his mother’s and afterward was planning to see what he could find out about Marcus, about the office break-in, if you could call it that. An odd calm had come over me; it was more like a brownout, the result of a brain short-circuit. You can only handle so much pain, fear, grief before your head switches off for a while. That’s how the psyche handles trauma. A clinical psychiatrist had told me this once during a research interview I was conducting for one of my novels; it made sense to me then. I understood it better now.

“Are you all right?” Linda asked when the doctor left. She’d repeated this question every fifteen minutes like a nervous tic since I’d regained consciousness.

“Can you just stop asking me that?”

“Sorry,” she said, straightening out her back, then arching it into a stretch.

“You sound like Mom.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, raising her palms in the air a little and then letting them drop to her thighs. “I’m sorry . You don’t have to get mean about it.”

“Did Erik call?” I asked.

She took her phone from her pocket and checked the screen, though we both knew it hadn’t rung. She shook her head. I opened my mouth but she interrupted me.

“I just tried Marc’s cell and your apartment five minutes ago.”

I closed my eyes. This wasn’t happening. I saw her face again, the blonde. What had she said exactly? Marcus is wrong about you. You’re going to be trouble, aren’t you? Every time I heard her voice in my head, I felt sicker and more despairing. Another phrase that was still burned in my memory started echoing as well, as much as I’d tried to forget it: I can still feel you inside me .

“That woman,” my sister said, reading my mind as usual. It has always been like this with us-calling each other simultaneously, finishing each other’s sentences, buying each other the same gifts. “Are you sure that’s what she said?”

“I’m sure.”

She leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees. She got this careful, thoughtful look on her face that she gets when she’s trying to be diplomatic. “I’m just saying-you do have a concussion.”

“I know what I heard, Linda,” I said. I felt bad immediately for my nasty tone but didn’t apologize. Instead, I closed my eyes and turned away from her.

She was quiet for a second, but I heard her tapping her foot on the floor.

“Do you want me to call anyone?”

“Like who?”

“Like Jack?”

“No,” I said. “No. Do you ever stop?”

I heard her stand up, issue a light sigh. “I’m going to find some food for us,” she said.

“Good,” I said blackly. “Take your time.”

She rested a hand on my shoulder for a moment and then walked out. I heard her ask the cop if he wanted anything, which made me feel even worse for being such a bitch. Everyone always thought of Linda as the good girl, the sweet one. I was the black cloud. I was the bad sleeper, the finicky eater, the colicky baby, the one who gave our mother heartburn during her pregnancy. Even as adults, I was the one who forgot thank you notes, who was always late and didn’t return phone calls. She never forgot a birthday, never failed to send flowers to the funeral of a distant relative, not only showed up everywhere on time but looking perfect and with an exquisite hostess gift. One of my top ten most dreaded sentences: Your sister is such a treasure , followed by a pregnant silence in which the subtext So, what happened to you? might easily be inferred. If they only knew. Not that she wasn’t those things. Just that she wasn’t only that.

I was glad for a few minutes of solitude to let some tears fall in private with no one fawning, telling me it was going to be okay. But I wasn’t alone for long.

“Mrs. Raine?”

I turned at the male voice. “I’m Detective Grady Crowe.”

Strictly by my estimate, the fiction writer notices approximately fifty percent more details than other people. These details get filed away for future use. This happens in a millisecond and I’m only barely conscious of it. In the case of Detective Crowe: I observed the clean, close shave, the tidy crease in his pants, the studied way his blue shirtsleeves peeked out of his black suede jacket. I noticed the careful cropping of his dark hair, the high arch of his brows, the polite smile that didn’t manage to offset a hard glint in his eyes.

The fiction writer then uses these details to weave a narrative. I immediately assessed the man before me as a textbook overachiever, a person who paid close attention to fine points and appearances. Possibly in paying attention to these things, he occasionally lost sight of the big picture. Something about the straight line of his mouth made me imagine that he was relentless when it came to getting what he wanted, sometimes foolhardy, thoughtless, in his pursuit of it.

Often-usually-this narrative I create is very close to the truth but sometimes-only sometimes-it replaces the reality of a situation and keeps me from seeing things as they actually are. This is not a good thing.

Detective Crowe moved into the space without invitation from me and extended his hand. I sat up with difficulty and took it reluctantly. His grip was strong and warm, his nails perfectly manicured. He smelled like coffee. He lifted one of those carefully maintained fingers to his temple, raised his chin toward me.

“Someone got you pretty good.” I thought I saw a smile play at the corners of his mouth and it infuriated me.

“Do you find what happened to me funny, Detective?” I asked, trying for a withering tone, but really just sounding sad.

Any trace of the smile, real or imagined, vanished.

“Uh, no. Of course not.” His face took on an earnest expression as he removed a neat leather notebook and a stylish Mont Blanc from the lapel of his jacket. “I’m here to talk to you about your husband, Marcus Raine. About what happened at his office this morning.” He flipped open a wallet and I saw his gold shield and identification card.

In my relief to talk to someone official about what had happened, I unspooled the string of events that had occurred. I noticed that he tried to interrupt me a couple of times by lifting his hand. I ignored him, kept going. I almost couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t stop until he knew every horrible detail, as though getting it out, getting it on paper, would be the first step toward understanding, solving, fixing everything that had broken since Marcus didn’t come home last night. He dutifully scribbled in his notebook as I ran through everything. I heard his phone vibrating in his pocket a couple of times but, to his credit, he didn’t answer it. Occasionally, there were two of him, the real man and his doppelgänger, the shadowy double my brutalized brain was creating.