Timothy Johnston - The Current

“So you didn’t whack it against something in your sleep, like your head.” He pulled at the strap and there was the rip of Velcro, and her arm was free. She raised the cast and looked at it, turning it this way and that. It encased her forearm from the elbow to the middle of her palm, with a neat thick eyelet for the thumb. Now that she could see it she felt its weight and its pressure and its prickly heat, as if her eyes were all at once undoing the work her body had done to get used to it while she slept. She felt an itch she knew she would never get to and she remembered a blackened wooden backscratcher—phoenix, arizona—and she remembered the filthy old piss smell of a bathroom and the greasy stink of a hand over her face.

“Do you remember breaking your arm, Audrey?”

It was the deputy who spoke.

“Ed,” said her father, and put his hand on her good forearm. “Audrey, you remember Ed Moran.”

Audrey lowered the cast and looked from her father to the deputy.

“Sure I do,” she said. “How are you, Deputy Moran?”

Moran was about to speak again but her father was quicker: “It’s Sheriff Moran now, Audrey. Remember?”

“Right. I remember. And there’s the badge and everything. I’m sorry,” she said. She was not ready to call the man Sheriff. Her father was Sheriff.

Moran shifted his weight and smiled at her. When she was young she’d thought him handsome in some manly, gum-chewing way. Now she wondered why. His lips were thin and his eyes were too far apart and a little bulgy, like a frog’s. Her head was clearing and she remembered that he was not the new sheriff here, he was not her father’s replacement, but had gone down to Iowa, just over the border, and after a few years down there had been elected sheriff. And now he’d come back up to his old turf to stand in his sheriff’s uniform next to her father, who was now a common civilian, and conduct his interview.

As if confirming these thoughts her father said, “Your accident was down in Iowa, sweetheart. Pawnee County. That’s Sheriff Moran’s county, and I asked him to come up here just by himself for now. Dr. Breece said he thought you could handle a few questions—just a few,” he said pointedly. “But if you don’t want to right now, if you don’t feel up to it, you just say the word and the sheriff will come back another day.”

She could see by Moran’s thin-lipped smile that he’d have liked to tell her father to stand down and let him handle this. And she could tell by her father’s voice, and the way he kept close to her, and the pressure of his hand on her forearm, that he’d rather not have his old deputy in the room at all; that it was too soon. Or maybe it was that he’d rather be asking the questions himself. In any case, she knew she could send the deputy away with one sentence, chomping his gum all the way back to Iowa, but he would only be more thin-lipped and more determined when he returned. And so she told him everything she remembered, from the boy who grabbed her at the gas station to the spinout on the road to the car behind them that failed to stop, that bumped the RAV4, to the fast ride down the riverbank and the spinning out onto the ice and the first sounds of the ice cracking.

And then she told him what she didn’t know she remembered until she heard herself saying it, and even then she couldn’t be certain it wasn’t some dream from the time that she was underwater, from the days and nights of swimming underwater—she told him that the ice had cracked and the car had tilted and she’d let go of Caroline’s hand so they could open their doors, but the driver’s side went under first and Caroline couldn’t get out that way, and she herself was climbing out of her door right up onto the ice, but the ice was breaking under her hands, under her knees, and she knew how cold the water was but she didn’t feel it at all, and she turned back and saw Caroline climbing up through the car toward her and she reached for her hand again and grabbed it, but then the car began to roll over and the door closed on her own arm like a shark and twisted and she had to let go of Caroline, she had to let go, and the car rolled and it took her under with it, and it held her. It held her underwater and it began to wheel slowly around, upside down, in the current, and the tires or something must have been caught on the ice because it didn’t go under the ice, and there was nothing to see under there but the beams of light in the yellow water, nothing in the water but water and bubbles until, all at once, there was Caroline—she’d gotten out of the car on the driver’s side, or had been swept out of it by the water, and she was in the lights and she was in the current and she was trying to swim back, she was trying to swim back to the car, her sweatshirt rippling in the current, the hood gaping behind her head like the mouth of a fish, like the bell of a jellyfish, and the current had her and she was growing smaller, smaller, and then she passed out of the reach of the headlights—and she was gone, Daddy, she was gone.

HER FATHER HELD her good hand in both of his. Squeezing so hard it hurt. Something private, secret, burning behind his eyes.

“Daddy—?”

“What hand?”

“What?”

“What hand did that—boy put over your mouth.”

“Tom,” said the deputy. The sheriff.

She did not look away from her father’s eyes. “He was holding my right arm with his… his left, so it must’ve been his right hand over my mouth.”

“His right hand,” he said.

Moran standing there looking hard at her father, and her father finally relaxing his grip.

He took a breath and sat back. “Go on, Sheriff,” he said.

Moran shifted his weight. He adjusted his black, gadgety belt. “So you were underwater, Audrey, but then you got out.”

The water so powerful and so deep and yellow in the lights. She saw hair, golden hair, sweeping in the current, or was it grasses from the floor of the river? The current pulled at her, wanted her too, but the car would not let her go.

“How did you do it, Audrey? How did you get out of the water?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The car was stuck on the ice and I was stuck on the car. I guess I must have climbed up. I must have gotten the door open far enough to get my arm out and I must’ve used the door to climb up on top of the car—on top of the underside of the car—and I must’ve climbed from the car to the ice. But I don’t remember that. All I remember is lying on the ice, on my stomach, and looking at the lights through the ice, the headlights, the way they were shining on the underside of the ice just as steady and clear as anything. Like I was underwater looking up at them from below. Like everything was upside down. The sky, the water. Everything.”

HOLLY BURKE IS dead , her mind kept repeating. Gordon’s daughter is dead . Rachel saw his face again… his shut-down eyes. Still breathing!

She wanted to see her boys. Craved the weight of them in her arms as she had when they were babies. The smell of them. Her breasts aching for them once again.

Momma guess what, Marky said when she returned to the Plumbing & Supply that afternoon. He was at the glass door, spritzing away smears and fingerprints.

What, sweetie, she said, fitting her hand to the back of his neck.

He shrugged off the hand and said, The sheriff was here Momma the sheriff and the deputies and they were all asking questions and all wanting to find Danny.

Jeff Goss sat behind the counter, unsmiling, listening.

Did the men talk to you, Marky? she said. Did they ask you questions?

Yes Momma they asked me where is Danny and I told them he didn’t take me with him he went up to Uncle Rudy’s cabin him and Wyatt but he never woke me up he never told me anything he just went.