Timothy Johnston - The Current

“It was a truck, Sheriff. I saw it from the river, when we were spinning around, before the ice broke. It was just sitting up there. And the next time I looked up, when I was lying on the ice, it was gone.”

“Did you see what kind of truck it was?”

“What kind of truck?”

“Yes.”

“Like a Chevy or a Ford or whatever?”

“Yes.”

“I have no idea. Plus I was, like, spinning around on a frozen river.”

“Could you see the color?”

“No, sir.”

“Was it new-looking or old?”

“I don’t know. It was just a truck, Sheriff.”

“Audrey,” said her father gently. “The sheriff is only trying to help us here.”

“I know he is. What did I say?”

Moran stood looking at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’m sorry to badger you, Audrey. I know you must be upset about the accident. And about your friend. But I have to tell those folks down in Georgia what happened up here. I have to tell them what happened to their daughter. That truck that bumped you, that sent you and Caroline down the bank—do you have any reason to think it was intentional? That whoever was driving it meant to do you harm?”

“No, sir. Only he didn’t do anything to help us either, did he. Or she.”

She drank more water. Moran waiting, watching her. Her arm under the cast was throbbing like a heart.

“I just have to ask you one more question and then I’ll get out of your hair,” he said, and she nodded. “If you saw those boys again, either one, together or separate, do you think you’d recognize them?”

She thought about that. She tried to piece them together from her memory but it was like trying to climb onto the broken ice, and all she found of the two boys were hands and shadows and caps and clouds of breath that stank of beer. She found the feel of his hand over her mouth and the oily smell of the hand and she found the muscles of his leg as he wedged it between hers.

But then she saw the scene from another vantage too: she saw the boy pressing her against the wall with his hand over her mouth and she saw his leg forced between hers and she saw him holding her by her right wrist and she saw the scratches that ran under his eye from ear to nose, weirdly small lines like a bar of sheet music and the dark little drops of blood that were the notes. And she saw the second boy’s face clearly when he turned, the look in his eyes as he tried to understand what she was pointing at him, and she saw the first boy’s face again as he raised his arms to block the burst of pepper spray. She saw all this as clearly as anything she’d seen with her own eyes and she knew she was seeing the scene through her friend’s eyes, through Caroline’s eyes, and she knew how crazy that was and yet she knew it was true just the same and she knew she could never say it out loud to Moran, or even to her father. Not because they could never use it against the boys—they couldn’t—and not because they would never believe it—they wouldn’t—but because to say it out loud would be to lose it, the realness of it, forever.

“I think I’d know them, Sheriff,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I would.”

Moran nodded. “That’s good, Audrey. That’s real good. You rest now and take care of that arm, you hear?” He seemed about to pat her on the knee but thought better of it. Turned instead to her father and said, “Care for one last smoke, Tom?” and her father looked at her and she said without saying it, Go , and he gave her hand a squeeze and both men collected their jackets from the chair and left her alone in the room with her crazy thoughts and the beating of her arm under the cast.

When he returned some minutes later her father smelled of smoke and the outdoors, but an outdoors that was much later in the day and colder, although when she thought about it she did not think a person could know the time and temperature of the day by its smells on a man’s clothes, and the moment she thought that, the smells lost their meaning and her certainty was gone.

He stood at her bedside but seemed far away. His eyes a faint blue down in their shadows.

“What did he want to talk to you about?” she said.

“I think he just wanted to let me know he had it under control. So I could rest easy, and stay with you.”

“So you wouldn’t get any ideas about going down there yourself and getting all sheriffy.”

He smiled. “Maybe.”

She watched him. “You weren’t very nice to him.”

“I wasn’t?”

She just looked at him, and he shrugged.

“I guess I didn’t care to see him in my daughter’s hospital room.”

“Him—?”

“Any lawman.” He placed a hand on her wrist and she flinched, and he removed his hand again. “I’m sorry—”

“It’s OK. It’s just—your hand is so cold.”

He cupped his hands and blew into them. “I can’t ever seem to get them warm anymore. It’s like they’re dunked in ice water all day long. Although I guess you’d know more about that than I would.” His smile was uncertain and she reached for his hand.

“I barely felt it, Sheriff.”

“I don’t know how long you were underwater, but you were on that ice a long time. The EMTs had to chip you free with ice scrapers.”

“They did not.”

“Honest to God.” He smiled at her smile, but it didn’t last. “If that old man hadn’t driven by and seen the lights, the headlights, under the ice—”

“What old man?”

“The old man who called in the accident.”

“Who is he?”

“I wish I knew. He declined to give his name. Said he was just driving by and was too old to go down there and help. Felt real bad he couldn’t help, Ed says. But didn’t give his name and didn’t stick around.”

She looked off and said quietly, “Poor old feller. Didn’t they get his number from the call?”

“He called from a pay phone.”

“At the gas station?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Now who’s getting all sheriffy?”

She held his eyes. Outlasted him.

“The old feller is a dead end, Deputy,” he said. “Called and vanished. But thank God he called.”

They were silent. Then he looked at her and said, “What is it, sweetheart?”

She shook her head. She wouldn’t cry again. If you tell him you wish you’d never asked Caroline Price to loan you bus fare you are just telling him that the only reason Caroline Price is dead is because you were coming home to see him, because he’s so sick. Because he is dying. All of which he already knows.

She gripped his hand tighter. “I just wish I’d never left, Daddy. That’s all. I wish I’d never gone back down there after Christmas.”

“Sweetheart, I never could’ve let you do that. I needed you to be in school. You should be there now.”

“But we don’t have time, Daddy. There’s not enough time.” Now came the tears. She couldn’t stop them.

“Sweetheart. We’ve had lots of time. Your whole life. And they have been the best damn years of my life. Hell, I wouldn’t trade another hundred years of living if it cost me one day of knowing you. Do you believe that?”

“No. You’re exaggerating.”

“The hell I am.”

He watched her. Then he smiled, and patted her hand again. “Can I get you anything? Aren’t you hungry?”

“No, thank you.”

She looked at the cast, looking closely at the purple surface of the plaster, the edges of the individual strips where they’d been layered and shaped by another person’s hands before they dried into this hard shell. She wiggled fingers that did not look like her fingers so much as the pink legs of a creature that lived inside the shell. She said, watching the wiggling legs, “I thought of something when I was under the water, Daddy. Something I hadn’t thought of in a long time. Someone, I mean.” She didn’t look up. She could feel him waiting. Could feel his tightening heart between the dying lungs. “She was blond, wasn’t she,” she said. And now she looked at him.