Timothy Johnston - The Current

Tom—the road!

He corrected again, and thumbed at the phone again, but the screen went dark.

“You son of a bitch,” he said. “You dumb son of a bitch.”

He sped up, and when he flew by the turn for home she said, What are you doing?

“I’m going up there. To the hospital.”

Why?

“I need to see her. I need to talk to her.”

It’s late, Tom. She’s sleeping .

He drove on. He felt a great panic in his heart. Like the car would not make it. Like it would blow a tire or throw a rod before he got there, before he could see her again.

Tom … she said. Sutter , she said, and he glanced over. You can’t do this now. You need to come home .

“I have to do this, Annie. Just—please…”

He gripped the wheel and drove on, into the diving snow, and she did not speak to him again until he’d pulled over and put the car in park. The motor running. The lights on, the wipers sweeping.

It’s all right , she said. Just get your breath .

He thumbed at the phone—no light, no nothing—and he popped open the glovebox and pawed everything out of there but there was no cord, no charger—what kind of an idiot, Jesus Christ—and it was then she caught up his hand in hers, held it in both of hers until it was still, until it was quiet.

She rested her head on his shoulder and after a while he put his head to her head and like that they rested. They breathed, looking out the windshield at the endless snow, how it dove into the lights and dashed itself soundlessly on the glass, how the wipers in their quiet rhythm swept it away and yet the snow kept coming… a million flakes, a billion, just diving and diving into the lights and no end to it that they could see.

HE WASN’T SUPPOSED to come before eight a.m. but she’d been sitting in the wheelchair since seven, face washed, teeth brushed, dressed and ready to go, glancing back at the clock—the plain round clockface strategically placed so that you could know exactly how slowly time moved when you were stuck in a mechanical bed with your broken arm that itched and itched under its cast—glancing at the clock every minute, until at last eight o’clock came. And went. And he was late. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Well, wasn’t he always? People called, they needed him—car accidents, fights. Law and order. Weekends included. That was his job, or had been, and so she’d waited: after band practice after school, after the movies with Jenny White, who was her best friend for one year of middle school, after her shift at Portman’s Dairy the summer before she left for college and she had her license but no car because he couldn’t afford even a used one, he said, but really it was because of all the teenagers and pieces of teenagers he’d seen strewn all over the roads. She waited for him on street corners and in the shade of trees and on Mrs. Aberdeen’s porchsteps as the old woman’s next student pounded out her scales inside the house; she waited for him as he went into her mother’s hospital room alone, and now she waited for him in her own hospital room, in the wheelchair, facing the open door, watching the open door, watching the clock behind her, waiting.

The hospital had cleaned and dried the clothes she’d been wearing when she came in—which now that she thought about it, should they have done that? Shouldn’t the clothes have been preserved? Or did the river already ruin them as evidence? In any case, she was dressed as she’d been dressed when Caroline had come to pick her up four days ago, minus the peacoat and the black knit cap, both still in the RAV4, or in the river, or else hung out to dry with the rest of her clothes on the bars of some jail cell down in Iowa, and she would ask him to find out and they could stop and pick them up on their way down to Georgia… but he had to get here first and get her out of here, and when she looked back into the room it was only the clock she saw and not the terrible mechanical bed or the dying flowers or all the little stuffed animals she was leaving behind, a childish menagerie sent or dropped off one by one by old childhood friends or the mothers of old childhood friends she hadn’t seen in years, none of whom stayed long or said anything she could remember now.

Audrey rolling the wheelchair forward and back, listening to the squeak of the rubber tires on the floor, and she didn’t need a wheelchair obviously but who knows—you might slip on the squeaky floor and crack your head before you got out of here and you could sue because you were still technically under their care, and she had waited for him one time in the nurse’s office at school and not outside because that was school policy, the nurse said, and at last he’d come for her in full uniform and all business and impatient with the nurse, hearing just enough to learn it wasn’t anything serious, something she ate maybe, and then he’d done something he never did in his full uniform and in front of people; he bent down and took her into his arms and held her close and kissed her near her ear with his sandpaper jaw that smelled of smoke and he squeezed her, hard.

Then it was just his hand on your shoulder as he led you down the school hall and outside to the cruiser, where he’d parked in the fire lane, waiting for you to buckle in before pulling away from the curb and right away talking into his cell phone as he drove, and something was happening, something was going on, and you still felt a little sick to your stomach but you couldn’t ask him to slow down on the turns, because he was talking… and then after a long moment of saying nothing, the phone resting on his thigh, he said they’d have to take a detour, he needed to make a stop and he didn’t have time to take you back to the office to sit with one of the deputies and you wanted to know were they going to arrest someone but he didn’t seem to hear, but then he did and turned to you and almost-smiled and said no, it wasn’t that kind of stop, but he needed you to sit in the car and mind yourself for a bit while he talked to a man and did you think you could do that, did you feel well enough for that? and of course you said Yes, Sheriff, I can do that.

And it was another two, maybe three days back at school—the huddled, whispering girls, the passed notes and the big eyes and the open mouths—before Audrey finally put it together, that the man they’d gone to see that day at his house in the woods and then driven into town was the father of the girl in the river, Holly Burke, a high schooler who’d been walking home through the park and had been beaten up or hit by a car or messed with by some man or men, or boy or boys, who had then tossed her into the river as you would toss an old piece of wood to see it splash and float away.

It was her boyfriend, my dad said , said one girl. He says it’s always the boyfriend .

How would he know?

My sister said it was a college boy , said another girl. He got her drunk and took her to the park and gang-raped her .

Oh, was your sister there, Christine? Do you even know what gang-rape means?

Do you?

Yes, do you?

Ten years ago that was and no one talked about Holly Burke anymore, the whispering girls grown into teenagers themselves, into young women gone off to college or some of them staying put and having daughters of their own, and whoever had done that to Holly Burke was still alive in the world, somewhere, still walking around, and whenever Audrey had seen the man she’d first seen on that porch in the woods—saw him getting into his van outside the hardware store, or pushing a cart down the cereal aisle, or walking toward her on a sidewalk—her heart would race and she’d try to meet his eyes, to see if he would recognize her, say hello or even nod at her, but he never did, he never did, and it was exactly as if she’d become invisible to him.