Лиза Смит - The Return - Nightfall

Meredith didn’t say a word. She just stepped forward and put her arms around him. He clutched at her as if he was afraid she’d run away, and buried his face in her dark hair.

“Meredith.”

“Just breathe, Jim. Breathe.”

“You don’t know what it’s been like. My parents left because my great-grandpa’s really sick — I think he’s dying. And then Tami — Tami—”

“Tell me slowly. And keep breathing.”

“She threw knives, Meredith. Butcher knives. She got me in the leg here.” Jim plucked at his jeans to show a small slit of a hole in the fabric over the lower part of one thigh.

“Have you had a tetanus shot recently?” Meredith was at her most efficient.

“No, but it’s not really a big cut. It’s a puncture wound, mainly.”

“Those are exactly the kind that are most dangerous. You need to call Dr. Alpert right away.” Old Dr. Alpert was an institution in Fell’s Church: a doctor who even made house calls, in a country where carrying around a little black bag and stethoscope was pretty much unheard-of behavior.

“I can’t. I can’t leave….” Jim jerked his head backward toward the interior of the house as if he couldn’t bring himself to say a name.

Bonnie tugged at Meredith’s sleeve. “I have a very bad feeling about this,” she hissed.

Meredith turned back to Jim. “You mean Isobel? Where are her parents?”

“Isa-chan, I mean Isobel, I just call her Isa-chan, you know…”

“It’s all right,” said Meredith. “Just say what comes naturally. Go on.”

“Well, Isa-chan only has her grandma, and Grandma Saitou doesn’t even come downstairs much. I made her lunch a while ago and she thought I was — Isobel’s father. She gets…confused.”

Meredith glanced at Bonnie, and said, “And Isobel? Is she confused, too?”

Jim shut his eyes, looking utterly miserable. “I wish you’d go in and, well, just talk to her.”

Bonnie’s bad feeling was only getting worse. She really couldn’t stand another scare like the one at Caroline’s house — and she certainly didn’t have the strength to Call again, even if Damon weren’t in a hurry to get somewhere.

But Meredith knew all this, and Meredith was giving her the sort of look that couldn’t be denied. It also promised that Meredith would protect Bonnie, no matter what.

“Is she hurting anybody? Isobel?” Bonnie heard herself ask as they crossed through the kitchen and toward a bedroom at the end of the hallway.

She could hardly hear Jim’s whispered, “Yeah.”

And then, as Bonnie groaned internally, he added, “Herself.”

Isobel’s room was just what you’d expect from a quiet and studious girl. At least one side was. The other side looked as if a tidal wave had picked everything up and thrown it down again randomly. Isobel was sitting in the middle of this mess like a spider on a web.

But that wasn’t what made Bonnie’s gut churn. It was what Isobel was doing. She had laid out beside her what looked a lot like Mrs. Flowers’ kit for cleaning out wounds, but she wasn’t healing anything.

She was piercing herself.

She had already done her lip, her nose, one eyebrow, and her ears, many times. Blood was dripping from all these places, dripping and falling onto the unmade sheets of her bed. Bonnie saw all that as Isobel looked up at them with a frown, except that the frown was only half there. On the pierced side, the eyebrow didn’t move at all.

Her aura was shattered orange with black lashings through it.

Bonnie knew, all at once, that she was going to be sick. She knew it with the deep knowledge that overcame all embarrassment and which sent her flying to a wastebasket she didn’t even remember seeing. Thank God, it had a white plastic bag lining it, she thought, and then she was completely occupied for a few minutes.

Her ears recorded a voice, even as she was thinking she was glad she hadn’t had lunch.

“My God,are you crazy? Isobel, what have you done to yourself? Don’t you know the kind of infections you can get…the veins you can hit…the muscles you can paralyze…? I think you’ve already pierced the muscle in your eyebrow — and you shouldn’t still be bleeding unless you’ve hit veins or arteries.”

Bonnie retched dryly into the wastebasket, and spat.

And just then she heard a meaty thud.

She looked up, half knowing what she would see. But it still was a shock. Meredith was doubled over from what must have been a punch in the stomach.

The next thing Bonnie knew, she was beside Meredith. “Oh, my God, did she stab you?” A stab wound…deep enough into the abdomen…

Meredith clearly couldn’t get her breath. From somewhere a bit of advice from her sister Mary, the nurse, floated into Bonnie’s mind.

Bonnie pounded with both fists on Meredith’s back, and suddenly Meredith took a huge gulp of air.

“Thanks,” she was saying weakly, but Bonnie was already dragging her away, away from the laughing Isobel and a collection of the world’s longest nails and the rubbing alcohol and other things that she had on a breakfast tray beside her.

Bonnie got to the door and almost collided with Jim, who had a wet washcloth in his hand. For her, she supposed. Or maybe for Isobel. All Bonnie was interested in was making Meredith pull up her top to make absolutely, positively sure that there were no holes in her.

“I got it — out of her hand — before she punched me,” Meredith said, still breathing painfully as Bonnie anxiously scanned the area above her low-rise jeans. “I’ll have a bruise, that’s all.”

“She hit you, too?” Jim said in dismay. Except that he didn’t say it. He whispered it.

You poor guy, Bonnie thought, finally satisfied that Meredith wasn’t perforated. What with Caroline and your sister Tami and your girlfriend, you don’t have the first idea of what’s going on. How could you?

And if we told you, you’d just think we were two more crazy girls.

“Jimmy, you have to call Dr. Alpert right away, and then I think they’re going to have to go to the hospital in Ridgemont. Isobel’s already done permanent damage to herself — God knows how much.All those piercings are almost certainly going to be infected. When did she start this?”

“Um, well…she first started acting weird after Caroline came to see her.”

“Caroline!” Bonnie blurted, confused. “Was she crawling?”

Jim gave her a look. “Huh?”

“Never mind Bonnie; she was joking,” Meredith said easily. “Jimmy, you don’t have to tell us about Caroline if you don’t want to. We — well, we know she was over at your house.”

“Does everybody know?” Jim asked miserably.

“No. Just Matt, and he only told us so that somebody could go check on your little sister.”

Jim looked guilty and stricken at once. The words poured out of him as if they’d been bottled up and now the cork was out of the bottle.

“I don’t know what’s going on anymore. All I can tell you is what happened. It was a couple days ago — late evening,” Jim said. “Caroline came over, and — I mean, I never even had a crush on her. It’s like, sure, she’s good-looking, and my parents were away and all, but I never thought I was the kind of guy…”

“Never mind that now. Just tell us about Caroline and Isobel.”

“Well, Caroline came over wearing this outfit that was — well, the top was practically transparent. And she just — she said, did I want to dance and it was, like, slow dancing and she — she, like,seduced me. That’s the truth. And the next morning she left — just about the time Matt came. That was the day before yesterday. And then I noticed Tami acting — crazy. Nothing I could do would stop her. And then I got a phone call from Isa-chan and — I’ve never heard her so hysterical. Caroline must have gone straight from my house to her house. Isa-chan said she was going to kill herself. And so I ran over here. I had to get away from Tami anyway because me being there at home just seemed to make it worse.”