Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

The sky is gray and low as I crest the knoll by two small farms down from Buffalo Street; silos decaying, empty of corn, two bales of hay sitting there like junked cars. It is gray for so long where we live, you forget what spring is like, that it will even come at all.

When we turn onto College Avenue where Carl lives, Abby rests her head on my shoulder.

“Thank you,” she says.

She has a pair of ice skates tied together at her feet and when I look ahead at Carl’s house, a jaundiced two-story student building, I see him in front with his own pair.

I pull the car into his driveway and Carl walks over to Abby’s side.

“What’s up, Willie?” he says.

“Nothing, Carl. Nothing but clocks and snow.”

He looks at me puzzled, and then hugs Abby hello.

As Abby walks into Carl’s house, I’m thinking about sticking around, about hanging out with Carl and his roommates around a bong and some music. We’d order out a pizza, maybe watch a basketball game, which I like to do sometimes. But my sense is that Abby doesn’t want me there.

I’m starting the car and driving toward Homer through the thick gray air, which has frosted with light snow. The farther I drive, the clearer it gets.

I picture them bounding down the hardened playing fields to the hockey ice, which is empty now because the team is away. They’ll be swirling around, holding hands maybe, and making circles in the dim light of the rink. She’ll be singing those songs again, grade-school songs, like a music box that you wind and wind, and then let loose.

I open the windows now and let the cold air in. I drive north for a long while until it’s dark out and I can’t recognize any of the town names. I turn off my headlights then and gun the engine and I think, This is what it feels like to be lost.

A young girl lies on a snowy country road. Her head has fallen to the side as though she’s sleeping, and her hair fans out across the snow. She is clothed in a blue parka with a white fringed hood, a red knit scarf, frayed jeans, and dark blue snow boots. She’s alive, thank God (her breath warm enough to melt snow), though unmoving.

I never saw her, you tell yourself. She’d been running in the cold night with her dog, who sprints up and down the road, barking. You were rushing a little, to score some Advil before the market at the gas station closed, but really, the girl came from nowhere. You are banged up yourself, a cut on the inside of your lip, and shaking, and the scene emerges before you in pieces: dog/girl/car/snow/scarf. You can’t wait for it to settle, for now there is getting the girl to a hospital. You don’t own a cell phone to call for an ambulance. You will take the girl yourself.

But loading the girl into a compact car isn’t easy, as you are five foot three, and in your doctor’s words, small boned . Straining, and chanting profanities under your breath, you manage to drag and then slide the girl — who looks to be around fourteen, but weighs as much as you — positioning her with legs bent and head ducked down, so that the door can close without hurting anything. You recall too late the rule about not moving someone when they’re injured.

The dog, you think then, because you can’t just leave him out on the road like this. You yell, Here, boy. Come here, boy, to no effect. You grab a slice of chicken from the plastic container of your dinner leftovers and hold it out in your palm. He walks over, dragging his leash, and eats from your hand. Thatta boy, you say, and then wrestle him into the passenger seat of your car. He has a blue bandanna around his neck, same shade as the girl’s jacket, and tan-colored fur. You try to calm yourself down.

In ten minutes or so you reach the emergency room entrance of the hospital, which lies at the eastern border of what they poignantly call downtown. You run inside and shout, “Can someone please help me? There’s a girl in very bad shape. She’s been hit.” An attendant with greasy blond hair tied back in a rubber band rushes out with a metal gurney. He braces the girl’s neck, places her carefully on the gurney, and rushes her inside.

You follow with the dog. There is dried blood on your hand, which you rinse clean at a water fountain. A few people smile over at you when you sit down in the waiting room. They think it’s your dog.

Eventually a young man in faded green scrubs with a chart in his hand emerges. His sentences come forth in disconnected sounds: The police dropping by… a report.

You give him the sequence of events. A flash of something in your headlights. Brakes. A skid. A crashing sound. It doesn’t feel like you’re slurring your words.

“So the dog was running ahead of the girl,” he says.

“I guess. I didn’t see either of them.” If only you’d hit the dog, you think. But it’s good you didn’t hit the dog.

“Where were you coming from?” he asks.

You consider telling him the truth, that you were in a bar, but because you ate at a restaurant called Howell’s on Montgomery Street earlier, you decide to simply say “Howell’s.” You were with two friends, talking about your week of housesitting for your boss, who was on vacation in the Florida Keys. You liked staying in a place with leather couches, a nice sound system, and shelves of clever movies. Even now you’re wearing her stylish red wool coat.

“Did you have anything to drink?” he asks.

“A glass of wine,” you say, and surprisingly enough that seems to satisfy him.

“One,” he says, writing this down, and you say, “Yes.”

People are rushed in, one woman crying in pain and others with small or invisible bruises and limps. A TV plays Fox News, a story about a man donating his kidney to his brother. Beneath the television, a waist-high plastic Santa stands behind a pack of small plastic reindeers. There are other Christmas decorations still up, and a small fake tree adorned with little red ribbons. A young boy asks if he can pet your dog, and you say yes.

“What’s his name?” the boy asks.

“Max,” you say, the name of a hamster your father gave you when you were six.

You consider calling one of the friends you’d been to dinner with, but it’s late now, and they are likely both asleep. There was a lawyer you dated a few times last year, but you’d lost his number, and that had ended awkwardly.

As you wait for the doctors to evaluate the girl, you are waiting too for the blood levels in your brain to shift, though you can’t tell if it’s alcohol that’s causing the dull ache in the front of your head, or if it’s an aftereffect of the collision. There is a formula that has to do with your weight, what you’ve eaten, and how many hours have passed. You recall seeing a chart about this a few years ago on a bulletin board at college, with the message A GOOD TIME TO MISPLACE YOUR KEYS. Your mouth feels dry. It’s hard to swallow. You drink a cup of weak coffee from the dispenser in the waiting room and take several long sips of cold water from the hallway water fountain.

It’s no big deal to drive with a few drinks in you, not in a town without traffic, where you can down a few shots of Patrón at a place like Finnegan’s or The Orchard and still make it home — people do. You’ve had far wilder nights and been fine, although once after a party you did scrape a curb, and after another you pulled into the wrong driveway.

On a dare when you were thirteen, you once told four separate store managers it was your birthday — though it was still months away — and that no one in your family had remembered. You were so convincing in your disappointment (your eyes were disturbingly red) that you walked home that night with a compact disc, two T-shirts, a poster, and a beautiful silver necklace with a locket, which you are wearing now. It was alarmingly easy to do. The key was tricking yourself into believing it. You think of this as you think of what you’ll say to the police.