J. Wachowski - In Plain View

“Tell me about this story you’re working on. Why’d you ask me about Samaritan law?”

It was hard shifting my brain to thinking about work, shifting tectonic plates hard. I wasn’t sure whether to call the result a headache or a headquake.

“I think somebody may have seen Jost at the tree. Setting up. Doing the deed. The whole thing.”

“He did it by the side of the road,” Curzon pointed out matter-of-factly. He flicked a glance my way. “You feeling all right?”

“Great,” I said, with one eye closed. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“What, the tree? No. He picked a tree on his daddy’s front lawn.”

“Okay, classic protest suicide-look what you made me do. But the more I’ve talked to people, the weirder that part seems. Amish people don’t do protest, much less suicide. And wouldn’t he have gotten the same effect if he did it in his apartment and wrote a note? So why the tree? What was he thinking?”

Curzon slowed to a stop at a yellow light. “You’re asking, what did he get by doing it in that tree?”

“Exactly.”

Curzon’s cell phone rang. He answered, “Sheriff.”

Time stopped. The street light was red.

Still red.

My night vision dissolved. All the grays of the shadows around us went black. In the distance, car headlights flashed and turned away.

Red.

“Yeah, got it. Tell them five minutes.” He snapped the phone shut with a flick, dropped it into the space beside the gear box. “They found her.”

“She’s okay, right?” Don’t bury the lead, you sadist.

The answer was hard to hear over the sudden blare of his siren.

“She’s alive.”

8:47:59 p.m.

I doubt it took us three whole minutes to get to her. Curzon drove like a bat out of hell. I was numb enough to admire the bright streak of lights we passed and the sensation of gentle compression into the Audi’s butt-warming leather seat.

As soon as he turned onto Orchard Road, I knew where we were going. Past the flashing yellow, where the edge of a golf course became a cemetery, lay the Prairie Path-an old railroad route that had been turned into a safe path for pedestrians, bikers, joggers. The Path crossed the busiest part of the road here. Cars against people.

I’d been to see the place myself several times this summer on my late-night jaunts. It was the spot where my sister died.

A squad car, wigwag lights flashing, and an ambulance were parked perpendicular to the road. Curzon pulled in next to the police cruiser. I had my door open before he’d even geared all the way down.

The night air near this narrow patch of woods had cooled faster; my breath fogged out ahead of me. I pushed between the cars, hands in my jacket pockets, cold and nervy to the core.

Trees and ancient bushes blocked most of the light around us from the houses. I could hardly see where I was walking. Dry leaves were heaped ankle high in the ditch. The crunch of my feet hustling toward the clump of emergency people was inappropriately silly.

“Jenny? Where is she? What happened?”

The cop got in my face. The paramedics were so busy they didn’t even look up.

“She’s alive.” He came toward me hands wide. “She’s unconscious. They need to know if she has a drug problem.”

“A what? ” Someone moved, I could barely see her legs. “She’s eight years old!”

“Easy.” The cop body-blocked me.

I would have shoved him aside if Curzon hadn’t come up behind me and put a solid hand on my shoulder, calming, restraining. I’m too big for that move to work most of the time. It caught me off guard.

“I’m on it,” Curzon assured the guy. “Let her through.”

I shoved past the junior cop, took two steps and suddenly, I could see everything. The paramedic reaching for a hypodermic. Jenny’s face-so white it was hard to believe she was alive. Her closed eyes smudged with dirt or something darker. Leaves blanketing the edges of her body. She looked so tiny, something the wind could carry off, like the rest of autumn’s refuse.

“Oh Lord,” slipped out.

Curzon was talking and the paramedic was saying something, and all I could hear was my one, single thought: no.

She was dead. My sister was dead.

I see. I can see it now.

Memories began to flip on the screen in my head and I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.

Stop. Stop it. My sister’s in her crib, holding on to the rail, screaming. My parents may, or may not hear her. The TV is on and they are screaming over the sound of music and gunshots and other happy voices. I’m not allowed to get my sister out of her bed. I watch her face, wetter and redder by the moment. She isn’t looking at the door, she is looking at me.

My stomach curdles. I walk the long hall, one foot at a time… um, baby’s crying?

Get back in your bed!

The pain is fast and sharp, but gone quick as a doctor’s needle. One fight ends. My father slams a door on his way out. My mother goes to the baby. I lie on the rug listening to commercials until my nausea is gone. I’m so calm, I’m invisible. I float back to my bed and…

My father laid out, dead this time, in his box. My mother is somewhere, speaking to strangers. My sister stands beside me. She is crying. This time her head is down. There is a line of white scalp where her hair parts. It is exactly the same color as the streaks her tears make on the front of her uniform blouse.

She fumbles for my hand-half my height, almost half my age-and in her face, I see all the sorrow I should feel but I am empty. Blank. I take her hand and…

They all look at me, the faces of my work. Brown skin, black skin. Hungry eyes. Haunted. They come from everywhere.

Listen to me!

I pound the heels of my hands against my eyes. Stop. Stop. Stop.

Worst of all, my family’s small pains were nothing-nothing!-in comparison to some of what I’d seen-the worst on earth. All my common pains, all Jenny’s. Not worth a photo or a sound bite’s worth of time.

Now, here in front of me, my sister’s eyes in my niece’s face. And I still felt the pain, exactly the same. Despite all I’d seen.

“Oh God,” I croaked. My stomach folded in on itself with pain.

“Maddy!” Curzon shouted through the interference. He was behind me, holding me back, or up, one arm across my chest and a hand gripping my shoulder. “She’s alive. Don’t bail. Get your ass in that ambulance.”

I did.

9:52:34 p.m.

Doctors jabbered at me in the emergency room. Their voices were hard to hold on to. The sounds of buzzers and elevator bells and metal carts kept jumping to the foreground, as if my internal audio B-track had a mind of its own. I kept nodding, hoping they’d just get the hell away from me or shut up for a minute. The last three hours had been hell.

“We’re going to transfer her to peds ICU, Ms. O’Hara. Her oxygen levels are still pretty low. The seizures will probably pass but she has to stay under observation.”

“I understand.”

“She’s all right for now. Everything seems to be stabilizing. The paramedics found the blister pack. It was some kind of trial pack of anti-anxiety medicine. Nasty stuff for a kid. Any idea where she got it?”

“No.”

“Do you take any medications?”

“I had something prescribed for my knee on Sunday. I had stitches, in the emergency room. Could she have-?”

The doctor rejected that idea. He showed me the foil packet. “This is a sample. Doctors give them out to test a medication, to see if it’s effective for a specific patient. The drug companies often provide them free of charge. This particular drug is the rage on the club scene right now. Mixed with alcohol it creates a very uninhibited evening.”