Hannah Pittard - Listen to Me

The plunger moved down the barrel.

The liquid disappeared.

Maggie removed the needle.

All at once, she gasped, then threw the needle aside. She put her hands suddenly to her face and slumped into a little heap at Gerome’s side.

Mark sat there, helpless.

It was fully light out now. Still morning, but light out. The hotel was an ugly double-decker affair made of cinder blocks and brick. It was situated on a small hill, in what appeared to be some sort of office park, a vestige from a time when the town believed it was capable of more. But it was just a foolish little mountain town; there was nothing any more or less special about its views and streams or rocks and pebbles than any other piddly municipality in West Virginia in the middle of nowhere. No, there was nothing special or frightening or interesting at all about Black Crows Hill, except this was where their dog had died. How stupid.

Maggie took a sheet from their hotel room, which, in the light of day, was nondescript and mockingly harmless. She went out the back way but not because she cared about the petite clerk girl or her oafish boyfriend and what they might say. They could charge her double, triple.

She was careful not to let the sheet drag along the parking lot. She wanted it clean for Gerome. He would have liked that it had her smell on it — her smell and Mark’s — even from a few hours’ worth of sleep.

Just as she wasn’t worried about what Tina or Pete might say if she’d been caught taking the sheet, neither was she worried about the fabric of the car. As she made a bed in the backseat with the sheet, she wasn’t thinking about the leather, she was thinking about Gerome. It wasn’t a matter of comfort at this point — he was dead, there was no changing that — but there was the matter of respect: respect for his body, respect for what he had been to them. A constant. An old pal. A faithful trouper. A total Loyalist.

Using the front and back headrests, she created a sort of hammock out of the sheet, which she imagined — if Gerome were still alive — would have felt to him like some wonderful hug all along his body. She was aware, as she tested to make sure the sheet would stay in place, of Mark watching. She wasn’t angry with him. She’d meant it when she said it wasn’t his fault. Things would be difficult for a while. She knew that. He’d blame himself even if she didn’t. But something good would come of all this. Even if she had to root around in filth and muck, she would find the goodness. She owed it to Gerome. She would be better, calmer. She would pick up more hours at the clinic — they’d name one of the rooms after Gerome, in his memory. She’d get back to the gym. She’d take up cooking again. Hadn’t she once loved to cook dinner for Mark? Starting in Virginia, starting with these couple months at the farm with Mark’s parents, she’d give up the Internet. Yes. This was the place to start. She’d give up the Internet, and she’d find polite ways to get out of watching the morning news with Robert. She’d do some gardening with Gwen. Plus there were the horses and golf. She’d do all this, and Mark would be buoyed by her pluck.

She couldn’t yet think about the return drive home, but once back in Chicago she would get rid of every hidden stash of pills, every hoard of would-be weaponry. She blushed just thinking about all the hiding places — the can of mace at the bottom of the toilet paper basket, the little contraband switchblade in the silverware drawer that she’d ordered off eBay and had shipped to the clinic. It was almost funny how quickly things were coming into view — how she could suddenly see so clearly just how fearfully she’d been living. The fact of the matter: Maggie wasn’t the coed and the coed wasn’t Maggie. Two different men, two different crimes, two different women, two different outcomes. It was all a matter of luck, life was. You could beg all you wanted for protection, you could pray or not pray to a god or to a devil, but what it all came down to was a simple game of chance.

When Maggie was satisfied that the hammock would hold, and after she’d tucked and retucked the sheet in all the right places, she turned to Mark.

“Do you think you can pick him up?”

He nodded.

“I’ll help situate him from the other side,” she said.

Mark bent down in front of Gerome. For a moment, he just knelt there, his fingers resting on the dog’s muzzle. Then he pushed his hands under the dog’s back and scooted him into the crook of his arms with a gentle bounce. He stood up slowly. He was being so careful. Maggie felt grateful for him just then, grateful that there was someone else who cared as much as she.

“Are you ready?” she said.

Mark was at the car, Gerome still balanced perfectly in his arms. One day — it was too soon to think about now — but one day there would be another dog. There had to be.

Mark nodded again, and together — as softly as they could — they installed Gerome in the backseat.

To anyone looking down, looking in, the sheet might have seemed a simple dog bed, and Gerome just a sleeping dog, waiting to get where his owners were going.

Maggie took the driver’s seat. Mark didn’t argue. From somewhere in the hotel she’d procured a small map of the Virginias. She folded it open to the appropriate section and drove them expertly down and out of the mountain and back to 64.

A plump sun was firmly in the sky by the time they reentered the highway. The big rigs were already on the road. The day was fully underway. Mark would never tell her about the truck or the sedan, what he’d seen, how it had happened. He would never mention that sickly swollen breast, the man who feared Mark a predator, the family — families? — too poor to pay for a hotel. You some sort of perv? The question had hit him like a fist to the gut. Unintentionally — oh, how this would have disappointed Maggie! — he had stepped into the role of villain. It didn’t matter that he’d been equally frightened by them. They couldn’t sense his fear. “People don’t seem to mind their business like they used to.” Maggie had said so just the day before! And now he’d gone and invaded another family’s space; treated the parking lot as an extension of his own property; challenged another’s right to exist. His motivations might have been pure, but his actions — at least as perceived by that man, that woman, whoever else was camping out there with them — were entirely intrusive. In trying to be useful, Mark had overstepped; in overstepping, he’d ended their dog’s life. He shuddered to think where those people might be now: huddled and hungry and scared, no doubt, in the cramped compartments of their too-hot automobiles.

Maggie turned on the radio and rolled down the windows. Gerome didn’t yet smell, but soon he would. Before they reached the farm, there would be an odor, but the would-be odor was the least of their woes.

The talk on the radio was all about the storm, about its aftermath. Dozens of cities were without power, thousands of people were dangerously low on potable water, hundreds of homes had been destroyed. It was unclear how many had died. The deejay sounded jazzed, not saddened by the possibility that the number might be severe. Politicians were continuing to weigh in. They were already thinking about the next election.

Except for the people they’d impacted, Katrina had been forgotten, Sandy had been forgotten, and this storm too would eventually be forgotten. Next month a new horror story would unfold and the month after that a newer one. Next winter there’d be a typhoon and the summer following there would be an earthquake. After that, a tsunami would hit.