The Ruinous Sweep Read online

  She waited, the Q-tip hanging in the air above his lips.

  “See,” he said.

  “See what?” She looked around as if there was something he needed, another blanket maybe.

  She stared at him breathlessly. Nothing more came. Then she noticed his lips moving — hungering — and she gently dabbed them again with the Q-tip. Finally, his mouth closed. She put the Q-tip back in the cup of water and sat back on her chair, trembling.

  There was so much she didn’t understand. What had he been doing on Wilton Crescent? He was supposed to be at his father’s and then join her at Bridgehead as soon as he could. But he’d gone home, for some reason, even though his mom and Scott were out of town. Maybe his big talk with his father had ended abruptly or had never gotten off the ground. She wouldn’t be surprised. She hadn’t wanted him to even try. She’d only ever met Al a couple of times but had loathed him immediately. She saw how he manipulated Turn. He tried it with her, too — tried to drag her into something. He spoke calculated words, sneaky words, words with barbs in them. She’d wanted Donovan to go see someone, professionally.

  “Like your mother, for instance?”

  “God, no.”

  “But a shrink.”

  They’d discussed — argued — what shape this help might take, but he was too independent, too determined. He’d solve this himself. “Listen,” he’d told her, taking both her hands in his. “If I start talking to a therapist about my relationship with my father, it might go on for a decade.”

  And as far as he was concerned, that was that.

  She leaned forward to look at him. How did he get himself run over fifteen yards from his own front door on a side street where you could count a typical evening’s traffic on one hand?

  “Oh,” he said, startling her.

  “Turn?”

  “Oh.”

  Was it an expression of surprise at some new pain? She leaned in close again, gripping the rail with both hands, watching his lips move as if searching for something in the air before he spoke again. “Dad,” he said. Or she thought it might be that; definitely there was a first D; she wasn’t sure about the second.

  She leaned forward. “What is it, Turn?”

  “Dad.”

  “You want your father?”

  His head quaked, like some kind of aftershock. She watched his face, willing his features to relax, the muscles to loosen.

  “They’re trying to find your father, okay? He’ll come as soon as he can.” She only hoped that was true. It was Friday, and Friday was pub night for Donovan’s father. Well, any night was, really.

  His hand suddenly flickered into life, as if he were playing a little arpeggio on the sheets. Then it lay perfectly still again. She patted it softly, softly.

  “Dead,” he said.

  Dead. Or was it “Dad” again?

  “What are you trying to say, Turner?”

  There was no sign of recognition — nothing to suggest he heard her. She tentatively touched his face, tried to smooth out the worry lines on his forehead with her thumb. His face was the least damaged part of him. A livid bruise by his right eye and scratches from the bushes in which he’d landed. Then suddenly but slowly — achingly slowly — he lay his head in the cup of her hand, like a cat.

  Did she imagine it?

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  “Dead,” he said. It was clear this time.

  “No, you’re not,” she said. “We’re at the General. You’re safe now.”

  He seemed to respond. There was some kind of a feeble straining toward the words she was saying. And then his face moved away from her hand and he grew still. She removed her hand slowly from his face, sat back down, exhausted. She crossed her hands on her lap.

  Her big black THEATER IS MY BAG bag was at her feet. She took out her phone and checked the time. It was in airplane mode so as not to mess with the high-tech equipment in the ICU. It was 2:30 a.m. She had phoned home from the lobby when she’d arrived to let her folks know where she was. She would stay the night if she was allowed to. She would phone again in the morning. She would phone work as early as she could to tell them she wouldn’t be in. There was nothing else she could do. She wasn’t a person who took to sitting doing nothing very well.

  She should go talk to someone, wake up Daisy or Jen. But the only person she really wanted to talk to was this boy lying here half-dead, on his back, hard against the side rail, as if he would hang on to it for dear life if his bandaged left hand could only grab hold.

  She dropped the phone back into her purse.

  “Are you . . .” he mumbled.

  She waited. “What, Donovan?” Nothing. “Am I . . . ?”

  “Are. You.”

  She didn’t ask again. He mumbled on indecipherably. There might have been words in the susurrations and murmurs, but Bee felt too tired to unscramble meaning from the sounds. Disheartened, she took a tissue from a box on his bedside table and wiped a line of drool from the corner of his mouth. Then she sat back down and closed her eyes to listen better, to listen with her heart. She dove into her bag again and found some hand cream, squirted some into her palm, and started rubbing it in. Had to do something.

  “K . . . t . . .” he said. “Kill . . . t . . .”

  She stopped rubbing. Froze. “Turner?”

  “Kill . . . t . . . im.”

  Bee rose slowly to her feet and, resting one hand on the rail of his bed, leaned closer to his face.

  “What are you saying, Turn?”

  “K . . . KILL . . . DIM!”

  He had raised his voice and she was so shocked she fell back into her chair, which rocked precariously for a moment before she steadied it.

  Donovan’s face contorted again and his one free hand scrabbled at the sheets.

  “Bee? Beeeeeee!”

  “I’m right here. Shhhh. I won’t leave.”

  “Din . . .” he said. “Din’n meee . . .” he said.

  “Didn’t mean to,” she finished the sentence.

  “No,” he whispered back. “No . . . no . . . no . . .” he said. And then his body seemed to cave in from the exertion and he was still again — so still she wondered if he was gone — as if these words had been a deathbed confession. She looked up at his monitor: the green calligraphy said otherwise. The space capsule was still hurtling through space with a live cargo.

  Bee collected herself. These are just sounds, she told herself. He’s hallucinating. Who knew what kind of meds he was on? I’m hallucinating, she thought, on too much coffee and not enough sleep. She calmed herself down a bit. Came to a decision.

  She reached way down into her purse for her journal and a pen. She was a stage manager. Stage managers kept track of things. When everybody else is losing their heads, they know exactly who has to go where and to carry which prop. She never went anywhere without her trusty Moleskine and a good pen. Her father liked to say that the world was in dire need of more stage managers.

  She wrote down what she had heard, trying to remember the sequence: the question “Are you?” asked twice, “See” something, “Dad” or “Dead”— one or the other, maybe both. She paused, looked at his face. He was motionless. Her eyes darted to his chest, waiting for it to rise, checking its movement against the monitor. Then she returned her attention to the page, but at first she couldn’t make herself write down what else he had said. Then she did. Had to.

  “Killed,” he had said. “Killed him.” There was no denying how plaintively he had called her name — as if he were lost. As if she were not there at his bedside. And there was no denying the melancholy pitch to his voice in what had seemed like an apology: “Didn’t mean . . . Didn’t mean to.” Then she wrote a string of “No”s after it; she wasn’t sure how many he’d actually said.

  She sat back, closed the journal on her finger. She would record anything that sounded like a word from here on in.

  She sat and watched. She thought of a favorite song of his and hummed it, very quietly.
“Carter and Cash.” Nothing. Gradually she felt herself go slack. She yawned, stretched, and settled. She drifted. She was in low earth orbit, a few hundred miles up, circling the globe, the seas and land masses slipping by down below if only there was a window in this tiny place to see them. She was lulled by the beeps and hum of the machinery that kept Donovan alive. She became a long, slim Buddha, sleeping upright on her chair.

  When she awoke again it was to a hand on each shoulder. Just Gerry. “How you doing, Miss Beatrice?” She searched Bee’s eyes, full of questions, as if she were the patient.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  Gerry gave her shoulders a squeeze and then turned to fuss with the IV tubing, the monitors and pumps, checked all the bells and whistles. She stopped to look at Donovan, her hand on her chest. “He say anything?” she asked.

  Bee slipped her finger out of the journal and closed it. “Sort of,” she said. “I couldn’t exactly tell. He did say my name.”

  Gerry turned from her fussing. “Good,” she said, her brown eyes glowing in the semi-dark. She stepped back from her patient, rounded Bee’s chair, and picked up the clipboard at the end of his bed, on which she jotted some notes. Finished, she smiled again at Bee. “There’s someone here for you,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said Bee gratefully.

  Gerry chuckled. “No, girl. I mean there’s someone here to see you. Come.”

  Donovan lay his weary body down, breathing hard, letting the adrenaline dissipate, sucking up the pain in his foot. He shouted his anger into the dead forest, one earsplitting cry punctuated by the only word that could hope to channel his misery, a word with sharp-edged consonants at either end and a painful groan in the middle. The shout echoed, enough to stop the frogs from peeping. And then into the dismal silence that followed his cry, the peeping critters returned.

  He sat up, scrubbed the gravel out of his hair, off the back of his hoodie. He glanced back into the impenetrable darkness. That thing. It would have heard his shout. Was it even now turning back, coming for him, drawn zombielike to the sound of human suffering? His eyes could pick nothing out. It would be upon him before he knew it was there.

  No, he told himself. He’d smell it first.

  He clambered to his feet, stood there, his hands on his hips, his right leg taking the load of his body while the twinge died down in his left foot. He patted his pockets, felt his wallet in the left back, felt his cell phone in the right front. Thank God for small mercies. He pulled out his phone. No charge. Right. No way of calling anyone. He knew that already, although he’d forgotten. He had tried to call her. Call Bee. He remembered that now. He’d been standing in a downpour. Then running. There had been a lot of running. Running from his father’s place, running home to Wilton Crescent. Which is where the fat man had picked him up. No. That couldn’t be right. Too far. And why would he do it: hitch a ride to nowhere?

  To here.

  He fumbled in his hoodie pocket and found his charger cable. Well, that was something. Now, if he could just find a tree with an outlet . . .

  That’s all there was: trees and wet.

  He hopped over toward the bank that descended to the deeper darkness of the forest floor. By starlight he made out the shimmer of water. Flooded land, spring loaded. He could only guess that it was the same on the other side of the road where the thing had gone. He looked over his shoulder: no shambling blanket creature. Nothing. So he was on a kind of isthmus through hell. Perfect.

  He closed his eyes. “Beatrice?” he murmured, summoning up her name and sounding it out. He could almost feel her there. “Bee?” He listened hard and swore he heard her. Surely he did, as if she were just on the other side of the air.

  He opened his eyes, stared hopelessly at the dull face of his cell. Clicked it harder, hoping to see her face doing her Mona Lisa routine.

  “Bee?” he said out loud. Then he shouted it. “Beeeeeee!”

  He had traveled Highway Seven to a cottage when he was young. Years and years ago, when they had still been a family. Was it the first time he’d ever seen anything dead? He remembered the bloated carcass of a raccoon on the roadside, with three kits, stragglers, arrayed across the road behind their mama like good little raccoon children who had been reduced to crow snacks.

  “Are they dead, Mommy?”

  “They’re dead, Dono.”

  “Welcome to the country,” said Dad.

  There must be towns and villages, he thought. There were. He remembered one with a river running through it where they would go for groceries and the Dairy Queen and the library. But he wasn’t sure what good a town would be to him right now. He looked in his wallet. He had a couple of twenties and his emergency Visa card, which, the minute he used it, would reveal his location. Your son was here, Ms. Turner, purchasing a not-so-happy meal; here, getting a room in a squalid motel; here, buying a ticket to Timbuktu.

  The fog rolled in, courtesy of the slow, wet wind. There’d been intermittent rain all evening. Donovan was damp with it. He took a deep breath, drinking the air. He closed his eyes. His shoulders fell. He reached up, felt the bruise left by the driver on his left arm. He took another breath, felt the ache in his bones. The fog had clammy hands.

  He took a piss off the edge of the shoulder, arcing phosphorescent gold into the dead water below. Then he crouched, painfully, and sat on the lip of the hill, his legs trailing down the weedy slope. He looked into the murk of the swallowed land, even now turning silvery in the mist. He strained to see lights through the trees, a house, a farm. Anything. He closed his eyes and let the fog massage his temples. He remembered dancing with a girl in middle school whose hands were almost this wet.

  Then his eyes popped open. A car. Had he heard it or seen it through the membrane of his eyelids? Lights, like Morse code through the trees — dot, dot, dot; dash, dash, dash; dot, dot, dot — heading his way, coming from the east. He was on a long, slow curve, but there was nothing slow about the speed of those approaching headlights. He hobbled back to his feet, grimacing with pain. Not every late-night driver could be a pervert.

  He could hear it big time now, the engine revving high, like the driver was in nineteenth gear and looking for twenty. Donovan hopped to the edge of the pavement as the lights rounded the bend, deep center field away. He faltered, the pain in his foot excruciating. He doubled over, then threw himself up tall, his right arm flying out, his thumb pointing over his shoulder, as the high-beam headlights cut through the fog, barreling closer, blinding him.

  The driver seemed to see him at the last minute; he corrected his wheel to pass as widely as possible, but he was going too fast. The car careened across the road, then squealed back into the right lane, weaving along the solid yellow lines until the driver corrected one too many times. The car skidded on the pavement, spun out of control, and plummeted over the shoulder, tipping into darkness.

  Flipping up

  on end

  and . . .

  over.

  A crash landing.

  The engine howled and then stopped.

  Donovan wasn’t sure how long he stood there staring.

  Did that just happen?

  The headlights, still on, lit the pavement like a crosswalk. Donovan hobbled across the highway and along the shoulder with as much speed as he could manage. He stopped at the place he’d watched the zombie disappear over the lip of the shoulder. Some of the light from the crash spilled this far, but there was no body at the bottom of the slope lying facedown in the muck. He moved on and finally stood above the crash site, looking down on the car’s underside, an obscene sight: all those body parts you were never intended to see. A white Camaro reduced to a turtle on its back, water halfway up the driver’s side window. There was music churning out of the radio. Hard rock.

  A fresh surge of adrenaline coursed through him. He slip-slided down the gravel embankment into the weed-choked verge. Then he splashed through the shallow water and, bending over, peered into the car.

  The d
river hung lifelessly from his seat belt, upside down, one hand still clutching the steering wheel, the other hanging limp, resting flat on the ceiling below him. The ceiling light shone upward, giving the driver’s face Halloween shadows. It was a little upside-down cocoon of a world of black pleather and winking lights and AC/DC.

  The roofline was crumpled, deeply embedded in the mud. Donovan tried to open the driver’s door but it was impossible. The other side was tipped up a bit, left to right, so he made his way around the humming, clicking hot body of the car. He was sopping to the knees now, slipping on the scree as he clambered back up the embankment around the front end of the car, then slid back down the other side. The top of the passenger door frame was free of the wet ground, the door unlocked. It took a two-armed effort, however, to open it, pushing mostly upward, heaving it open. Then he leaned into the cab of the car, trying to reach across the center console. He stepped on the upended roof’s edge and the car began to tip toward him. He imagined the car falling on him, pinning his legs — submerging him under the black water. He jumped away and the car rocked back again. Settled. There was no way he could reach up to unlock the man’s seat belt, but even if he did, what then? The man would drop like a sack — probably break his neck, if it wasn’t already broken. Something was broken. The man was far too still. And looking at him, Donovan suddenly crumpled. He felt the pain of the crash surge through him. He doubled over, retched, but there was nothing in him to come out. He was empty.

  He recovered, then leaned back into the car. He could reach the console. He stopped the music in the middle of a scorching guitar solo. The air filled again with the prehistoric sounds of night, modified only by hissing and popping, the death rattle of the flipped car.

  He stared at the man, his knees pressed up against his chest, fetal in this metal womb. He tried to make the man breathe through a supreme mental effort. No luck.

  The airbags hadn’t deployed. He had no idea why not. Maybe this was the stretch of highway where nothing goes the way it should. Where fat perverts ditch you and a walking pile of blankets steps into the night and disappears and racing cars fly off into the trees and nothing is as it is meant to be. He watched the shadowy figure, grotesque in the dashboard light shining up into his limp and crumpled form, his grimacing face.