The Rising(44)

“It doesn’t matter now. Just normal shit from playing football.”

“You mean, like a concussion?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s football.”

“You said that already. But concussions are serious, Alex. Nobody ever examined you?”

“With the play-offs coming, I wasn’t about to let them.”

“So you didn’t tell anyone.”

“I’m telling you.”

“I meant before.”

“‘Before’ doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”

Sam watched the lights of the motel sign flickering through the flimsy blind. She thought she saw an elongated dark shape projected against it, but she blinked and it was gone.

“That shadow could mean the results of the first scan were just inconclusive,” Sam said. “Something wrong with the dye or the machine itself, something like that.”

“What if it was something else?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, Sam. All I know is that’s when all this started, with the second CAT scan.” Alex swallowed hard, fighting to cling to whatever composure he had left. But thinking it out, working the problem, took his mind off what had happened just a few hours before. At home, to his parents.

“Occam’s razor…”

Alex formed his hands into the time-out signal. “Occam’s what?”

“Razor. A principle postulating that the simplest answer is often, even usually, correct. That’s what you’re suggesting about the CT scan.”

“Why couldn’t you just say it that way?”

“I thought I did.”

“What time is it?”

Sam checked the watch her mother had given her a few months back for her eighteenth birthday. “Almost one.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

“Well, today, actually.”

“Sam,” Alex snapped.

“All right, tomorrow.”

“I’ve never wanted a day to end more.” Alex’s gaze turned downward, his bare feet kicking at the worn carpet, faded and stained in as many places as it wasn’t. He rested a hand on her knee that had rubbed up against his. “And I need new clothes. I feel like I’m wearing a dead man’s.”

“You are, but it’s not like your doctor was killed in them. Was he?” Sam asked, stiffening so much at the thought that Alex pulled his hand from her knee. She missed the feel of it immediately.

“No, but it still feels weird. I don’t know why, but it does.”

“We’ll get clothes tomorrow.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know,” Sam answered, trying not to sound as scared as she was feeling again.

“You need to call your parents,” Alex said suddenly. “They must be worried sick.”

“I know, but I’m scared.”

“Those men, the fake cops, came to my house looking for me. Any others, if there are any others, would have no reason to come looking for you.”

“I can’t risk a phone call giving away our location.”

Alex looked at her, swallowing so hard it looked as if the air had lodged in his throat. “You should go home.”

“Don’t go there again.”

“It’s too dangerous,” he said, looking down once more. “I can’t ask you to stay with me.”

“You didn’t ask me. I volunteered and I’m not leaving you now.”

“On one condition.”

“Name it.”

“We figure out a way for you to call your parents. Tomorrow,” Alex said and ground his feet into the worn carpeting.

Sam found herself doing the same, the two of them finding a strange rhythm to the motion, seeming to work in concert.

“And I’ve got to get new sneakers. Dr. Payne’s are killing me.”

“You should try high heels,” Sam told him.

“I never saw you wear high heels, never saw you, you know, dressed up.”

Sam held his gaze. “Maybe you weren’t looking.”

“Really?”

She shrugged. “Okay, so maybe I haven’t been to a lot of the dressy stuff.”

“Well, prom’s coming up,” Alex said, seeming to brighten up a bit, embracing a brief moment of normalcy. “Let’s make a pact: we get out of this, we go together.”

“It’s a date—er, I mean a plan.”

“No,” Alex corrected, “it’s a date. Hey, do your parents really grow weed?” do your parents really grow weed?” Alex asked her suddenly.

“Not the way you put it.”

“How did I just put it?”

“Like it was a crime or something. But it’s legal. They’ve got a license and everything.”

Sam’s parents had barely been making ends meet by packaging their own line of herbal supplements grown in gardens they tended themselves. For a long time they supplemented this by growing exotic flowers, orchids mostly, that appealed to a specific clientele. And when that proved more costly than it was worth, they began their foray into growing marijuana for a local dispensary.

Her mother approached the effort as if pot were like all the other plants she nursed lovingly from mere seedlings. Making a go at the world of weed meant growing in much larger quantities than her parents had ever taken on before, posing a challenge that left her mother perpetually exhausted and hoarse. Exhausted because of the hours it took tending and trimming such a volume of plants. Hoarse because it was the habit of Sam’s mother to speak out loud to her plants, going so far as to read them children’s books when they were seedlings. It took hours to manage that task within the hydroponics greenhouse that had once held exotic flowers, their luscious smell replaced by the skunk-like stench of weed. Sam wondered how much weed her parents had smoked as kids, how much they continued to smoke today, often lighting incense in an inadvertently hilarious attempt to keep their habit from her. Once when she was a sophomore they’d even sat Sam down, her father extending a joint toward her.