Universal Harvester(37)

PART THREE





1

“Oh, my God,” Sarah Jane said when she answered the knock at Lisa Sample’s door. Jeremy was standing on the porch looking dazed. His shirt was covered with blood.

“Sorry,” he said reflexively.

“No, no,” she said. She put her arm over his shoulder and led him inside. “Are you all right?”

“It’s not me, it’s Ezra.”

“Oh, my God,” she said again. “Where is he? Where is he?”

Jeremy turned halfway back toward the door he’d just come through and nodded stiffly in the direction of the highway. “Paramedics,” he said. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

Sarah Jane grabbed a remote from an end table and turned off the television in the living room. “Didn’t they offer you a ride?” she asked, trying not to sound irritated; in the absence of details she’d begun stitching a story together, something that would explain both why Jeremy’d happened to set out for Collins and how he’d done so just in time to find Ezra in the road, his errand interrupted, the remnants of its purpose surrounding the wreck in broken plastic pieces and shiny lengths of unspooling tape.

“Could I get a little water,” he said.

“Oh, my God, of course,” she said, hurrying to the kitchen.

“Could I use the restroom,” he called after her.

“Just through the door on the other side of the couch,” she said from the kitchen over the sound of the cooling water rushing from the tap.

*

Washing Ezra’s blood off his hands and face in Sarah Jane’s bathroom, trying to listen to his thoughts over the new ringing sound in his ears alongside the rhythmic whoosh of his own pulse: Did she live here now? Was that it? It was obvious she’d been spending a lot of her time out here, but he hadn’t given much thought to the technicalities. Nobody likes a nosy neighbor. In the mirror, he saw his face looking tired, like he’d been up all night worrying, dusty sweat encrusting at his temples. It was a little past four in the afternoon.

Back in the living room she was waiting with a glass of ice water. “Rest,” she said, patting the couch cushion a respectful half-arm’s length from where she sat.

“Thanks,” he said. The coldness of the glass in his hand drew him earthward, down into the present moment, then eased him further down; he might easily have nodded off to sleep, glass still in hand, like an old man in a rest home. All the chaos of the highway began to ebb, seeking the place where dreams go after you wake up: the sirens breaking the stark silence; the paramedics emerging from the van all at once, two-way radios squelching arhythmically; the team strapping Ezra to the stretcher while the driver asked Jeremy question after question in rapid succession. How long has he been unconscious? Do you have any idea what he hit? Do you have a phone number for his family?

“What happened to Ezra?” she said.

“I guess he flipped that old Citation,” said Jeremy. “I don’t know why he drives that thing. Anyhow, it was upside down in the ditch.”

“Gosh,” she said. The blood on his shirt was still wet and gummy; she didn’t want to ask the obvious question.

“He was breathing when I picked him up. Unconscious, though. Thrown from the car, I guess. I figured I should just get him out of the road.”

“Sure.”

Jeremy’s momentum had been arrested; he didn’t know what to do for conversation now. It didn’t seem like a good time to put in notice anymore. “You know those telephone pole call boxes?” he said instead. “The telephones inside are like antiques. I had to say everything two or three times before they got the message.”

“Oh, jeez,” she said.

“Yeah. I think they usually have some waterproof metal door, but this one didn’t even have any door.”

“Oh, jeez,” she said again, and then, reasoning that she’d waited long enough: “Why—what was he doing all the way out here?”

Jeremy felt the adrenaline letdown take hold, his body sinking into the soft couch. It was so comfortable. He looked up at her until he caught her eyes, and then held her gaze just long enough to convey, as gently as he could, that he didn’t consider her question a real question. A person like Ezra wouldn’t have been on his way to Collins unless somebody’d called him there on some business, on or off the books.

“We should probably go get all those tapes off the road. Might rain,” he said after it had been quiet for a minute or so.

She rose rather quickly to her feet.

“No real hurry, though,” he said, smiling a little, rubbing his eyes while holding his face in his hands, really pressing the pads of his fingers down hard into his eyeballs: the pressure felt good, incredible really. “That car’s not going anyplace.”

Sarah Jane was at the hall closet, taking down a couple of canvas totes from a hook.

“You’re right, though, it might rain,” she said.

*

She stood by the wreck with her hand over her mouth for a minute or more; the hypnotic uniformity of rural highways allows for plenty of cars in ditches, but Ezra’s crash had been especially dramatic. There were long skid lines on the blacktop, and the driver’s-side door had been torn from its hinges. It lay interior-side-up thirty feet from the wreck, its window shattered.