You (You #1)(73)

I don’t have a plan or a backup plan and I didn’t think things through. You’re a good friend, polite and loving. Of course you need your time with Peach. And I’m a serious mess, pained and bleeding. My car is in the trees and I’m not strong enough to walk back to town and break into a B and B. I crouch and make my way back to the neighboring property.

The front door is locked (go figure), and the world is lit by moonlight on snow (God bless), so I make it around back without falling and causing a ruckus. There is a boathouse—go figure—and the door is unlocked—God bless. I sneak inside and wrap myself up in a tarp. My wounds come back to life in the warmth, as if there are invisible dogs biting me, gnashing. I hurt. But rise. You miss me and that thought lifts me above my pain. I settle into the far left corner where the wind can’t nip me with such force.

A cop shines a flashlight in my face. I see his gun and I don’t need a mirror to know that I look like and smell like a zombie. The cop is jacked with a thundering baritone. “State your name.”

I cough up blood before I get my last name out. The cop pockets his piece. Progress. I sit up. Progress. He’s the most American man that America ever made, dark skinned in a white town with white snow. He scans my Figawi hat that he holds in his hands as if there’s a barcode in the Mount Gay Rum logo. It must have fallen off while I was sleeping. He smiles. “You raced in Figawi, Spencer?”

“A couple of times,” I answer and now I know why Stephen King can’t stop writing about New England. I’m bleeding. A deer is dead. I’m squatting. My car is steaming in the woods. And this motherfucker wants to talk about sailing.

He hands me my hat. “Are you a friend of the Salingers? I noticed some activity there. Did you get lost?”

I will die if he says the name Salinger again and I shake my head. “No. I’m lost.”

“Where are you trying to go?”

The questions unnerve me and the stress intensifies my pain. Everything is wrong and my ribs twinge. I wince. The cop is concerned (yes) and he offers a hand (thank you, RIPD). I take it and I hold on. “Officer, in all honesty, I don’t even know where I am. My GPS crapped out a while back. I got lost. I’m a wreck.”

“So that is your Buick in the woods.”

“Yeah,” I say. Fuck.

“Spencer, did you have anything to drink tonight?”

I’m about to ask why he’s calling me Spencer but I remember the name sewn into the hat: Spencer Hewitt. Relief. “No, sir.”

“Did you have anything to smoke?”

“No,” I say. “But you might want to ask the deer that rammed me out of nowhere.”

He smiles and I wince. He radios the station about ER wait times and we have to get out of here now. You are close, mere footsteps away. For all I know, you’re already awake, rubbing sleep out of your eyes, soothing paranoid Peach. What if she saw the cop car? What if the cop used his lights? What if he called for backup? What if you are out there right now giving a statement to the police? I vomit all over the tarp.

“Let it out, Spence.” He has a comforting way. “We’ll get you an ambulance soon.”

But ambulances are bright and loud. I have to be strong for your sake and I manage to get up. “Not necessary, Officer.”

“Fine,” he says. “But I’m taking you to the hospital.”

I’ll go anywhere to get away from you and he helps me hobble outside and toward the car. The trees obscure the view of Peach’s house, so even if you were standing at the great room window, you couldn’t see me. Officer Nico—cool name—didn’t leave his lights on—cool dude—and his cop car is a hybrid—only in LC—and we are driving, relief.

Nico is a good man, friendly, distracting me with tales of his football days at URI. He loves it out here. He’s from Hartford and he comes to life regaling me with stories about nut jobs who come up this way hoping to get a look at Taylor Swift. “As if she’s gonna go out with some stalker, right?”

“Right,” I say.

“Try and get a little shut-eye,” he says. “We got a bit of a drive.”

I admit that it’s nice to have someone take care of me, someone who wants me to get enough sleep. I can relax in here, the doors locked, the heat on, the partition solid. Soon, I am out, cold, dreaming of you in an old, billowy Dickensian dress, you.

CHARLTON Memorial Hospital is in Fall River, Massachusetts, only twenty miles away. But twenty miles may as well be twenty light-years because this place is depraved, loud and smelly, the anti-LC. When Nico opens the car door, a wall of cigarette smoke consumes me. A dozen degenerate junkies hang around trying to score Oxy. I’m tempted to ask Officer Nico why he didn’t take me to the hospital where the summer people go, but what’s the point? We’re here. The guy ahead of us has a bloody knife protruding from his back pocket and he’s trying to tell the nurse he had an accident with a car door. A fourth grader would know that he was lying, yet he begs, “Just one Oxy’ll do, Sue.”

But Sue is tough. “Get a coffee, go to a meeting, and fuck off.”

I’m no junkie lowlife and Nico has pull so we’re ushered into a room right away. It turns out Nico used to work in this town, but he left because it’s been “chewed up, swallowed, and spit out” by heroin and Oxycodone. He shakes his head and I must be glaring at the desperados in the waiting room because Sue grins at me. “Whatsa matta, kid?” she sneers. “Too much glamma fah yah?”