The Herd(91)

I tried to loll my head back and something burned the back of my skull, a branding iron, and through my shuddering jaw I moaned. I tried to sit up, failed. Banged my cheek back down on the iron below me.

Iron—iron bars, below and in front of me. I looked beyond them and made out a wall of brick a few feet away, spotlit in the dark by the same orange glow. My logic kicked in, stitched the world together: I was outside in the freezing cold, without a jacket. I was…it came together, a pouncing revelation, I was on Mikki’s fire escape, the one I’d seen in her bedroom, dumped and left to die. Why was I out here? Why did my head…she’d hit me, right? I tried moving my neck again and found the white-hot patch.

I had to think. Thinking was hard, slow, thick, thoughts like crankcase oil in a freezing cold engine. The first order of business was warming up. I needed to get inside. I ordered my hands to collect under me and was alarmed when they only half obliged. I wrenched open my chattering jaw and tried to scream, but what came out was a dry rasp, a white cloud, there and then gone. My heat—warmth from the inside, from my lungs, I needed to conserve it.

Roll call: Knees? Present. I awkwardly army crawled across the cold iron until my shoulder hit the window. I tried to look inside: darkness, the door between her bedroom and hallway closed. I rocked away and then slammed against the glass, once, twice, explosions of pain and the knowledge this would never work—it wouldn’t open it, wouldn’t attract attention, nobody would hear it in the cold with their windows sealed so tight, if only it were summer, in summer people are—

Focus. I was four floors up. Too many to jump, and in this state, my arms and legs shaking so violently I couldn’t see straight, I wouldn’t make it down three ladders. I wanted to cry, to scream, let the shaking overcome me and roll me right off the side.

One floor: I only had to go one floor to be on someone else’s fire escape. I closed my eyes for a moment, listening to my own gasping breath, to the pounding of blood in my ears. I heard distant Christmas music, the honk of a horn. I said a silent prayer, and then I moved.

I made it down two rungs before my hands, stiff like Barbie’s, failed me and I fell hard onto my tailbone. The impact jolted me but didn’t hurt, and in a faraway, filmy way I knew this wasn’t good, this indicated something bad. I stared at the stars overhead, a few visible even here in our huge city, with all its light pollution and pollution-pollution and people, people are garbage, there’s so much garbage in the city streets, it flies up from the sidewalk and smacks into you when you—

A strange scraping sound. “Are you okay?” It was a girl’s voice, a kid or maybe a teenager, and it took me a moment to realize that since it was a question, I was supposed to answer.

“Eeugh.” I wasn’t sure what I meant, but that’s what came out. I heard her gasp and step away from the window and I started to cry, please don’t leave me, please stay and—

“Yes, hello, there’s a woman on our fire escape, it appears she fell coming down and she’s not wearing a coat, she’s shaking pretty violently, she could be—ma’am, are you drunk? Are you okay?” It was a woman’s voice, an adult, and she appeared above me with a phone pressed to her ear, and I pointed a shaking hand at the back of my head, sucked cold air into my lungs, and said the one word I’d been unable to utter for months: “Help.”

The woman and her daughter brought me inside and spread me on the floor with a blanket over my body and a pillow under my head. The shaking intensified as heat worked its way back into my limbs, firecrackers from the inside, heat and light. My brain still felt sludgy, logy, slow. I heard sirens warbling through the night and for the first time in months, I didn’t tense, didn’t summon Chris and with her a rushing meteor of shame and heartbreak. I was grateful for them. Eager to get to the hospital. Then I could tell—

The EMTs arrived and none of them would listen, none could hear what I was trying to tell them. I kept pointing at the ceiling and they kept tucking my hand back under the blanket. Finally I sat up and touched the back of my head, the wound there, flinching.

“Mikki, upstairs, the apartment right above this one—she did this,” I said. “You need to get her now—I think she killed my friend.”

But EMTs aren’t cops and so they told me they’d send the nearest squad car, and it arrived, lights flashing, right as they were lifting me in a gurney into the back of the ambulance. They’d strapped me down and had just slammed the doors when there was more commotion, shouting, walkie-talkies crunching and snapping and medics hustling back outside. The woman from upstairs was going to ride with me—my angel, her name was Sue, I never did see her again—and she saw the alarm in my face and said she’d try to figure out what was going on.

The ambulance door flew open and they were lifting a second body into it, a stranger, who the hell was this? I watched as the body, unfamiliar, foreign, was locked into place next to me.

And then it was like the big twist in a movie, the huge reveal, the unfathomable surprise, the bombshell that leaves you almost elated with its unexpectedness, how everything you thought you knew was wrong.

It wasn’t just a body. It was Hana.





CHAPTER 27





Hana


WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 6:51 A.M.

In my mind, Katie had gotten older just three times in her life, time standing still and then bounding forward in great leaps: once while I was a teenager in California, another while she was in college at NYU, and then finally while she was in Kalamazoo helping Mom. During those periods, the Disney-like spell had lifted, months could pass, and when I saw her again she looked different, older, more mature. The rest of the time, everything about her stayed the same, as if the ravages of radiation and worry and other things that left us pockmarked with each passing day didn’t apply to her.