Desert Crossing (3 page)

We could hear Jamie's voice, muted, talking to Beth. Maybe she was asking him about the beer. He'd tell her the whole truth, I was pretty sure. He wasn't like Kit that way. He wouldn't be thinking ahead and trying to guess the consequences.

“Look,” Kit said, pointing. In the distance I could see tiny flashes of red and blue light streaking across the land. In almost the same minute, we heard the whine of sirens. My arms shook. I clutched my elbows to hold them still.

What would happen to us? People went to jail for things like this. Drunk driving, hitting and killing someone. Wasn't it murder? But Jamie wasn't drunk. Kit was right. They didn't drink much at all. I hoped Kit couldn't see how I was trembling.

Beth came back to the truck and rested her hand on the door. “Here they come. You might as well get out.”

We walked over to Jamie. He was sopping wet, his T-shirt so drenched it stuck to his chest, transparent. His hair hung down over his eyes and he flipped it back, spraying water on us.

“There hasn't been one car since you left,” he said. “It's freaky out here.”

We could hear the night rustling, close to us, except for the hushed patch of gravel where the girl lay.

Kit jerked his head. “Can we stand over there? Away from this?”

“Her,” I said.

Kit walked a few yards away, and Jamie and Beth followed. I stayed where I was. I crouched down to really look at her. Her eyes were as shiny and light as glass. Her cheeks glistened. She had no expression at all. It was different from the way people looked when they were sleeping. So much blanker than that, with no flicker or twitch, no sign that her face would ever change.

Her T-shirt was dark blue. Letters stretched across it in big, excited loops:
THE ROCKIES
ROCK! Maybe she was from Colorado. Or she'd gone there on vacation. Or somebody brought her this T-shirt back from a trip.

The sirens were getting louder. I looked at her curled white hand, at the bracelet circling her wrist. Shouldn't it be easier to destroy a bracelet than a person? Shouldn't that be the first thing that got crushed or shattered? But the bracelet was perfect, exactly as it had been when she was alive.

It looked like my charm bracelet at home. It had a silver heart hanging from it, just like mine. Someone would take her away soon. This bracelet would be all that was left.

It seemed so unfair. Something should stay.

Before I even thought about what I was doing, I reached out and unclasped it, sliding it under her arm. The tips of my fingers grazed her cold skin, and the charms jangled against each other. I knew it was wrong. I could hardly breathe. I didn't know why I was doing it.

I shoved it deep inside my jacket pocket just as the police cars came screaming to a stop.

6

There were three cops. They got out of their cars all at once, with the ambulance wailing behind them. The paramedics swung open its back doors and yanked a metal stretcher to the ground. It clattered across the road. Then they crouched by the girl, and their hands were quick and confident, lifting her wrist, feeling her neck, shining a tiny, piercing light in her eyes. The police had flashlights. They walked around, looking at the road and the gravel shoulder where she was lying. Somebody took pictures, and the fierce burst of the flash made me blink. They talked to the paramedics. They marked the outline of her body. Everyone seemed to know what to do.

I watched the paramedics move the girl onto the stretcher. They straightened her out and pressed her arms close to her sides. For a minute, it seemed like they were tucking her in, the way my mom sometimes did when I was almost asleep, smoothing the covers, and if my arm dropped over the edge of the mattress, sliding it back toward the middle.

But then they snapped the white sheet taut and covered her completely.

One cop stayed at the ambulance, and the other two walked toward us. Watching them come, with their shiny badges and bulging holsters, I felt a wave of fear wash through me. The girl had been alive, and now she was dead. There was nothing between those two moments but us. My heart started to pound. We'd done something terrible. Even if it was an accident, there was no way it wasn't our fault.

A heavy, older man, the one who seemed to be in charge, came up to us. He rubbed his forehead and nodded to Beth. “How have you been, Beth? I haven't seen you in a while.”

“Fine, Stan. Busy. How about you?” Beth tossed her hair back, staring at the ambulance.

“Not too bad. It's a shame about that girl. She's young.”

“I know, I know.” Beth shook her head. “What was she doing out here, by herself? Did you pass any breakdowns?”

“Nope, nothing reported from here to Kilmore.” He turned to us. “I'm Sheriff Durrell,” he said. “We'll need to get statements from you folks. Now, which of you was the driver?”

Jamie nodded slightly, biting his lip.

“And where's your vehicle?”

“It's at my house,” Beth said. “Let me talk to you for a minute, Stan.”

She pulled him away from us, speaking softly. I could hear Kit swearing under his breath. Jamie shook his head. “Cut it out, Kit. We've got to tell them what happened. Okay? Everything that happened.”

Kit frowned. “I don't even know what happened. Do you?”

Then the sheriff came back, and he was different, bristling and curt. “I understand you boys have been drinking. Can I see your licenses? We'll need to run a few checks. And how about you, young lady? Did you have any alcohol this evening?”

“No,” I said quickly, but I couldn't look at him. I could feel the weight of the bracelet in my pocket.

“Are you aware the legal drinking age is twenty-one?”

“She didn't have any,” Jamie said.

When I raised my eyes, the sheriff was still watching me. “Walk that way, toward the squad car, in a straight line,” he ordered. “Heel to toe, arms at your sides, count the steps out loud.”

I felt my cheeks get hot. I did what he said, placing my feet carefully. “One, two, three…” My voice was thin and high.

“Louder,” he said. I swallowed. I couldn't stand all of them watching me. “Eight, nine…”

“Okay, that's enough,” he called. “Come on back. What's your name?”

“Lucy Martinez.”

“Roy!”

I jumped.

“Take Miss Martinez back to the car and get her statement.” He turned to Jamie and Kit. “You boys stay with me.”

I followed the younger cop to the police car. As we walked away, I glanced back and saw Jamie and Kit standing like statues, arms pressed to their sides. It seemed not real and too real at the same time, like a dream. The sheriff was making each of them raise one leg out in front and hold it there. Another time it would have been funny—they looked like storks—but not now, with their faces stiff and scared. There was no way they were drunk. But I was afraid for them, even so.

*   *   *

The police car was dark inside, with a sharp, sour smell. What was it? Sweat? Blinking screens and gauges crowded the front panel. It looked like the controls for a spaceship. Staticky voices burst over the radio, making me flinch. The clock said 10:38.

“Is it that late?” I asked, and then felt stupid when he didn't answer. I realized I didn't have any sense of the time. I had no idea when we had the accident, when we got to Beth's, when the police arrived. Of course he would ask me that. And I wouldn't know.

The cop turned down the radio and took out a clipboard with a printed form on it. He asked questions without looking at me—my name, my address, my age—scribbling across the page in quick, dark lines. I watched the side of his face in the dim light of the car. A muscle in his jaw twitched under the skin. “Okay, tell me what happened.”

I pressed my lips together and stared out the window, thinking hard. I would be careful, like Jamie said. I wanted to tell him everything. “We were driving—”

“Who was driving?”

“Jamie. My brother, Jamie.”

“And you were in the front seat?”

“No … no, Kit was in front. I was in the back, behind Jamie. We're driving to Phoenix to see my dad, and we were trying to get to Albuquerque tonight, to break up the trip. It started to rain really hard.”

“What time was that?”

I bit my lip. “I don't know. I didn't look at the clock.”

“Roughly what time? Seven o'clock? Eight?”

“It was dark. I don't know. It could have been dark because of the storm, but I think it was after sunset. Maybe seven-thirty?”

“And how would you characterize the visibility?”

“Uh…”

“How well could you see the road?”

I thought of that ocean swirling around us. “It was raining hard,” I said.

“So the visibility was poor?”

“Yes.”

“And did your brother adjust his speed? Did he slow down?”

I thought of us racing through the dark, watery night. “I don't know. I wasn't paying attention.”

“And then what happened?”

“We hit something.”

“What did you hit?”

“I didn't see it. I just felt the bump.”

“You didn't see it because you weren't looking out the front? Or because you were looking but you couldn't see what it was?”

I tried to think. Had I been looking through the windshield when we hit her? I couldn't remember now. The rain blurred everything.

“I don't know. I don't think I was looking out the front.”

“Did your brother brake? Did the car skid?”

“No, no, it happened too fast. There wasn't time to brake.”

He stopped writing. “But you weren't actually looking in front of the car. Is that right? So you don't know if there was time to brake.”

I pushed my hand deeper inside my pocket and touched the bracelet. For a minute, it made me feel more scared. But then, somehow, safer. I closed my fist around it and took a deep breath.

“No, I guess not. But it happened quickly.”

“After the bump, did your brother brake?”

“Yes, he braked. Yes.”

“And stopped the car?”

“No, he thought it was an animal. A coyote.”

“Did he say why he thought that?”

“I guess that's what he thought he saw.”

“But you didn't see a coyote.”

I shook my head. “But I looked back, afterwards, and I saw something in the road.”

The cop turned toward me, interested. “What did you see?”

“It was dark, there was too much rain. I don't know.”

“Well, did it look like an animal?”

“It could have been an animal.”

“And it was in the road?”

I thought of the dark, spasming thing in the road, that injured, dying thing. I couldn't look at him. I tightened my fingers around the bracelet, and the sharp edges of the charms cut into my palm. “It was trying to get off the road.”

“So it was moving?”

“Yes…”

“Upright? Or—?”

“No. Sort of crawling, close to the ground.”

“So what you hit was still alive?”

I thought of her lying there, with her beautiful curving arm and her dark hair like a halo. I heard Jamie's voice:
But it was a coyote.

“I guess,” I whispered.

“What did you do at that point?”

“I told Jamie and Kit. I said I saw something move, and we talked about going back, and Kit thought if it was a wild animal there was nothing we could do.”

The cop paused, holding his pen over the page. “Did you or your brother, or the other passenger, discuss that what you saw in the road might be a person?”

“No!” My throat ached. I sucked in my breath and clenched my fist around the bracelet. It hurt, but I was glad it hurt. “No. We never thought that. If we'd thought that, we would have stopped right away.”

He was writing again, quick, certain words, even though everything I said was so unsure. He glanced over at me. “Miss Martinez, do you need to take a break for a few minutes?”

I shook my head.

“Tell me what happened next.”

“We turned around. We went back, and when we got to the place, we found her there.”

“And it was raining this entire time?”

“Yes.”

“And what happened then?”

“We … we saw right away that she was dead.”

“How did you know she was dead?”

I chewed on my lip, hesitating. “We could tell. Her eyes were open. She wasn't moving or breathing or anything.”

“Did you attempt to perform any kind of resuscitation on the victim?”

It was the first time anyone had called her that. I looked at him. If she was the victim, what were we?

“No. She was dead. But we tried to call 911. We couldn't get a signal on the cell phone.”

“And what did you do then?”

I told him the rest, quickly, without stopping for air. Now that we'd gotten to the part where she was dead, nothing else really mattered. I told him how I'd thrown up, how we drove to Beth's to get help, how Jamie stayed behind. It seemed important to tell him that Jamie stayed behind. Like that was the one thing we'd done right.

He listened and wrote. Then a stuffy silence filled the car. I watched his face while he checked over his notes. I could draw it, I was thinking, the sharp line of his jaw. But I didn't know what it meant. Was he mad? Did he believe me?

People's faces were like that when you first started drawing them: geometrical, abstract. They became less familiar the longer you looked at them, segmenting into shapes like a puzzle, impossible to solve.

Finally he said, “All right, Miss Martinez, I think that's it. You must be pretty worn out.” For the first time, he looked at me, really looked at me. He had nice eyes, crinkly at the corners. If I'd seen him playing baseball or walking his dog, I never would have thought he was a cop. He didn't seem like a person who spent his life around criminals and dead people.