Fearless (9 page)

“AND AT APPROXIMATELY WHAT hour did you see Heather Gannis approaching the park from the west side?”

Gaia couldn’t quite pull her eyes from that vague middle distance to focus them on the detective sitting across from her.

“About seven forty-five, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I wasn’t wearing a watch at the time. I’d dropped off a friend at First Avenue and

Fourth Street at seven-thirty and then walked directly to the park on my way home. I figure it would take roughly fifteen minutes to walk from First and Fourth to Washington Square West,” Gaia replied. She was on auto-answer. It felt to her that she’d already fielded at least a hundred thousand questions, and they hadn’t even gotten to the meaty part.

“Fine. And what exactly happened when you saw Heather?” the detective asked. Detective Anderson was his name. He was in his forties probably, with thinning medium-brown hair, slightly pocked skin, and pale eyes. He looked just as tired and harassed as detectives always looked on those realistic cop shows.

Gaia let out her breath slowly. Did he really want the catty details? “I—um—sort of stopped her, and she—uh—” Gaia broke off and glanced at the detective. “See, Heather and I weren’t exactly on friendly terms. A few days ago I spilled hot coffee on her, and since then—”

“Since then?” he prompted.

“We’ve had, uh, words, you could say,” Gaia explained.

“I see.” The detective nodded. “So you disliked Heather, did you?”

“I was told she is still alive.”

“Excuse me. I’m sorry. Yes.” Detective Anderson looked genuinely awkward. “You dislike Heather,” he amended.

“That’s a tough thing to say about a girl in a coma, sir,” Gaia pointed out.

“Right. Yes. Okay.” He sighed and shifted in his chair. “But as of yesterday evening, you and Heather were enemies?”

“Am I a suspect in this case?” Gaia asked, staring him dead in the eye.

He cleared his throat and shifted again. He moved his mouth a few times before any sounds came out. “Uh, no. You’re not.”

“Okay.” She settled back in her chair. She knew she wasn’t a suspect, because she knew they’d assembled a police lineup, because she’d overheard it being discussed when Detective Anderson was hunting around for cream for his coffee. She knew he was trying to pretend like she was so he could manipulate and intimidate her more easily.

“So, back to the story,” she said, chilly but helpful. “Heather told me to leave her alone, and I did. Less than a minute after walking past her, I ran into her friends—Tina and two other people whose names I don’t know. I think you know the story from there. After that I walked home. You have all that information already.”

Detective Anderson looked even more harassed and tired. “Right. Now am I to understand that you did not warn Heather as to what you’d just seen moments before in the park?”

“No, sir.”

“But you did warn the three people you saw subsequently?”

“Yes, sir.”

He waited for an explanation that didn’t come. After a while he stood up. “All right, Gaia, that’s it for the moment. Would you come with me? I’d like you to look at a lineup.”

She followed him through the precinct to the viewing-room, listening to directions, warnings, assurances associated with a lineup. She felt floaty and distant as she took in the hodgepodge of beat-up office furniture, papers, files, boards, maps, clippings, notices, charts, the pathetic set of twigs on a windowsill that had probably been a live plant a decade or two ago.

It was so different in particulars, but so generally the same as the precinct where she’d spent the night as a twelve-year-old in San Rafael, California, after her mother was murdered, when they couldn’t figure out anyplace else to put her.

“GAIA! GAIA! ARE YOU OKAY?”

It was Ed, waiting outside the police station for her, and she wasn’t happy to see him. Who ever said misery loved company? Her misery did not love company. Her

misery loved to be alone. Her misery threatened to bludgeon company.

“I’m fine.” She hardly stopped. Another funny thing about having friends was that they expected things of you. They made you want to not be a terrible, awful, execrable person. They made you feel even worse when you were one. It was a lot easier not to have any friends.

“Gaia, wait. What’s going on?” He rolled along after her.

She was tempted to find a quick set of stairs to ascend. Jesus, she really was an awful person.

“Haven’t you heard from the angry hordes at school? I put Heather in the hospital. Didn’t they tell you?”

“They—I—I mean—,” Ed stammered.

“Come on, Ed. They did, didn’t they?”

“But Gaia, you know it’s not true,” Ed argued, breathless from rushing to keep up with her. “You are not responsible for Heather. Even if you had warned her to stay away from the park, she would have cut through, anyway. She wouldn’t have listened to you. There’s nothing you could have done.”

Gaia made a sharp turn onto West Fourth. Ed’s tires practically left skid marks.

“Gaia, are you even listening?” Ed demanded.

She didn’t bother to stop at the light on Seventh Avenue.

“Gaia! Come on!”

She practically sprinted all the way down Perry Street and pulled up short in front of George and Ella’s house.

“Listen to me. What happened to Heather was scary and horrible, but it was not your fault.”

Gaia walked up all fifteen steps of the front stoop before she turned around to look at him. “Ed Fargo. Thank you for trying beyond all possible reason to be my friend,” she said quietly. “But it was my fault.”

She turned her key in the door, went inside the house, and shut the door firmly behind her. She went up three flights of stairs with the grace of a robot. Once in her room she walked straight to the vintage turntable she’d recently hauled from the garbage and set up on the mantel. She reached behind the pile of records she kept in the nonfunctional fireplace to the LP in the very back.

She’d long ago memorized every centimeter of the faded, brittle record cover, memorized every word. She took out the record gingerly and set it on the player. She didn’t need to study the grooves to know exactly where to set the needle.

The music filled the room, loud enough to destroy the speakers, to infuriate Ella, to explode her own head.

It was the second movement of the Sibelius violin concerto, the darkest, saddest piece of music

on the planet. It was her mother’s favorite—her weird, beautiful Eastern European mother with the embarrassing accent Her mother knew all of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, and Prokofiev and nothing of Nirvana or any music Gaia held to be important at the time. She’d been so annoyed at her mother for that.

But now the soaring, wailing violin touched Gaia’s cracked heart, and she did something she only allowed herself once or twice a year.

She lay down on the floor and cried.

He needed to pull himself out of this trance, to get a little distance.

SAM SAT IN THE WAITING ROOM OF the intensive care unit, rhythmically whacking his heel against the foot of the couch. It was just like hospital waiting rooms were supposed to be: genuine Naugahyde couch and chairs, plastic side tables displaying magazines you wouldn’t have wanted to read in the late eighties when they came out. A mounted television showed some wretched soap opera that might as well have been filmed and closed-captioned in that very hospital.

He hadn’t seen Heather since last night, and he felt nervous. Finding her in the park eighteen hours before, white as the moon in a dark puddle of blood, was such a potent jolt to his system, he was still breathing, moving, thinking too fast.

God, she’d looked so fragile and broken. He’d thought she was dead until he detected the faintest, slowest flutter of a pulse in her wrist. After that everything exploded into sound and motion. Screaming ambulance sirens, police sirens, people hurrying every which way.

He hadn’t slept since, of course, so his senses were oddly distorted—colors were too bright, noises too

shrill, smells too acrid. Time was disjointed. For example, hadn’t it been at least two hours since Heather’s parents had disappeared with a doctor into Heather’s room, telling him they would be out in ten minutes?

What little peace he had would be shattered when Heather’s sisters arrived from their colleges and Heather’s friends stormed the place the moment school let out. A bunch of those friends had already camped out in the waiting room through their lunch period, spewing millions and trillions of words.

But Sam would suffer them. He would deprive himself of food and drink and sleep and continue to torture himself with this ridiculous soap opera as punishment, laughably slight though it was.

What was the punishment for? For contemplating a breakup with Heather not half an hour before she nearly bled to death. For sitting here, his skin intact as a newborn’s, while Heather lay slashed in a coma. For thinking nonstop of
that girl
.

Mistake. Big mistake. Better not to think of thinking about her because then suddenly he was thinking of her. No. Stop. Heel. New thought.

New thought … He dragged his mind back to an absorbing topic, one he could worry and fiddle with obsessively, like a bloody hangnail. What was that girl’ s name? The one Tina and Co. had blathered

on about for a solid hour? Maia. No. What was it? Gaia? Something like that. How he hated her. Loathed and despised her. What kind of person would let an innocent girl walk straight into a situation they knew was deadly? How petty and small and cowardly this girl Gaia must be.

Of course, the knife-wielding devil who attacked Heather deserved the real blame. But he was beyond hating. He was beyond imagining. Gaia, on the other hand, was a classmate. She was one of them.

Ah. This was good. Righteous indignation got him back on course every time. If he could just keep this focus, keep railing loyally against Gaia, he wouldn’t have to think for minutes at a stretch of
that girl
.

GAIA DREADED THIS WORSE THAN she would dread a group hug with Ella and George or thirty-three simultaneous root canals or even trying out for the cheer-leading squad. But she would make herself do it. She would drag herself right up to the eighth floor of this hospital, past the bevy of Heather’s Mends who detested her, the desperate parents who were

too broken up to care about her, the steadfast, adoring boyfriend who’d maybe take a nanosecond from his grieving to curse her name. It was the right thing for Gaia to do. The fact that she dreaded it so much only made it seem more necessary.

Gaia emerged from the elevator and hesitated in front of the nurses’ station.

“You’re a friend of Heather Gannis?” the orange-haired nurse asked without even looking up from her computer.

“I—”

“Waiting room on your left,” the nurse said, still not looking up.

Gaia loitered another moment, feeling wrong about going to the waiting room under false pretenses. But what was she going to do, pour out her heart to the overburdened nurse? Like she’d care that Gaia dumped coffee on Heather or that Heather bitched her out at a party?

“Okay,” Gaia said, as meekly as she’d ever said anything. “Thanks.”

Walk. Walk. Walk, she ordered herself.

Okay, there they were, spilling out into the hallway. The Friends. When they saw her, would they make a scene right there in the waiting room? Throw stones? Burn her at the stake?

The first murderous glance came from Tina herself. Many others followed as Gaia attempted to slip

past the too full room. The murmur of hushed conversation stopped.

Tina gaped at her but was apparently so appalled, she couldn’t speak. Instead the good-looking boy who’d been with Tina last night, the old suede-jacketed star of Gaia’s cafe fantasy, stepped in.

“Why are you here?” he demanded.

Why was she here? That was a good question.

Because it was the last place on earth she wanted to be?

Because self-flagellation was the only thing that felt right?

Gaia’s real answer made her sound like a kiss-ass, so she didn’t want to say it out loud: She was here because she wanted and needed to apologize to Heather, even if Heather couldn’t hear. Gaia didn’t want to pander to the crowd, and she wasn’t looking for social resurrection. She was perfectly happy being a pariah. That was as comfortable to her as a pair of old shoes.

So, as often happened, she said nothing. She continued on her way down the hall without a particular plan in mind.

The second room on the right, through a wide-open doorway, was Heather’s. Gaia drew in a sharp breath and quickly averted her eyes. She hadn’t meant to go right there exactly. She hadn’t imagined how Heather would look, frail as a bird, hooked up by

scores of tubes to machines that dripped and machines that bleeped, shorn of the self-consciously cool clothing and the beauty that made it so much easier for Gaia to ridicule her. Gaia suddenly felt like throwing up.

There was something much, much worse than your enemy receiving praise, fame, and riches and living happily ever after with an exceptionally handsome guy: your enemy getting slashed in the park after you hoped it would happen.

Her eyes swept into the room again. There, as expected, she saw the dark head of The Boyfriend, bowed over Heather’s prone, still body. Maybe he was crying.

Oh, shit. Shit. Shit. Gaia had no right to be there. What had she been thinking?

It was some selfish hope for exoneration that brought her, nothing nobler than that. Now what? She’d walk herself to the end of the hall. She’d wait a minute or two. She’d walk herself back out to the reception area, maybe find a waiting room on another floor, keep her own private vigil for a few hours—or days, if necessary—until things settled down. And then, as politely as possible, she’d apologize to Heather’s parents and ask if she might have permission to apologize to Heather. They’d think she was a complete freak, but that hardly mattered, did it?

Gaia trudged to the end of the hall. On her way back she cast one last look in Heather’s room. Quiet though she was, The Boyfriend chose that very moment to look up.

Gaia’s eyes stuck to his, and she couldn’t move them.

Her body reacted before her mind. Her head swam. The Coke she’d had for lunch climbed up her esophagus. All oxygen departed her lungs.

It was him. He was it.

It, him, he was Heather’s boyfriend.

The evil, ugly monster with the matted, stinking hair and the razor-blade fangs moved up from her stomach and took a chomp at her heart.

Gaia staggered toward the elevator so he wouldn’t see her when her knees gave out.