One Bloody Thing After Another (3 page)

What is she, slow?

“No he hasn't,” Charlie says. “He's been with me all day.”

“She's real small, and she's all black except for her nose,” the little girl says to Mitchie.

“We have to go.” Charlie pulls on the leash and waves her off with his other hand. She stands watching as Mitchie and Charlie start walking up the hill again.

Mitchie stops at the next lamppost. Charlie looks back at the little girl, making sure she doesn't take this as a sign to start talking to them again.

“Christ almighty, Mitchie. I want to get home. How would you like it if we stopped at every house, so I could go inside and use their toilet?”

Mitchie doesn't care — he'd probably like that just fine.

Tell

The cop says “Sorry” when he cuffs Jackie's hands behind her back. He guides her head gently as he helps her into the cruiser. Jackie doesn't fight. Then both cops go to talk to Mrs. Hubert, and Jackie is stuck listening to the police radio with her hands cuffed under her butt.

It's uncomfortable sitting on handcuffs. Jackie rolls over on her left leg, which isn't comfortable, either. She rolls over on her right leg. The police radio people are having a great time, using their code words and sounding very official. “One-Mike-one, are you dealing with a fifty-one-fifty?” Jackie can hear her own breathing too clearly. The first-kiss tree used to be between the house and that fence. You could have seen it from here. It's gone.

Maybe if she had come yesterday she could have saved her tree. But that's stupid. If she came yesterday it would have been there and she would have sat underneath and thought about Carl and his rat-tail haircut and his dog. Then, the next time she got sad, she would have come and found nothing. She would have rung the doorbell then. This would have happened either way.

After a few minutes, the cops close their notebooks and Mrs. Hubert comes over to the car with them. The cops stand and talk some more, ignoring Jackie for now, but Mrs. Hubert looks down through the window. Jackie smiles at her before she even realizes what she's doing. Mrs. Hubert looks startled.

And then the cops are in the car and they're driving. Jackie feels a bit better now. Mrs. Hubert is okay. She probably has insurance. It was just glass. And now Jackie feels strong and tough, handcuffed in the back of the police car, driving through her old neighborhood. She couldn't protect her tree, but at least she
did
something.

The cops keep trying to get her name. Jackie just looks out the window. There go the tennis courts. When she was in elementary school, she used to come down through the path in those woods every day to play basketball. There's a path through the backyards of these houses, a shortcut to and from school. Trees and rocks and little Jackie's backpack and juice containers. She doesn't remember if she felt strong and tough back then.

The cruiser stops behind a bus, and a bunch of girls get out. They're younger than Jackie and they've all got matching school jackets. Two of them look over, and Jackie wishes she could wave. The girls are all watching now, hoping to recognize her from school. Jackie always used to get excited when she saw a police car with someone in the back. Was it a murderer? A shoplifter? Murderers probably wish they could wave, too.

The cop car turns right, at the corner where you turn left to get to the broken-arm tree.

her

At the police station, the cops put Jackie in a room with a big mirror along one wall like a blackboard. They tell her that they're going to call someone from youth services. She's not really listening. She still hasn't told them her name.

“I'm not stupid,” she says. “I watch
.”

The cop writes something down on his piece of paper.

“Go soak your head,” Jackie tells him.

Someone has carved initials into the table.
P.H.
There's a line under it. Those are the same as her mother's initials. Maybe they
are
her mother's initials. Could be. Jackie wonders how old this table is. The wood is stained a dark colour and it's oily looking.
Tire Iron Pat
, she thinks, and she smiles.

The cop smiles back. “Did you carve that?” he says.

“You know I didn't carve it. You were watching from the other side of the mirror.” She touches the
P.H.
with her fingertip. It's smooth. Old.

“We don't have to be enemies,” the cop says. “I'd love to get your side of the story. That's all.”

Jackie rolls her eyes. “There is nothing you can say to a cop that will ever help you,” she says.

Her mother taught her that.

I'm

Every day, in the front lobby of the retirement home, Mitchie gets stuck in the corner. He gets too excited, coming back from his walk, pulling at his leash. And every day Charlie has to help him.

“Careful, Mitchie. Watch where you're going.” But poor blind Mitchie hobbles into that corner anyway. He's reliable. Every day, stuck in the corner. And every day, without fail, that woman is standing on the other side of the glass door, her own severed head in her arms, watching them.

Charlie opens the door, and he gives Mitchie's leash a sharp tug. The fat little dog pulls back a bit, and then walks into the wall again. He totters from foot to foot. The headless woman is still standing there, blocking the way, blood trickling. She's talking, and Charlie can see her lips moving, but no sound is coming out. If he was a younger man, maybe he could read her lips a bit, but his eyesight isn't so good anymore. Charlie is getting tired of her anyway. He pulls at the leash again.

“God damn it, Mitchie,” Charlie says. “Come on, now.”

Mitchie has himself turned around the right way, and he starts toward Charlie, panting a bit. Each little step is an effort. He walks right past the door again, and Charlie has to give the leash another tug, to turn him in the right direction. They squeeze past the woman, and Charlie grits his teeth against the cold where he brushes against her skin. He can feel her eyes looking up at him.

“What do you think she wants today, Mitch?” Charlie asks the dog. They're in the elevator lobby now. “She just won't give it up, eh? What was it yesterday?” Charlie turns to the ghost. She's on the other side of the lobby. “Is it your email again? Are you having trouble with your email?”

The ghost takes a shaking step toward them. She's off balance, not that Charlie could blame her. Having your head cut off would certainly affect your equilibrium. She takes another step, and then another. She's so slow. Mitchie is chewing on himself while they wait.

okay

Margaret and Ann are home from school. Downstairs their mother is waking up again. They can hear her voice through the basement door. No words yet, just a constant howling. An animal sound. It will get worse as the night goes on.

“This is stupid. We know what she needs,” Margaret says, putting her books on the table. Ann shakes her head again.

“No,” she says.

“Don't be an idiot,” Margaret says. “The hamster and the bird were both alive. That's the connection, and that's what she needs.”

Ann knows her sister is right. But they have to be sure. Of course they have to be sure. Why is this so easy for Margaret? Already it's “the hamster and the bird,” and not Herman and Blue Guy.

“We have to try other things,” Ann says. “What about raw meat? We can get something fresh from the grocery store. The best steak they have. Or we could try fish. Or dog food.”

“We're not feeding her dog food,” Margaret says. “Jesus. She's our mother.”

and

“We want you to call your parents.” A new cop takes Jackie to a small room with lots of old desks and bored-looking police officers. They have old computers too, and old telephones, and everyone is frowning.

“Good evening, everybody!” Jackie says. Her head is clear now. That tree is dead and gone. Okay. That is not what she would have chosen, but it's done now and she is in a new situation and she has to act accordingly. Ann ignored her at school, but that is not the problem on the table at this time. Ann didn't know Jackie was going to ask her out. She couldn't have known. It wasn't a rejection because Jackie didn't get a chance to even ask.

Clear your head, Jackie thinks. It is not time to worry. It is time to escape.

The police are still frowning.

“Are you this unhappy all the time?” Jackie says. But they don't look unhappy. They look bored. She wishes she had a water balloon. That would cheer them up.
Splash!
Why do they keep coming to their jobs if they hate it here so much? She wants to tell them that they can escape with her when she goes.

“Press nine to call out,” bored cop #
1
says. He is all business, Jackie thinks, and these people are in the business of frowning. Well, not Jackie. Jackie is in the business of escape. Jackie is in the business of magic, and magicians always tell jokes.

She picks up the phone and presses nine for an outside line, just like the cop says. Nothing up my sleeve! Can we all agree that this is just a regular telephone, ladies and gentlemen? But she doesn't dial her own telephone number. Her father wouldn't be home anyway. Jackie dials the number for the police station, which is printed right on the phone itself. Line two starts flashing. The phone on the next desk begins to ring.

“Yes?” bored cop #
2
says into her phone.

“Is your refrigerator running?” Jackie says.

that

Ann looks down at her homework but still can't seem to see it. All day she went to classes. Wrote down notes. Anything to try to forget about what was happening. She didn't even see Jackie. What would she have said? But now she regrets it. She should have gone and found her. Not to tell her. Just to see her. Tomorrow she'd go and find her friend.

Downstairs Ann's mother is screaming the same word over and over again, “Taste, taste, taste, taste, taste!” and Ann can hear Margaret's quiet voice, trying to soothe her.

The plate breaks against the wall down there, and then silence. Ann looks down at the homework and she wants to believe that their mother is eating the steak they bought her. The silence goes on and on and after a while it gets easier for Ann to believe this. She should be down there, too. She shouldn't have made her sister do this alone.

She hears Margaret again, singing a song that Ann forgot they even knew. It's been so long. It was a song they only ever heard when they went camping.

Ann remembers the cabin by the lake. Their mother carrying Margaret screaming out into deeper water, shampoo in Margaret's hair. The terrible blackness of the outhouse at night. Frogs on the wooden step. The way the lake shone first thing in the morning.

And every night, sitting in the dark with the wood stove giving the room just the smallest bit of light, their mother would sing to them. Ann hasn't heard that song in years. She'd forgotten it.

Margaret is downstairs, singing it now, to calm their mother down.

But the screaming begins again. “Taste, taste, taste, taste, taste, taste, taste!” The word sounds wrong, because the shape of their mother's mouth has been changing.

I

They want to take her fingerprints. But Jackie knows how that works. They take her picture and her fingerprints and they put all that information about her inside a computer. Strangers will know things.

“Oh, we knew just where to find you because of computer science! You were on file and in our database so we caught you really easily.”

No thank you, Jackie thinks. So she tells the cop that she has to go to the bathroom, and she uses her little girl voice. He waits right outside the door with his gun, so that Jackie can't escape, but she's going to escape anyway.

Inside the bathroom, Jackie climbs up on the gray counter beside the sink and sits with her back up against the corner. The paint on the walls here is a mustard yellow. Once, her mom told her that hospitals paint the walls yellow because it calms people down. Jackie pulls her knees to her chest and for a few seconds she feels stupid and scared. But there is no other way to escape. Outside that door there is only a computer waiting for the cops to put Jackie inside it. There are no windows in here.

She always forgets this part, how gross it feels, how hard it is to make herself do it. All she can think about now is how awful it will be. But there are no windows in here. They thought of that. Maybe there used to be windows, but too many people escaped. The yellow paint didn't calm them down enough. This is a police station, and there is only one way out. Jackie hugs her legs tighter, and she feels a bit sick. Outside, the cop knocks.

“Come on,” he says. “Hurry up.”

This is her own fault. She should have run away when the cops pulled up to the house instead of just telling stupid jokes. Now she has no choice. The inside of her face tastes like blood again. The cop pounds on the door again, and turns the knob. The door starts to swing inward.

“Mom,” Jackie says, under her breath. This is her magic word.

She is a computer shutting down. Her senses all go quiet like programs closing one by one. This part is fine. This is the good part. She can't hear the buzz of the lights anymore. The room isn't hot anymore. Jackie is not really there. She's in a secret place, and from that secret place she can see the cop step into the bathroom, but can't hear what he is saying. He looks behind the bathroom door, then closes it. He says something else. She can see his lips moving. He looks around. He looks right through her.

Jackie doesn't really know where she is. She's on the counter, but she's not on the counter. This is like
tv
. Her father works in
tv
, and at the studio they have a big room that is a bedroom and a kitchen and a living room and a basement with a pool table all lined up. People stand in one part and pretend there are walls, and on camera it looks separate. But it isn't really. Jackie is sitting right on the couch, but the cameras are all pointed at the dining room table. Nobody can see her.