Bluff Page 21

I heard: She needs to get to a hospital.

  I heard: Not from here.

  I heard: We need her gone.

  Ellen bent down and draped a dish towel over my bleeding hand, and my whole arm screamed, and I saw black, then Victor Flowers’s kitchen, then black, then Victor Flowers’s kitchen.

  Ellen was cooing in my ear. I concentrated on her words, struggling to hear them above the roaring in my head.

  “… get up, sweetie. You need to get up.”

  “No one breathes a word of this,” said Victor, who had come back into the kitchen with our coats. “Not ever.” Then time jumped ahead. Ellen was wearing her coat. She was laying mine over my shoulders. I was standing again, leaning against her.

  Stay awake, I told myself. Stay awake. Everything depends on it.

  “They’re gonna go to the police,” Jason said.

  “No,” Victor said. “Emily, you need to make sure she never talks. To anyone. Am I understood?”

  “What’s she supposed to tell the hospital?”

  Blood spilled onto the floor. My blood. People were saying words to each other.

  “No one can make her talk,” Victor said. “And she’s not gonna talk. Make sure she knows her life depends on it.”

  Mine. My life depends on it.

  “I’ll make sure,” Ellen said.

  “Not a word, Emily. I’m holding you responsible. You keep her from talking and I’ll make sure you get your buy-in back.”

  “When?”

  “No, you don’t ask when. You just say okay.”

  I was up, barely, on my feet, Ellen’s arm around me, supporting me.

  Stay awake, I told myself.

  Ian held open a door leading outside. Every step brought a fresh shock to my hand. We were outside. The door shut behind us.

  The outside lights revealed a harsh, muted world. Snow in the trees, snow on the grass, snow falling and blowing and vanishing into the black bay far below. The frigid temperature kept me awake and moving. Ellen slowly guided me across the lawn, one foot on the snow-covered grass, then the next, around the side of the house, toward the front, and closer to the car on the street, the trees and shrubs and hedges around Victor Flowers’s property making private our shameful, excruciating exodus. I fell. Ellen got down on her knees and helped me sit up, and then she helped me stand. Then we were moving again, moving across the surface of a new planet, frozen and harsh and windswept. I stumbled again and grabbed her coat tighter, nearly pulling us both down. She held on, keeping us up, and then we were trudging together once more, my good arm reaching around her waist, underneath her thick coat, and I held on as we cut a path through the fresh snow, leaving a wake of blood.

  “We’re a boat,” I said.

  “What?”

  All I could manage was to repeat, “A boat.”

  She shushed me. “Come on, honey, we’re almost at the car.”

  She led me to the passenger side. Sill holding on to me with one arm, she found her keys and unlocked the door, pulled it open, and eased me into the seat.

  “I’ll drive a mile and then call 911,” she said.

  “No!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Take me home.” I had trouble catching a breath, forming words. “Don’t argue.” I could hear my words slur. “Hurry.”

  “No, Nat—that’s crazy.”

  “Drive me home!”

  “Honey, you need a hospital. They can’t make you talk. Even if they call the police, the police can’t make you say anything you don’t—”

  “Stop talking.” With my good hand I had fished my phone out of my pocket. I held the home button and said, as clearly as I could, “Call Harley.”

  The phone echoed me—Calling Harley—and started to ring. Ellen’s tires spun in place.

  Harley answered. I would always consider this to be the miracle of my life. “Natalie?”

  The tires caught traction. We pulled away from the curb.

  “Are you home?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m home. Natalie, what’s—”

  I interrupted her with all the words she needed to hear and not one extra. First aid. It’s bad. My fingers. Thirty minutes. My apartment. Don’t tell anyone. Please. Do it. I ended the call. When she called back a few seconds later I let it go to voicemail.

  Elevate. I should elevate the wound.

  “Natalie?” Ellen said.

  Blood soaked the dish towel. Blood on the car seat. Direct pressure.

  “Natalie, are you still with me?”

  Stay awake. Elevate.

  We passed the exit for the amphitheater where long ago I had seen Pearl Jam with my friend Jamie Carr and her older brother Lance, who’d been in college. The band had looked old. Lance had looked old. He kissed me by the bathrooms. His lips pressed hard. Direct pressure. Snow struck the windshield.

  We passed the exit for Bayshore hospital.

  Wipers pushed away the snow. Wipe. Wipe. Snow snow blood blood, blood in the snow, like a boat’s wake—

  “Another fifteen minutes. Okay? Natalie?”

  —fourteen thirteen twelve eleven ten my fingers two were gone forever and God it hurt and all the blood elevate the wound—

  “Hang on there, Nat. The roads are really bad. I wish I could drive faster. We’ll be there soon.”

  —wipe wipe snow wipe wipe snow the cleaver echoed in the kitchen my bone was white I saw my own bone—

  “We’re here. Natalie? Natalie. We’re here.”

  My apartment building. Ellen parked directly behind my car. She shut off the engine and left me in the seat. She went around to my side and Harley was there with us in the snow and they both held on to me. The snow was falling lighter, and there were no gusts, not like by the water. Harley and Ellen were dragging me toward the house like a drunk bride at her bachelorette party who should have known better but it was all okay and tomorrow morning I would be hungover but no worse and then we were stepping up onto the landing where the porch light was shining, waiting for me, and then we were going through the front doorway and into my apartment and I felt the heat and we were home.

  4

  In my apartment, Harley lifted the coat from my shoulders and I fell to my knees on the carpet. Seeing the blood-soaked dish towel wrapped around my hand, she said, “Oh, Natalie, what happened to you?”

  On the carpet beside the coffee table was an unzipped red canvas satchel. Covering the table were sealed packs of bandages and ointments and pills and tape.

  “Her fourth and fifth fingers were severed,” Ellen said.

  “My god—where are they?” Harley asked. “Are they on ice?”

  “They’re gone,” Ellen said.

  Only then did I decode the meaning of the grinding sound in Victor’s kitchen. Garbage disposal.

  “She needs a hospital,” Harley said.

  “No,” I managed.

  “We have to call 911.”

  “No!” I struggled for more words. I needed an interpreter. “Ellen …”

  “We got involved in something,” she said. “Bad people did this. If we go to the hospital and the hospital calls the police … you have to patch her up.”

  “Are you crazy?” Harley said. “This isn’t a patch—it’s life-threatening!”

  “Please,” I said.

  Harley pulled her eyes away from the bloody dish towel and knelt down to me. “Are you allergic to latex?”

  I shook my head, and she pulled on a pair of gloves. “Help me get her over to the kitchen.” She and Ellen dragged me there, and then Harley guided me down so I was sitting on the floor. The room got swimmy. The kitchen sink turned on. “Keep her from moving,” Harley said. She unwrapped the dish towel. I turned my head away. “Now find a clean towel—dish towel, any kind of towel.”

  I heard the kitchen sprayer being pulled from its home. When the spray of water hit my hand, I screamed so loudly that Harley’s dog started barking, and from my living room there came an intense flapping of wings agains
t metal cage bars.

  “Try to stay still,” Harley said. “I know it hurts.”

  That word, “hurt,” was a piece of cotton. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the fire bolt ripping up and down my arm.

  “I found some towels,” Ellen said.

  “Put them in the other room by the table,” Harley said, and went back to spraying my hand. I bit my lip to stop myself from screaming. When the spraying finally ended, she told Ellen to shut off the water. My shirt was wet. I was shivering. “I’m going to put some ointment on now,” she said. I couldn’t watch. The direct touch made me scream again but I did my best to hold still. More barking upstairs. More wings beating against the cage.

  “I’m going to wrap it tightly in gauze,” Harley said, “and we’re going to hope the bleeding slows down.”

  After the initial contact, I felt my hand relax the tiniest bit as she continued to layer on the gauze, over the wound, around to the base of my hand, around my wrist, and back up, over and over. When I dared to look at my hand, blood was already darkening the gauze. She continued to add layers. “Help me get her over to the couch,” she said, and with Ellen’s help I was being lifted to my feet and guided over to the loveseat, then lowered again. My legs were lifted and placed over an armrest. Harley slid one of the back cushions to the side and underneath my head. She placed the other back cushion on my stomach and laid my arm on top. My birds, no longer frantic, started to coo—first one, then both of them. “You have to keep it elevated,” Harley said. “Above your heart. That’ll slow the bleeding and help with pain.”

  She wrapped one of my bathroom hand towels around the gauze.

  “Can you keep pressure on it?” she asked me.

  “I think so.”

  “Good girl.” She covered me with the afghan. “Ellen, come with me a minute.”

  They didn’t go far enough. Even with the birds cooing, I heard every word.

  She needs a hospital. She needs sutures, specialists …

  Can’t you do it?

  You can’t just start sewing. I think the bone needs to be cut back to make a flap of skin. And she probably needs blood, and there’s a huge risk of shock, and even if by some miracle she doesn’t go into shock, she’s gonna end up in the ER anyway when this gets infected.

  She won’t go.

  Do you really think she should be making her own decisions right now? God, what did you two get involved in?

  This wasn’t supposed to happen. Pain slowed down time. An eternity passed before Ellen spoke again. I have to leave. But I’ll call for an ambulance from the road. Give me ten minutes. Okay?

  What do you mean, you’re leaving?

  But Ellen was already back beside the loveseat, crouched down. “Honey, Nat, I hope you understand, but we can’t be in the same place. I’m gonna go. You’re in good hands here.”

  “You can’t leave,” Harley said. She repositioned the afghan, which had slipped down from my legs.

  “She has to,” I said.

  Ellen got her coat from the floor and came over to me again. She spoke softly. “I swear to God, Natalie, I thought your deal was great.”

  “It was perfect,” I said. My teeth were chattering.

  Her gaze moved to my bandaged hand resting on the pillow. “No. But it was the best I ever saw.” She shut her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  She watched my face a moment and then left, shutting the inner door behind her and then the outer one.

  “Open the blinds,” I said to Harley. “Right away. Please.”

  She opened them, and from the loveseat I watched Ellen through the window, walking through the falling snow to her car.

  “Unwrap the gauze,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Harley, you have to do it.” Each breath was getting harder. “Do it fast. Please.”

  I watched out the window again and then dug with my good hand beneath the afghan and into my front pants pocket. I had to shift a little to the side. The slightest movement sent my hand screaming.

  Outside, Ellen’s car door slammed shut.

  I removed my hand from my pocket and looked. There had been no time earlier, when I stole it from Ellen, to do anything with it other than shove it into my pocket. There was no time now, either, to examine it, but I had to know what had been worth all this risk, all this deception, all this misery.

  “What is that?” Harley asked.

  It was a bell.

  Silver and very small, it was about the length of a thumb. Engraved on it was a single word—REVERE—and a year: 1775. The clapper was stuck to the bell’s side, silenced, with a Band-Aid.

  “Wrap my hand up again,” I told her, pressing the bell against the palm of my injured hand, “with this inside. Please. Hurry.”

  Harley glanced outside, where Ellen had gotten into her car but wasn’t driving away, then back at me. For the first time, I think she understood that either she was going to do what I asked or she wasn’t, but that logic and reason were not in play—that all this would be beyond her, at least for a while longer.

  Rather than remove all the gauze from my fingers, she cut what was left and began to wrap the new gauze around the old, going over the wound, then up my hand to the wrist, back to the wound, again and again. I prayed that Ellen would drive away, but I wasn’t surprised when her car’s interior light came on. Of course she would want to touch the bell, hold it, remind herself it was hers finally, before leaving. And when she couldn’t find it, there was going to be an explosion.

  She got out of the car and climbed into the backseat. I couldn’t see her any longer, but I knew she had to be searching under the seats, reaching into the car’s crevices. She had to be frantic in that car. She had lost it. Everything she’d worked for this past year was unraveling. She left the backseat and got into the front passenger seat. More searching. Only a matter of time before she came back up the walkway.

  The bell’s shape was vanishing into the bulge of gauze when I heard a hissing sound through my thin living room windows. I couldn’t place the sound until my beautiful, pathetic young neighbor came into view. He had on a leather jacket. No hat or gloves. The sound was the shovel dragging behind him across the top layer of snow.

  He crossed to our side of the street, approached Ellen’s car, and said something I couldn’t make out. The passenger door was still open, and she turned around and looked up at him. I had no trouble hearing her response: “Get the hell out of here!”

  Calvin watched her another moment, and without saying anything else he walked past the front of her car and began shoveling snow away from my rear tire. He dumped the snow by the curb. Shovel, dump. Shovel, dump.

  “You’re shivering,” Harley said, tucking the afghan tighter around my legs. “You’ve lost a lot of blood. You’re going into shock. You need a hospital.”

  I shook my head no and watched Ellen crawl across the center console to get into the driver’s seat again. More searching. By the time she left her car again, my rear wheels were free from the snow, and Calvin was over by the passenger front tire. Ellen shut the driver-side door, went around and shut the passenger door, and headed back toward the apartment. My hand was fully bandaged again, the bell making only the slightest bulge at the palm. I covered my hand with the dish towel as Ellen came charging back into the building, then into my apartment.

  My expression, pained and exhausted and frozen and lightheaded, was no act.

  Hers wasn’t either: sheer panic.

  Without a word, she crossed the living room toward the kitchen. I heard cabinets opening, items being thrown around. Then she was back in the living room. On her knees, she felt under the loveseat, looked under the coffee table. She slid her hand into the corners of the sofa, grazing my legs, my torso, as if I were an inanimate thing—a heavy duffel bag, a log—no longer of consequence. Every jostle sent a million volts through my hand.

  “What are you doing?” Harley asked.

  Ellen stood and leaned over me, examining the lov
eseat, and I noticed her exposed thumb, the neat stiches made with black thread, which the Band-Aid had been covering up until very recently.

  “What are you looking for?” Harley asked. “Maybe I can help.”

  My neighbor wasn’t going to win an Academy Award, but Ellen, scanning the living room, was too busy to notice. She went into the kitchen again. There were only so many places to search, but she had to keep at it because the alternative was too awful for her to consider: if it wasn’t in her car or in my apartment, then the bell, whose theft she had planned and plotted with such precision and guts this past year, the bell she had successfully stolen from Victor Flowers’s home without anyone knowing, had slipped out of her pocket back in the Highlands, somewhere in Victor’s vast yard, in the deep snow, during our graceless trek to her car.

  “It has to be here,” she said, the queasiness in her voice having nothing to do with me or my injury. It was the thought that a search anyplace other than on Victor Flowers’s property was probably fruitless.

  “What does?” I made myself ask. She ignored me, but when one of the birds cooed again, Ellen glanced up at the birdcage. She kept watching it and went closer. Julius was pecking at a small silver object hanging from the top of the cage by a length of twine.

  Not a bell. A small disco ball.

  She muttered to herself and turned to me. “Where’s a flashlight?”

  “I don’t think I have one.”

  She removed her phone from her pocket and was out the door and outside again. She began to search with the flashlight from her phone—first the stoop, then the walkway, slowly retracing her steps to the street.

  “What’s that, Natalie? I didn’t hear you?”

  Harley was kneeling down beside me. Time had skipped. I’d lost a couple of seconds. The afghan wasn’t thick enough. My face felt clammy, but I was shivering hard. I didn’t realize I’d said anything aloud.

  “She never needed a partner,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” Harley asked. “Tell me what happened.”

  It had all been misdirection. Every single moment since she drove me to that Flemington café. All our practice. All our planning.

  “We were partners,” I told Harley, “but she never planned to win the game.”