“Eventually,” she said. “It’s her defense mechanism. When things get too bad, she just checks out. I wish I could do the same thing.”
“One of the nurses said she was sending in a doctor to examine her.”
“God,” she said, turning back to look at her daughter. “She saw the whole thing, didn’t she?”
“She was standing in the doorway when I got there, so yeah, probably. You don’t remember?”
“It’s all murky,” Janey admitted. “I remember screaming for him to stop. His fist hitting Ma over and over. Then you coming in. That look on your face. But it’s like it’s all happening underwater.”
“You’re lucky,” said Sully, whose own recollection was all too vivid, as if playing on a color video in his brain: Ruth’s battered, bloody, ruined face almost unrecognizable, her eyes meeting his for just that split second before rolling back in her head. “Are they saying anything, the doctors?”
“They’re not using the word ‘coma,’ but she’s still unconscious, so…”
“They don’t come much tougher, though,” Sully said. “She’ll fight.”
“I know, but, Jesus, Sully, he knocked out half her teeth. Broke her nose, fractured both cheekbones…”
She allowed him to draw her into his arms then, and he held her until she sobbed herself out. At one point he glanced over at the doorway, half expecting to see Zack come in. Their embrace was innocent enough, but Sully couldn’t help wondering if that’s how it would appear to her father. He recalled Carl’s observation about the world still turning no matter how fucked up things got. No matter how we fuck them up was what he’d meant because, face it, things didn’t fuck themselves up. Sully’s chest, he realized, felt heavy, though what it was heavy with — sorrow, fear, rage — wasn’t immediately clear.
“I keep remembering what I said to her yesterday,” Janey said, finally stepping back. “About how it’s always my jaw that gets broke. Like it was her turn, or something. And that’s what happened.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t cause it,” he said. “It wasn’t you that beat her unconscious.”
“No”—her eyes hardening—“but I fucked the man who did. And then I just watched. I screamed for him to stop, but I didn’t do anything. I let her take my beating.”
“She wanted to. Why do you think she came between you?”
“I’m gonna find that son of a bitch and kill him. I swear to God.”
“No, you’re going to take care of your daughter. Leave Roy to me.”
“You have no idea where he is, even.”
“I’ll find him,” he said, glancing at the girl again and hoping she was still checked out. “Your dad still doesn’t know what’s happened?”
“I left a message on the machine at home in case he’s still on his rounds. He’s probably out in the shed.”
“I’ll swing by the house.”
“Would you?”
“Right now, in fact.”
He was halfway out of the room when he heard her say, “When you find Roy?”
“Yeah?”
She came over to where he stood and whispered directly into his ear, “Hurt him. Promise me you’ll hurt him bad.”
—
ZACK MUST’VE HEARD Sully’s truck turn in to the drive, because by the time he shifted it into park he was standing in the shed’s open doorway, wiping his hands on a rag. He had on greasy jeans and a threadbare plaid shirt, his gut hanging out over his belt, his cowlick in full bloom. If the word “doofus” didn’t already exist, Sully often thought, you’d have to invent it to properly describe him. When he didn’t get out of the truck, Zack came over, looking worried. “You okay?”
Sully held up his hand, and the other man waited patiently for him to regain his breath. “There,” he finally said, though that one word used up all the air in his lungs. The heaviness he’d felt in his chest back at the hospital was even more intense now. The pressure came in waves, making it difficult to inhale. The last one washed over him as he turned in to the drive, a real doozy, but it was almost past now. “Just let me sit a minute.”
“Sit all day,” Zack said, good-natured as always, this man whom Sully had wronged for so long. He’d stayed away these last couple weeks, afraid that Zack would have a two-man job he’d been putting off, some sleeper-sofa that needed to be lugged out of the shed and into the bed of the truck, work Sully simply wasn’t up to in his present condition. “I got no place to be.”
“You do, actually,” Sully told him, and again was out of breath. “Ruth,” he finally managed.
Zack cocked his head. “She all right?”
Sully held his hand up again, waiting for the last wave to draw back down the beach. “She’s in the emergency room.”
Hearing this, Zack looked more perplexed than anything, like maybe he suspected Sully was playing a trick on him. “You sure?”
“She’s in pretty bad shape. Roy beat her up.”
“Ruth,” Zack repeated, scratching his chin now. “Not Janey.”
“Janey’s there with her. And Tina.”
“They okay?” he said.
“Janey is.”
“Tina go into one of her trances?”
Sully nodded.
“I can usually get her to come out of them things,” he said, not bragging exactly, but clearly proud of his knack.
“Well, they can probably use your help, then,” Sully said, because, really, what did it take to light a fire under this guy?
“You say Roy hurt her pretty bad?”
“Yeah,” Sully admitted. “Pretty bad.”
“She gonna die, Sully? Because—”
“I don’t know. But prepare yourself. You’re not going to recognize her. She’s all…” He couldn’t find the words for what she was or possibly imagine how Zack might prepare himself.
He was now looking over at the shed. Watching him process information in real time gave Sully a window in Ruth’s frustrations with him — she, so preternaturally quick and perpetually waiting for her husband to catch up. Anybody else would have been halfway to the hospital by now, running stop signs, honking at drivers in front of him to pull over. If the world were populated by people like him, there’d be no need for stop signs, speed limits or, probably, laws of any sort.
“Her and me…,” he began, then paused, his eyes suddenly full. “You see that up there?”
Sully’d been so intent on the task at hand that he hadn’t noticed the slender shard of metal, a good seven or eight feet in length, that was standing straight up, like a weather vane minus its horizontal arms, on the peak of the shed. At its base, where the lightning had struck, was an enormous scorch mark, which meant they’d been fortunate. Sully’d heard stories of outbuildings that weren’t properly grounded exploding when directly hit by lightning. Many of those were barns filled with hay, but still.
“Last night, what her and me saw up there?” Zack was saying, his voice full of wonder even now. “You couldn’t hardly believe it. This big ball of light. Fuzzy, like those frosted lightbulbs, but really bright. It sat right there at the tip, balanced, like it might fall off. Like something in a dream that don’t make sense, but there it is anyhow. Something come to visit. Trying to tell us something.”
Sully didn’t need to follow the sight line from the roof of the shed to Zack’s bedroom window. If he and Ruth both witnessed the glowing orb, they were both standing at the same window. Her bedroom was on the other side of the house. He recalled what Ruth told him yesterday about how strangely Zack had been behaving of late, as if he was really taking her in for the first time in years. Was the miracle Zack was trying so hard to describe the glowing, unnatural orb atop the shed or the fact that he and Ruth had witnessed it together in the middle of the night in a room she had led Sully to believe she never visited?