“You’ll just have to turn me in,” I said. “I’m gonna hug you again.”
She screamed, “No more! I don’t want any more hugs!”
But she kept her arms on her chest, and I wrapped the blanket around her and stuffed a piece into each of her tight, small fists. I didn’t know what to do for her feet. Finally, I got down on my haunches in front of her. She crouched down, too, protecting herself.
“No,” I said. “No. You’re fine.”
I took off the woolen mittens I’d been wearing. Mittens keep you warmer than gloves because they trap your hand’s heat around the fingers and palm at once. Fanny knitted them for me. I put a mitten as far onto each of her feet as I could. She let me. She was going to collapse, I thought.
“Now, let’s go home,” I said. “Let’s get you better.”
With her funny, stiff lips, she said, “I’ve been very self-indulgent and weird and I’m sorry. But I’d really like to die.” She sounded so reasonable, I found myself nodding agreement.
But I said, “You can’t just die.”
“Aren’t I dying already? I took all of them, and then”—she giggled like a child, which of course is what she was—“I borrowed different ones from other people’s rooms. See, this isn’t some like teenage cry for help. Understand? I’m seriously interested in death and I have to stay out here a little longer and fall asleep. All right?”
“You can’t do that,” I said. “You ever hear of Vietnam?”
“I saw the movie,” she said. “With the opera in it? Apocalypse? Whatever.”
“I was there!” I said. “I killed people! I helped to kill them! And when they die, you see their bones later on. You dream about their bones in splinters and with blood on the ends, and this kind of mucous stuff coming out of their eyes. You probably heard of guys having dreams like that, didn’t you? Whacked-out Vietnam vets? That’s me, see? So I’m telling you, I know about dead people and their stomachs falling out. And people keep dreaming about the dead people that they knew, see? You can’t make people dream about you like that! It isn’t fair!”
“You dream about me?” She was ready to go. She was ready to fall down, and I was going to lift her up and get her to the truck.
“I will,” I said, “if you die.”
“I want you to,” she said. Her lips were hardly moving now. Her eyes were closed. “I want you all to.”
I dropped my shoulder and put it into her waist and picked her up and carried her down to the Jeep. She was talking, but not a lot, and her voice leaked down my back. I jammed her into the truck and wrapped the blanket around her better and then put another one down around her feet. I strapped her in with the seat belt. She was shaking; her eyes were closed and her mouth was open. She was breathing. I checked that twice, once when I strapped her in, and then again when I strapped myself in and backed up hard into a sapling and took it down. I got us into first gear, held the clutch in, leaned over to listen for breathing, heard it — shallow panting, like a kid asleep on your lap for a nap — and then I put the gear in and howled down the hillside on what I thought might be the road.
We passed the cemetery. I told her that was a good sign. She didn’t respond. I found myself panting, too. It was like we were breathing for each other. It made me dizzy, but I couldn’t stop. We passed the highest dorm, and I got back up into four-wheel high. The cab smelled like burnt oil and hot metal. We were past the chapel now, and the observatory, the president’s house, then the bookstore. I had the blue light winking, the V-6 was roaring, and I drove on the edge of out of control, sensing the skids just before I slid into them, then getting back out of them the way I needed to. I took a little fender off once, and a bit of the corner of a classroom building, but I worked us back on course, and all I needed to do now was negotiate the sharp left turn around the administration building, past the library, then floor it for the straight run to the town’s main street and then the hospital.
I was panting into the mike, and the dispatcher kept saying, “Say again?”
I made myself slow my talking. I said we’d need a stomach pump, and to get the names of the pills from her friends in the dorm, and I’d be there in less than five minutes.
“Roger,” the dispatcher said. “Roger all that. Over.” My throat tightened and tears came into my eyes. I felt a kind of stupid gratitude.
I said to the girl, whose head was slumped and whose face looked too blue all through its whiteness, “You know, I had a baby once. My wife, Fanny. She and I had a little girl one time.”
I reached over and touched her cheek. It was cold. The truck swerved, and I got my hands on the wheel. I’d made the turn past the ad building using just my left. “I can do it in the dark,” I sang to no tune I’d ever heard. “I can do it with one hand.” I said to her, “We had a girl child, very small. I used to tell her stories she didn’t understand. She liked them anyway. Now, I do not want you dying.”
I came to the campus gates going fifty on the ice and snow, smoking the engine, grinding the clutch, and I bounced off a wrought-iron fence to give me the curve going left that I needed. On a pool table, it would have been a bank shot worth applause. The town cop picked me up and got out ahead of me. He used his growler, then his siren, and I leaned on the horn. We banged up to the emergency room entrance and I was out and at the other door before the cop on duty, Elmo St. John, could loosen his seat belt. I loosened hers, and I carried her into the lobby of the ER. They had a gurney, and doctors, and they took her away from me. I tried to talk to them, but they made me sit down and do my shaking on a dirty sofa decorated with drawings of little spinning wheels. Somebody brought me hot coffee — I think it was Elmo — but I couldn’t hold it.
“They won’t,” he kept saying to me. “They won’t.”
“What?”
“You just been sitting there for a minute and a half, shaking, telling me, ‘Don’t let her die. Don’t let her die.’ ”
“Oh.”
“You all right?”
“How about the kid?”
“They’ll tell us soon.”
“She better be all right.”
“That’s right.”
“She — somebody’s really gonna have to explain it to me if she isn’t.”
“That’s right.”
“She better not die this time,” I said.
Fanny came downstairs to look for me. I was at the northern windows, looking past the mullions, down the valley to the faint red line along the mounds and little peaks of the ridge beyond the valley. The sun was going to come up, and I was looking for it.
Fanny stood behind me. I could hear her. I could smell her hair and the sleep on her. The crimson line widened, and I squinted at it. I heard the dog come in behind her, catching up. He panted and I knew why his panting sounded familiar. She put her hands on my shoulders and arms. I made muscles to impress her with, and then I let them go, and let my head drop down until my chin was on my chest.
“I didn’t think you’d be able to sleep after that,” Fanny said.
“I brought enough adrenaline home to run a football team.”
“But you can’t be a hero, huh? You can’t be discovered. You’re hiding in here because somebody’s going to call, or come over, and want to talk to you — her parents for shooting sure, sooner or later. Or is that supposed to be part of the service at the playground? Saving their suicidal daughters. Freeze to death finding them in the woods and driving too fast for any weather, much less what we had last night. Getting their babies home. The bastards.” She was crying. I could hear the soft sound of her lashes. She sniffed and I could feel her arm move as she pawed for the tissues on the coffee table.