For one long thundering moment she held his gaze, saw the vacancy there, the fear, the retreat, and she trembled all over, the most ridiculous thing, as if she'd caught a chill on the hottest day of the year. She didn't know where she was. Didn't know what was happening to her. “You go to hell,” she said, feeling the triumph surge up in her.
They stood there side by side, not two feet apart, as the men from the car, the black men, came at them, flailing their arms and working their mouths, people gathering, the door of the police cruiser catching the light as it flung open and everyone looked to the blue-black uniform, the nightstick and revolver and the visored cap. He was going to run, she knew it. He was going to run and she had to stop him. She jerked round, too wrought up to notice who was inhabiting that uniform and fingering that nightstick or to see where this was going, where it had been going all along, inevitably, one long downward spiral from the day the microbes invaded her body and she stopped living in the world of the hearing. She watched his face change. Watched his eyes settle. And then the cop stepped between them and she was looking into a face she recognized, fury there, fury and disbelief, and she knew she was on trial all over again.
What she remembered most, what she would always remember, was the way they failed her. She tried to marshal her words but she was overwhelmed, heaving for air-“Him,” she kept saying, jerking a finger at Peck Wilson, “he's the one, arrest him”-but P. Runyon wasn't listening, and at some point in the silent shuffle of bodies and faces and the shock of the way P. Runyon seized her arm and held it in a tight unyielding grip, she looked up and saw that Peck Wilson wasn't where he'd been a moment before. He wasn't in the cruiser or in the custody of the other cop, the older one with the drooping face, who was busy with the two black men and their windmilling arms and snapping teeth. She felt the panic rising in her and she jerked her arm back. She looked wildly round her, spinning once, twice, the crowd giving back her stare out of indifferent eyes, the trees whirling overhead, shirts, blouses, jeans, shorts. Officer Runyon laid a hand on her again and again she jerked back. Couldn't they see what was happening here? “Peck Wilson,” she shouted as if it was the only name she knew, and she shouted it again and again, till all the air had gone out of her.
By the time the interpreter arrived, it was too late. She'd tried to tear away, burning with her urgency, tried to thread through the crowd and fling herself back down the street to that house and the silver-haired woman on the porch-“Ask her, she'll have the answers, ask her”-but P. Runyon wouldn't hear of it. Only then did she think of Bridger. Was he hurt? Or was it just bruises, aches, something he could shake off the way people did in the movies? She felt a flutter of fear rise in her throat: why wasn't he here, why wasn't he adding his voice to the mix? He could explain. He could tell her, this lady cop with the starved lips and grabby hands and the eyes that started at zero and went down from there. Where was he? Where? She had her answer a moment later when the ambulance nosed up to the curb, lights flashing, and P. Runyon waved the driver angrily on, releasing her grip on Dana's arm to point down the street in two quick chops as if she were flinging something away from her. “Who-?” Dana asked, but couldn't finish the thought.
Officer Runyon actually had her handcuffs out-she was shaking them in Dana's face, warning her to calm herself down or she'd have no choice but to take her into custody-when the interpreter pulled up in a nondescript black car with the city logo on the door. She was small, neat, young, her features already in motion as she crossed the street and stepped between the two of them. “What's the matter?” she asked and signed it simultaneously.
“He was chasing me. He wanted to hurt me. Peck,” Dana said, “Peck Wilson.”
The interpreter looked to P. Runyon and she just shrugged. “That's all she can talk about. She's hysterical.”
“Who is Peck Wilson?” the woman signed, turning to Dana and shutting out the officer.
“The thief. He stole my identity. And he chased me, he”- “Where is he?”
Where is he? The question cut right through her. She couldn't help herself, couldn't pull away from it, the rage and frustration and the sick irony that was like some sort of cosmic joke, and suddenly she was sobbing. The interpreter dropped her hands to her sides and then lifted them again and embraced her. There was a long suspended moment, the stranger clinging to her in a crowd of strangers, and then she gently disengaged herself. She didn't brush the hair away from her face or dab at her eyes, but instead brought her right hand to her forehead and swept it out, open-palmed: “I don't know,” she signed. “But I know where his mother is.”
At the hospital, she sat in a hard plastic chair in the emergency room with the interpreter on one side and a detective from the Peterskill Police Department on the other. It was evening now, Saturday evening, and there was a momentary lull in the drift of patients pressing bloodied rags to their shins and arms and foreheads as the late afternoon gave way to night and the alcohol-fueled trauma to come. She was feeling jittery-she'd drained three cans of diet cola and was thirsty still-and her right knee was stinging where they'd dug bits of gravel and dirt out of the pad there and cleaned and dressed the wound. She had a matching square of gauze beneath the left knee, but the right seemed to have taken the brunt of it-that was where the pain was, anyway. The interpreter-her name was Terri Alfano, she was twenty-six years old and possessed of a pair of dark wide-set eyes that absorbed hurt and confusion and delivered up absolution in their place, and Dana didn't know how she would have gotten through this without her-had asked for some clarification on the timing of the incident, and the detective who'd posed the question, his pen poised over a pad of paper, seemed to have drifted off as they signed back and forth.
The problem now-the concern, the worry, the fear that was booming inside her with a dull echoing horror-wasn't Peck Wilson or his mother or wife or the wine-red Mercedes the police were impounding until legal ownership could be established, but Bridger. Bridger was somewhere behind the swinging doors in back of the nurse's desk, beyond the expressionless patients slumped in the rows of molded plastic chairs and the TV on the wall that was tuned, in another sick intrusion of irony, to an overwrought drama about emergency room doctors. They hadn't told her much, and what they had told her she wasn't getting at all until Terri Alfano wrote it down for her: Bridger, it seemed, was having trouble breathing and they'd done an emergency tracheotomy. He'd suffered laryngeal trauma and they were going to have to operate in order to clear the air passage and repair damage to the thyroid cartilage. That was the problem. That was why she was sitting here watching the clock and the swinging doors and the face of the nurse every time she jerked her eyes to the phone and picked it up.
An hour crept by, then another. The detective was gone now, long gone, and the waiting room had begun to fill again. Dana paged through a magazine and watched people's faces as they shuffled in and out the door on the arms of relatives and friends, their features tugged and twisted round the flash point of their suffering eyes. There had been no news of Bridger, and as the light failed beyond the windows and the night settled in, she turned to Terri Alfano and told her she might as well go home. “You don't have to sit here and keep me company, you know,” she said aloud, though she didn't mean it. She was glad for the company, desperate for it. She was confused and hurting, crushed with guilt over Bridger-it was her fault, the whole thing, involving him in this in the first place and then dragging him all the way out here, and for what? She shouldn't have been so hardheaded. She should have let it go. Should have left it to the police and the credit card companies instead of playing amateur detective, instead of taking it personally, as if the thief could have cared who she was, as if it mattered, as if “she” mattered. What was she thinking? But the worst thing, the thing that haunted her as she stared at the floor and shifted in her seat and raised her eyes to look at the nurse and the clock and the swinging doors that never swung open and gave up nothing, was leaving him when he needed her most, when he couldn't breathe, when he was clutching at his throat and thrashing on the pavement with the pain that should have been hers. There was a moral calculus here, and she'd failed it.