“Oh, yeah. WXII met me in the parking lot when I showed up for work this morning and shoved a microphone in my face as soon as I got out of my car. I can’t remember the reporter’s name… you watch the news? Ever seen that hot brunette?”
“I have.”
“It was her. She asked me for a comment, and I told her that it was a tragic event, that I was shaken but otherwise okay and that my heart went out to the families of the deceased. I’ve been told that I’m going to be on the six o’clock news. I’ve been talking to reporters all day, Doc. Except for my wife, my kid and my secretary, you’re the only human being I’ve spoken to today who isn’t going to print something I said.”
“So you’re going to be a celebrity again,” he observed.
I sighed. “I guess so.”
He stared at me.
“Does any of this strike you as odd?” He asked.
“Absolutely.”
He moved his stare from my face to his notepad. I watched his lined features, his manicured goatee, and tried unsuccessfully to read his thoughts.
Finally, he capped his pen and clipped it to his notepad, which he slipped into his leather briefcase. “Do something for me,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Our next session, bring Allie. I still need to talk to her. Can you do that?”
I looked at the window and inhaled a deep ki breath.
“Can you do that?” He repeated.
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
16.
Getting mugged in the same year that you suffer a home invasion stretches the imagination almost to the breaking point. Lightning, we’re taught from an early age, doesn’t strike twice in the same place. There’s this cosmic bad luck budget and we’re only allotted so much of it in any given time span. Think about it: how many people in their twenties and thirties lose both their parents close together? Not many. It happens, but when it does even people who don’t know you pinch their faces and purse their lips and breathe through their noses and say something like, My God, that’s terrible. Because you’re only supposed to suffer so much suckness. We have faith in the ability of statistics to protect us from receiving more than our fair share of tragedy. He Who Shovels the Shit will only pile so much on you, because, as we know, his wagon has to serve everyone.
I say “we,” but that’s a crock because I don’t actually believe that. I know it to be untrue and I didn’t need to get mugged to understand it. I’ve understood it ever since the day, back when I was a kid, when I met a woman named Angela.
I don’t remember her last name, nor the precise time we met. October, November, something a like that. The leaves had largely vanished from the trees that lined the back roads of Catawba County, a few brown hangers-on dangling from skeletal branches in stubborn refusal to surrender to the oncoming winter. A night wind blowing down from the mountains to the west ruffled these and sent the occasional victim fluttering in the air over the highway, spinning and twirling and dancing before coming to rest on a blacktop that blended seamlessly with the sky. The three of us—Bobby and Kate in the front, I in the back—sat comfortably ensconced in the warmth of my mother’s Mercedes. Driving around, burning up gasoline, trying to postpone the moment when we couldn’t avoid going home any longer.
We found her wandering on Sigmon Dairy Road outside of Maiden. Not on it, not exactly; she actually sat on the shoulder, legs crossed Indian-style. Bobby fiddling with the tape deck, we almost hit her. Earlier in the week, he had picked up a tape by this new band called “Pearl Jam.” He was half-driving, half-rewinding to listen to the first song again, when Kate suddenly screamed, “STOP!”
He slammed his foot to the floor. A machine-gun opened fire somewhere as the antilock brakes deployed, snatching the Mercedes to a chattering and shuddering halt as inertia threw me forward and then jerked me violently backwards just as fast. Had we not just stopped at a gas station ten minutes before, I may have wet myself. Instead, I just said with my eighth-grade eloquence, “What the fuck?”
“You almost hit her,” said Kate.
“Almost hit who?” I demanded.
“Her,” said Bobby.
I followed the invisible beam shining from Bobby’s extended index finger. When he’d slammed on the brakes, he guided the Mercedes partially onto the shoulder and now the headlamps shone in a crazy oblique direction across the pavement and into the barely restrained wilderness that abutted the shoulder. There, on the outskirts of the light, sat the woman.
Long brown hair hung in strings over the shoulders of a pink bathrobe. She sat hunched forward, eyes open but seemingly unaware of our presence. She didn’t move, not even when Bobby moved the car fully onto the shoulder and brought the front bumper to within mere feet of where she sat. In the electric glow of the headlamps, her eyes looked solid black.
“What’s wrong with her?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know,” Bobby said, “but I’m about to find out.”
He unbuckled his safety belt, opened the driver’s door and got out. I swallowed then, my pulse quickening just a little because the woman not only didn’t look at us, but she didn’t even blink, and I thought, who doesn’t blink? My gut flooded with something cold and black, and I wanted to reach forward and grab Bobby back into the car. Leave her alone, I wanted to say. Something’s wrong with her. Something is very, very, very wrong.
“Be careful,” Kate cautioned. It came out as a whisper.
Bobby didn’t hear her. By the time she said it, he’d already made it out of the car and around the front bumper. He knelt beside the woman, said something we couldn’t hear. When they both stood, her bathrobe fell open to reveal a pair of pink sweatpants and a matching T-shirt that read, What Would Jesus Do?
Bobby walked her to the other side of the car and put her in the back with me. She moved under her own power, compliantly obeying his instructions as he told her to get in and watch your head and buckle your safety belt. But she didn’t look at me.
Kate turned and stared from me to the woman, from the woman to me.
“Uh… hi,” Kate said.
The woman didn’t answer. Bobby closed the door and made his way back around to the driver’s side, where he got in and buckled up again. He placed both hands on the wheel and looked in the rearview mirror.
“This is Angela,” he said. “And she needs a ride to the hospital.”
Angela spoke.
“There’s been an accident,” she said in a monotone. “With David. And Johnny.”
“Who are David and Johnny?” I asked.
“Husband and son,” Bobby replied, shifting into drive and pulling back onto the road. He found a driveway and used it to reverse directions, taking us back towards Hickory. “Car wreck.”
“Are they okay?” Kate asked.
“I need to go to the hospital right away,” Angela repeated. “Because there’s been an accident.”
They probably weren’t okay. You didn’t wander out onto the highway when the hospital called to say your husband and your kid have a nasty case of whiplash. Her shuffling walk, her catatonia, that could only follow an earthquake or the detonation of a nuclear bomb inside the brain case.
“Oh. Oh my God.” Kate turned around in her seat to face us. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
“There’s been an accident,” Angela repeated.
“Pray,” Kate urged. “That’s what you need to do right now. You pray, and we’ll get you to your family.”