“I’m needed at the hospital right away,” Angela said.
“And we’ll get you there. Bobby, can you move it little faster?”
“Christ on a stick, what do you think I’m doing?”
“I don’t know, Bobby, what are you doing, move it!”
When we reached the emergency room at Catawba Memorial, Kate hopped out to open the door for her. I hopped out, too, because if I remained in the backseat Kate would ask me to reach over and unbuckle the woman and if I did that our skin might touch. I hung back, not touching, not helping, remaining as far away from her as I could. Bobby and Kate each took a side and guided her into the building, but I hung back. I didn’t want to touch her, because bad luck—really bad luck, like this kind—is contagious. I could smell it on her. She was cursed.
And I was right. Inside, we learned that David and Johnny had lost their lives to a drunk driver on Highway 321 two hours ago. The year before, the nurse said, she’d been in here another time. When her daughter and her other son had died in the same kind of accident.
One husband, three kids, two car wrecks. Everybody dead.
Up at the admissions desk, both of Kate’s hands flew up to her mouth. Bobby just stared at the nurse—he didn’t say anything. I turned to look at Angela, whom they’d planted in a seat beneath a television bolted to the ceiling. Above her head, a rerun of Growing Pains did its best to ease the suffering of the patients waiting in slumped agony for a chance to see a doctor. She stared at the black windows until she noticed me looking at her, and we locked eyes.
“I need you to fill out some paperwork,” the nurse said.
“But we don’t know her,” Bobby protested. “I just found her sitting on her behind out in the middle of nowhere…”
“We’re a little shorthanded tonight, do you think you could help us out a little?”
“I don’t mind helping you out, I’m just saying that I just turned eighteen, like, last week and I don’t even know who this lady is…”
I walked over to Angela, leaving the conversation behind me. She didn’t look away as I approached and sat down in a chair just outside of touching distance.
“God hates me,” she said. “He wants to see me burn.”
How do you argue with that? I didn’t want to get too close to her, but I did want to comfort her, ease her suffering if at all possible. But what do you say? Cheer up? Uh, no. Everything’s going to be okay? Bullshit. Everything would not be okay. Not for her.
“It’s not true what they say,” she told me. She leaned forward and spoke in an almost conspiratorial tone, like she wanted no one but me to hear her. “They tell you He loves everybody, but he doesn’t. They say He punishes the sinners, but that’s not true either.”
“Don’t say that.”
“There’s no one protecting you,” she said. Now she was smiling—or grinning, or grimacing, something that involved an upturn of the corners of the mouth but played something black and out of tune on my ribs because why would anybody do anything but scream at a time like this? “There’s not. You can pray to the empty heavens all day long, but there’s no one listening. You can be a good boy, but that won’t protect you because He doesn’t care. He’ll let your guts spill out all over this floor. He’ll cut you. And when you think you can’t bleed anymore?”
She raised her chin and regarded me the way teachers habitually did when they stood on the verge of an important revelation about history, literature or algebra.
“He’ll cut you again. Because you can always bleed more. And He likes that.”
“Who likes that?” I whispered.
That crazy, hellborn smile. She raised her index finger, but whether she meant to emphasize her point or to direct my attention heavenwards, I didn’t know.
“Him,” she hissed.
Ten feet away, my brother and Kate tried to complete hospital admissions sheets for a woman they didn’t know. Angela stared at me, watching me digest what she just said. I sensed her waiting for a response, I really didn’t know what to say. Had I been a more enthusiastic disciple of Christ, I would have been better practiced in the logical jiu jitsu employed by the faithful when confronted with things like nuclear weapons, the Holocaust and families dying in car accidents. Maybe I could have provided her with some small measure of comfort in that moment. But, lacking any better ideas, I allowed my lower jaw, that thing dangling from the bottom of my empty skull, to open and I said, “Shit happens.”
As soon as I said it, my face reddened and my skin burned with shame. But her eyebrows rose like I’d just said something incredibly profound and revelatory. She nodded three times, her eyeballs remaining fixed on mine as her head rotated around them.
“Yes,” she said. “And then it happens again.”
I don’t know what became of Angela. After we left her at the hospital, we didn’t speak of her for many months, hoping, maybe, that if we didn’t talk about it we could forget whatever lessons we’d learned that night. It didn’t work—not for me, anyway. I thought about her again and again over the years. And I thought about her yet again on my way out of Dr. Koenig’s office that afternoon, after again agreeing to bring Allie to one of our sessions.
I climbed into the BMW and shut the door, banishing all noise from the outside. Shit happens, I thought. And then it happens again.
It did. But the likelihood that I would have to go all Chuck Norris not just once but twice in a lifetime—let alone a single year—was so miniscule as to be…
“Almost impossible,” I said to the steering wheel.
I looked out the windshield. I’d parked in front of an evergreen hedge that separated Dr. Koenig’s parking lot from the one next door, and this was littered with the castaway leaves from the trees that shaded the lot in the summertime, littered it in the fall. Another leaf fell then and landed on the hood of my car. After several more moments of staring through my windshield, I started the car and pulled away.
17.
Coincidence: a man, a liberal man, a lifelong Democrat, receives an assault rifle as a gift from his mentally incompetent father, learns to use it from his Marine brother and for some reason not only still has it when two yahoos break into his house, but has it in a gun safe in his basement. Where, incidentally, said yahoos leave him for dead.
Coincidence: a fortune teller warns the man, then a boy, about a figure she calls the Bald Man. Two decades later, a prankster who calls himself the Bald Man begins harassing the man by telephone. Two weeks after that, an armed assailant says Bald Man as he dies with his own knife sticking out of his chest.
I was beginning to doubt the outer edges of my reality. But if I had a spooked feeling before I sat down with Craig Montero that afternoon, I had it twice as bad afterwards.
“The cops have an ID on that shitbird who tried to rob me last night?” I asked as Craig entered my office.
He stared at me with pursed lips, appeared to think for a moment, then shut the door. He lowered himself into one of my two client chairs and touched his fingertips together pensively.
“Well?” I asked.
“He’s a John Doe,” he said at last.
“What?”
Craig shook his head. “He had nothing on him. They ran his prints, but they didn’t get a hit. Guy’s never been arrested before, apparently. They’ve passed his photo around to the uniformed patrol and vice officers, but nobody recognizes him.”
He studied my face for a moment.