A Hard and Heavy Thing (2 page)

“It hath pleased Almighty God—” She sniffed. “To summon out of this vale of tears the soul of your grandfather, Randall Hartwig.” She took one loud breath and rapidly exhaled the rest into the telephone's receiver. “Your father and I are trying to figure out the funeral. Call us as soon as you get this.”

Levi closed his eyes. Finally. He had his silence.

Nick set the guitar down. “Man. I'm so—”

“Ssssh.” Levi placed an index finger in front of his lips.

“I'm sorry.”

“Ssssh.” He kept his eyes closed and he held his breath.

With the house finally silent, Levi heard the noises coming from the bathroom. It sounded more animal than human. He cocked his head.

Nick eased himself to his feet. Levi marched down the hallway without hesitation. Always one to cross busy streets without looking, he found himself glad for the diversion.

“Dude, wait,” Nick said before following in a crouch. “Aren't you going to call your mom back?”

Levi followed the noise, knocking through the bathroom door with his shoulder. Once inside, he flung back the shower curtain to find Eris.

The last time Levi had seen her that night was shortly before A Failed Entertainment took the stage for their final show of the summer. He stood on the fire escape of The Warehouse smoking a cigarette. Eris had looked like she was in a hurry the way she was trucking through the alley two floors down. Levi dropped a lit cigarette in front of her to get her attention, but it accidentally landed on her head. The orange sparks bounced off her black hair, and she jumped and swatted at the air as if she had stepped into a spider web. She looked up and yelled at him. Threatened to kick his ass. Her big green eyes matched her flannel shirt. As the sun dropped behind the old brick buildings downtown, her skin looked like it had been tanned brown like a farmer's, not orange like a co-ed's. “Where you going?” he had yelled. She shook her head and walked on down the alley. He didn't see her at the show.

Now in the bathtub, her fierce eyes were closed and her skin was pale. They realized she was the one making the dog noises. Her flannel shirt soaked up long tendrils of thick drool. Her knees were tucked into her chest, the pale patellae popping out of the holes in her jeans.

Nick pushed past and turned the shower on. He spun the knob to cold and flung the curtain closed. “This is bad. This is bad. I didn't even know she was still here.”

“Still here? What do you mean still?” Levi opened the curtain again.

“You were at the store. The cigarettes. She was drunk. I told her our plans. She left in a huff.” He opened the curtain just a bit to look in. “Oh God, what do we do?”

“Do?” Levi said, looking oddly triumphant, like his plans for the night had finally materialized. Like he had been hoping for some disaster like this to happen so he didn't have to be bored anymore. Like even a dying girl in his bathtub was better than calling his mother to confirm that his grandfather actually was dead, and that what he had heard on the answering machine wasn't a mere auditory hallucination. “We save her, of course.”

[This was denial.]

“We gotta call 911.”

Levi opened the curtain again and turned off the water. “Nuh uh. No way. We gotta save her ourselves.”

He climbed into the tub behind her and placed his feet as wide apart as the tub would allow. He squatted down, hugged her around the chest, and stood. Her head dropped forward, her neck twisting as it dropped to her chest.

She slapped at his hands; the right one cupped one of her small breasts. “That's no way to touch a lady,” she said, the thick drool falling from her lip, down her chin, and onto Levi's wrist.

“Here. Gimme a hand,” Levi said.

Nick was the larger of the two, the solid first baseman in high school, the strong power forward in summer rec leagues, but now he stood motionless, his mouth hanging slightly open. He lifted a hand and brushed it over his light sandy hair, which was just long enough to be soft and fuzzy. He rubbed his hand over his hair again. His dilated eyes took up half of his round boyish face, which was now slack. His hand went over his hair a third time.

“Nick,” Levi said, exasperated. “Take her.”

Nick moved like a man underwater, but he hugged her and pulled her from the tub. He lowered her to the floor, where the water from her clothes pooled around her limp body.

Levi put both his hands on his chest and felt his damp T-shirt. “We need to get her to a hospital.”

“We need to call 911.”

“And what do we tell them?”

“I can't drive.”

“We tell them you can't drive?”

“You can't drive.” Nick reached down and touched the pool of water on the floor as if testing its viscosity. He rubbed the wet flannel of Eris's shirt between his thumb and forefinger as if he doubted that it was tangible. He straightened up. “We are definitely not driving.”

That's how they ended up dragging her through the heart of La Crosse, her toes skimming along the cracked asphalt of back alleys lined with six-bedroom Victorian frat houses and low-income apartment complexes. They rushed past dimly lit parking lots as they tried to stay out of sight, until finally they had no choice but to drag her along the sidewalk next to busy South Avenue as they neared Gundersen Lutheran Hospital.

[Most people don't realize how things can get serious so quickly. One second you're face down on your carpet listening to bad guitar-playing, and the next second there's a dying girl in your bathtub. One second you're playing with your best friend and his GI Joes under the pool table, and the next second Oma is pulling you off the barroom floor trying to explain that the crash was really bad and you have to leave right now, right this second, and then all you can do is stand next to your newly orphaned best friend as two caskets get lowered into the ground. Or, you're cruising along in your super-cool-guy Humvee thinking about chicks or cheese curds, and your best friend's truck disappears into a Hollywood ball of smoke and flame. The next thing you know, you're covered in blood and you're tossing around the severed limbs of your friends.

These things can happen to anyone.

But of course, you already know that.]

They dragged Eris under a canopy of trees on the sidewalk, and the illumination from the stars and the streetlights disappeared. Cars whooshed past. For a brief moment of darkness, their mess felt invisible to the world.

“Levi,” Nick said. “We cannot keep taking drugs.”

Levi had nothing to say to that. He had nothing good to say about their small town hemmed in on all sides by bluffs, rivers, and coulees. He was dissatisfied with their small shows, their uneventful lives, and his boring conservative family. He felt the drugs were the only excitement in his life so he said, “It's the only excitement in my life.”

After a few more cracks in the sidewalk, they were back under the streetlights. A maroon Park Avenue slowed; the silver-haired driver stared at them stumbling beneath the streetlights, and then he moved on.

Levi used his free hand to grab her shoulder and shake her. “Hey, wake up.” With the hand that was on her back, he grabbed a handful of wet flannel and bra strap. He pulled and snapped the strap. “Help us out here.”

Eris was a small girl, but the work was taxing for both of them. Levi could see the blond fuzz of Nick's upper lip collecting sweat. With Eris sandwiched between them—her arms slung over their shoulders—they trudged the final block to the auto-opening doors of the hospital. Drops of sweat pooled on Levi's forehead, slowly growing until they swelled to critical mass and had no other avenue but to travel down, plopping from his eyebrow to his lip, where he grabbed the drops with his tongue to feel their salty wetness.

Eris, on the other hand, had stopped sweating, or she had never been sweating to begin with. Maybe her clothes and hair were only wet from the shower. Levi didn't know. He put a hand to her cool, dry face. He urged Nick on and pleaded for him to walk faster; act cool; don't act weird.

They set her in an empty wheelchair, which they found by the elevator. Levi checked her pulse with his fingers on her neck. He stuck his forefinger in his mouth to wet it and he held it under her nose.

“Oh God, is she still alive?” Nick said.

Levi pushed the wheelchair. “Of course she's still alive.”

Eris opened her eyes, rolled her bobbing head around, and closed her eyes again. Her chin dropped onto her chest.

“Chip off the old block, huh?” Levi said. Her dad was long gone and her mother spent a considerable amount of time at the Hazelden Rehabilitation Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

They followed the hallway to reception, where a large fleshy lady sat back in an oversized office chair, her feet on an upside-down wastebasket. Levi stopped the wheelchair so Eris faced away from the desk. He turned and stood between the woman and the wheelchair, and he put both hands on the desk to show that if he was anything at all, he was serious. “This lady needs to see a doctor.”

The woman dropped her feet off the basket and stood. She moved to her left, leaned over the desk, and looked at Eris's soaking wet clothes, the black hair plastered against her face, and her unresponsive limbs dangling by the wheels of the chair. The woman said, “Ma'am?” All this was to say nothing of the not-so-slight smell of vomit emanating from Eris's clothes, a smell that Levi was just now noticing in the sterility of the hospital. “Did you drag her out of the river or something?” the woman asked.

“Mmm,” Levi said, nodding his head. “Yes. Exactly. Fished her right out of the water. This ox right here probably saved her life.” He pointed at Nick, who looked up from the floor, mouth open, eyes wider and blacker than before.

“Oh my,” she said. She lowered herself back to the edge of her chair and rolled slightly from the desk. “This is Labor and Delivery. She needs to go to the Emergency Room.”

“This is Labor and—?” Levi looked around. There were no doctors bustling. No one sat waiting in the wide chairs. Down the hall, two nurses casually whispered and sipped from oversized mugs. Levi smacked his forehead with a palm. He pointed in the direction of the hallway from which they came. “So then the emergency room is—?”

She pointed in the opposite direction.

“Of course.” Levi flashed a smile and grabbed the handles on the wheelchair.

The woman picked up the telephone on her desk. “I can call someone to come get her. Let me call someone.”

Nick spoke up. “No, no. That's fine. No need. It will be faster if we do it. We can do it. You can put down the phone.” He spoke rapidly, and he chewed on his tongue after he stopped. His jaw worked, and he looked from Eris to the receptionist, from the receptionist to Eris.

“Is he okay?” she asked.

Levi shrugged and started moving. “You'll have to pardon him; he's had a bit too much to drink.” In that town, a town where the bars outnumbered houses, such an explanation wouldn't raise an eyebrow.

She raised an eyebrow. “He has?” She started punching in numbers. “And what's with you? What's with the earmuffs?”

“Huh?” Levi said. “Oh these?” He stopped, pulled the earmuffs from his neck and held them out to look at them. “Tinnitus,” he said. He put the earmuffs over his ears and yelled out, “Experimental treatment.” He once again grabbed the wheelchair and started down the hall. “Walk faster,” he told Nick. “I think she's calling the cops, man.”

Nick gripped Levi's forearm. “Hey, what are you planning here?”

“What do you mean what are we planning? We're dropping her at the emergency room.”

“And then what? Leave her there?”

“She's underage. We're underage.”

Nick lowered his voice to a whisper. “Yeah. This is bad.” He nodded as if realizing all of this for the first time. “Plus we're on drugs.”

Sometimes Levi wondered if Nick was really a cop.

“But we can't just leave her here.”

Levi turned a corner and stopped. “This is a hospital, Nick. I think we need to step back and appreciate that we've got a lot going on here.” He lowered his own voice to a whisper to match Nick's. “We were faced with a situation; we made a decision, acted with some poise, and saved the day, right? I mean, really, we're doing the best we can here. I'm going to drop her off at the emergency room where the professionals can handle it, and then you and I skedaddle.”

Nick shook his head no.

“There's no sense lingering here.” Levi looked around and started walking again.

“But—”

“But nothing. There's no sense in waiting for the cops. We had nothing to do with this.”

Nick stopped again and grabbed Levi's T-shirt.

“Look, buddy. Do you trust me?”

Nick nodded mutely. His teeth chattered together.

“I'm as freaked as you are. Really. I am. But let's be rational. We're in a hospital. Let the professionals handle this. We'll push her to the emergency room, and then you'll follow me out the door. We'll act natural, and we'll just walk down the block. Then we'll call for a ride home so we can avoid any further discord as we ride this thing out.” He patted one of Nick's cheeks and dropped his hand onto his shoulder. “You tracking?”

“We can't just dump her off.”

“Can we pump her stomach? Can we give her the medical care she needs? If she gets taken to jail, can we bail her out if we too are in jail?”

Nick shook his head. “I'm staying.”

“Suit yourself.” Levi dropped his hand and pushed Eris down the hall. They took a few more turns. Nick reached out to touch the wall as they walked, his finger tracking the horizontal line where the teal paint met the purple. His finger jumped each time they passed a doorway. They followed signs and ended up at a crossroads.

A set of doors in front of them led outside. A set of doors to their left led to the emergency room reception desk. Levi pointed outside. “Wait for me out there.”