Sammy Keyes and the Kiss Goodbye (3 page)

Sergeant Borsch appearing at the Cypress Street residence (either via squad car or in his personal vehicle, which he now drove) was not, in and of itself, cause for concern for Hudson or Rita. The two had grown to know (and even like) the lawman, especially since he seemed to keep a weather eye out for Sammy and had delivered her home safely from one tangle or another more often than they cared to recall.

This time, however, neither the front nor back passenger door of Gil Borsch’s car swung open.

This time, no skateboard or backpack or high-tops emerged.

This time, Hudson was the first to realize, something was wrong.

“Sergeant?” he called, hurrying down the porch steps as Rita followed closely behind.

So, with a fumbling of words and barely checked emotions, Sergeant Borsch managed to convey the crucial points:

Sammy was hurt.

Badly hurt.

They needed to get to the hospital.

Now.

Old people are not known for their quick movements. But these two seniors became instant Olympic contenders, dashing and leaping and propelling into the house and out again as they snatched up keys and cash and insurance cards and dived into the Borschman’s car without invitation.

Gil Borsch just went with it. He jumped in behind the wheel, slapped his portable spinning light onto the roof, and gunned it back to the hospital.

The car was still rolling when Rita and Hudson (apparently still vying for slots in the Olympics) bolted out and ran for the emergency-room door, leaving Sergeant Borsch to find legal parking on his own.

Once through the door, Rita and Hudson skidded to a halt.

It was as though William Rose Junior High School were conducting an assembly in the waiting room.

Only there was no presenter.

Just chaos.

“QUIET!” a voice across the room bellowed, and when Rita looked to see who had made the sound, she saw a bullish woman with bulging eyes. “WHERE’S THE LEGAL GUARDIAN FOR SAMANTHA KEYES?” Nurse Abbey shouted.

“Right here!” Rita called, holding up her hand.

The flash mob of teens turned to face her. And while they didn’t break into a spontaneous rendition of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” they were clearly in a Bohemian Rhapsody state of mind, parting to let this older woman through as they wondered,
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
…

Then they watched the guardian and the nurse disappear behind the Swinging Door of (Maybe) Death.

Waiting was hard. And although Hudson managed to slip through the swinging door to be with Rita, the rest were left to pace about. Or gnaw on nails. Or wring hands, or go into texting overdrive.

And as the wall clock ticked along from one agonizing minute to the next, sweeping past ten-thirty and on toward eleven, grumblings grew in the waiting room.

What was taking so long?

Why wasn’t anyone coming out with an update?

Parents began showing up to fetch their children or sending messages demanding that they return home.

After all, it was a school night.

Final exams were looming.

And who was this Sammy Keyes person, anyway?

Which underscored why Marissa and Holly were so annoyed with the crowd. If these parents had never heard of Sammy Keyes (or were asking who “he” was), clearly their kids hadn’t weathered the junior-high storm with Sammy. In fact, half of these kids had
been
the storm! What were they doing here?

It was a rhetorical question. Marissa and Holly knew what the mob was doing there. When the news about who Sammy’s father was had broken a few months earlier, Sammy had instantly catapulted from scrappy girl to celebrity.

To (especially) Holly’s delight, Sammy was still the scrappy girl she’d met at the soup kitchen over a year and a half ago and hadn’t let her new “popular” status change her, holding tight to the friends who’d been there for her before the Big Discovery and keeping the others politely at bay.

But the tide of people trying to break into their circle was relentless and annoying—and now, as Holly and Marissa waited in agony for word about Sammy, very upsetting. To make matters worse, there seemed to be no sign of the tide going back
out
for the night. Once parents were brought up to speed about the celebrity connection, curfews were automatically extended, exam concerns brushed aside, and the question became: “Do you think
he’ll
show up?”

“I wish they would all just
leave
,” Holly whispered to Marissa as they both cast a resentful eye over the mob of teens and the growing number of parents.

“Except Billy and Casey,” Marissa said. “They can stay.”

“And Officer Borsch and his wife,” Holly added (as Deb had appeared to comfort her uncharacteristically emotional husband).

“How about Heather?” Marissa asked.

“She’s outta here!” Holly snarled, and after she and
Marissa shared a little fist bump, they continued scanning the crowd, whispering back and forth about who could stay and who should go.

And then
finally
Rita and Hudson emerged through the swinging door.

They looked pale.

Drained.

Like their hearts had forgotten how to circulate blood.

The waiting room fell quiet, and when the pallid seniors realized all eyes were on them and that
they
were expected to convey the news, Hudson gathered himself, cleared his throat, and said, “She’s breathing on her own. There don’t seem to be any broken bones, her heartbeat’s regular and strong, but she hasn’t regained consciousness. They’re moving her over to ICU and will keep her there until she wakes up.”

This news was received with great gusts of youthful relief.

She was going to be fine!

But amid the relief and jubilation, members of the over-sixteen set eyed each other cautiously.

Being unconscious for this long was a worry.

A big worry.

Better broken bones than an extended unconsciousness.

Better a ruptured spleen or a mangled meniscus or an impaled intestine (or even a grisly combination of all of them).

Doctors knew how to fix those things.

But unconsciousness? Maybe a coma? It was territory
that was frightening in its shadowy uncertainty. And as most adults knew, the longer the uncertainty, the more frightening it became.

Unconsciousness was, in reality, often just this side of death. Or on a path toward agonizing decisions involving ventilators and vegetative states and life-support systems.

But after a long moment of shadowy fear had crossed the adults’ faces, there was a silent and almost unanimous shift toward a sunnier outlook as these same adults forced themselves to rally around optimism.

Maybe the poor girl’s unconscious state was not just this side of death.

More likely, it was just
that
side of sleep!

It was simply her body’s way of beginning the recovery process.

Besides, what purpose would it serve to sound the alarm or explain to the youngsters just how serious unconsciousness could be? Better to go home and get a good night’s sleep. Better to focus on the positive and hope for the best. A child’s innocence was short-lived enough these days.

So with murmurs among themselves and a few kind words to Rita and Hudson, the adults rounded up their teens (and whatever friends needed a ride), and slowly filtered out of the waiting room.

When the rest of their peers had left, Marissa and Holly (and a somewhat subdued Heather) joined Casey and Billy, and then went up to Rita and Hudson, who were quietly conferring with Meg. They still had questions. Big questions.

Like, How is she really?

Is she going to be all right?

When do they think she’ll wake up?

But the only question either senior could even begin to answer was, What is ICU?

“Intensive-care unit,” Hudson told them. “They’ll monitor her round the clock.”

“Can we see her?” Marissa asked, and her eyes were suddenly brimming with tears.

Hudson shook his head. “They wouldn’t let
us
stay any longer. They say they’ll call us when she wakes up.”

Casey stepped forward. “But that’s supposed to happen soon, right? She shouldn’t wake up alone in a hospital!”

“We hope it happens soon,” Hudson said cautiously. Then, in an effort to not walk further down that shadowy road, he volunteered some concrete and useful facts. “ICU is on the fourth floor of the main part of the hospital. Visiting hours are from eight a.m. to eight p.m.” He forced some optimism into his voice. “Who should we call when we get some news?”

“Me!” the teens cried in unison, but in the end they agreed that since Marissa no longer had a cell phone, Casey would be the contact person.

At this point Gil Borsch came forward with Deb at his side. “Can I give you a lift?” he asked the seniors, then looked to the teens and added, “Do you need rides?” He focused on Marissa. “Not a good idea for you to go back to East Jasmine on your own this late at night.”

“Oh,” Marissa said. Then her cheeks flushed as she explained, “We don’t live there anymore. We’re …,” she looked away, “nearby now.”

Gil Borsch studied her for a moment, but only for a moment. He’d heard rumors of gambling problems and a divorce, but gossip was for bottom-feeders, and he made a habit of trying to swim in cleaner waters. “Well, Deb or I can give any of you rides. We have two cars here, and your parents would probably like you home.”

“I can help, too,” Meg offered.

So rides were given and teens delivered, and seniors left to wearily climb the steps they’d flown from earlier. And back at their little cottage on Elm Street, Debra washed her face and went to bed, telling her husband (who was sitting in the living room in the dark), “Hon, do not stay up all night broodin’. You cannot help Sam by broodin’. All you’ll be is tired tomorrow when she wakes up.”

Words of wisdom, perhaps, but as the clock moved past midnight, Gil Borsch could still not shake the feeling that, regardless of how well she was monitored by the ICU staff, Sammy was alone.

And unprotected.

At last he moved his brooding from the living room to the shower (which he took in the dark), then tiptoed through the blackness of the bedroom to the closet, where he retrieved his uniform and regulation shoes. He dressed in the darkness of the kitchen, donned his personal holster and gun, and slipped out into the night.

On his way back to the hospital, he focused on getting his story straight, reminding himself that a serviceable lie was always close neighbors with the truth, and that a lie that
should
be the truth was barely a lie at all.

Then, knowing the hospital’s main lobby doors were
locked after nine p.m., he went back to the ER entrance and gained access to the main section of the hospital without being questioned. He then rode an elevator up to the fourth floor, followed the signs to the ICU, and strode confidently through the waiting room area and up to the nurses’ station. “I’ve been assigned watch on Samantha Keyes,” he said as he flashed his ID at the nurse sitting behind the counter. “Attempted homicide victim. The perpetrator is still at large.”

Perhaps it was that violent-crime victims often landed in the ICU, or perhaps it was the authority with which Sergeant Borsch presented himself (or maybe just that it was the night shift, where energy supplies were limited and making easy things hard was just not worth it), but the lawman’s intentions were met with no resistance. The nurse simply checked her roster, pointed down the sterile corridor to her left, and said, “Room 411.”

Rooms in the ICU were private, and 411 was located near the end of the hallway, on the right. Gil Borsch hesitated at its open doorway. A light was on inside, and the foot of Sammy’s bed was visible past a drawn curtain.

In his many years on the force, Gil Borsch had seen his share of gruesome and tragic. If you joined the police force expecting to keep your cookies down, you learned in a hurry that you’d been one naïve chump. The first time an officer had to report to a scene where brains had been splattered against the wall, or a child had been hit by a car, or a decaying body had been discovered in a cellar … that was when the fantasy of the job instantly became the reality.

That was when every cop became a cookie chucker.

Including Officer Borsch.

So the lawman had experience. He knew that turning the corner past the curtain that shielded his view of Sammy and stepping through the barrier between imagination and reality was something he couldn’t reverse after he’d done it.

There was no undo command for what would be hard-written into his memory.

Still. There was no turning back. No chickening out.

No not facing what he really didn’t want to face.

And so he stepped forward.

And then, there she was.

His first reaction was one of enormous relief.

Her face was fine!

There was a bruise and a scrape, but … he had imagined much worse. And although her arms were wrapped in gauze and her
head
was wrapped in gauze and there were tubes going into her and wires coming off of her, her face was fine!

Almost … angelic.

“Sammy,” he whispered as he moved closer. “It’s your buddy the Borschman.” He grinned. “Yes, I know you call me that.” He stared at her for a long minute before whispering, “Who
did
this to you?” A lump began forming in his throat as he choked out, “And
why
?” He took a moment to compose himself, then whispered, “Did you really go there because of some nightie-napper? Who cares who’s stealing nighties! Was it worth
this
?”

The lump in the lawman’s throat had grown, and it silenced him until he gave a snort and said, “Just like me
to start with an interrogation, huh? What am I, an idiot? That’s what you’re thinkin’, right? Can’t I see you’re not doin’ so hot?” He studied her a little longer, then shook his head. “You should have seen the waiting room earlier. It was packed with kids. I can’t handle a room of teenagers on a good day, you know that. And here I had to go and tolerate it on a day like this?” He forced a laugh. “Thanks a lot, Sammy.”