The Rest of Us Just Live Here (6 page)

Of all people.

I stare at her profile as she drives, taking a turn, then another, then to the road that leads to our respective houses.

She’s beautiful, and not in a stupid way. Sometimes she leaves her hair curly, sometimes she straightens it. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if she’s got make-up on or not – though she regularly complains about how hard it is to get proper stuff for black skin out here in our little middle of nowhere.

But
it doesn’t matter
. She’s beautiful. The tiny scar on her cheek makes her more so, not less. The freckles that are pretty much the only inheritance from her father even more. The slight overbite. The terrible taste in earrings. None of it matters. Or if it matters, it’s only because it makes everything else more beautiful.

And she knows I think so.

How could she not? She’s smart, like she said, and she’s best friends with my sister. There’s no way she could
not
know.

And she desires Nathan, not me. Her anxiety – which I understand, hooray – looked for a place of safety and it found Nathan. It didn’t find me. And she knows how I’ll take that information.

This should hurt my heart. It does. I can feel it. I should also be humiliated that she knows how I feel, and I do, I can feel that, too. But I look at her, and I just want to make it all okay.

So I have absolutely no idea why the hell I say, “I’m in love with you, Henna.”

She smiles a bit at that, looking as surprised at the smile as I am at my words.

“Mikey,” she says. “I don’t think you are.”

Then she screams at the deer that’s jumped out of the trees and onto the road in front of us and there’s no time to even brake and we hit it, taking its legs out from under it, which everyone in these parts knows is the worst thing that can happen when you hit a deer, because now six hundred pounds of panicked, dying, unstoppable deer carcass are flying right up the hood, straight at us–

This is how people die
, I think, in that instant–

And Henna and I are both ducking to the middle of the seat and our heads hit together with a funny coconut sound and glass is breaking and metal is bending above us (which is so loud,
so
loud) and something hits me hard in the cheek and I hear Henna make a soft “oof” sound and her body shifts away from mine and it’s only now I realize the car is still moving and I reach over her to try to steer but the steering wheel has snapped off and I feel us veering and tipping and we come to a slamming stop and the passenger’s side air bag goes off so ferociously I actually feel my nose breaking.

Then it’s quiet.

“Henna?” I say.
“Henna!”

Her voice, when it comes, is deep and guttural, pain-filled. “My arm,” is all she says.

I pull myself up to an almost-sitting position. Rain hits my face. The roof of Henna’s car is peeled nearly all the way off. We’re pushed up against the dashboard and I turn my neck (ow, ow,
ow
) to see that the deer somehow went all the way over the top of us, which is some kind of freaking miracle. Its bulk takes up the entire back seat, its neck broken, its dead weight pressing against us. The engine stopped when we drove into what I now see is a ditch, and I can hear movement all around us.

I must be in shock. Dozens of deer,
dozens
of them, are leaping out of the forest on our side of the road, crossing it, and disappearing through the treeline on the other side.

They keep coming. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s unreal.

“Mikey?” Henna says, her eyes wide with fear and the same shock as she sees what I’m seeing. Her left arm looks awful, twisted in a horrible way, so I take her right hand and hold it, as the impossible flood of deer spills around us like we’re an island in a river.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” the big Latino intern Dr “Call Me Steve” says, as he sews up my right cheek, “you’re going to look pretty rough for a while.”

“He hasn’t taken his graduation pictures yet,” Mel says, standing to the side of the gurney, arms crossed, and so comprehensively not flirting with Call Me Steve that, as flirtations go, it’s working really well.

“Then you’re going to have two black eyes in them, I’m afraid,” Steve tells me. “I’ve reset your nose” – he glances at Mel with a smile – “which is turning out to be a specialty of mine” – he looks back to me – “so it should be close to its normal shape within a week or so, but I’d keep the bracing bandage on for a week more after that, otherwise you won’t be able to breathe. And as for this” – he puts a rectangle of gauze over my stitches – “I think you were probably hit by an antler or hoof rather than glass. It’s a raggedy tear. I did my very, very best, but you are going to have a scar, my friend.”

“It’ll make you look rugged,” Mel says.

“Because I woke up this morning,” I say, “and the one thing I realized I lacked was ruggedness.”

“Your lucky day then,” says Call Me Steve.

“It is,” Mel says, and her face gets that angry look it always does when she’s about to cry. “He could’ve been killed.”

Dr Steve reads the vibe and starts to make his excuses. “Wait,” Mel says. She tears a strip of paper off my admissions chart and writes down her phone number. She gives it to Steve. “It’s all right. I’m nineteen. I should already be in college. You’re good.”

Steve just laughs, but he takes the number. “Go now, please,” she says. “I’d like to yell at my brother for almost dying.”

When we’re alone, she doesn’t yell. She just stands in front of me, gently gently gently not quite touching the wounds on my face. She
is
crying now, but her face is so fierce, I know she’d take my head off if I mentioned it.

“Mikey,” she finally says.

“I know,” I say.

She tries to gently hug me, too, but even that’s too much. “Ribs!” I say, groaning. She just sits down next to me on the gurney.

It turns out that both the slight fascists and the pot farmers who live on our road are equally nice in a car accident. My phone disappeared somewhere under the dashboard and Henna was still pinned in, so I don’t know who called 911. Before the ambulances and the fire truck even arrived, though, people were running out of their houses with towels – the first of them stopping for a moment in wonder to watch the last of the deer flood disappear – then they were pressing those towels against my face. A couple of other people tried to get Henna’s door open to get her out in case the car caught fire. She screamed every time her arm moved, and she wouldn’t let go of my hand, not even when Mr and Mrs Silvennoinen were retrieved from their house – we were like six doors away when the deer hit us. They were fantastically calm, so much so that it was only when I saw them that I realized how much pain I was in.

Someone called my house, too. My mom was picking Meredith up from Jazz & Tap, so Mel – not even bothering with our father – came roaring down the road in her own car. Me and Henna got taken away by ambulance, Mel and the Silvennoinens followed, and Henna went straight into surgery to put her arm back together.

The last thing she said before the paramedics knocked her out was, “Mike.”

“I called Jared,” Mel says now. “He’s going to come by at midnight. The Field.”

“Good,” I say. “Thanks.”

Her hand is next to mine on the gurney and she laces our fingers together, squeezing hard. You see how lucky I am? Knowing that people love me? So lucky. So stupidly lucky.

We hear our mom’s voice before we see her. Mel lets go of my hand. My mom turns the curtained corner where we sit in the emergency room, and the first sight of her face is so worried, so terrified, that suddenly I’m six years old again and have just fallen off my bike and want her to make it better.

This lasts a full four seconds until she tries to hug me.

“Ribs!” I pretty much shriek.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” she says, pulling back. I have to flinch again when she tries to touch my face. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“Can’t you see the bandages?” Mel asks. “And the blood?”

“Yes,” my mom says, “why hasn’t anyone cleaned that off?”

“They did,” I say. “Most of it.”

Her face softens again. “How bad?”

I shrug, then I wince because shrugging really hurts. “Gash on my cheek, broken nose, most of my left ribs are cracked, sprained my ankle. Henna got the worst of it.”

“I saw Mattias and Caroline on my way in,” my mom says, meaning Henna’s parents. “She’s in surgery right now but aside from her arm and a broken collarbone, just bumps and bruises, like you.”

“‘Just’,” I say.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. We’re lucky. It was scary, though. And weird.”

“You should see Henna’s car,” Mel says. “It’s been decapitated.”

“Where’s Meredith?” I ask.

“Caroline’s watching her for a minute in the waiting room,” my mom says.

“Someone should tell Dad,” Mel says.

Mom gets a look of fleeting irritation on her face, then swallows it. “I’ll tell him when we get home.” She looks at us in a particular way. “Listen, I know this isn’t the time or the place–”

“Then why do it?” Mel says.

“Do what?”

“Whatever it is you’re about to do.”

Mom gets that fleeting look again. “Now that I know you’re all right,” she says to me.

“Well, I’m not exactly all–”

“You’re going to see it on the news anyway and I want you to hear it from me first.”

She stops, and for a confusing second, I think it’s going to be about the weirdness with the deer, which no one has satisfactorily explained and which it would be extraordinary if my mother could do so, but hey, I’m still in shock here, and the idea lodges so firmly in my head, that when she says, “Mankiewicz died,” I try to think if I know any deer named Mankiewicz.

“What?” Mel asks, warily.

“This morning,” my mom says, a bit too eagerly. “Stroke. At his house in DC.”

She stops again, and I can see her try not to smile, which even
she
must recognize is the wrong reaction to this news, in this place, with my nose looking like this.

Mankiewicz isn’t a deer. He’s our US Congressman and has been since before my mother was born. A million years old, beloved by this congressional district, and utterly unbeatable in every election.

Now dead.

“Seven days is the protocol,” my mom says, now not even pretending not to smile. “Seven days out of respect and then I announce my intention to run for his seat.” She lets this news sink in. We just stare at her. “The state party actually called me, they called
me
and
asked
me to run.”

Her smile hardens for an instant. “And I suppose your friend’s father is going to run as well, but he’ll lose, like always, so it’s pretty much mine for the taking.” She turns to Mel. “And you’re finally old enough to vote for me!”

Then my mom claps. She actually claps.

“Your mother’s going to be a United States Congresswoman,” she says. “In Washington, DC!”

“Your son is going to have a permanent scar down his cheek,” Mel says.

“Oh,” my mother says, “of course, I know, but it’s in the news today and I thought you might–” She stops, gathers herself. “I’ve finally got my big chance. And we’ll keep the family pictures to a minimum and no one will have to do anything they don’t want to–”

“I should probably tell Meredith I’m not dead,” I say.

Mel takes that as a cue to find Call Me Steve, who officially releases me and nods at Mel when she makes a “phone me” sign with her hand. Meredith is playing on her computer pad when we find her with Mrs Silvennoinen. She jumps up and wraps herself around my limping legs. “I am very upset,” she says.

“I’m going to be okay, though,” I say. “I’ll have a cool scar.”

“I’m still upset.” Meredith eyes my mother. “So upset it would take something
really special
to make me feel better.”

“Meredith–” my mother starts.

“How’s Henna?” Mel asks Mrs Silvennoinen. She’s as beautiful as her daughter, but also not, because Henna is open, where Mrs Silvennoinen – even as a music minister who has to rouse people on a Sunday morning – is always a bit of a closed door. Not unfriendly, just not your business.

“Nothing life-threatening,” she says.

“Praise God,” Mr Silvennoinen says, joining us. He’s six foot nine and has unnervingly pale green eyes, which Henna didn’t inherit. His voice is deep, his accent thick, and he’s handsome in a way so scary it’s like he’s hypnotizing you with it.

He’s always been nice to me, though. Stern, insistent on seeing me at church, and grinding Henna slowly down with his expectations, but nice. He puts a soft hand on my shoulder.

“We saw how you were there for her, Mike,” he says.

“Thank you,” Mrs Silvennoinen says, seriously.

And I remember these are people who haven’t seen their son in four years.

The poor bastards.

Before I can answer them, the most horrible, painful wail I think I’ve ever heard brings the room to a standstill. The police lead a man making the noise through the waiting room. Their caps are off, and the man isn’t arrested or injured. They’re clearly taking him to someone who didn’t make it.

“Isn’t that someone’s dad from our school?” Mel whispers to me. “One of the indie kids’, I think.”

We watch until he disappears down a deeper hallway, his wails still coming.

“I think I’d like to go home now, please,” I say.