Valley of Ashes (15 page)

“Classical, mostly. Got hired by the Cincinnati Symphony when he was fifteen. Then his father refused to pay for college unless he majored in business, so he gave it up.”

“And now the poor guy’s getting his teeth kicked in on a daily basis by Bittler, the rice grain–dicked Napoleon? Horrible.”

Dean yawned, shuddering. “Exactly.”

“Help him out, okay? He’s an amazing friend to both of us.”

“Mmmm,” he said.

“And can I just say that Setsuko gives me the creeps? Nice and everything, don’t get me wrong, but—”

In answer to that I felt Dean’s leg twitch, and then he inhaled with a bit of snore.

Sigh.

“Sweet dreams, Intrepid Spouse,” I said.

He muttered something and twitched again, fully out.

I turned onto my other side, yearning for maximum sleep before one of the girls woke up.

Just as I finally drifted off, a fire truck’s siren echoed in the distance.

A
bout the last thing I expected the following afternoon—entertaining the girls on our sun-drenched back lawn while Dean was off on yet
another
hours-long siphon-off-the-final-ounce-of-my-wifely/parental-will-to-live biking excursion—was that my Intrepid Spouse would return through the yard’s side gate practically carrying a battered and bloody Bittler.

“Found him on the creek trail,” said Dean, crouched and breathless, arms cinched around the smaller man’s waist to hold him upright. “Didn’t think we could get all the way to his place… six more blocks.”

They were still wearing bike helmets. Bittler’s looked like a rottweiler’s chew toy: chunks of Styrofoam missing all along the right side, tufts of his blood-darkened hair poking through the gaps.

There was even blood soaked into his mustache.

“What’d you do there, Mr. Bittler, stick your head in a wood chipper?” I said, to jolly him through the long wince of pain that hissed through his teeth while I drew his free arm across my shoulders.

“M’okay,” he insisted, but he leaned on me hard all the same.

Dean and I piloted him gingerly toward the picnic table, taking tiny steps while he hopped right-footed between us.

I glanced at the girls. They were fine. Toddling happily around in T-shirts and diapers—it was that hot out.

Bittler kept asking where his bike was, over and over, until we’d maneuvered him gently down onto the wood-plank bench.

“In the creek,” Dean told him each time. “In a lot of pieces.”

I crouched down in the grass the second we had him settled. “Look at me, okay?”

Bittler blinked, then slowly raised his head.

His left pupil was twice the size of his right.

“Call nine-one-one,” I said to Dean. “
Now
.”

He took off at a sprint. Three leggy strides and he’d cleared the back porch steps, barreling into the kitchen—screen door yanked wide so fast and hard it slapped the wall’s brick face with a
crack
before rebounding twice off the door frame.

Bittler fidgeted like he was trying to stand up. Well, not “fidgeted,” exactly—unless you could stretch the use of that word to include the movements of someone just waking up on the bottom of a swimming pool, after a long winter. But “trying to stand up” was definitely being telegraphed, all the same.

“Stay on the bench,” I said. “You have a concussion.”

“Do
not
.” He gripped the bench plank’s front edge with both hands, knuckles paling on either side of his bloodied knees.

To our left Parrish shoved India, who toppled backward onto her diapered butt and started wailing.

I stood up. “Mr. Bittler, do I look like a woman who needs a
third
one-year-old here?”

He glowered at that, all pissy, while I scooped India off the grass and onto my hip.

Her crying ratcheted up to full aria mode.

Bittler squinted up at me, slurring “Where’s my bike?” through the racket.

“In the creek,” I said.

“D’you do that for? Creek.”

“
I
didn’t…”

India hiccuped, gave one more whimper, and then dragged her face
back and forth across the front of my right boob, grinding snot into my shirt.

I was about to raise my left hand to wipe it off, but Bittler looked groggier all of a sudden and started listing to port. “You took my bike?”

I whipped my left arm across my stomach and India’s chubby calf, gripping his shoulder to steady him, willing Dean to come back outside.

How the fuck long could it take, dialing three digits on a goddamn Touch-Tone phone and telling whomever-the-hell picked up, “send an ambulance to Nineteen thirteen Mapleton”?

“Where’s Setsuko?” mumbled Bittler.

“Mr. Bittler, you’re at Dean Bauer’s house, remember? You had an accident at the creek.”

“Fine piece of tail,” he said, leering.

Well, not like a concussion
stops
someone from being an asshole.

Bittler leaned harder against my hand. “Lost my bike.”

He was getting heavy. I tried moving my feet farther apart for leverage.

That worked for all of five seconds.

I slid my right foot toward my left, trying to lean back into him.

“Want to lie down,” he said, pushing against my arm with his torso’s full weight. “Tired.”

“Mr. Bittler, you have to stay awake now. You’ve got a concussion, okay?”

I needed to get my body wedged between him and the bench before he knocked all three of us over—which meant moving India to my other hip so she wouldn’t get crushed between us.

“Dean!” I yelled, trying to pivot in the other direction, but I was already canted at too weird an angle, India weighing on me like a downhill anchor.

I couldn’t put her down—she’d dug her knees into me, front and back, and I was afraid of dropping her.

Like a bad game of Twister, with a bucket of blood and snot thrown in.

My arms started quaking. “Dean? Get back out here!”

No answer.

“Look, can you just…, ” I said, but then Bittler coughed up scary-red phlegm all over his chin and his eyes rolled back.

I got one knee up on the bench next to him.

Then he got all floppy on me, India’s foot now wedged between his shoulder and my knee. Along with my left hand.

I said, “Mother
fuck
,” clenched my right arm tighter around India’s waist, and just yanked her across my stomach, which thankfully popped both her foot and my hand free of the man’s slack weight.

But it also started him toppling forward.

I don’t know how the hell I did it, but somehow I twisted and kind of ducked simultaneously—without letting go of my daughter—and managed to get under him before he did a face-plant into the lawn.

I ended up down on one knee with my back to the guy—crouched forward with his head lolling over one of my shoulders and his arm dangled over the other.

He was hot and sticky-wet and he weighed a gazillion pounds.

I gripped poor India, meanwhile, diagonally across my hunched chest like she was a Kalashnikov and I was Che fucking Guevara.

Bittler moaned, drooling into my neck.

I yelled Dean’s name at the top of my lungs, telling him to get his sorry ass back out into the yard.

I must have arched my back with the effort or something, because Bittler’s other arm flopped down, crashing into the outside of my thigh.

“Mummie,” said India, “want down now.”

“Want down now
please
,” I muttered automatically, letting go of her legs.

She got her feet under her and wriggled free.

I dropped my hands to the dirt, elbows locked to brace myself against Bittler’s deadweight. I took the deepest breath I could and started yelling, again, for Dean.

A siren started up in the distance—drowning me out just as my husband walked back onto the porch, phone still in hand, his head craned away from us toward Mapleton Street.

I realized he was waiting to flag the ambulance, probably still talking to the dispatcher, but the siren sounded entirely too far away.

Bittler felt like a dump truck, parked across my back.

And where is Parrish?

I tried to turn my head toward where I’d last seen her, but Bittler’s weight shifted ominously.

Then I couldn’t catch my breath, and dark spots started crowding the edges of my vision.

“Daddy!” piped India, toddling toward her father with both arms up in the air, “Look!”

The paramedics burst into our backyard just as Dean was lifting Bittler off me, which meant the three of us were covered in blood and must have looked like a particularly scary tableau of domestic threesome what-the-fuck scary shit, right off the bat.

I dropped my other knee to the ground and then slid over onto a hip, straightening my legs out.

“Sir!” said the first guy hauling a stretcher. “Please step back!”

“I don’t want to drop him,” said Dean. “He’s out cold.”

My legs prickled with a rush of blood, but I got to my feet as quickly as I could. “The guy crashed his bike—this isn’t a fight or anything.”

They looked unconvinced.

“Really,” I said. “He has a concussion. My husband went inside to call you guys and he kind of fell on me when he passed out…”

Bittler groaned in Dean’s arms.

“For God’s sake,” I said, “they
work
together. Bittler crashed his bike by the creek and Dean
carried
him here. Get him onto that stretcher.”

And then it was like everything sped up again, all crowded.

Dean handed off Bittler and reached for me but I told him to make sure Parrish was okay first, because suddenly I was so exhausted I didn’t think I could make my legs move again, but I could see India sitting right on the porch steps in her diaper so I knew
she
was all right.

Dean said, “She’s right here behind the table, sucking her thumb. She’s fine.”

And then I kind of slumped over and he got me onto the bloody bench, his arm behind my back, and the ambulance guys shined a penlight in my
eyes and wanted to know if any of the blood on me was mine, and they put a blanket around me even though I kept saying I was fine.

Dean was holding my hand and I told him to just get the girls inside, and safe.

They had Bittler in a neck-brace thing by then, strapped to the stretcher all snug.

One of the guys said, “Miss? We’d like to take you down to the hospital, make sure you’re all right.”

“Look, nothing
happened
to me,” I said. “I mean, the guy fell over and I caught him, but the whole thing probably lasted three minutes or something, okay? Bittler’s the one who’s hurt. I just need a bath.”

And then suddenly I was really, really tired… like all the adrenaline had galloped off at once, with the dregs of my iron-poor blood riding along into the sunset on the back of its horse.

I yawned, and right then it seemed like holding my eyes open was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.

“You’re sure?” the guy asked.

I nodded, yawning again.

“Let me just take your pulse, okay?” he said.

His hand was gentle on my wrist.

I eyed the ground, aching to lie down on the grass.

“You’re fine,” he said.

“Told you. I just need a bath. And maybe a nice long nap.”

He smiled. “Your little girls are twins, right? How old?”

“Just turned one,” I said.

“In that case, I’ll tell your husband that you
not
getting a nap for the rest of the afternoon would constitute a life-threatening emergency. How’s that?”

“Dude,” I said, humbled with gratitude, “I would so hug you right now, but I don’t want to get Bittler’s blood on your shirt.”

He laughed at that.

“Should I ever lose my mind and decide to have more children, however,” I continued, “I’m naming them
all
after you.”