The hospital had cleaned and dried the clothes she’d been wearing when she came in—which now that she thought about it, should they have done that? Shouldn’t the clothes have been preserved? Or did the river already ruin them as evidence? In any case, she was dressed as she’d been dressed when Caroline had come to pick her up four days ago, minus the peacoat and the black knit cap, both still in the RAV4, or in the river, or else hung out to dry with the rest of her clothes on the bars of some jail cell down in Iowa, and she would ask him to find out and they could stop and pick them up on their way down to Georgia… but he had to get here first and get her out of here, and when she looked back into the room it was only the clock she saw and not the terrible mechanical bed or the dying flowers or all the little stuffed animals she was leaving behind, a childish menagerie sent or dropped off one by one by old childhood friends or the mothers of old childhood friends she hadn’t seen in years, none of whom stayed long or said anything she could remember now.
Audrey rolling the wheelchair forward and back, listening to the squeak of the rubber tires on the floor, and she didn’t need a wheelchair obviously but who knows—you might slip on the squeaky floor and crack your head before you got out of here and you could sue because you were still technically under their care, and she had waited for him one time in the nurse’s office at school and not outside because that was school policy, the nurse said, and at last he’d come for her in full uniform and all business and impatient with the nurse, hearing just enough to learn it wasn’t anything serious, something she ate maybe, and then he’d done something he never did in his full uniform and in front of people; he bent down and took her into his arms and held her close and kissed her near her ear with his sandpaper jaw that smelled of smoke and he squeezed her, hard.
Then it was just his hand on your shoulder as he led you down the school hall and outside to the cruiser, where he’d parked in the fire lane, waiting for you to buckle in before pulling away from the curb and right away talking into his cell phone as he drove, and something was happening, something was going on, and you still felt a little sick to your stomach but you couldn’t ask him to slow down on the turns, because he was talking… and then after a long moment of saying nothing, the phone resting on his thigh, he said they’d have to take a detour, he needed to make a stop and he didn’t have time to take you back to the office to sit with one of the deputies and you wanted to know were they going to arrest someone but he didn’t seem to hear, but then he did and turned to you and almost-smiled and said no, it wasn’t that kind of stop, but he needed you to sit in the car and mind yourself for a bit while he talked to a man and did you think you could do that, did you feel well enough for that? and of course you said Yes, Sheriff, I can do that.
And it was another two, maybe three days back at school—the huddled, whispering girls, the passed notes and the big eyes and the open mouths—before Audrey finally put it together, that the man they’d gone to see that day at his house in the woods and then driven into town was the father of the girl in the river, Holly Burke, a high schooler who’d been walking home through the park and had been beaten up or hit by a car or messed with by some man or men, or boy or boys, who had then tossed her into the river as you would toss an old piece of wood to see it splash and float away.
It was her boyfriend, my dad said, said one girl. He says it’s always the boyfriend.
How would he know?
My sister said it was a college boy, said another girl. He got her drunk and took her to the park and gang-raped her.
Oh, was your sister there, Christine? Do you even know what gang-rape means?
Do you?
Yes, do you?
Ten years ago that was and no one talked about Holly Burke anymore, the whispering girls grown into teenagers themselves, into young women gone off to college or some of them staying put and having daughters of their own, and whoever had done that to Holly Burke was still alive in the world, somewhere, still walking around, and whenever Audrey had seen the man she’d first seen on that porch in the woods—saw him getting into his van outside the hardware store, or pushing a cart down the cereal aisle, or walking toward her on a sidewalk—her heart would race and she’d try to meet his eyes, to see if he would recognize her, say hello or even nod at her, but he never did, he never did, and it was exactly as if she’d become invisible to him.
Or maybe it had nothing to do with her, and everyone had become invisible to him. He was a ghost who everyone could see but who could see no one else.
And her father had not found the man or men, or boy or boys, who’d done it and no one talked about that anymore either, or at least not in front of Audrey they didn’t. Nor did they talk about it themselves, she and her father, although she knew he thought about it always, that it was in him every day like his cancer and maybe it was even part of his cancer. Or his cancer was part of it, had grown out of it, feeding on it… And just then the particular sounds and smells of hospitals, of human sickness, returned to her in the moment and she remembered she was in a hospital once again, and she turned her head just enough to see the clock and not the bed itself, not the wilted flowers and the stuffed animals.
Forty-five minutes late now.
An hour late now but she wasn’t angry, she wasn’t mad, she could never be mad at him again, there wasn’t time for that. But finally she couldn’t sit there any longer, and she rolled to the open door to see was the coast clear, and she’d no sooner crossed the threshold than she saw a doctor coming toward her, and it was her own Dr. Breece—less breezy than usual, the wings of his white coat weighted down by his hands like stones in the pockets, a man deep in thought, and she thought she could roll back into the room without him seeing her but she couldn’t—he looked up and saw her there and she saw him catch himself up, saw the recognition in his eyes and she knew at once he wasn’t passing by but had come to see her especially, walking all the way from some far wing of the hospital, some altogether unrelated place where people weren’t waiting to leave their quiet little rooms but were arriving in bursts of noise and urgency, nurses converging, doctors commanding, a place of blood and pain and emergency.