I threw the note to the floor and ran for the bedroom.
Scott Early had tied a plastic bag around his head, and it was misted with his shallow breaths, sucked in against his open mouth. He’d wrapped his wrists with duct tape—ten, twenty times around. And the whumping sound was his kicking against the footboard of the bed. I don’t know if he was entirely conscious. Open bottles lay empty on the floor—the clonazepam that helped him blot out his dreams. They were probably the same dreams, old, misty dreams that still surprised me, especially after a bad call, waking me with the force of a collision. Like a robot, I walked back out into the hall, brought Juliet’s stroller inside, lifted her out, held her against me so that she didn’t wake, and laid her carefully on her side in her cradle. And then I sat down on Kelly’s desk chair and waited, watching as Scott Early’s breathing grew quicker and shallower and the agonal kicking of his legs slowed to a twitch.
This was his wish.
This was his atonement.
He had chosen this, coward that he was.
I had not done this.
But on the desk was a photo, taken on Halloween, of Juliet dressed in a felt bunting made to look like a carrot. I remembered her newborn’s wrinkled little face. In just a few months, it had taken on curves and characteristics. Her cheeks that had been flaps now were rounded velvety little globes. Scott Early was on one side, with his own cheek pressed against Juliet’s, and Kelly was on the other, smiling at both of them. I’d taken the picture myself. They looked . . . like they had seen heaven. In Kelly’s face was the certainty that Scott was again, forever, the boy she’d loved at Colorado State, the boy she’d suffered with as the voices grew louder and more demanding, the husband she’d cleaved unto when hate mail asked her how she could bear the touch of the Grim Reaper. In Kelly’s face was the purest love, not love of her own dreams recovered, but unconditional love for Scott Early and their beautiful baby.
I waited a full minute by my watch. Five more minutes, and Scott Early would suffer irreversible brain injury. Five minutes or less. How long had he been this way? He was already hypoxic. I could see that by looking at his lips. After his brain winked out, he would be just an electrical impulse, a heart waiting to stop. He would cross over and perhaps be at peace.
And perhaps so would I.
I jumped up and ripped open the plastic bag, using the nail scissors Kelly kept in her drawer to cut the pink ribbon he’d bound it with. He’d vomited, and I grabbed his shirt and wiped the acidic stuff away from his mouth. Then I filled my lungs and put my mouth to the mouth of Scott Early and blew in—long, measured, timed breaths, summoning all my training. I sat back on my heels and looked at him. He was immobile, his face still bluish. My hands crossed, I slammed my fist down on his chest. I felt for his pulse. It was patchy, irregular. I took in more air and breathed it into Scott Early’s mouth, again, and again, and again, again, again, until I was dizzy, swaying and clinging to the headboard. Then, finally, he coughed, and I held him up while he vomited the sour white contents of his stomach on the chenille spread. I pushed him onto his side and slid his pillow under his back. I dialed 911. I gave them the address. Yes, Scott Early was breathing. No, he was unresponsive to questions. Yes, he had overdosed on a nonspecific number of Fluanxol tablets as well as clonazepam and Halcion and, although the label was ripped off, what I thought was the anti-Parkinson’s drug Artane. Yes, I had administered emergency resuscitation. No, I was not a doctor, and I was not his wife.
Here I was, calling for emergency medical help. Calmly and clearly, in detail, an act of desperation now second nature, my training displacing my emotions. And yet Ronnie the young woman was a transparency: It was possible to see through the overlay to a terrified long-haired kid screaming for help, throwing the phone to the floor, running across the hard ground to Sister Emory’s door.
It was impossible. Life was not tracing paper.
Calling for help to save Scott Early.
Calling for help to save us from Scott Early.
To pass time, I pictured what was happening on the other end. People who’d been sitting around the station house playing cards or stirring chili leapt for their gear, checking to make sure that there was glucose, a board, oxygen. I could taste the adrenaline in my own mouth, just as my fellow EMTs would do as they slammed into their truck now. They were me. I was them. I forced myself to check Scott Early’s pulse one more time, then sat back down in the chair, gripping the arms so as to will myself not to fly out that door. His pulse was steady now and regular. He was beginning to moan, but you could not call it verbalizing. I couldn’t ask him to describe his condition. In less than three minutes, I could hear the sirens. Quickly, I wrote down the telephone number and name of the hotel where Kelly was staying. I also wrote down her cell phone number and then, finally, a note to her reading, “Sorry for this pain, and my needing to leave, from Rachel, with love to Juliet,” just one sentence. I relented then and added that the suicide attempt had been stopped early, and he would probably be fine. With a piece of tape, I attached these to Scott Early’s filthy shirt.
The unlocked door hit the wall as the paramedics slammed into the apartment. I stood in the bedroom doorway while they threw themselves on Scott Early, opening his eyes and examining his pupils with their penlights, clearing his mouth, inserting an airway. Then, from the telephone in the kitchen, I called Mrs. Lowen downstairs and told her that Scott Early was sick and might well be taken to the hospital. I asked, “Is it possible for you to come up and look after Juliet? Just for an hour or two? I’m sure Kelly will come back tonight. I’m so frightened. I have to leave or I’ll miss my plane.” It wasn’t a lie. Well, it strained the definition of truth. Mrs. Lowen didn’t know how sick Scott Early was, or why. But in fact, if I didn’t get out of there right then, there would be a million questions, and I would miss any plane altogether, even tomorrow. I had to get out of that place.
But I did lie. The lie was that I was frightened.
I had never been less frightened. I was too numb for fear, numb to my lips. But knowing that Mrs. Lowen was going to grab her purse and run down the hall and up the stairs made me bold. I knew someone would show up shortly to investigate this, but there was no choice for me but to vanish. My fingerprints were all over that apartment, but since no Rachel Byrd existed, neither did her fingerprints.
When I walked out that door, I would become Veronica Swan again.
I walked out the door.
It was not until hours later—when I had driven to the airport, parked in long-term, and purchased a ticket for the morning plane to St. George; when I was lying on a thin mattress in the Red Roof Inn a block from the airport, listening to a group of truck drivers overhead cheering for the Giants—that I realized I had forgotten his note. I had left behind Scott Early’s note to me, right on the floor near the hall table where I had dropped it. And the woman at the airline counter might know where I was. I had been the only one to show up there at midnight, disheveled and dirty, smelling of puke, asking to change a reservation and if there was a clean but inexpensive motel nearby. There was only one ticket counter for True West.
She would remember.
And still I was not frightened. I had done nothing wrong, unless thoughts counted. But now I would have lost my anonymity. It would all come out. Kelly would be there within hours. And when she got to the hospital, she would be asked about the circumstances surrounding Scott Early’s suicide attempt and the disappearance of her nanny. She would tell someone who Ronnie Swan was and what my connection was to them. The police would be suspicious. Who wouldn’t be? Even Kelly might suspect that, with her gone, I had tried to hurt Scott Early and made it look like a suicide attempt.
My cell phone rang.
I didn’t even try to dig for it.
It rang again.
This time, I plunged my hand deep into my duffel and pulled it out. Without even looking at the callback number, I flipped it open.
“Veronica,” said Mrs. Desmon
d, “are you hurt? Are you safe?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s on television,” she said. “Would you like me to come for you?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I’ve caught you up in this too much already. I’m sorry, Missus Desmond. I’m so sorry.”
“But the report says there was a call from an unidentified young woman who saved Mister Early from a suicide attempt.”
“Yes.”
“And the baby is unhurt.”
“Yes.”
“This is absurd. I’m going to come there now. . . . Where are you? You poor child. At least I can wait with you until . . . Is your father coming for you? We can go to one of those awful Denny’s and have some soup or something. I would think they would have herbal tea.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll sleep.”
“I don’t feel safe with your being alone. You didn’t do anything wrong, Ronnie.”
“I . . . hope not,” I said. “I should never have come.”
“Good-bye, dear,” said Mrs. Desmond. “I’m not sure I shouldn’t come. Where are you?”
“Some motel. By the airport.”
“I’m not sure about this,” she said.
The phone went dead. It was out of juice.
I lay sleepless in the dirty room, where the air conditioner blasted relentless chemical-smelling air. I put on my hoodie, then my jean jacket. I lay down again.
Did thoughts count? Had I tried to hurt him, with my thoughts? Of course I had. I had hoped and hoped, for years and years, had stopped just short of praying, hundreds of times, that Scott Early would fall, fry, crash, choke, trip, slip, seize, freeze, drown.
Thoughts did count. But did all of them? The hatred and the pity? The awful moment when the pity outweighed the hate? Did thoughts count to the world . . . or only to me? Legally, was I liable for anything that had happened? Had I . . . assaulted Scott Early just by reminding him of what his mind would not ever allow him to remember?
Only I knew why Kelly kept the buck knife in her drawer. Even Kelly, who had loved him so long, would die before she let Scott Early harm her baby. I’d looked at Juliet in her basket and thought of her as a tiny princess Moses, to be set on clean waters. I had seen her as an earth angel I would send on a journey down a river of hope, to bring to someone unknown the very joy Scott Early had stolen from my family. But I had also watched the Scott Early who rocked baby Juliet and helped tiny children find their books at the library. And he was not the man who had killed Becky and Ruthie. And yet he was. He had once had a personality of surpassing sweetness. And it had been stolen from him by an illness. Perhaps this was why I had not been able to do that huge and terrible thing. My convictions weren’t really convictions, only half-baked promptings, leftover rage to kill, or to feed.
Did Becky and Ruthie know? Were they like the hungry ghosts Kevin Chan had told us about, on moonless nights, around campfires at the beach, trying to spook us with his tales? Were they spirits of people who died in the wrong way, who were cruelly hurt or who committed suicide? Kevin’s grandmother, his father’s mother, despite her tendency to say “Gotcha” and “A-okay,” put out rice and fruit for these ancestors so they wouldn’t do mischief, like pull down the laundry or dump ashes in the rice. But how could such a myth be real? Ruthie and Becky were the Heavenly Father’s chosen. They would not have sought revenge. Kevin’s face wound past me. He would be well and live a long life, but he would never understand.
What had made me come here?
I had never, not even on the day of the murders, felt so alone.
Looking up at the grubby light, I wrapped my arms over my heart and prayed for answers. But the Lord is not Alex Trebek. I prayed until sweat collected under my hair, at my temples, in the freezing room. What was vengeance? What was justice? Had I even known what vengeance would mean? I was a sinner, I told my Lord. I knew I had sinned. But was it possible, I prayed, that I had ended up administering justice along with artificial respiration? Justice was based on a word in Hebrew that meant giving people what they needed, not what they deserved. Had I freed Scott Early or condemned him to a life of knowing that it was I, the witness, who had spared him—forcing him to reckon every day with the burden of my forgiveness? Could my old, banked rage have led me to grace?
And then a truth washed over me like the momentary flash of sunlight off the harbor—a brief, piercing illumination. I remembered the passage in Doctrine and Covenants 3, the revelation of the Lord to Joseph Smith after Joseph Smith trusted his foolish friend with translations from the Golden Plates. The friend lost them, or his wife hid them. And Joseph Smith warned, in his rewriting of the revelations, against anyone “Who has set at naught the counsels of God, and has broken the most sacred promises which were made before God, and has depended upon his own judgment and boasted in his own wisdom.” I remembered it from Sunday school: “For, behold, you should not have feared man more than God. . . . Yet you should have been faithful; and He would have extended His arm and supported you against all the fiery darts of the adversary; and He would have been with you in every time of trouble.”
Father, I prayed, this is my truth. I feared Scott Early more than I feared You. I trusted my own wisdom more than Your divine counsel. My heart burst. How could I have expected God to comfort me?
I don’t know how long I prayed, or when I fell asleep under the garish light, or what time it was when I woke to the whirl of revolving lights outside my window and the banging at my door. I got up and brushed my teeth while the police shouted, Open up, open up! I checked myself the way I once did before a basketball game, to make sure my soul and body were in it together. They were. As for being in grace, I accepted that we aren’t given that to know.
When I opened the door, I was composed, even as the lights blinded me. It was just like what Clare once said, quoting some baseball player, déjà vu all over again. I stepped outside and held my arms up over my head. Ronnie, someone called, Ronnie, how did you feel when your sister’s killer tried to kill himself? Ronnie, did you come here to murder him? Are you glad he’s in a coma? Ronnie? I sat down on the curb and curled over myself.
“Veronica Swan,” said a man’s gruff voice. “Are you Veronica Swan?”
Suddenly I felt someone’s arm fall lightly across my shoulder.
“I am Alice Desmond,” I heard a voice say. I looked up. She was holding up one of her black umbrellas, though it was not raining. “This child is a minor. Her father says you are to leave her alone until he can come for her.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Once I had wished with all my being to clear out of the little hollow below the ridge at Pine Mountains.
And now I wanted that little hollow, with its red barn and blue house, more than anything else in the world. I wanted to be there—curled up on Sunday mornings in my teenager’s bed, running my fingers along the grooved, scrubbed-to-satin butcher block that smelled of cinnamon and cloves, turning up the wood stove in the morning to warm my mother’s slippers before I slipped them on to start my breakfast, her worn scuffs that always seemed warmer than my own.
Mrs. Desmond had told my father the honest essentials. I was spared what I knew would be his moan of concern and shock and my mother’s voice piping in the background, “London, what’s wrong? Is Ronnie hurt? What happened?” We sat in the lobby of the Red Roof Inn with a police sergeant, because Mrs. Desmond insisted that the officer phone his commander and ask under what authority I would be brought to the police station and questioned without the presence of a parent or guardian; and the officer said he would wait.
“Uncle Andrew is coming with me,” Papa told me when we called him the second time. “Not that I can think of any trouble you might be in, with the law, that is. Try to stay calm. I just think we’re going to have to explain things to them. And you’re going to need to explain things to us. You are very lucky your landlady was so kind.”
“I will try to explain,” I said. “I don’t think they’ll lis
ten. Maybe you will.”
“Don’t try anymore,” he said. “Just sit quietly.”
I just sat quietly.
No one seemed to know quite what to do with me or Mrs. Desmond. I wasn’t under arrest. But after a while, a police lieutenant came. Kevin came, too. But they would not let Kevin talk to me. The lieutenant said I was a witness to a suicide attempt, so he had to make me wait for various reasons, including my own safety, until one of my parents showed up. After a while, I put my head down on the back of the scratchy green motel sofa, then on the arm of the sofa. When I woke up, there were my father, wearing a corduroy jacket over his flannel shirt and jeans, and my uncle, in a business suit, and Mrs. Desmond, still with her umbrella, looking down on me. I’d never seen anything more beautiful. My father held me tight.
And then he asked, “What happened to your hair?”
My uncle Andrew identified himself to the lieutenant as an attorney and asked if he could have a moment with his niece.
“Papa, it’s a long story,” I told him after the officer moved away.
“And you can share it with us, but not anyone else, Veronica.”
Uncle Andrew asked me, “What have you said to the police?”
“That I came home to the place where I worked and the man who lived there had tried to commit suicide and that I gave him artificial respiration and called 911.”
My uncle asked, “Did you tell them you knew this man?”
“No,” I told him, my voice unnaturally slurred and slow to my ears, “they already knew that, from calling Kelly Englehart.”
“Okay,” my uncle said, taking a little notebook out of his breast pocket. “Was the baby ever in danger?”
“No, she was with Mrs. Lowen the moment I left. I made sure.”
“Did you tell them why you’d come here?”