that she’d slept in, her legs entangled in the afghan—was soaked in blood. It streaked her legs to the knee and seeped into the bottom edge of her T-shirt.
“Jesus Christ,” I shouted. I shoved Elias aside and tried to shake Jill awake, calling her name, but she wouldn’t wake up. Faintly, she breathed. I yelled for Dodge, but of course he was in his own house, too far away to hear me. Elias’s screaming kept on in a gravel monotone, an alarm that wouldn’t goddamn quit. I looked at him and shouted, “What did you do to her?”
Elias just kept on yelling.
My mom had appeared at the top of the stairs, clutching at the neck of her nightgown. “Get Dodge,” I ordered her.
I tried to loop my arm beneath Jill’s knees, but her legs were too slippery from blood to let me get a solid grip. The blanket beneath her was too bloody to use. To Elias I yelled, “Get me a different blanket, quick.”
Elias didn’t budge. That never-ending Tarzan yell was more than I could take. I crossed the room to where he was standing and shoved him in the chest. “Stop it. Stop it. Tell me what you did to her. What did you fucking do to her?”
The screaming stopped, and Elias panted but said nothing. I shoved him again, but he was too heavy for it to move him or even register. I was losing time. I wrapped the bloody afghan around Jill’s legs and hoisted her up. My mother scuttled past Elias and opened the door, and I rushed outside into the warm night air.
The porch light cut through the blackness, but only far enough to get me partway across the lawn. Dodge was sprinting across the grass toward me. I could hear his ring of keys clinking on his belt. When he came into view he was dressed in his jeans as if he kept them fully outfitted beside his bed like a minuteman. “What happened?”
“Jill’s hurt. There’s blood everywhere. Open the car door.”
Dodge pulled open the passenger door of the Saturn and put his arms behind Jill’s shoulders to help ease her in. I got her legs onto the seat, then stopped and said, “Fuck.”
“What?”
“I don’t have enough gas. I don’t get paid until tomorrow.”
Dodge nodded toward his SUV. “Take mine.”
“You’re blocked in. Get her in the Jeep.”
“I’ll drive.”
“No, you better stay here with Elias. I don’t know what the hell he did to her, but we can’t leave everybody else here with the goddamn psycho.”
He shouted to my mother to bring me the keys while we maneuvered Jill into the back of the Jeep. As I started the car he laid a hand on the windshield to stop me. I rolled down the window, and he said, “Take her to the firehouse. They can get her to the hospital faster.”
“Right. Yeah, okay.”
When I spun out of the driveway onto the pitch-dark road and the car lurched between gears, I felt nothing but afraid. Jill was the one who would know what to do in this situation. She would know how to stop the bleeding, how to prevent shock, how to change gears without leaving the goddamn transmission in the middle of the road. I should have let Dodge drive after all. I had overestimated myself once again, as I always did, because I was so used to being golden that I had missed the fact that in the face of gritty reality I was less than nothing.
The dense forest broke and the small clear lights of Liberty Gorge appeared. I made a quick left turn and followed the street to where the old hose tower rose up high above the small shops around it. At the curb I lurched the Jeep to a stop and ran in through the open bay doors. Four guys in dark blue uniforms were playing poker around a table. I barely got three words out before they rushed past me, instantly to work. The lights of the ambulance whirled on. Then the siren chirped, and I stood aside as three of the men eased Jill onto a gurney, stanching the blood and wheeling her to safety all at the same time.
I leaned against the rear of the Jeep, let my head drop back and felt relief and shame wash over me. She would be all right. She was in the hands of men who knew what they were doing. Men who were not me.
* * *
The baby’s cry