Collecting Cooper (45 page)

“Do you have any antiseptic, Adrian?” she asks.

“Huh?”

“Antiseptic.”

“Oh, yes, sure.”

“Can I have some?”

He moves around the bed and unties the ropes. She sits up, carefully so the sheet doesn’t drape from her body. She rubs at her wrists while he unties her feet. Her wrists are red and the skin is broken and it must be hard being tied up for nearly a week the way she was, and he’s annoyed at Cooper for doing that to her. Cooper could have just locked her in a room. When her feet are free she slowly leans forward and rubs at her ankles.

“Can I have the antiseptic?” she asks.

He passes it to her. She takes off the lid and starts to rub cream into her ankles and wrists. He watches her work, going from limb to limb, and he wants to offer to help but he doesn’t. He likes the idea of rubbing cream into her and helping her, but he doesn’t think she’ll like the idea as much.

“It really hurts,” she tells him.

“I’m sorry. Next time it’ll . . .” he stops talking, realizing his mistake. He looks down, unable to look her in the eye, waiting for her to pick up on it, waiting for her to say
Next time what? You said you were letting me go.
He doesn’t know how to finish his sentence, and thankfully he doesn’t have to because she lets him off the hook.

“Let’s take a look then, shall we?” she says, missing his comment, and he is pleased. “What happened?”

“Somebody shot me.”

“Oh, you poor man,” she says, and her voice is soothing and already his leg doesn’t seem to hurt as much. The image that comes next is immediate—he sees himself sitting with this woman on the porch watching a sunrise and not with Cooper. His chest is warm
and he feels a little light-headed and he isn’t sure what’s going on. Her wrists are shiny from the cream. He can’t stop looking at them.

“It doesn’t hurt that much,” he says, but it really does. He doesn’t want her to know how much pain he’s in. “You know, I’ve had worse,” he adds and immediately wishes he hadn’t.

She tucks the sheet beneath her armpits and clamps her arms down on the outside of it. “Is that everything in the plastic bag?”

“Yes.”

“We should start by washing the wound,” she says. “Is that okay? Do you want me to do that for you?”

“Okay.”

“You have nice legs, by the way,” she says.

“Oh. Oh, really?”

“Surely, Adrian, you’ve heard that before?”

“Umm . . . no. Never.”

“Never? I find that hard to believe,” she says, and her smile makes him smile. “Now, do you have any cotton balls?”

“In the bag.”

“Then let’s get started.”

He hands her the bag and she goes through it, placing the items on the bed next to her. Along with the antiseptic, there are other ointments, bandages, gauze pads, tape, a safety pin, pills, creams, a pair of scissors. He keeps his eyes on the scissors. He wants to take them away from her, but at the same time he doesn’t want to say anything mean to her. He needs to take them away without sounding like he doesn’t trust her. He’s really starting to think it would be a waste if he gave her to Cooper.

“Is that pad stuck on the wound?” she asks, leaning forward to get a better look. Her hair is draped down her back, the sheet open like a curtain through which he can see her spine, it looks like a row of knuckles down her back, her skin is smooth and pale. The skin on her neck is tight and there are beads of sweat sitting on the surface. He has the urge to run his finger over them and send them dripping down her body.

“Yes,” he hears himself saying.

“We’re going to need to remove it.”

“The leg?” he asks, the image of him pacing uneven laps in his room comes back to him, and he can feel the blood drain from his face. He wants to be sick.

“No, the pad,” she says. “That would be awful if we had to remove the leg,” she says, and she says it in a way to not make him feel stupid about his mistake. He doesn’t know why he thought she meant the leg—it makes no sense. He feels silly. In the past others would have laughed at him for getting something so simple so wrong.

“It’s going to hurt,” she warns him, “but I sense you’re not going to have a problem. Here, let’s soak it first. It should come away easier.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

She soaks one of the cloths in water and he watches her fingers, her arms, the way her hair sticks to her face. His heart is racing. She squeezes the cloth and he loves the way the water sounds sprinkling back into the bucket. It makes him want to go for a swim, something he hasn’t done since he was a boy. She places the cloth and holds it against the pad on his thigh and she looks up at him and smiles and his legs are starting to turn into jelly. He wishes he were sitting down. She peels the corner of the pad away. It’s still stuck but not as bad.

“Just a little longer,” she says. “Or I can just rip it straight off. Would you prefer that?”

“Yes,” he says, and the word hasn’t been out of his mouth for more than half a second when
rip,
it’s torn from his thigh. “Ah,” he says, “ah that . . .”

“Was really brave of you,” she says, and smiles at him.

He smiles back, hiding the pain. She reminds him of Katie, Katie the girl he fell in love with, only Emma is much nicer than Katie. Far more beautiful, and friendly, and even though she’s much younger than Adrian he can feel himself falling. It’s as if he’s thirteen again. Of course his mother would say he’s becoming obsessed, but his mother would be wrong.

“Now, let’s take a look,” Katie says—no, not Katie, Emma. When
they’re sitting on the porch watching future sunsets, he’s going to have to be careful not to make that mistake. “Hmm, it looks nasty. Let me wash it down,” she says, and she soaks some cotton balls in antiseptic.

“It’s old,” he says, nodding toward the same antiseptic she put on her own wrists and ankles.

“This stuff lasts forever,” she says. “Trust me, they only put expiration dates on it to make sure you keep buying more. It’s perfectly safe.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I used it, didn’t I?”

She did, but she didn’t know it was old, and he feels bad about not having told her before she used it on herself. He has a decision to make—does he believe her or not? Does he trust her? He decides that he does. She’s a nice person, that is obvious, and nice people can be trusted.

He nods. “Okay,” he says, “use it on me.”

She smiles. He never wants to see her not smiling. She pads two cotton balls against his thigh, then slowly wipes them downward. “You’re doing really well,” she says. “Not much longer to go.”

“Okay.”

“You really should get stitches, Adrian.”

“I can’t.”

“Then we’ll do the best we can. Now, I need to cut some gauze into the right size.”

“I’ll do it.” He leans over to the bed and picks up the gauze and the scissors. “What size?”

“Just a little bigger than the wound.”

“Oh, of course.” He uses the scissors then hands her the gauze. He puts the scissors into his back pocket. She holds the gauze in place and puts another medical pad on top of it.

“Now I need you to cut some tape to the right lengths.”

“How long?”

“Just a little longer than the pad.”

She passes him up the tape. It’s difficult because he’s still holding
the gun, but he manages okay. He cuts a piece at a time and hands it to her and she sticks it across the edge of the pad and across his thigh. When all four are in place she lets go and leans back.

“Looks good,” she says. “How does it feel?”

“Much better,” he says, and he smiles and she smiles back and this is perfect, just perfect.

“Okay, now, where’s the bandage?” she says, turning back to look at the contents on the bed. “Ah, there we go,” she says, picking it up. “Now I’m going to put this on tight, but not too tight, okay, Adrian? Let me know if it hurts.”

“It won’t hurt,” he says, his heart fluttering, liking how his name sounds coming from her mouth. He can see what Cooper saw in this girl, but what Cooper was going to do to her was wrong. Very wrong. He will never let Cooper hurt her. Never.

“Just let me know if it does,” she says. “I don’t want to hurt you, Adrian.”

“And I don’t want anybody to hurt you.”

She puts one hand on the inside of his thigh and he can feel himself stirring and is embarrassed about it. She reaches the bandage behind his leg and takes it in her other hand then starts pulling it around. She repeats the movement over and over, crisscrossing the bandage until it’s nice and secure and covering about half of his thigh.

“Now you’ll need to do this again tonight, so if you like I don’t mind staying for the day, and tonight after I re-dress the wound you can take me home? Is that okay, Adrian? I need to see my parents. I love them so much and miss them.”

“Sure! Sure,” he says, excited.

“How does it feel?”

“Good.”

“Now you’ll need to use both hands to hold the bandage,” she says, “one here on this side and one on this side, just until I can pin it into place. Be careful with that gun and don’t shoot yourself in the foot. I’d hate for you to hurt yourself, Adrian.”

“Okay.” He lowers his free hand and holds the bandage, and he lowers his gun hand and does the same, extending his grip along
the side of the gun to the bandage, the barrel pointing to his foot.

“You got it?”

“Yes,” he says, wishing things had gone this easy with Cooper.

“Now don’t let go. Keep lots of pressure.”

“Okay.”

“Now, what else do we have here,” she says, turning toward the bed, then she comes back with the safety pin. “Let me secure it with this,” she says.

He’s thinking about the sunrise, about how, if he’s allowed, he’d like to hold her hand as they sit on the porch, a nice warm wind, both of them drinking orange juices. He’s thinking about a future with her, about the sun coming over the tops of the trees and shining in her hair and he’s thinking about how beautiful she’ll look. He’s picturing himself on the porch at the opposite end of the day, watching the sun set behind the mountains in the distance, Emma cuddled up next to him for warmth. He’s thinking about holding the bandage nice and tight, and he can’t think of too many things at the same time because he’ll end up forgetting things.

Her hands brush against his, and he watches her fiddling with the safety pin, poking the point just so it will slide beneath the material. Her hand touches more of his hand and she tries to get a better angle, and then her hand is on his hand and then . . .

The gun goes off. Her finger is jammed against his finger, which is resting against the trigger. The barrel is still pointing down at his foot. Two toes have completely disappeared, replaced by a pulpy mess that looks like a crushed tomato. He doesn’t even feel any pain, it doesn’t have time to register before Emma’s arm swings upward, the safety pin is in her hand and it’s bent open, he gets a real good look at it because it comes racing toward his face. His hands are still on the bandage, still on the gun, and he’s still not letting go just as she told him, at least until the pin hits, enters, and sinks down deep into his eyeball, right up to the small
O
-shaped hinge. Then he lets go with both hands and screams.

His hands race up to his face and the gun hits him in the side of the head hard enough to give him an immediate headache, but he
hangs on to it. He squeezes his eyes closed and his left one closes across the pin but won’t seal shut, letting in light, allowing him to see the shaft of the pin as it trails out of his blurry perspective. There’s an immediate flow of tears. The pain comes from his eye and from his foot at the same time, both far worse than anything he ever felt in the Scream Room. The pain has a weight to it, it’s heavy inside his head pulling his gaze to the floor, a sharp intense pain that starts at his eye and detours through his brain before spreading to his shoulders, and from his foot a dull ache races up his leg into his belly. He touches the pin with his free hand wanting to pull it out and the pain widens, and immediately he vomits, no warning of it, stomach bile spilling over his chin and down the front of his shirt. There’s a sudden ache in his groin and his entire body burns with pain and he doesn’t know what’s happening.

The girl is screaming at him but he can’t absorb the words, they’re all insults, even if he can’t focus on them he can recognize the tone, and the pain explodes in his groin again and he realizes she’s kicking him. He puts his arm ahead and pulls the trigger and the gun goes off and he can’t see if he hits the woman or the wall, and he fires again and then again, the sound deafening, hurting his ears. He staggers to the side leaving one of his toes behind, another barely hanging on, and he can’t maintain his weight on his foot, he buckles and trips over the bucket and hits the floor, his bare feet soaked in the process, his body banging against the drawers and the Taser landing in his lap. He pinches his fingers on the safety pin, takes a deep breath and pulls. He can feel his entire eyeball being brought forward and the pain is too intense and he has to let go, it’s as though the pin is much longer now that it’s inside of him, so long it’s gone directly into the center of his brain. He opens his good eye and has to hold it open with his fingers to stop it from closing. Something oozes down the pin and drips onto his cheek. He looks around the room and he’s alone now. He takes another grip on the safety pin, puts down the gun, pushes his other fingers against his eye to stop it moving, grits his teeth, and pulls as hard as he can.

The alarm clock goes off and I wake up feeling even more tired than before I went to sleep. It reminds me of how I used to feel last year when I’d wake up every morning with a hangover. I spent months on end trying to drink away the memories of the bad things I thought I’d done before crashing into Emma Green sobered me up for good. A couple of cups of coffee go a long way to bringing me around. I take a cold shower and drink another coffee before settling up with the hotel clerk, this one a different guy from two hours ago.