Slide (5 page)

I turned the TV on, flicked all the lights off, and curled up on the couch with my head on my arm. Some shitty old sitcom was on. I watched it for a while, but I didn’t get the jokes. Most aspects of domestic American life passed me by, and I didn’t recognize the world they were mocking. Apathy and exhaustion made it almost easy to fall asleep.

Sometime later, I woke with a jump. I shivered. Something warm dripped down my arm. There was a heavy weight on my chest, like somebody’s foot. I tried to move, but it held me in place. I stumbled to my feet, struggling to wake up, but my vision was black as I swayed, and suddenly, I was terrified. The shirt covering the wound on my hand was unbearably tight, like my hand was going to explode. I tore it off. Blood gushed over my fingers, and instead of a blissful release, I panicked.

A door in the hallway led to the fire escape. I stumbled through it, gulping in air, but it was no good. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was going to burst out of my own skin. Frustrated, I sank down on the metal steps and pulled at my hair. Fuck! I couldn’t make it
stop
. I reached into my pocket and lit a cigarette with shaky hands. It smoldered. I watched it burn, anticipating the calming, chemical rush of nicotine, but it never came. Instead, I closed my fingers around the smoking tip and crushed it in my bleeding hand.

It was cold outside on the fire escape. I stared at the city below me, watching with unseeing eyes as the night got darker and darker. The freezing air seeped into my skin, and I welcomed the numbness. Frustration with my lack of control had turned to hopelessness so heavy my chest ached. The cold numbed the pain, though I knew it was only a temporary reprieve.

I wasn’t aware of a presence beside me until warm fingers pushed up my sleeve. The sensation made me jump. I ripped my arm from Pete’s grasp and roughly jerked away from him.

Unperturbed, he reached for me again. “Let me see.” Somehow, he pried my fist open. “The bleeding’s stopped,” he said. “But that’s a nasty burn. Wait here.”

He let go of my hand. The loss of his touch made me shiver. Just the pads of his fingers had felt scorching against my cold skin. Without him, I felt colder than ever. I took a deep, shaky breath, and my head swam, like I hadn’t bothered to breathe for a while. I blinked and suddenly Pete was back. He crouched in front of me and silently poked around at the bloody mess on my palm. I was too tired to stop him, or maybe I didn’t care enough to try. I knew I didn’t care enough to figure it out.

Pete released my hand, satisfied with the bandage he’d expertly put in place. He sat down beside me, so close our shoulders touched. “I like it out here,” he said. “After the first snow of the winter, all you can see is white. It’s like another world.”

I liked snow. I saw it in Philly every year, but I spent most of my time in the shittiest parts of the city, and more often than not, stoned off my face. The snow was dirty by the time I was really aware of it, and there was something unbelievably depressing about gray snow.

Beside me, Pete shifted and stretched his legs out in front of him. “I don’t know what’s going on, but whatever it is, you’re not going to fix it getting pneumonia out here.” He paused, though he didn’t appear to expect a response. “I’m going inside to watch a movie. Come in when you’re ready. Might help you wind down.”

He stood, and was gone before I could formulate an answer, but it didn’t matter. The only working DVD player was in his bedroom, and I knew he didn’t really want me in his room. Why would he? I sat for a little while longer, but the numb feeling that had been there before was gone, and in its place I felt antsy and uncomfortable. I snorted softly. Maybe even the city was sick of my misery. After one last look at the world below, I got to my feet and retreated inside.

I shut the door behind me and locked it. Pete came out of the bathroom, rubbing his hair with a towel. He looked like he was grinning, but I couldn’t be sure.

He inclined his head toward his room. “Are you coming?”

I didn’t fight it. Pathetically, I just let it happen. In a world where I seemed to be ruled by shit I didn’t understand, the rare moments I spent with Pete were the only respite I knew. I craved it. I needed it. Who the hell was I kidding? I needed
him
. He smiled when I appeared in his doorway, then scooted across his bed and held out a beer. Hesitantly, I took it and sat on the very edge of the bed.

Pete sat up and put his hand on my arm. For the second time that night, the feel of his hand on me made me jump. “Jesus,” he said. “You’re freezing. Wait here.”

He slid off the bed before I could answer and padded quickly from the room. Alarmed by his abrupt departure, I didn’t move a muscle until he reappeared and replaced the beer in my hand with a mug.

I peered at the hot coffee.

“Don’t laugh,” he warned. “I see enough frostbitten fuckers at work. Ask my mom, it makes me neurotic.”

He clicked on the TV and cued up a movie. I took a few sips of the coffee he’d made and set it down on the side. I didn’t really know what to do with myself after that. I’d shared rooms my whole life: foster care, group homes, and hostels. I’d even, on occasion, platonically shared Ellie’s bed, but something about being in Pete’s room felt different, like I was on the knife-edge of something I couldn’t take back.

Pete sensed my predicament with a quiet sigh. “Dude, just lie the fuck down.”

I
T
WAS
early when I woke up the first time. I was aware enough to know I wasn’t in my room or on the couch, but I didn’t know where I was. Something shifted and a door closed. A moment later, I felt a hand on my shoulder and a familiar voice told me to go back to sleep. It was all too easy just to do what he said.

Sometime later, I woke up properly. I opened my eyes, feeling warm and a little dazed. I raised my hands to rub them over my face, but sharp pain and scratchy material caught me off guard. I stared at my hand. The events of the night before slowly filtered back into my brain, but my arm didn’t look the way I expected it to. Instead of a macabre, burned mess covered in blood, it was clean and neatly wrapped in white gauze.

I sat up, using my good arm for leverage, and surveyed my surroundings. Damn. Pete’s room? How the hell did that happen?

“Hey, you’re awake.”

Like magic, he appeared. His grin startled me. Bizarrely, I’d neglected to account for his whereabouts. “Um, yeah… sorry.”

“What for? It’s not like you snore.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Are you working today?”

I frowned and tried to remember my schedule. My head felt fuzzy, still hazy with sleep. “At three, I think,” I said uncertainly.

“We better get going, then. Get dressed, and I’ll get you some coffee.” He disappeared as abruptly as he’d appeared, then suddenly he was back. He tossed my jeans and a hoodie at me. “We’re going to the hospital,” he said. “You need stitches.”

I glanced between him and my bandaged hand. “This was you?”

He rolled his eyes. “Who else would it be? The crappy dressing I put on outside was never going to last. Lucky you sleep like the dead. It took me ages to clean it. You had all kinds of shit ground into it. Were you drunk or something?”

Or something.

I rose from the bed without answer, wondering if I’d woken up to a different world, and made my way to the bathroom to have an awkward shower. After, I stared at my reflection in the mirror. I looked just the same—scruffy, pale, and crappy—but I felt different, off kilter somehow. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was disconcerting, like I wasn’t quite myself. Yeah, that was it. The world wasn’t the problem; it was me. It was always me.

Pete was in the living room when I ventured out. I folded the blanket he’d brought into his room to cover me with onto the arm of the couch. “You don’t have to come with me.”

He glanced up from the paper he was reading. “If you want to get to work on time, I do,” he retorted. “Do you have insurance?”

I nodded. Ellie’s dad had arranged it for me when I came out of rehab in Philly nearly a year ago. Somewhere in my room was an envelope containing a shiny ID card.

Pete discarded the paper and stood up. “Okay, go get your shit. We’ll go to St. Mark’s. I know the nurses there; they’ll get you in and out quickly. If we go to Mercy, it’ll take all damn day.”

I didn’t really have a choice. I had the most important sitting of my fledgling career at three o’clock. I couldn’t risk messing it up by bleeding all over the place. Besides, by the look on Pete’s face, he wasn’t asking.

We left. I followed Pete to the subway. He seemed a man on a mission, but when we reached the steps he stopped. “Are you okay on the L? We can walk if you want.”

It was ironic that he felt the need to ask. In Philadelphia, I’d slept on the subway. The underground trains were warm and barriers were easy to jump. With people around nearly every minute of the day, it was one of the safest places in the city. I brushed past him and started down the steps. “It’s fine.”

We had to stand on the train, and the whole journey, I was hyperaware of Pete next to me. All the other commuters faded away, and he was all I could feel. He tried talking to me, but I couldn’t focus on his words. Though I could feel every facet of him, he sounded oddly distant. My silence must have convinced him I’d fallen asleep, or maybe I actually did. When the train stopped and he moved his arm, I realized it had been holding me up. Damn.

He led me to a huge building not far from Ellie’s brother Charlie’s apartment. I’d never taken much notice of hospitals before. This one looked more like a factory to me, but what did I know? I followed him inside and sat where he told me to. He left me in a row of plastic seats and walked over to the front desk. A woman he obviously knew nodded when he pointed at me and handed him a clipboard. Pete took it and came to sit in the chair beside me.

“You need to register your details before they fix you up, okay?”

“Register?”

He nodded patiently. “Insurance, allergies, emergency contact, shit like that. Have you been to any hospitals in Chicago before?”

I shook my head and wrote my name in the first box. “What’s an emergency contact?”

That earned me one of his patented looks, the ones where he stared at me like I was a puzzle he couldn’t work out. “Who you’d want the hospital to call if you had an accident or something.”

“Is that like next of kin?”

“Sort of.”

“I don’t have any of those,” I said. “Can I leave it blank?”

Another frown….

“What about Ellie’s family?”

I shook my head and puzzled my way through the rest of the boxes. They’d done enough for me already, and besides, if Ellie’s father got wind of this, he’d be back on my case for sure. It was only recently he’d stopped staring at me like I was an unexploded bomb. I held out the clipboard when I was done. “What do I do now?”

“Write my name in the box.”

“What?”

Pete sighed and pried the pen from my grasp. “Fucker, you’ve got to have someone.”

He wrote his name and number in the emergency contact box and abruptly got to his feet. He walked back to the reception desk and handed over the forms. When he came back it was clear the subject was closed. Lacking the inclination to argue, I let it slide.

A little while later, I found myself behind him again as he led me through a maze of bustling corridors to a dark room with the smallest window I’d ever seen. I hesitated in the doorway. He crossed the room, opened the window slightly, and gestured for me to get on the bed. I swallowed my building unease and did as he asked while he flipped the lights on.

“Jane’s coming to fix you up,” he said, like I knew who he was talking about. “She’ll need to take your blood pressure, so take your sweatshirt off. Have you ever had a tetanus shot?”

A what?
“Um, I don’t think so.”

I hoisted myself up onto the bed. The door opened. A woman in her forties came in and introduced herself as Jane. I watched suspiciously as she set a tray of weapons on a weird suspended table. Some of it I recognized from my work, but the rest of it looked like torture contraptions.

Jane took what I presumed was my blood pressure before she finally pulled up a stool to look at my hand. She unwrapped the dressing Pete had put on and examined it. I didn’t pay much attention as she looked it over. Pete had already told me it needed fixing, and I was mentally prepared for the pain of it being stitched up. I didn’t pay Jane much heed at all until she picked up a syringe. “What’s that?”

“Just something to numb you up, honey.”

I forced myself to shake my head. Being numb all over, or even just a little bit sounded good,
way
too good. “No, thanks.”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Are you sure? You’ve made a quite a mess of yourself.”

I followed her gaze down my arm and found myself transfixed by the bloody, blistered hole in my hand. It didn’t look anything like the neat incision I’d been so fascinated by the night before. I felt sick. The sight of my scorched skin made my head spin until I was sure I’d fall off the damn bed.

Pete moved. Suddenly, he was beside me. “Don’t look,” he said. “Just breathe.”

He put his hand on my back and gestured for Jane to continue forward with her syringe. “It’s just your hand,” he said quietly. “You won’t feel it anywhere else.”

The injection hurt, but after, with my attention thoroughly focused on the warmth at the base of my spine, I didn’t feel a thing as she put eight stitches in my palm and cleaned and dressed the burn. She wrapped my hand up the same way Pete had before she left the room to get a tetanus shot.

I let out a long breath and looked up to find Pete watching me closely. He searched my eyes for a moment before he grinned and dropped his hand from my back. “Better?”

I nodded, ignoring the lingering sensation his touch had left on my skin. “Yeah, thanks.”

“So…,” he said. “I’m confused.”

“Hmm? About what?”

“How do you tattoo people if you don’t like needles and blood?”

I attempted to flex my hand. The stitches caught and pulled. “It wasn’t that part; it was the burned bit.”