Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER THIRTY

They want to take me to the police station, but my injuries require otherwise. I sit in the back of an ambulance and nobody talks to me. A paramedic tends to my wounds, but he doesn’t really seem to be putting any energy into it. Like everybody else he’ll be wishing I was the one who was dead.

After a while a policeman takes a statement from me. He doesn’t know who I am. Doesn’t know my history. I tell him what happened. He tells me that witness reports indicate that I ran a red light. That it had been red for at least two seconds before I hit the intersection. He asks if I’ve been drinking. I tell him I have because he’s going to test me anyway. He pulls out a Breathalyzer and makes me say my name into it, as though he’s giving me an interview and the Breathalyzer is a microphone. He looks at the numbers then writes them down. I know what they’re telling him. I’m way over the limit even though I feel sober. Killing a woman will do that to you.

At the hospital I’m put up in an emergency ward with dozens of other people. My bed has a curtain drawn around it. The cut in my leg is stitched up and bandaged and I’m told it will leave a scar. There are other cuts over my body too, other scars. The finger with the missing fingernail is cleaned, wrapped in gauze, and bandaged. There is a cut at the top of my forehead, which gets stitched. Blood is cleaned off my face. Safety glass is plucked out of my knees. My scraped-up palms with tiny pieces of shingle in them are cleaned.

When the nurse is all done fixing me up she pushes past the curtain and Landry pushes his way in. He is expressionless, as if he can’t be bothered being angry with me anymore. It’s worse.

“Of all the people to be drunk and driving,” he says.

“I don’t need the lecture.”

“What were you thinking, Tate?”

I shake my head. Who the hell knows? “I don’t know.”

“I tried to warn you.”

“I know.”

“Don’t you have anything else you can say?”

“I. . I don’t know. I wish I did.” I feel so numb. So numb.

“The girl’s in a coma,” he says. “It’s serious. Four broken ribs, a punctured lung, and her jaw was dislocated. You’re lucky she’s not dead.”

I’m lucky.

My heart starts to flutter. “I. . I thought she was dead.”

She’s lucky.

Luck.

“I know,” he says. “Only nobody felt like telling you.”

I’m too angry at myself to direct any of it toward him. “She’s going to be okay?”

“You better pray, Tate. You better pray.”

Nobody comes to see how I’m doing over the next hour, and nobody has made the effort to feed me any painkillers, though the throbbing in my head and from all the wounds is becoming unbearable. Nobody cares about that. They all care about the woman I hurt, and so they should. I want to go and see her. I want to speak to her family and tell them how sorry I am. I can’t, of course. I’d simply be making myself the punching bag for their anger.

Eventually two officers come to get me. They don’t cuff me. With a bare minimum of words and gestures they escort me out to a police car. I sit in the back for the short drive to the station. They don’t put me in an interrogation room. Instead they escort me to the drunk tank full of other people who’ve made similar fuckups tonight.

I find a small piece of real estate I can call my own, a piece of bench between one guy already passed out and another guy on his way to passing out. I take my jacket off and ball it up so I can lie down and rest it behind my head. I’ve never been in jail before-not one I couldn’t freely leave at any time-and even this is only a waiting room for the real thing. The smell is overpowering and the moans coming from the other drunks irritating. The floor is covered in piss and the toilet looks about as bad as toilets can possibly get. The cream cinder-block walls spread a chill into the room.

I stay awake all night. Occasionally our numbers go up, and in the end we all make it through to the morning. As they lead me from the cell I think about Bridget and Emily and what they would think of me now. I remember having the same thought yesterday.

I’m led through to the same interrogation room I sat in yesterday. Everybody looks at me on the way. Yesterday it was with pity. Today it’s contempt.