Collecting Cooper

chapter fifty

Adrian can’t sleep.

One reason is his leg. The bandage has gotten bloody because the wound beneath it keeps itching and he can’t stop scratching at it. He keeps digging his fingernails into the itch trying to find relief only it doesn’t work. Cooper’s mother told him he’d need to get stitches, but he had stitches all those years ago when he was badly beaten and pissed on and he didn’t like them then and can’t see any reason why that will have changed.

Another reason he can’t sleep is he can’t switch off his mind. He never did find the glue, even though he is absolutely sure he took it from the pocket of his last pants and put it into the pocket of the ones he took from Cooper’s mum’s place, but the problem is the more he thinks about it, the less certain he becomes, the more his memory of the event starts to change. He can remember setting it on the bed with his old clothes when he emptied the pockets, but nothing after that.

He thinks about Theodore Tate and how he could easily have lost his life tonight if Tate didn’t have a bandage around his gun hand. That’s what slowed Tate down, he’s sure of it. He thinks about the Twins, he thinks about the people he met at the halfway house, he thinks about his mother and he thinks about his other mother. He can’t stop thinking of people and it’s keeping him awake. He thinks about the look on Cooper’s mother’s face as he played the tape. He only had to play a few seconds of it before closing the door, knowing what would happen next, but she deserved it. She was a bad mother. Bad mothers deserved what they got.

The bed isn’t comfortable. One of the Twins-he isn’t sure which one-slept on this bed, and that’s another picture he can’t get out of his head, a man who treated him so badly would come here at night and roll in these sheets, his skin flaking into the creases of the bed, into the folds of the pillowcase, and now it’s sticking to his own body, making him itch.

In the end it all becomes too much for him. The window is open and the curtains are moving slightly on the breeze, brushing against the windowsills. He turns on the light. His pajama bottoms are soaked in sweat and there is blood on the right-hand side. He tugs them off. The bandage has gotten loose and saggy. It’s across his thigh, about equal distance between his knee and hip. He holds on to it as he walks outside so it doesn’t slip down his leg. He doesn’t know what the temperature is, but it’s still warm. He knows it’s after midnight but not by much. Much warmer than usual for this time of night he suspects-not that he’s normally outside at this time of night. Back at the Grove he was locked in his room, which was always hard if you needed to use the bathroom, because you had to wait. At the halfway house the only reason you’d step out the doors after dark was if you wanted to commit a crime or be a victim of one.

He lowers the bandage. He scratches at his leg. More blood and more pain and something yellow oozes out, but relief from the itch for those few seconds as his fingers scrape over it. He could try to get Cooper’s mother to help him again, but he’s pretty sure she isn’t going to want to do that no matter how hard he tries. Anyway, he’s angry at her for not believing him. Her son was the one covered in blood, he was the one who put the knife into that girl, and yet he looks like the good guy. It annoys him. He didn’t think Cooper would do that to him. They were meant to be friends, weren’t they?

He wishes he could work on the wound himself. It needs to be cleaned, he knows that. It may get infected. Sometimes infected limbs have to be cut off. He knows that too.

He can’t help himself. He begins crying at the thought. He turns and sobs into the pillow, for the moment not caring about the last person who laid on it, only thinking of a future with one leg, pacing the room and struggling to end on an even number when you have an odd amount of limbs to begin with. When the sobbing dies down, he limps to the bathroom and goes through the medicine cabinet. There’s a lot in here, but on closer look he sees dates with exp in front of them. They must be explanation dates; the dates explaining when the medication is no longer any good. Many of the things in here went bad a few years ago. He doesn’t know if bad medicine just means it won’t work, or won’t work as well, or make him even worse. There is an antiseptic cream that was good up until two months ago, surely that’s okay. The painkillers all went bad a few years ago. The bandages must stay good forever. And there’s some kind of medical padding that looks like it’ll help. Some sharp scissors for cutting things to fit. A safety pin for securing the bandage. He closes the cabinet and stares at the mirror. His face is flushed and there’s a slight rash starting around the edge of his hairline, which he hopes is from the heat and not from some infection climbing through his body. He doesn’t want to die. Not now when life is so good.

He holds the back of his hand up to his forehead like he’s seen people do and his forehead feels warm. A fever? Or just the result of stress and a very, very hot day? He cups his hands under the tap and fills them with water and splashes his face. He immediately feels better, but without his fingers pinching the bandage on his leg tight it slides down to around his foot. His tears become lost in the water on his face. He wishes his mother was here. Either one.

He turns on the shower. He steps inside and lets the water run over his leg. He can feel the infection being washed away from the surface, but at the same time he can feel it inching its way through his body. He doesn’t have to see it to know it’s there. He scrubs at the wound with a facecloth. The gash is about the length of his finger and about as deep and as wide, a long furrow that an inch to the left would have had the bullet missing completely and an inch to the right have had it buried deep into his leg, severing one of those thick veins in there that would cause him to bleed out. It’s not bleeding as much as earlier, even with all the scrubbing, but it is still bleeding. The shower feels good. He has the water temperature set so it’s cool but not too cold. He spends enough time in there for the pads of his fingers to wrinkle, then he climbs out and dries himself down. The itch has faded, but he still needs to do something with the wound.

He doesn’t want to lose the leg.

Doesn’t want to die.

Can’t go to hospital.

Doesn’t want to lie down in the same bed as one of the Twins because the infection would only become more infected.

He goes outside and holds a clean medical pad over the wound, carrying Cooper’s manuscript with him. He sits on the porch. There’s a wooden swing chair that would fit two people, he rocks it slowly back and forth and it relaxes him. It’s too dark to read yet, and he can’t be bothered going back inside to turn on the porch light. The fields around him look pale blue from the moon. In four or five hours the sky will start to lighten. He’s never seen that happen before, and suddenly he is desperate to watch his first sunrise, liking the idea that one day he and Cooper may sit out here on the porch enjoying it together.