Chapter 25

Chapter 25

I wake up the next morning to a nurse checking me over. She has sandy hair still dark at the roots with small breasts sagging inside her blue scrubs. I play possum while she looks me over, not wanting to scare her. After she’s written whatever information on my chart, I ask, “Can I go home now?”

“The doctor still has to sign the release. Your vitals are looking good, though.”

I’m feeling better too. The dizziness has subsided and the nausea has given way to hunger. I’m tempted to ask the nurse about breakfast, but hospital food probably will make me vomit.

After the nurse leaves, I wait until I don’t hear any footsteps to unplug the tubes again and put on my clothes. I find my underwear, socks, and shoes on a chair I don’t remember seeing the night before. Then again, I don’t remember a lot about the night before and what I do seems fuzzy like a dream.

I’m not sure if what happened after I woke up the first time really happened or if I imagined it. Did the Steemroller really come in here and threaten me? Was Susie really paralyzed from a gunshot to the back? The only thing I do know is I can’t find the answers in here. The hell with waiting for a doctor, I’m getting out of here now.

This time I can move pretty well under my own power, although I still look down at my feet to make sure I don’t trip. Instead of the emergency room, I follow the arrow to the intensive care unit, where Susie should be if she’s out of surgery. The Trench Coat Bandit might be here too, unless he’s in the morgue by now. I take the elevator up to the fifth floor and go through the doors to intensive care. I meet another nurse, this time a man with spiky gray hair and a mustache.

“I’m here to visit Susie Steemer,” I say.

“Are you family?”

“I’m her fiancée.” It’s not entirely a lie: she was my fiancée for a couple minutes in my dream.

“OK, but don’t be in there too long. She needs her rest.”

“I won’t be long.” The nurse gives me the room number and I go down the hall until I find the right number next to the door. I ease the door open, expecting goons hired by the Steemroller to jump out at me. Instead, I see only Susie.

She’s lying on her right side, the same side she laid on when we slept together. They gave her a half-assed haircut so that her hair is short in the back, but still long everywhere else. I don’t want to startle her, so I whisper, “Susie? Are you awake? It’s Harry.”

“Go away,” she says, her voice muffled by the pillow. I walk around the bed and a bank of machines taking her vital signs and dripping fluids into her body. Tears stain her face; either the doctors told her the bad news or she’s figured it out on her own.

“I’m sorry, Susie. I really am.”

“Sorry isn’t going to help me walk.”

I squat down so I’m at eye-level with her. “Susie, I know you’re upset, but I want to be here for you.”

“Why? I’m no good to you anymore. I can’t—” She becomes too choked up to speak. Finally she says, “I’m never going to have a baby.”

I drop into a chair next to her bed. I came up here all gung-ho about doing “the right thing.” I would tell Susie I love her and being crippled doesn’t matter and all that garbage. We would kiss like in my dream and everything would be right with the world. But now I’m starting to see how our life together would work. I would spend most of my time helping her do the things she’s unable to anymore from getting things off a high shelf to driving her around. At the end of the day, she would struggle her way into bed and then we might kiss before falling asleep until the next day of the same.

Those days seem endless in my mind. I’m twenty-two years old for Christ’s sake. I have too many good years ahead of me to live celibate like a priest. My longest stretch of celibacy was the two weeks I spent above the Marshall’s garage and look how that ended up. Susie and I just weren’t going to work anymore. The Trench Coat Bandit’s gun made sure of that.

“I’m sorry, Susie,” I say. I want to say something chivalrous like, “I wish it had been me”, but who am I kidding? If I lost my ability to have sex, I’d smother myself with the pillow the minute I was alone. I’d rather the Bandit shook me in the head or some vital organ than cripple me. All I can think to say is, “I wish there was something I could do.”

“Just leave me alone,” she says. “You’ve done enough.”

“I didn’t do anything!” I shout. “I didn’t put the fucking bullet in you. I didn’t ask you to come down to the store at ten o’clock at night.” I point to the bandages around my head. “I tried to save you.”

She starts to sob then, her face contorting with pain. I ease towards the door, not knowing what else to do. “Mother was right about you,” she says through clenched teeth. “You ruined my life.”

“Fine, you go crawling back to Mommy like you always do.” I realize the inappropriateness of saying “crawling back” too late. There’s no point in apologizing now.

“Just get the fuck out of my life!” Susie roars. I’ve never heard her swear before. I’ve heard such raw hatred in her voice. In that moment, she sounds like her mother. I leave the room without looking back.

On my way out of intensive care, I slow near the nurse’s station. I should tell him to increase the dosage on Susie’s painkillers. I think about it for a second before leaving intensive care without saying anything.

As I leave the hospital, I keep thinking about what Susie said, mixing it with her mother’s words. How could they blame me for what happened? The fucking Trench Coat Bandit pulled the trigger. Susie showed up on her own accord. If she hadn’t interfered, the Bandit would have gotten away with the paltry sum from the cash register and some grim-faced bimbo would have shown up outside Alternate Dimensions to report the robbery.

Hell, I got popped in the mouth and probably a concussion trying to defend her. I did everything I could to protect her. If they want to blame anyone for this mess, they should blame Todd. It was his fucking store. I was there because he abandoned Brooke before their wedding. It should have been him getting robbed by the Bandit.

It wasn’t enough for Todd to squander most of Mom’s insurance money on the store, spoiling my chance to attend a real college. It wasn’t enough Susie and I had to help Brooke through the pregnancy of Todd’s child. It wasn’t enough for me to take a semester off school and go on leave from a decent job at Herbert Chemical to run his shitty store. No, he had to ruin things with Susie and I. The best thing I ever had going in my life, and she’s gone now because of Todd.

I walk over to a nearby convenience store to call for a cab. My wallet is still in my pants. I should have enough to get across town to Alternate Dimensions. As I wait for the taxi to arrive, I see the robbery leading the front page on the Freepoint Daily News. I buy a copy and sit down on the curb outside to read.

“The Trench Coat Bandit struck again for the sixth—and final—time last night at a small bookstore called Alternate Dimensions near the campus of Freepoint State University. Details are still sketchy, but it is believed the Bandit was in the process of robbing the store when a customer interrupted the theft. A struggle ensued, during which the customer was shot before the Bandit escaped.

“Police later attempted to pull over the Bandit’s car for driving without headlights at night. When the Bandit fled, police gave pursuit in a chase ending on I-69 early this morning when the Bandit’s car collided with a fuel tanker.

“The Trench Coat Bandit—Freepoint police are withholding his name at this time—was rushed to St. Luke’s Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead. The customer shot earlier is in stable condition. Police Chief Mayer has called a news conference this afternoon to provide more details on the case.”

I tear up the newspaper after reading it. Susie wasn’t a customer. She was my…I can’t find the right word to describe her. Someone I cared for is the best I can come up with. I go back to the payphone to demand a retraction, but I don’t have enough change in my pocket to make another call. What good would it do anyway?

The cab arrives and I give him the address for the Starbucks. I don’t know if he’s heard the news about what happened at Alternate Dimensions, but if he has I don’t want him to think I’m some ghoul hanging out at a crime scene. “What happened to your head?” the driver asks me.

“I slipped on some ice.”

“My mom broke her hip falling on some ice.” He goes on to explain the incident, but I don’t pay attention. I think about Susie and the unfairness of this. If she had arrived a couple minutes later, if she had decided to call instead of meeting me in person, or if she hadn’t gotten so wrapped up in baby shopping earlier, she would still be able to walk. We’d probably be recovering from a night of wild make-up sex. Then we’d spend today sprucing up the nursery for when Diana came home. Everything would be normal instead of a mess.

There’s yellow crime tape around the front of Alternate Dimensions, but no cops are around. I don’t suppose much of an investigation is needed when the prime suspect is dead. I pay the driver and then go inside the Starbucks to wait until the taxi pulls away. After it’s gone, I go next door to where everything unraveled.

The door is open, as the Bandit must have left it on his way out. I bend down in the doorway to see spots of Susie’s blood staining the floor. I think back to my dream and am surprised by how little blood I see. If not for those spots, it would be hard to imagine anything of consequence had happened. No bullet holes, no shattered glass, not even a broken lock on the door.

I slip through the yellow tape, heading over to the counter. I find trace amounts of my own blood on the edge of the counter where I hit my head. The counter itself is fine. The cash register is still open, but now empty. If the paper sack of money survived the crash, I’m sure it’s in police custody by now. They can keep it. The amount was hardly worth enough to ruin a young woman’s life before losing his own.

I go into the back room, where the ledger and atlas are open as they were when I first heard the Bandit’s footsteps. I look around the room, my eyes falling upon Todd’s stool. A murderous rage explodes through my body at the sight of Todd’s treasured possession. This is his fault. Susie is crippled for life because he was too fucking chicken to marry Brooke. She and I are over because he needed an adventure.

Before I know what I’m doing, I grab the stool and rush out into the store. “How’s this for an adventure?” I shout before smashing the stool into the butcher’s case. The glass shatters but the stool remains intact. Unsatisfied, I slam the stool against the cash register. The wooden stool doesn’t break. I hurl it across the room into the bookshelves. Finally, one of the legs snaps off.

I pick up the rest of the stool to finish it off. I batter it into the bookshelves until the symbol of Todd is kindling. Then I stand in the center of Alternate Dimensions, breathing hard and hungry for more destruction. Fuck this place. I don’t care if the police haul me to jail for interfering with their investigation. I don’t care if the landlord is pissed about the damage. I don’t care if the insurance policy doesn’t cover my rampage. I’m going to destroy this place so that if Todd ever comes back, he’ll find his precious store in ruins, just like Susie’s life. It’s about the best I can do for an-eye-for-an-eye with Todd still MIA.

My hatred gives me the strength of The Incredible Hulk. I topple the bookshelves in one motion. Then I go over to the comic book rack. All those superheroes fighting imagined evils while real evil struck three feet away. I heft the comic book rack over my head and heave it through the front window. The rack rolls across the sidewalk and the road before coming to a stop on the shoulder, a trail of comics left in its wake. I pick up the cash register, the object at the root of this disaster, and hurl it like a shot-put after the comic book rack. The cash register bounces once before landing in the gutter.

I look around the room for something else to destroy, but see no other worthy targets. The only one that remains is not accessible from inside. I return to the back room for the stepladder and haul it outside to the sidewalk. A small crowd has assembled now, the most ever created by Alternate Dimensions, but no one tries to stop me as I scramble up the stepladder to the roof. The sign I repainted still advertises that hated name. I reach up and rip the sign from its moorings with my bare hands. I can’t think of any way to destroy the sign here, so I drag it around back to my car. I find some rope in the trunk to tie the sign to my roof. Then I get in the car and roar away from the destruction.

Alternate Dimensions is no more, but I’m not finished yet. I’m going to do what I should have done years ago: I’m going to erase Todd from my life.