Through the trees, the interstate had begun to hum again with the traffic of early commuters to Birmingham. And footsteps rang behind me, gaining on me. John passed me and stepped in front of me. I stopped to keep from running right into him. He wore jogging shoes and jeans, no shirt. His white chest glowed under the streetlights.
He took a big breath. "You're fast."
"So they tell me." I stepped around him and started running again.
"Hey!" He ran a few steps after me and caught me with his hand around my upper arm.
I stopped and screamed at him, "I told you, don't grab me!"
"For God's sake, Meg! We look like a domestic!" "Whose fault is that? You're the one with your shirt off."
He looked down at his bare chest, then accusingly at a passing car. Then accusingly at me. "What is the problem?"
I put my fists on my hips. Between panting breaths, I said, "All right, John. You want to play dumb? I'll explain it to you. Girls don't like it when boys don't want to have sex with them."
“I—"
"Boys are supposed to be helpless in the face of their hormones, or a pair of big tits. You didn't turn me down because I had my shoes on. That's bullshit. You're in love with someone else."
"I am not in love with Angie," he said with his hands out to me. "To tell you the truth, I was kind of relieved when she broke up with me. I should have ended it a long time before that, but she'd gotten to be a habit. A bad habit."
"You're in love with that dead girl."
He put his hands down. "Oh, come on, Meg," he shouted at me. "Why does it always circle around to that?”
"Right. Why does it?"
He ran his hands through his hair and held on to the back of his neck, both biceps bulging. God damn him for looking so hot when I wanted to run away.
"You reminded me of her that first night at the bridge," he said. "That's it. You didn't even remind me of her by the time I told you about her. And now you don't remind me of anyone." He squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath, gathering courage, before he told me. "I'm in love with you."
I felt the tears coming. I lashed out to keep from crying. "You love me so much that you won't do me when presented with the invite. This is all about you needing to be in control. It's not enough to arrest me. You make me ride around with you while dirty men tell me they want to rape me. It's not enough to take away my spring break. You give me back a little piece of it, but only if you hold me on a leash. It's not even enough to have sex with me."
I gasped for breath, and he stepped toward me.
"You want me to beg for it," I choked out, "so you can say no."
I wished it wasn't true. But I could tell by his silence that it was. Maybe he was just now realizing it himself.
But then he said, "That's stupid. I said no because you don't love me.”
"I do love you," I screamed at him.
"You can't possibly! You're so closed off. You're just saying that to get laid."
He flinched and turned to look as a car swiped past us on the highway. I took the opportunity and ran.
He caught up with me in five seconds and stepped in my path. "We can't leave it like this," he said, feeling for my hand, chasing my hand around my waist when I held it away from him. "Let's talk about it when we're not mad. I’ll call you later today."
I blinked back tears. "I'll still be mad later today."
"Then you call me when you're not mad anymore."
"I don't call people." I brushed past him and escaped.
This time, he let me go.
*
After a mile and a half. I was too tired to go on. I slowed to a stop on the grassy shoulder and bent over with my hands on my knees, catching my breath. I did not have leukemia. This fatigue was of an entirely different sort.
I glanced at my watch in the moonlight. The problem with walking was, I would never make it to the trailer in time to take a shower before my shift at the diner. I needed to wash the sand and the ocean and John off me. I smelled his cologne and his sweat on my skin.
But I couldn't run anymore. I walked along the dark highway, wading through the long grass that had sprung back to life in the past few days. I should have felt scared, a teenage girl walking along the highway alone in a skimpy shirt at 5:30 a.m. I didn't. There was no one to scare me. This section of the main highway through town was lined with pine trees and utterly abandoned. I pictured John driving up and down this highway, nineteen times a night, for the rest of his life.
I had set up my project for the DA to discourage other teenagers from venturing onto the bridge, but also to encourage John to let the bridge go and leave town. Now that I finally faced my feelings for him, I realized I'd hoped all along he would follow me to Birmingham and we'd hook back up. And now that I'd gotten up close and personal with his control freak side, I knew it wouldn't happen. My project alone wouldn't be enough to nudge him off his orbit around the bridge. He would stay. I would go, but I would feel like I'd left part of me here with him, cemented as securely as my handprint tile on the wall in the park.
This wasn't happening, this couldn't possibly be the way it ended, but it was. Unless I did something.
With a final sigh, I started running again. I had gotten my second wind. I had a lot to do after my shift at the diner, before I finally went to bed. I needed to sweet-talk Lois. Then I would make an appointment with a train.
*
And at 6:01 the next morning, I called him.
"Hey!" he said. "I was just about to drive back to the police station." He sounded stoked to hear from me. Little did he know what was in store for him. "Where are you?"
"On the bridge."
Through the phone, I heard the wail of his siren begin. I also heard it in stereo, up on the highway. Somewhere beyond the bridge and the clearing and the dark silhouette of trees against the gray dawn sky, the siren woke the dead.
"John!" I shouted. "John, you don't have to do that. I looked up the schedule on the Internet. I even called to double-check. The train won't cross here for another fifteen minutes."
The siren switched off.
I joked, "And you thought I wouldn't make a good manager."
John had switched off, too. I repeated his name through the phone, but there was only static and the murmur of Lois's voice. He must have thrown the phone down on my seat.
I watched across the clearing, waiting. Finally I heard the low hum of the car's motor. Then the car itself emerged from the trees, blue lights off but headlights on. He drove too fast across the clearing and skidded to a stop in the gravel. A cloud of dust rose in front of the headlights and hung in the still dawn air.
He got out of the car, strode toward the bridge, stopped in front of the No Trespassing sign. I could tell from the way he moved that he hadn't seen the city's new installation before. A new sign bolted below the No Trespassing sign said SMILE! You 're being watched by the Police Department. He turned around and looked for the camera mounted high on a tree.
Then he brought his phone up to his ear. "Is this your surprise for me?" His tone was absolutely flat. But he caught an extra breath at the end, like he was trying hard to stay calm.
"I figured you would have seen it by now, on one of your many trips down here to the bridge on your shift all night."
"I didn't get out of the car." He took two hard breaths in the phone. "Does the camera really feed back to the police station?"
"Yes. Lois is watching us right now. Say hi." I waved in a broad motion that the camera could pick up this far away.
"Meg, you're doing exactly what you got arrested for in the first place."
"I let Lois know what I was doing so she wouldn't tell on me. The only reason it's illegal is that it's not safe. I've already informed you that for the next fifteen minutes, it's safe."
"Somehow, I don't think the DA is going to buy that." His words sounded rational, but his voice was drawn tight underneath.
"Yeah, I should have run away from you and started college and gone on without you. But I would always have regretted it if I didn't give this a shot." I pulled back his leather cop jacket, so maybe he could see even from a distance that I was wearing his To Protect and Serve T-shirt. "Come and get me. You have fifteen minutes before the train comes." I glanced at my watch. "Twelve."
He was breathing so hard that he exhaled static into the phone. I could see his shoulders rising and falling in the dim light.
"Come on, John. You're the bravest person I've ever met."
In a rush, he closed the rest of the space across the clearing and put one foot on the bridge.
"Take your shoes off, so you don't get trapped," I suggested. "I want to keep you safe."
I heard him curse before he pocketed his phone and bent to unlace his boots. He cursed again, muffled, like he couldn't get them unlaced fast enough. Then he straightened and stepped in his socks across the ties, toward me.
He raised the phone to his ear. "Aren't you supposed to be at work right now?" he asked in that strange, flat voice.
"I have a few minutes. I got Purcell to stay a little late at the end of his shift."
"I thought you didn't get along that well with Purcell." He was only yards away from me, coming fast across the railroad ties, without glancing down at his feet.
"This was important."
"It took a lot of planning," he said in the strange voice. He was a few steps away. His dark eyes didn't look loving. And they didn't look afraid.
That was the first hint something was terribly wrong.
I knew I'd better start explaining myself, or I was going to be in trouble. "Now that the camera's here, there's no reason for your body to stay, guarding this bridge. But your mind would still be here. I thought it might help you to come up on the bridge, so you could stop wondering. See what the dead girl saw."
This was likely not what she saw. I didn't know what time of day those kids got creamed, but if they were drunk, it was probably night. The nighttime view from the bridge was beautiful, but there wasn't a whole lot to see, surrounded by darkness. So I'd banked on bringing John here at sunrise, when we could see more.
And I was right. The faintest hint of pink in the sky reflected far below us in the river, flat as glass. Mist rose from the water and curled up to me. Dark pines and trees with new green leaves clung desperately to the violent angle of the gorge.
I put my phone down. "And feel what they felt." As John stepped close to me, I put my other hand on his bare arm.
"Don't touch me," he barked.
I looked into his hard eyes. My heart skipped a beat as I recognized that look. The look Eric had gotten in his eyes when I pushed him beyond control, and nothing but anger was left.
"John," I said quickly. "I'm sorry. I thought—" "Poor judgment." He snapped a cold handcuff around my wrist.
I fought him without thinking, with the vaguest awareness that I'd struck him and hurt him somehow. Then my shoulder hit the rusty wall of the trestle, and the bang echoed against the hills. Through blinking red lights, I was looking over at the pink river, watching both our cell phones fall into the mist.
Already I was half gone, wondering whether the fish would run up my minutes, when he said, "Don't resist arrest," and slapped the handcuff around my other wrist.
Chapter 18
I was a skeleton. I leaned over Meg's hospital bed, the Meg that used to be. She slept. I reached down and brushed pink hair away from her face. It came out in a clump, and the strands slipped through my finger bones.
*
"After?" said Lois.
*
"John!" said Lois.
The second time, I roused enough to know Lois was calling on John's radio attached to his shirt. John had slung me over his hard shoulder, which dug into my belly with each step he took. Nose to his back, I smelled his sweat. Strange that I recognized his scent so readily. But there was no cologne mixed with it. He'd become someone else.
"I can see you on camera, John," said Lois. "I saw what you did."
*
Slowly I realized I was in the backseat of the police car, on my stomach, face stuck to the vinyl. Men murmured outside.
The talking escalated as the door opened behind me. "That's why she passed out." I recognized the voice of Quincy, my paramedic friend. "Uncuff her, would you?"
I felt the cuffs slide off my wrists, but I still couldn't move.
"Why does she do that?" Officer Leroy asked.
"Panic attack." I felt Quincy leaning over me. "Come here, you rascal."
My face peeled away from the vinyl. He slid me backward across the seat and picked me up. I clung to him with his shirt bunched in both my fists, like he was my father.
"You need to get over this, sugar," he murmured. "It's completely psychosomatic. You were sick four years ago." He set me on the back bumper of the ambulance and held me steady with one hand while he reached for something.
"Not the—" The smelling salts razored through my nostrils and into my brain. At least I could see clearly again: Quincy standing in front of me, weathered face lined with concern, and Officer Leroy hovering behind him.
"Where's John?" I asked.
"Where's John," Officer Leroy muttered. He shook his finger at me. "John is having his own panic attack. That's a nice stunt you pulled, missy. You know his brother got killed on that bridge."