Page 10 of The Family Across the Street
‘It is. Thanks so much.’ The young girl looks a little like Debbie, with the same tiny frame and big hazel eyes.
He returns to the van and thinks back to that night that landed him in the emergency room. He has no idea why he decided to take a hit at Nick’s urging. He was a beer man, sometimes a good Scotch, but he never, ever touched drugs. He’d grown up in a neighbourhood where he’d watched what happened to those who succumbed to the promise of some time out from their misery. He’d watched Nick get all jittery and sweaty when he needed his next fix.
But that night he had agreed, had smoked what Nick had rolled for him, mistakenly assuming that smoking ice instead of injecting it would lessen its effects. He was tired of what he did with his time, tired of his lonely life and of Nick. Tired of himself. Why not? he had thought. He remembers the rush now, the feeling of being so powerful he could lift a car if he chose to.
He knows he stood up and left Nick’s house and he knows that he started running. He felt like he could fly. When he found himself in some garden, in a suburb that he had never been to before, he looked at a pair of glass French doors and thought, Those’ll be easy to open. And then he put his fist through the glass, smashing it, cutting his hand, causing the alarm to scream and the owner to come running. He smiled when he saw it was a woman – a tall woman, but a woman he could deal with. He would grab what he could and fly away again. But she swung out at him, furious and strong, and caught him on the nose. Blood gushed from his face and his own anger rose up and he swung back. He broke her cheekbone and fractured her eye socket and she went down.
He remembers the woman from his trial. He hadn’t recognised her, hadn’t even remembered what she looked like, but her victim impact statement bruised him with its fear and pain. He wrote to her in prison, asking for forgiveness. He wrote three times and then he stopped. He reasoned she had a right to move on with her life and hopefully think of him less with each passing year.
He checks for his next delivery. It’s close by and in a street he’s been down before so he doesn’t need his GPS. As he drives, he wonders what would happen if he turned up to a house he had broken into. Would he recognise it, or have they all blended into one? He doesn’t even know the address of the one where the woman he hurt lived. What if one day a front door is opened and she’s standing there? The thought makes him push his shoulders back, suddenly uncomfortable. The image of her body sprawled on her stone-coloured kitchen floor comes back to him. He stared down at her, and then the police were there, appearing out of thin air. Now he knows she made the call before she confronted him. She had heard the glass break. He had thought he was moving quickly but in reality, he’d stood there for a few minutes watching the blue whirling light of the alarm glint off the shards of broken glass from the French door, mesmerised by the shiny flashes.
The police told him to stop, to get down on the ground, but Logan was still flying high and he advanced towards them. They told him once, twice and then the taser struck him in the chest, paralysing him and forcing him down. Tingling pain seared through his body and the high wore off.
The police got him up after a few minutes and he was given a towel for his hand. Only one ambulance arrived and Logan remembers hearing the words, ‘We’ll just take him in ourselves,’ and then he was in the back of a police car, his body shaking as shock replaced every other emotion.
He knows that the hands of the male police officer were large and strong and that they wrapped around his arm tightly, pushing into the muscle so Logan understood exactly who was in charge. Once they’d got him onto a bed in a small curtained-off bay in the emergency room, he dropped his head as he felt tears pricking at his eyes. He was twenty-six and he had wasted his whole life without meaning to, without thinking anything through. He’d never had a plan or a dream and now he was going to prison. And no one would care, except Maddy – she would be bereft and disappointed in him. That is what made the tears burn in his eyes.
He knew he was screwed, knew it without a shadow of a doubt. He also understood that there was a small feeling of relief. He was never going to stop unless something stopped him, and now it had.
‘Can you lie back please?’ He heard a soft voice. He shuffled backwards and dropped his head onto the pillow. He felt his uninjured hand get handcuffed to the bed rail. ‘I think he’s calm now, officer,’ said the voice. ‘Perhaps you could just give me some space.’
Logan looked at the nurse, who was delicately probing his hand, wiping and touching softly to see if there was any glass stuck in his flesh. Her skin was pale in the harsh hospital light, but smooth and perfect. Her hazel eyes were fringed with long black lashes and a curl had escaped her neat bun.
‘This looks clean and I don’t think any of the cuts are deep enough for stitches. I’ll clean it up and bandage it and then the doctor will be along shortly.’
Logan nodded, horrified to find that the way she was speaking to him, the kindness in her voice, was leading to more tears, slipping down the side of his face.
‘Hey now,’ she said gently and she reached up and wiped a tear away. ‘This can be the worst day of your life if you want it to be. There can never be another day as bad as this. If that’s what you want.’
Logan smiled. ‘It’s what I want,’ he said and he looked at the nurse, her clean soap smell comforting, the hint of floral perfume a scent he would always remember. ‘Debbie’, her nametag said. She had a small mole above her full red lips and he wanted to touch her mouth, but he knew better and he was grateful that at least he had begun thinking straight.
‘I bet all those tattoos hurt more than this anyway,’ she said and he nodded. He couldn’t explain then that there was pleasure in the pain of a tattoo, in the repeated sting of the needle, in being able to bear the ache that changed his skin, changed him. They were his pain and his anger detailed over his body, scars that could be seen.
He had never expected to see Debbie again. But in the months leading up to his guilty plea and being sent to prison, he’d thought about her. In prison he held on to her words. He needed to make sure that the day he was caught high and violent – the first time he had actually hurt someone who didn’t deserve it – was the worst day of his life. He was a model prisoner, recommended for parole after three years. He worked out, took classes and wrote his final exams to complete his schooling. Most importantly, he stayed out of trouble. He was big enough to be left alone, quiet enough not to bother anyone, and on the day he got out, he took the biggest chance he’d ever taken in his life.
He went back to the hospital and asked for her, knowing that they probably wouldn’t be able to identify her with just a name and a description, knowing that even if they could, he would probably get in trouble for behaving like a stalker. But the need to tell her that her words had meant something would not let go.
‘I’m looking for a nurse,’ he explained to the woman sitting at the front desk of the hospital, and then he stood quietly, trying not to let his six-foot-four, tattoo-covered frame look threatening. He hunched his shoulders and bowed his head, meek and mild. Nothing to worry about here. ‘Her name is Debbie and she treated me a few years ago. She has blonde hair and hazel eyes and a mole just here,’ he explained as the woman’s lips thinned into a disapproving line.
‘I don’t know if she still works here,’ he said, holding his hands up, ‘but I just wanted to thank her for being kind to me. I’ll sit down over there.’ He indicated some fake leather sofas. ‘I’ll wait for a few minutes and if you want me to leave, I’ll just go.’ He moved away from the desk, the woman’s eyes watching every step, and he sat down. He was being an idiot, but he couldn’t seem to do anything else. He knew that he had to see her and thank her and then he could go out into the world and try to start rebuilding his life.
He watched as the woman lifted the telephone to her ear. He waited for the security guards to come over to him, waited for the police to walk through the front door. He stared down at his new phone, scrolled through news websites as his heart raced, noticing that his fingers were trembling a little. He took a deep breath, catching the smell of antiseptic in his throat.
‘Excuse me,’ he heard and he looked up and there she was. She looked exactly the same, except her hair was in a low ponytail and he could see that when it was loose, it would hang down her back. The floral scent was there as well, bringing the night they’d met back to him in a heady rush. He stood up, towering over her, then quickly sat down again when she took a step back.
‘I don’t know if you remember me, but you treated me three years ago and you said… You were so… I just wanted to…’
She smiled, a dimple appearing on one cheek, her teeth an even white line. ‘Of course I remember you. It’s hard to forget a six-foot-four, heavily tattooed man who cries. I was only on emergency duty that night because we were short-staffed. I usually take care of much smaller people, ones that cry all the time.’
‘Can I take you for dinner? Or coffee? Or lunch? Or anything? You helped, you really helped, and I just wanted to thank you…’ It took all his self-control not to reach out and touch her. He had not intended to ask her out, just to thank her – but that dimple, that smile. He prepared himself for a no. He couldn’t remember half the women he had slept with before going to prison but he knew he had never cared if he saw them again or not. He knew she was going to say no.
‘I get off at five and I’m very hungry because I missed lunch. How about then?’
‘Tonight?’
‘Yes, is that too soon?’
‘No… it’s… I’ll be here. Thank you, Debbie – can I call you Debbie?’
