I wake up in a hospital bed, a white sheet draped over my clothes. I open my eyes slowly, staring up at a white ceiling. My shoes are gone and someone has fastened a plastic band around my wrist. The space I’m in is tiny, bordered by one of those blue-and-white striped shower curtain sheets that slide around on a thin metal strip. A dull pulsing behind my eyes feels like fists beating the back of my head. Boomboomboom. The ache is enormous, spreading down behind my ears and into my neck. My arms hurt, too, just under the armpits, as if someone pulled on them.
Suddenly, I remember the probation office. James. Shots fired. Suspect down. My God. What happened? Where is he? I sit up with a start, clutching at the sheet.
“Hey.” Mrs. Ross gets up from a plastic chair at the foot of my bed and clicks her way over to me. Her suit jacket is off; she’s pinned her hair back up. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine.” I yank the sheet off, slide sideways off the mattress. My head feels like it’s going to explode from the inside out, but I force myself to keep moving.
“Whoa, whoa.” Mrs. Ross reaches out and grabs my shoulder, pushing me back down. “You have to stay in bed for a little while. At least until the doctor comes back. You hit your head pretty hard back there at the office. You were out for a while.”
“I don’t need a doctor.” I wince as the pain in my head spreads down the front of my face. “I’m fine.”
“It won’t take long.” Mrs. Ross sits down on the bed and crosses her legs. “He’ll be back in a few minutes. He said it might be a mild concussion, but he wanted to run a few tests once you were awake to be sure.”
“I don’t need any tests either.” I push past Mrs. Ross, pulling the long silver arm attached to a television on the wall until the screen is close to my face. “I need to know what happened at the church. At Saint Augustine’s. Do you know? Does anyone know?” I flip impatiently through the channels. Soap operas. Family Feud. More soap operas.
“Bird.”
“I’m just looking for the news.” I keep flipping. “Okay? Am I still allowed to watch TV?”
“Bird.”
I stop then, my hand going limp. I can tell by the expression on her face that she already knows, but I don’t want to hear it from her. I can’t. “What?”
“Did you know he was up there?”
I stare at her, a plate of pain widening behind my eyes.
“There are a lot of things being said right now, but the big one is that someone helped James Rittenhouse while he hid in that choir loft.” She rubs the bottom of her chin. “Was that you?”
I don’t even blink.
“They found food and water and his leg had been set. With the injury he suffered, there’s no way he could have done that himself. He had clean clothes, too. Pants at least. And baby wipes so he could keep himself clean.” She inhales deeply. “Is that who you were talking about in the probation office? Is that who you wanted to go see?”
A long moment passes. I know she’s waiting, but I can’t bring myself to say it. I can’t bring myself to say anything. Not about this. Not about him.
“Do you know what harboring a fugitive means, Bird?” Mrs. Ross gets up off the bed finally, arranging her arms in a neat little package across her chest. The softness in her voice is gone; the little lines around her eyes have begun to crease. “Do you understand what can happen to you if you’re found guilty of something like that? If you’re on probation and you’re found guilty of something like that?”
My voice is still lodged in a rock eight miles away. Where is he? Is he here, in this hospital? In an operating room?
“It can be classified as a felony, Bird. A felony! Do you know what a felony is? It means that you could go to jail for two years! Maybe even longer! Do you understand what I’m telling you?” Her eyes are snapping under the fluorescent lights. “Do you?”
I don’t know if I have ever been so terrified in my life. And yet, somehow, there is something even bigger to be scared of. Something that pushes the voice out of the back of my throat, and out into the space between us. “Did they shoot him?” I whisper. “Is he dead?”
Mrs. Ross’s shoulders sag. She has the same defeated look on her face that Ma had earlier in the kitchen. Then she points to the television behind me. “Look for yourself.”
I turn around.
And all of a sudden, there he is.
Or there someone is, lying on a gurney, covered in a sheet, being wheeled into the back of an ambulance. It doesn’t mean it’s James. It could be anyone. A police officer, a fireman, maybe even Father Delaney, God forbid. Police officers stand around as the body passes, watching as the EMTs fold the metal legs and roll it inside the cavernous vehicle. I lean in slowly, turn up the volume.
“. . . the body of James Rittenhouse, who was involved in a bar fight a few days ago and then managed to escape while in police custody.”
I bring my fingers to my mouth. They are trembling.
“Police are currently saying that Rittenhouse provoked the ultimately lethal response by pointing a gun at the three officers as they entered the building, leaving them no choice but to defend themselves. Further investigation is pending.”
I want to move. I do. I want to put my fist through the television. Rip the volume knob off. Throw the whole fucking thing through the window. Or better yet, at Mrs. Ross.
But I can’t.
There’s nothing left inside.
Nothing at all.
THE NEXT TWO days are a blur of quiet, clipped activity. It turns out that I do have a mild concussion, just as the doctor suspected, and so I have to lie still, keep away from the TV, and avoid any loud noises. This is not hard to do, since both Ma and Angus tiptoe around outside my room, talking in whispers and letting me sleep. I am not sleeping, of course. I doubt I will ever sleep again, although I have no choice but to lay there with my eyes closed since it hurts too much to keep them open. Still, the pictures inside my head torment me. I play the final scene between James and the cops a thousand different times, from every possible angle, but each one ends the same way. My eyes fly open just as the bullet hits him (in the chest, not the head) and I lay there panting, tears leaking from both sides of my eyes.
On the third day, Ma comes into my room and tells me that I am wanted down at the district attorney’s office. “I can tell them you’re still not feeling well,” she says, standing in my doorway, rewrapping the edges of her cardigan around her waist. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the look on her face before; it’s a mix of terror, rage, and maybe a little bit of apathy, which frightens me the most. “Do you want me to call them back?”
“No.” I push the covers off, inhale a stale stink. “I just want to get this over with. I’ll go down.”
“Take a shower first,” Ma says. “I’ll drive you.”
I sit in the back with Angus, who reaches for my hand as soon as he climbs in and rests his head against the side of my arm. No one says a word as Ma drives to the courthouse, and despite the warmth of his little hand in mine, I can’t help but wonder what Ma has told him, or if he’ll ever talk to me again.
Inside the DA’s office, I follow directions woodenly, sitting in a brown chair behind a long glass table, staying quiet until I am spoken to. I tell the truth, too, when they start firing questions at me, because honestly, I’m too afraid at this point to keep lying. I’m scared they’ll take Angus. I answer everything as succinctly as possible, even though it feels as if I am underwater, as if someone else is doing the talking for me:
“No, I didn’t take James to the church.”
“Yes, I accidentally ran into him after heading up to the choir loft.”
“Because I heard a noise up there, and I thought it was Father Delaney.”
“No, Father Delaney did not know anything about it. At any time. Ever.”
“Yes, I brought him food and water and the equipment to set his leg with.”
“Yes, I brought him clean pants and baby wipes, too.”
“No, we weren’t romantically involved.” I’m not giving them that, as small as it was. No how. No way.
“No, we did not have sex in the church choir loft.”
“Yes, I knew him from before.”
“Yes, he told me what led up to the bar fight.”
The district attorney sits up a little straighter when I answer this last question, and flicks his eyes over at the guy across the table who has loosened his tie, and has one finger on the tape recorder. “He talked about the bar fight?”
I nod.
“Even though you weren’t romantically involved? Even though, according to everything you’ve just told us, there was absolutely nothing at stake for him—or for you—to make such an admission?” The district attorney is a tall man with a squarish face and large, wide hands. When he talks, he thrusts both of them forward, as if such movements are necessary to get the words out.
I look down at the surface of the table, study the swirled patterns of maple and caramel beneath the glass veneer.
“He left a note, you know.”
I look up.
“Well, not a note exactly,” the DA says. “More of a . . . I don’t know what you would call it, really. One of our men found it inside the organ, where he managed to get himself inside as our men were coming up.” He watches me carefully while sliding a torn piece of paper across the table. “Doesn’t mean anything to us right now, but maybe it might ring a bell for you?”
Everything still feels foggy; the note itself looks like a raft of some kind, afloat in a body of very dark water. I can see the faint marks of words printed inside, the swoop and scrawl of ink. I reach for it with trembling hands, open it slowly. There in shaky script are James’s last words:
Fact #346: The heart will continue to beat even when separated from the body as long as it has an adequate supply of oxygen.
I read the words once quickly, and then again, more slowly. Something in my chest fills like water. Had he heard noises? Voices? The slow ascent of footsteps on that terrible, circular staircase? Had he known he wouldn’t make it out of there alive and, in his last moments, reached for a piece of paper, a pen? Where had he found a pen? Had I brought him one? Or had he seen one in my bag, slid it out while I wasn’t looking? Oh, James.
James, James, James.
I close my eyes, thankful to be sitting. If I was on my feet, my legs would give out from under me. When had he found this particular fact? How had he known exactly the right moment to use it? And what does it mean when someone you love knows more about you than you do?
“Miss Connolly?” The district attorney clears his throat. “Does it mean anything?”
I shake my head.
The two men exchange a look. “How about this, then? Do you have any idea why James Rittenhouse beat that man in the bar?”
“Does it really matter now?” I run a fingertip over the word “Fact.” The ink is smeared along the capital F, blurring the top line. “He’s dead.”
Another glance exchanges between the two men. “We’d still like to know what he told you.” The district attorney runs his fingers over the point of his chin.
I end up telling them the story about James’s family. I tell them how awful James’s father was to him growing up, how James read the fact book at his father’s bedside for two years, waiting for the man to extend a single shred of humanity to him before he died. And I tell them how James went on a bender afterward, how he got drunk and ended up in a fight with a mouthy guy who insulted him. “It was just a perfect storm,” I hear myself finishing. “All those things coming together at the same time . . .” I shrug, my shoulders like anvils. “He just went a little crazy, I guess.”
The district attorney looks at the tape recorder guy again. He sighs deeply, loosening a button on his suit jacket. “Well, then, I guess that’s about all we need from you right now.”
I stare down at James’s note, watch as the letters swirl before my eyes. “Are you going to press charges against me?”
“The fact that this guy is dead doesn’t negate your actions.” The district attorney rubs an eyebrow. He has a map of red veins threaded across the top of his nose, a few gray hairs in his eyebrows. “Do you realize that what you’ve done is a felony?”
I nod without looking at him.
“Our police force wasted innumerable hours over these past three days because of the assistance you provided to James Rittenhouse. I had people working overtime—double, triple shifts—to get this guy behind bars. Do you know how much money it costs to keep a system going during a crisis like that? Do you have any idea?”
The y in the word “oxygen” is long and narrow; the g has a little dip at the top of it, like a lopsided apple. I’d never seen his handwriting before; nothing we’d ever shared had been written. Now it seems like something miraculous, a singular trait all its own, just like one of his factoids, a small perfect thing, right there on the page.
The district attorney is waiting for me to answer. I look up, shake my head again.
“A lot,” he says. “It costs a lot of money, young lady, and a lot of manpower.”
“So you are going to press charges, then?”
“We still haven’t decided. But I’ll tell you what.” He stops here, lifts a thick finger to point at me. “The fact that you’re already on probation isn’t going to do you any favors.”
I swallow, look back down at the note.
All I see this time is the word “heart.”