Heather(13)
She mounts the steps and the frame creaks a little under her weight. In the second to last row she sees the girl’s legs draped into the aisle, gangly in denim cutoffs, a pair of red Chuck Taylor high-tops on her feet. The left shoe is missing its laces, used to tie off her upper arm. Her lips are pale and her face has a gray cast to it. Callie doesn’t need the needle for confirmation but she spots it on the floor, just past the red Converse. She’s not breathing and her eyes are closed. Maybe already gone.
Callie whips the Narcan from her pocket, administers a dose in each nostril, moves the girl onto her side to keep her from choking when—if—she regains consciousness. Feels for her pulse, catches a light, sporadic beat.
“Come on,” Callie says, softly as she can. “Come on, come on, come on.” If three minutes pass and she doesn’t wake, Callie can administer another dose. She feels every second. It’s the closest she ever gets to praying, standing over people like this, waiting to see if they’ll rejoin the living. Feeling death in every one of those long intervals between each breath, each heartbeat.
One minute ticks by, then two. She finds herself holding her breath, and just as she starts to count the seconds until she can give the second dose, the girl’s narrow shoulders jerk and she lets out a long, low groan.
“There we go,” Callie says, letting herself exhale. “There we go. You’re okay.”
The girl rubs the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Fuck you,” she says, her voice thick, her teeth clenched. She backs away from Callie’s touch. “Get your filthy cop hands off of me!” Callie raises her hands gently, tries to show she means peace. Sometimes they come back this way. Angry after losing their high, ripped out of a sweet delirium and called back into gritty, dank reality, withdrawal symptoms already setting in.
“You overdosed. I just administered Narcan. The EMTs will be here in a moment and they’ll take you to the hospital for monitoring.”
“No way.”
“You need to be supervised. This dose I just gave you could wear off and you’d be right back to the way I found you. Almost dead, in case that’s not clear.”
“I said I’m not fucking going.”
“You’re not in trouble. You have my word.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Callie sighs, drops her eyes to the girl’s red sneakers. Kid probably still lives at home, doesn’t want her parents to know. “How about this? I’ll give you a ride to the hospital. Help arrange a ride home when you’re released. But I need to know you’re going to be okay.”
The girl shoots her a furious look, dark eyed, mouth tight with contempt.
“I’ll let you think about it for a few minutes. I’m going to go talk to my friend out there and then I’m going to check on you, see what you’ve decided. Me, or the EMTs.”
She steps off the bus and finds Kirby, who is pacing in a twitchy way that makes her wonder if he doesn’t have a habit himself. “Who was she here with?”
“They all left, the dudes. Three of them.” Of course. Shot up with her or hooked her up then peeled off when shit hit the fan.
“How’d you know to check the bus?”
“One of the kids she was with. He turned in all of their gear, left, then came back in and told me I probably wanted to look at a problem on the bus. He didn’t say anything else; I didn’t think it was urgent or else I woulda ran over there. Instead I took a phone call, checked in a few dudes for a bachelor party. Fuck. She’s dead, right? Fuck fucking me.”
“Not dead. But close. Minutes away, if I had to guess. If you feel bad about that, why don’t you help me out. You hear anything about who is dealing heroin around here?”
“Nah. I don’t know,” Kirby says, his eyes darting over her shoulder in a way that makes Callie think the opposite.
“You sure? You don’t want me to have to come back and take a look around, see if there’s anything I missed this morning that might be relevant to my case.”
He turns and looks over his shoulder, making sure no one else will hear. “Rumors are Fauver is in on it. But you did not get that from me, right?”
“Who is Fauver?”
“Billy. Billy Fauver. But please. It comes down to it, I didn’t give that name to you.” Callie looks him over. He’s really scared. There’s a new neediness in his voice, his jittery movements and that evasive stare have turned focused, intent.
“Why are you afraid of him?”
Kirby looks at Callie with disbelief. “You wanna stay alive? You don’t piss that guy off.”
* * *
Back at the station she shuts the door to her office—something she almost never does—and dials Jenna. She wills herself to concentrate on something blank, simple: the cup of pens on her desk; the patch of wall discolored from where someone had once hung a framed picture.
She gets Jenna’s voicemail again.
“Mom. Please let me know you’re okay. I just … Just call, all right? Or text. Anything.”
The girl—whose name was Layla Hart—let Callie drive her to the hospital in the end, silent and seething. Callie had walked her to the check-in desk at the ER, offered her her cell phone number if Layla needed any help down the road. But she still can’t shake it, the chill that runs through her every time she has to pull someone back from the edge.