We saw flashlights approaching and I realized I hadn’t even noticed it was full dark. We could have been lying here, like Esme said, all alone. As three officers arrived, their own guns drawn, I thought of Esme then, saying, You don’t know her like I do… How right she was. And how wrong. How pitiless. She had known everything, all along, far more than I realized.
“Okay, ma’am,” the officer said to me. “Put the gun down. Now. Step away. Slowly.”
I said, “Gladly. It’s not my gun. I mean, I wasn’t the one with the gun, she was, although yes, technically now I have the gun…” I set the gun on the ground.
“Now turn and face the bench.”
“What? Why me?”
Stefan said, “Mom. He’ll figure it out.” The officer spoke into his radio. “Yes, send him up. We’re just getting started here. Can somebody get some lights?”
Twenty minutes later, Pete Sunday arrived at the grave site, explaining all our roles to the other police in a few sentences.
“When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” I told him.
“I couldn’t agree with you more. Although I think that if I was faced with the same facts again, I’d make the same mistake again.” He rubbed his hands together. “She was very convincing.”
“She thought she was on the side of the angels.”
“I just don’t get the motivation. Your kid is dead. You know it was an accident, you didn’t mean to hurt anyone, the worst thing has already happened, no horrible consequences for you, but instead of fessing up, you decide to hurt someone else’s kid, and you wait until years later?”
Someone flipped on a spotlight, and Pete Sunday’s face gaped in horror. “Get an ambulance!” he yelled, whipping off his really great trench coat and pressing it to my left arm. “You didn’t tell me she shot you!”
I looked down. My arm was swollen, purpling and covered with blood, and for the first time, I experienced a hot ache, just above my elbow. Stefan was sitting on the bench and I glanced down at the whorl of his dark hair and then suddenly I was looking down on my own dirt-smeared face, my tangled hair, as if from a perch on a tree limb. I knew all about hypotensive shock and the blessings it confers on mortally injured creatures, but along with the surcease of pain came a pleasing sense of rightness and goodness, as if currents from the earth were joining currents in my veins, linking me to all the plants and grasses and even the people under this quiet ground. The new universe winked at me.
Stefan yelled, “She’s hurt, this way, help us!”
Her hands cuffed behind her, Jill was being hustled away. She glanced back over her shoulder and said, “Oh, Thea! I’m sorry.”
It was the last thing I heard. I remember waking up next to wonder how really sick people even managed to survive ambulance rides, much less their injuries, because the one I was in was bouncing like a carnival ride. The young paramedic on his haunches next to my shoulder said, “Well you can stop bleeding anytime you want, ma’am. You’re giving us a little too much drama here.”
I said, “Don’t put in one of those tubes. I’m even afraid of blood tests. It hurts too much.” He gently held up my hand for me to see.
“Already did it. I’m the hero of all IVs. Got one in an eighty-four-year-old gentleman the other day. My crew bet me three days of breakfasts I couldn’t do it.”
Then it was too much work to talk. At the ER door where I’d been so recently when Rebecca had her baby. I was deftly wheeled through the secret swinging doors and into a cubicle bristling with gloved and gowned people. “Not every day we get a GSW,” said someone. “Since this isn’t the Wild West, we’d probably better get that hunk of lead out of your arm, Mrs…？”
“Demetriou.”
“Okay, let’s just get an X-ray in here…”
I heard Jep before I saw him, where is she? Is she being operated on? When he was ushered past the curtain, I watched his face as he engaged in a titanic struggle not to say, didn’t I tell you so?
“Let’s just have a little bit of…ten milligrams diazepam, get you all comfortable while the numbing medicine takes effect.”
Jep took my other hand and said, “You’re the only person I’ve ever known who’s been shot.”
I said, “I’m the only person I’ve ever known who’s been shot. Sheltered lives we’ve led.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.” He went on, “Stefan told me everything. This changes our whole life. But I confess I’m having a hell of a time wrapping my head around it. Why would she do this? How could she do this? Do you think she’s making it up?”