Devine's Providence: A Novel Page 27

  The next thing was the sound. I couldn’t see the minivan backing up—not through the hedges. The bike was going too fast to see the van in time. The van was going too fast to see the bike in time. Nobody saw anything until it was happening. It was just sound. The sounds that changed everyone forever. The screech of brakes, the thud of the impact, the thwppppppp as the bicycle wheel kept spinning even as it was in the air, the bike upside down in the middle of the street.

  This was where I suppose the dream departed from reality, because everything started moving in slow motion. As someone who has a decent grasp of temporal physics (thanks, Star Trek!), I of course realize that time doesn’t behave like that.

  It’s funny, though, because that’s exactly how I remember it happening at the time.

  Sam, Martha and I went running over. A couple of neighbors across the street came over as well. I slid down next to the girl like I was sliding into third base, my khakis tearing on the gravely asphalt. I lifted her head up and brushed her golden hair away from her face.

  “Riley?”

  Oh god oh god oh god oh god…

  There was a lot of blood, already. So much blood. On her clothes, on the sidewalk, on the back of the van, on my hands as I held her head.

  Too much blood.

  Equally in slow motion, Susan bolted out of the van, fighting through the tangled up seatbelt, her screams drowning out the bing bing bing from the dashboard letting her know she had left the door open.

  She pushed her way through the gathering onlookers. I had been a cop for a while already, but I had never seen such terror in anyone’s face, before or since.

  By the time the ambulance came just three minutes later, Riley was already gone. I couldn’t do anything. Anytime she scraped her knee or got a bee sting, I could patch it up with a Band-Aid and kiss it better, and her tears would stop. I could always rely on my magical power to kiss it better. But I couldn’t kiss this better.

  I tried.

  Time sped up. Days passed. There was the funeral. The grief counseling. The parade of friends and family and neighbors and strangers bringing over casseroles and pies and lasagnas, trying to fill the newly-formed hole in our family with thoughts and prayers and food. It didn’t work.

  Weeks passed. Susan was racked with guilt. She had been running late, and wasn’t paying attention, and backing out of the driveway far too fast. She had backed out of that same driveway far too fast hundreds of times without killing our daughter.

  Except the last time.

  There was also my own guilt, deserved or not. If I hadn’t stopped to talk to Sam and Martha, I would’ve been with her, and I might have seen everything happen in time to stop it. If I had just made her wear that helmet—the one she refused to wear because it would mess up her perfectly-braided pigtails and “We’re only going up and down the street, Daddy.” And what the hell? Nobody ever even owned a bike helmet when I was kid, and we all turned out fine. But Susan certainly didn’t blame me. Or at least that’s what she told me.

  The truth was, I didn’t blame her either. But when I think about it, I don’t think I ever told her that.

  Months passed. The casseroles and condolences slowed down to a trickle, but our little girl was still dead. Life in Providence moved on for everyone else. Friends and neighbors started talking again about the weather, about the Red Sox, about their summer vacations, but our daughter was still gone. The myriad of people who had come out of the woodwork insisting that if we need anything, anything at all, please let them know what they can do…they all disappeared back into their normal routines and their worrying about their own problems with work and money and time management. We were left alone. Together, but utterly and deafeningly alone.

  That, I think, was the hardest part of all. Not the immediate aftermath, which was a nightmare, but a nightmare with the support of everyone in the community. But six months or so later, when everyone in the community gets the luxury to move on. And we were stuck. We couldn’t move forward. We certainly couldn’t move backward. What other way was there to go but down?

  Years passed. I disappeared into my work and my drinking. She disappeared into her drugs. The Harry and Susan Devine that once existed were now extinct. They died with Riley Devine in the middle of the street that day. The family that just in recent memory were happy and normal were now spiraling downward. Like a double helix; independent of each other but each toward their own demise, pulled down by the shadowy, rotting, toxic claws of grief.

  Time sped up faster still. I was thankful I didn’t have to relive every tragic moment from there on out, because there were so many of them to go around.

  A couple of decades passed. I was standing in my office, talking to Chelsea. But it felt all wrong. I wasn’t the bumbling, shy, smitten sack-of-shit I had actually been. And she wasn’t the same femme fatale she had been. She was like a spider, spinning her web around me. She was an intruder. In the story of my life, she did not belong.

  She had told me earlier that she brought nothing but destruction and ruin to anyone that got close to her. I knew that now to not be as hyperbolic as I had first thought. Even my dream office was starting to crumble, turning to ancient ruins before my eyes as Chelsea stepped closer, those green eyes burning through me. Like a predator studying her prey.

  The closer she got to me, the more rapid and dramatic the destruction grew around us. The whole place was crumbling. Large cracks splashed across the ceiling. Plants wilted, glass shattered, wallpaper peeled itself off the walls. She reached out to touch my face and a toxic black mold spread quickly out from the corners of the room. It was all from her. She was tearing everything apart. Destruction and ruin.

  And yet, I want her, still.

  The truth was, I didn’t mind the destruction. I had been slowly destroying myself from the inside out for many years now already. If I was going down anyway, it may as well be with Chelsea Woodstern.

  She represented the opposite of all the choices I’ve made in life. The opposite of all the sacrifices I’d made, putting others first. Trying to help everyone else while I silently fell apart. She was all the things I’d wanted in life but never went after because the timing was wrong, or it wouldn’t be proper, or I had other obligations. Or I felt I just wasn’t deserving enough.

  I wanted her, I wanted us, and why the hell couldn’t I get what I want, for just once in my pathetic meaningless life? Other guys see what they want, and they just reach out and take it. They’re happy because they allow themselves to take their happiness. Why couldn’t I do that? Why wouldn’t she do that? If we both wanted each other, what was so wrong in taking the happiness?

  I leaned down and kissed her. As we embraced, the room erupted into an explosion of sparks and flame and smoke. Every surface was ablaze. Floating embers and ash swirled and danced, surrounding our bodies. Providence burned down around us. It was all wrong.

  We were destroying everything. Ruining everything. But at least we weren’t alone.

  • • •

  The dream eroded into a blank nothingness, like a shoreline being swallowed by the ocean at high tide. After the nothingness lasted what seemed like both a second and a decade, my physical senses started returning to me. I felt like I was floating. Lying on my back, bobbing up and down in the middle of Narragansett Bay, the warm sun shining on my face. It was brighter, though. Brighter than the sun. The light pierced through my closed eyelids to wash everything in a burning orange-red.

  It wasn’t the sea. It must be a pool. The smell of sterilizing chlorine singed my nostrils. Like mostly-bleach solution they used at the YMCA where I had taken Riley for swim class. I pushed open my eyelids, a herculean effort, and was blinded by the fluorescent light.

  As my eyes slowly came into focus, I realized there was no pool. I was in a hospital bed.

  A young woman in blue scrubs was writing something on a clipboard at the foot of
the bed. My brain gave my mouth instructions to say, “What’s going on? Where am I? What did I miss? I have to get out of here!”

  My mouth, not one to be bossed around by the likes of my brain even on the best of days, instead stubbornly blurted out, “Mmmwarmph!”

  The girl looked up, saw my eyes open, and smiled.

  “Heyyyy, you’re awake,” she said. She spoke in a tone that would be appropriate for a kindergarten teacher addressing her class, but was just annoying when it was directed at a grown-ass man. “Good morning, Charlie!”

  Charlie? Like the bartender from Rick’s?

  I struggled to remember what happened, but my brain felt like it was soaking in cotton, my thoughts had to fight to make their way through and not get lost. Had I died and become reincarnated as my bartender?

  Did I actually Quantum Leap into Charlie’s body?

  “Don’t worry, hon,” she said with enough saccharine to make Snow White gag. “We’ll get you back up and around and no time. I’ll go get the doctor and tell him you’re awake.”

  “Mmmmph,” I said.

  She came up beside me and pressed a button to push the bed up into a sitting position.

  “Can I get you anything, Charlie? There’s some water here, but you need to drink it slowly, mmkay? Are you comfortable? Do you want the TV on?”

  I don’t know what she was expecting. If I hadn’t been able to form words yet, what made her think that I would suddenly be able to rattle off answers to her questions in list form?

  And why did I still feel like I was floating?

  “Flllrrrkm,” I said.

  “Alright sweetie,” she said, flicking the TV on. “Just sit tight, the doctor will be in soon, okay?”

  My hearing was at least fine, though she talked at a decibel level people usually reserved for grandmas and foreigners-for-some-reason.

  She thankfully left the room, and I laboriously swiveled my head to take in my surroundings. Sunlight was streaming in through the windows. I was hooked up to an IV. I was wearing the most vile and useless and mortifying of garments, a hospital johnny. My clothes were in a neatly folded pile on a chair against the wall, a clear plastic bag atop containing my watch and other belongings.

  The TV was mounted high on the wall opposite the bed, and was showing a cooking competition where three home cooks were attempting to make a meatloaf with oven mitts duct-taped to their hands.

  What fresh hell did I land myself in?

  I was finding it very hard to concentrate, and I felt slightly out-of-body. Pondering those observations, it was only then that I realized that I was, by all accounts, in a hospital, and was probably there for a good reason. A reason that would no doubt account for why I couldn’t seem to do anything that resembled being a person at the moment.

  Why am I here?

  I fought my way through my own mind to try to think of the last thing I remembered.

  My sweet little girl died…no, that’s not right.

  Susan arrested…that was a long time ago.

  Chelsea…

  …

  …Chelsea.

  The memory of Bruce’s interrogation gone awry came rushing back. My stab wound had reopened. I had lost a lot of blood.

  My hand reached down to my side and felt my abdomen. I was stitched up—for real this time. It wasn’t the haphazard, schlock-job treatment I had received in the back room of the deli, it was real actual sutures. I pressed on the stitches, but didn’t feel any pain.

  Of course. I’m on painkillers.

  The floating feeling and inability to form coherent thoughts made sense now. And once I realized why I was feeling the way I was, I was somehow able to focus better.

  I have to get out of here.

  I didn’t even know how long I’d been here. But I had to find Chelsea and stop her from doing anything stupid. I had to find Terry and warn her to keep a low profile. And then, I had to leave town, contact the feds, and wait it all out. I was a sitting duck lying in a hospital room.

  The nurse had left the TV on too loud. It was distracting my plan-making. I needed to hear myself think. I picked up the remote attached to my bed and pressed the “lower volume” button. Or so I thought. Instead of quieting the television, my bed slowly lowered back into a flat position.

  “Flrghit!” I said aloud.

  I hit another button, and the channel changed. I craned my neck up to see a local anchor reading the morning news.

  At least it’s better content.

  My scattered thoughts were taking a hiatus from an escape plan to admire how pretty the anchor was, when my face suddenly appeared on the screen next to her.

  What the fuck kind of drugs did they put me on?

  “A former Providence Police detective is wanted this morning in connection with a string of vicious murders,” said the anchor. “A police spokesman says Harrison Devine shot and killed two men in a deli on Federal Hill last night.”

  The news switched to footage of the outside of the deli, blocked off with crime scene tape. Coroners brought out two bodies on stretchers. White sheets covered them, but the cream-over-brown wingtips sticking out from under one of them unmistakably belonged to Slim. The other, I presumed, was Teddy Rocco.

  FUCK.

  As piecemeal as my memories were in my drugged-up state, I was pretty certain both Teddy and Slim were still breathing when I had left them.

  “Devine is also wanted for questioning in the death of former planning commission chief Philip Grayle, whose body was discovered last week. Police allege the gun used to kill Grayle is registered to Devine and has been recovered in his office, where he runs a private detective agency.”

  The footage changed to another crime scene, this time cops coming down the stairs to my office carrying evidence bags.

  Delgado is cashing in all his chips.

  “Devine’s current whereabouts are unknown, and he is considered extremely dangerous. Police caution the public to not approach him if you see him, and to please contact them with any information.”

  The wraths of God and Providence are squeezing down around me.

  I fumbled with the stupid remote and mashed buttons until the TV clicked off.

  I gotta go.

  I didn’t know where to go, or what to do, but I sure as all heck couldn’t stay there. If everyone in southern New England was looking for me, it wouldn’t take them long to find me.

  I sat up quickly, and I felt like when my body stopped, my head kept going and splattered against the wall far across the room. It was a strange, ethereal feeling, like all of my body parts were detaching from each other but still being tethered by a string. Like a broken marionette.

  At least I’m not in any pain.

  That unexpectedly changed when I ripped the IV port out of my arm.

  I covered my mouth as I let out an audible squeal, one which was decidedly not manly. Not the squeal of the dangerous, nefarious murderer the previously-found-attractive newswoman was making me out to be.

  I swung my legs over the bed and floated over to my clothes. I replaced my hospital gown with my pants and shoes…but there was no shirt.

  Probably bled right through it.

  I examined the contents of the plastic bag. My watch, my smartphone, my burner phone, and a wallet…but definitely not my wallet.

  I vaguely remembered Charlie putting it on me before I blacked out. I opened it up to find some cash, credit cards, supermarket club cards, an AAA card, insurance card, library card—all in Charlie’s name, and none of them including a picture or a photo. The sleeve made to hold a driver’s license was empty.

  So that’s why the nurse called me Charlie. They think I’m him.

  Good old Charlie. He had bought me a little time, at least.

  With my picture plastered all over the news though, my delay of the inev
itable wouldn’t last long.

  I took the watch and wallet but left the cell phones floating in the pitcher of water at the bedside. I put the johnny back on so I wouldn’t be bare-chested, and carefully opened the door. There was no one around in either direction, so I crept out into the hallway.

  I walked as briskly and as steadily as my drugged body would allow, but stopped suddenly when I reached the nurses’ station on the corner. Not only was it full of what had to be every nurse in the ward, but there was a police officer leaning against the counter with his back to me.

  I ducked into the nearest room before anyone saw me and quietly swung the door closed. I turned around to see the lone bed’s occupant thankfully unconscious. It was a man who was far too young to look as old as he did. His face was covered in cuts and pockmarks, and blue track marks ran up the length of his arm.

  His clothes, like mine had been, were folded up neatly on the chair against the wall. A pair of jeans and what looked like a black t-shirt. I quickly threw off my johnnie again, and threw on the t-shirt. The style was a tad tighter than I was used to wearing, but at least it fit well enough to cover my midriff. Fugitive murderer is one thing, but don’t call me improper.

  I turned back toward the door, but caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I walked by the bathroom, and couldn’t help but stop to examine myself further.

  Oh, good Lord.

  The front of the t-shirt had a large, incredibly cheesy graphic of a cat flying through space, paws outstretched and shooting lasers out of its eyes. It was hideous. I imagined purposefully so, with the intent of being ironic. But on purpose or not, it was the most conspicuous thing I could be wearing, even if a gorilla costume was the only other option.

  Of all the shirts on the patients in all the hospitals in all the world, and I had to walk in to steal this one.

  I was just considering taking it off and turning it inside out, when the young man in the bed started stirring. I panicked and exited the room, closing the door behind me. I kept my back to the group at the nurses’ station and walked back down the hall. The overhead lights glared into my skull like they were high beams, and the hallway twisted and warped in front of me like a fun house tunnel. Luck was with me as I made it all the way to the staircase at the end without passing a single soul.