“Keep your mouth shut!”
“She just tried to kill herself,” I said, grunting as they slammed me to the ground and cuffed me. “If you try to separate us she will kill herself, you have to trust me—I was trying to help her!”
Brooke’s body was still rolling around on the sidewalk, twisting either in pain or a seizure, I couldn’t tell which. She’d hit her head so hard I was amazed she was even conscious. The cops tried to help her, but weren’t sure what to do. I heard one call for an ambulance, and others knelt next to her, speaking in calm, businesslike phrases:
“Are you okay?”
“Was this boy chasing you?”
“Did he hurt you?”
I took another deep breath, trying to calm myself as much as possible. “Please believe me,” I said. I stuck with the name everyone in Dillon knew her by. “Her name is Marci, though she has some mental problems and doesn’t always answer to it. I’m her friend and I was only trying to keep her safe. Part of her mental illness makes her highly prone to suicide.”
I saw someone step out of the shop she’d crashed into, an old man in an apron, and I shouted out to him. “You—you from the store. You’re my witness, okay? This girl is a severe suicide risk, and I have to stay with her, and you just heard me warn these cops, okay? If they separate us, and she kills herself, you can testify it was their fault, okay? Sir, did you hear me?”
“Shut up,” said the cop holding me down.
“Is there anything I can do?” the old man asked the police.
“Just stay back,” said the nearest officer, “we have an ambulance on the way.”
“Bring her some water,” I said, “And all the ice in your store; she probably has a concussion.” The man nodded and went back inside. The cop on my back shoved me against the ground again, frisking me with his free hand.
“He’s got a weapon,” said the cop, pulling Potash’s combat knife from the sheath on my leg. Dammit. “You want to explain this, kid?”
“Officer,” I said, talking to the cop who was trying to help Brooke. “You see her hand? Yes, you—you see her hand? It looks like it’s flailing randomly, but she’s reaching for your gun. Just—just step away, that’s right, and try to hold her down.”
“What’s your name?” asked the cop I’d warned, glancing at me as he grabbed at Brooke’s flailing arms.
“David,” I said. “I’m only trying to help her, you have to believe me.”
“Why’s she trying to kill herself?”
“That’s a very long story.”
“You’ve got time,” said the cop on my back. There were at least six other police officers swarming around us; if Brooke had gotten hold of a gun, she’d be dead. I tried to look her in the eyes, to see how lucid she was, but she was squeezing them shut.
“Just let me die,” she whimpered. “Just please let me die. It’ll all be over and I can start again.”
The cop holding her arms looked at her in surprise, then back at me. “Start again?”
“She’s mentally ill,” I said. “Most of the time she’s fine, but when she gets like this you just have to ride it out. She’ll be okay again soon.”
“She can ride it out in the hospital,” said the cop. “And you in the station, explaining all this.”
The store owner came back outside with a glass of water and a bowl of ice. “Did you hear that?” I asked him. “They’re going to separate us. Remember this when she dies in their custody—you have to testify that I warned them first.”
“Fine,” said the cop, “we’ll take you with us to the hospital.”
*
It’s sad, when you think about it, how precarious our lives are. Our ways of living. Everything I’d tried to accomplish over the last year, all the secrecy and the hiding and the coping strategies to try to keep Brooke healthy, it was pointless now, everything lost forever in ten seconds sprinting across an empty street. If we’d been somewhere else, the cops wouldn’t have seen us; if I’d been able to grab her more quickly, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt. If I’d had a better plan, or better reflexes, or been a better person.
Now we were in small, regional hospital, locked in a room with the cops keeping watch outside, waiting for the results of an MRI. I was surprised a hospital this small even had an MRI machine, but I wasn’t complaining. Brooke’s unconscious body lay in a bed, her head bandaged and hooked up to softly beeping monitors. Boy Dog was being held in a kennel in Dillon. And somewhere a state police officer was trying to figure out who we were, and then the FBI would come, and they’d take Brooke away, and I’d go to prison or worse. And Attina would keep killing.