SHOCK IS A FUNNY THING. THINGS GET BOTH SHARP AND FUZZY. TIME stretches and distorts. Things come rushing into focus and seem larger than they are. Other things vanish to a single point.
“Come with me,” Larry said, turning Stevie by the shoulders gently and leading her out of the tunnel and back to the cart.
“He’s dead,” Stevie said, looking up at the sky and taking a deep breath of cool air. “Hayes is dead.”
Larry continued to lead her toward the cart for a moment before speaking. He settled her into the passenger’s seat and looked her in the face.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Just tell me if I’m right.”
Larry exhaled slowly.
“He’s dead,” he said.
“Why?” she asked. She sounded simple, like a child.
“I don’t know,” Larry said. “Do you? What was he doing down there tonight, Stevie? You need to tell me.”
“I don’t know,” Stevie said. “Really. I don’t know.”
Larry studied her face for a moment then seemed to accept her answer. Stevie felt like she was gently hovering over the scene like in a recurring dream she had in which she floated from room to room of a neighbor’s house, watching them do mundane things. A ghost in someone else’s home.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
Again, what a weird question. Inside Stevie could think. Outside Stevie was hugging herself and saying weird things.
“I’m going to take you back to Minerva,” Larry said.
They said nothing as they drove back. Ellingham Academy rolled past her, looking like movie footage. Nothing was real. There was a far-off noise, a rupture in the air. Larry leaned forward and looked up as the lights of a helicopter appeared overhead and landed on the green. The ambulance had come, but the patient was gone.
She had wanted to see a dead body—but not this, not a real someone. Not sneakers upturned at the end of those legs, the legs that had been squatting so stupidly on Stevie’s floor only days before. The kneecaps—the patellae—the real human who was now still and cold, and somewhere behind them in the dark.
When they arrived at Minerva, Larry told Stevie to wait a moment, so she waited. He spoke to Pix just outside the door. Stevie saw Pix put her hand over her mouth as she got the news, and then she came over to the cart and grabbed Stevie’s hands.
“I’m okay,” Stevie said.
“Stevie.” Larry leaned in from the driver’s side, his hand on the roof of the cart. “I’m going to ask you not to say anything to anyone else in the house right now, just for a little bit. Do you understand?”
“You don’t want to cause panic and you need to keep the area clear to investigate what happened,” Stevie said.
“That’s right,” Larry said. “That’s real good, Stevie.”
“Stevie,” Pix said. “I’ll take you up to my rooms. . . .”
“If you take me upstairs, the others will know,” Stevie said. “I’ll just go to my room. I’m okay. I can do this.”
Larry nodded.
“She’s doing good,” he said. “You just go to your room and get into bed, Stevie. Just stay there and I’ll be back for you in a while. We’ll need you again.”
Stevie tested the ground before she stepped out of the cart and found that her legs were steady. She resisted Pix’s offer of an arm around her shoulders. Once inside, the common room now seemed very bright. The wall vibed red and the moose on the wall seemed grotesque. Janelle had gone but Ellie and David were still on the sofa, their feet facing each other, laughing at something. They stopped when Pix and Stevie came in.
“What’s up?” Ellie said. “Is Hayes in trouble?”
“No,” Pix said quietly.
David was looking at Stevie. She saw him peeling away her blank expression and attempting to go through her thoughts.
“I’m heading for bed,” Stevie said, turning away.
David followed her with his eyes. Then she heard his phone chirp.
“Someone saw a helicopter,” he said to Pix.
“I thought I heard something weird,” Ellie said.
“Pix, is there a helicopter landing?” David asked.
“It’s fine,” Pix said.
Stevie hurried to her room and shut the door. She leaned against it, her head banging against the hook. A wave of nausea passed over her, and she moved to the trash can in preparation, but it passed. She climbed into bed fully dressed and pulled the comforter up around her.
Six had gone up the mountain, and then there were five.
Maybe she would go to sleep . . .
Shock. She was slipping into it. She sat up straight. Paper. She needed paper now. She went to her desk and snatched her anatomy notebook. She needed to write everything down, now, fresh. What had she seen? What did she know? Just write down everything, plain, without thinking about what any of it could have meant.
There was a knock at her door, and it creaked open before she could reply.
“Hey,” David said. There was no humor in his face now. “What’s going on?”
“I can’t,” Stevie said, bending over the notebook, her brow furrowed.
“What are you doing?”
“Can’t. Talk.”
“What?” he said.
“It messes with your memory,” she said impatiently.
“Something is going on,” he said. “There are only a few reasons they send a helicopter. You also look like you just had three pints of blood removed. What the hell is happening?”
“I can’t,” she said. “I need to write it down now. Stories can change accidentally once you start to talk so I can’t talk. Please, just shut the door.”
There was a faint tremble in her hand. She balled it into a fist to steady it and jammed it under the covers. David backed away slowly, closing the door behind him.
Stevie pressed on her mind. Just list it. What did you see, Stevie? She let herself write. It started Thursday.
• Moved ramp and supplies to the garden
• Set up fog machines
More granular, Stevie. Put it in order.
• A few nights before, we went into the tunnel. We
No.
• We I broke the lock to get in
There was noise outside and in. She heard the drone of the helicopter as it flew away, the sound of voices from the common room. She put on headphones to muffle them. The information was traveling and soon everything would be chaos. She had to get her thoughts together now. When she was sure she had recorded all she knew, she ripped out the page. Then she got up, removed her red coat from the closet, and put it on, taking refuge in the stiff vinyl. She put one Ativan in the left pocket and the folded list in the right. Then she sat on the edge of her bed, hands on her lap, until Larry came for her.
It was maybe an hour later. Stevie wasn’t sure. Time was slippery now. Stevie passed through the common room like a ghost, not looking at the others. Outside, there seemed to be red and blue lights everywhere, winking through the trees, echoing into the sky and throwing strange shadows all around. The temperature felt like it had dropped about ten degrees. Nate was waiting outside with Pix. He looked blank and gray.
Larry drove Stevie and Nate to the Great House. He and Stevie sat side by side behind Larry in the cart, taking a bit of warmth from each other. A state-police cruiser was parked under the portico and the officer inside was entering information into the computer. There were more officers inside. Several faculty members were crowded on the balcony, looking down. Maris and Dash were already in the hall, sitting by the massive fireplace. Maris was sobbing and Dash was glazed over, staring at his phone.
“I think I may throw up,” Nate said.
“Deep breaths,” Stevie said, taking his hand. “With me.”
She sat down with Nate on the bottom step of the grand staircase.
“The trick,” Stevie said, “is to make the exhale longer than the inhale. So we’re going to breathe in for four, hold for seven, out for eight. Do it with me. I’ll count. One, two, three, four . . .”
Nate breathed with Stevie, slowing the response, slowing the fear.
This was the funny thing about Stevie’s anxiety—when she encountered someone else who felt more anxious than she did, she leveled out. She’d first made this discovery a few years ago, when she got trapped on an elevator with another person in a hotel on one of the few Bell family vacations. The hotel was twenty stories high. Stevie and another woman got on at the eighteenth floor. The doors closed and the elevator went down, then the car dropped suddenly about a story, juddered, and stopped. Stevie’s heart almost flew out of her mouth, but when she saw the woman cry out and sink into the corner of the elevator in panic, something new set in. The woman spent the next half hour sitting on the floor in the corner, half in tears, shaking. Stevie talked her through it, and when they were rescued, the woman had nothing but good things to say about Stevie and bought her a giant cupcake and a coffee from the café in the lobby.
This might be her future—talking to people who had just witnessed traumatic events. She would have to work with them, calm them, get them to a place where they could talk.
“Nate,” Stevie said, taking his hand again, “what’s your favorite book?”
“What?”
“Just tell me your favorite book. Don’t think about it too hard. Just name a book you like.”
“The Hobbit.”
“What do you like about it?” Stevie asked.
“I like the whole thing.”
“But name one thing. Close your eyes and think about The Hobbit for one moment and tell me what you like.”
Nate closed his eyes. His face smoothed just a bit.
“The round door,” he said. “On Bilbo’s house. I read it when I was little and I always thought about the door.”
“That’s great,” Stevie said. “Keep that door in your mind. Keep Bilbo in there. Let’s breathe again. Four in. Seven hold. Eight out.”
After another moment, Stevie saw Nate settle a bit more. His shoulders relaxed a bit, and the strain of trying not to be sick let up. He exhaled one last time, opened his eyes, and looked at her.
“Okay,” he said, nodding. “Okay. What’s going to happen? What’s happening? Stevie, what the hell is happening?”
“They’ll ask us what we saw,” Stevie said.
“I didn’t see anything. I don’t even know what’s going on. They said Hayes is dead?”
“I mean how the day went,” Stevie said. “They need to establish the facts.”
“But what happened? How did Hayes die?”
“I don’t know,” Stevie said, though in her mind’s eye, she was looking at the hatch door again. She felt it in her hand, the weight of it as she balanced on the thin-runged rail of the ladder. “But it’s important we don’t try to make anything up. Just be clear. Just say what you know.”
“That’s good advice.” Larry was standing in front of them. He squatted down and looked Nate over, then looked to Stevie and nodded his approval. “This one here has a good head on her shoulders. The police need to go over the events.”
One of the troopers called Nate’s name and summoned him into the front parlor. Larry sat on the step next to Stevie.
“How you doing?” he said.
“I wrote some of it down,” Stevie said, showing him the notes. “As fresh as I could.”
Larry read the page carefully. Stevie followed his eyes as they went to each line.
“This is good,” he said, passing it back. “You’re handling this well.”
“Do you know what happened?” Stevie asked.
Larry shook his head.
“Don’t know?” Stevie said. “Or can’t say?”
“They’re ready for you,” an officer said, stepping up to Stevie and guiding her into the security office.
Here she was, watching a case up close, giving a statement, experiencing all the things she so longed to experience.
All it took was for someone to die.