Chapter 7
Jessica sits in the backseat of the car, stunned. No John, and yet she is safe. The woman starts the car, and Jessica decides it would be a good idea to buckle her seat belt, but she can't keep her hands steady enough to push the buckle into place.
"It's okay, don't worry about it. I'll drive slow," the woman says. "I'm Detective Carter, but you can call me Joss. Do you need anything? Do you want some water?"
Joss doesn't wait for her response, just passes back a water bottle. Jessica realizes how good water sounds right now — she hasn't had anything to drink since the small paper cup the bank manager offered her yesterday. She tips the bottle back and drinks greedily, and the water settles rough on her long-empty stomach.
It isn't long before she's asking Joss to pull over the car; she thinks she's going to be sick. Jessica is barely able to get the door open before she throws up in the long grass on the side of the road. Joss waits until she's finished, rinsed her mouth out, and pulled the door back closed behind her before speaking:
"Normally, I'd have called for an ambulance, but I didn't want to wait around for those guys to change their minds. You need IV fluids, at the very least. I'm going to have to take your statement, in case one of the officers decides to get stupid and speak up. But it's going to be better for everyone if you slip away at the hospital."
Jessica wants to ask if John has sent Joss, but she's asked that question once before, and she can't take another response in the negative.
"Where should I go, when I slip away?" Back to the loneliness, she suspects, if not back to the house on the Sound. Back to hiding, the way she did in the days after Nathan left her, back to John at the fringes of her life, never to intervene. But doesn't she deserve to at least see him? After everything she's been through, if he's alive —
"Just walk out and keep walking," Joss says. "He'll find you."
"John?"
"Yes," Joss says, and her tone seems curt. "John."
Jessica smiles faintly in the energy she has left, lays down on the back seat, tears in her eyes, doesn't even realize she's fallen asleep until Joss is gently shaking her shoulder, telling her to wake up.
"You need a stretcher?"
No, she says, but she has to lean on Joss as they walk into the emergency room. Joss flashes an NYPD badge and that garners them a curtained-off space and an IV in her arm soon after she sits down.
Some time later, a young doctor slips into the curtain with a lighted scope for her ears, nose, and throat, pronounces her dehydrated, nothing more, and leaves. He is followed by a nurse, who changes her empty IV bag, and then Joss, who's managed to step out and return with a set of blue surgical scrubs and cheap plastic hospital slippers.
"Best I could find," she says. "You feeling better? Think I can take your statement now?"
"Yeah," Jessica nods. She wants more sleep and a shower, but at least the chalky taste is gone from her mouth, and her stomach is no longer wrenching occasionally.
Joss pulls out a little spiral-bound notebook, tells her to think carefully about what she says, and proceeds to scribble her way through the notebook as Jessica tells her bits and pieces of what happened to her that seem to be safe to be recorded for posterity. The second IV bag narrows as she talks.
"You think you could eat something?" Joss asks, a peculiar look on her face. "I could go to the vending machine down the hall, get you something."
This is when she should slip away, Jessica realizes, and she nods, waits until Joss slips through the curtain, and pulls the IV needle from her arm. The bag is nearly empty, and she feels much better, although hollow, rootless, as though she is a pinball that will ricochet out of here.
There is a little blood, where the IV needle was, but she takes some gauze from the metal cart in her curtained area, tapes it on and changes into the scrubs. Walks out of the room with her chafed feet wobbling in the oversized hospital slippers. Out into the waiting area, and then, when no one stops her, out of the emergency room.
Past the ambulances, unloading their patients with sharp staccato commands, past the benches, with the unhealthy sitting there, trying to take in the fresh air. Out to the street, thinking of Joss' words: "He'll find you."
The black Town Car is not what she's expected, and she freezes as it pulls up beside her, ready to run back to the hospital and try to find Joss. But then the door opens and she realizes it's John, motioning to her to get into the car.
She slips in, and for a moment after she closes the door behind herself, just stares at him. For so long he's seemed a figment, a story of someone she loved, that it seems impossible he is here, and real. Briefly, she is shocked by his face, by how much he's aged since she saw him last.
Perhaps that's unfair. It's been five years, and the shock of seeing him in the airport, those few minutes of conversation, didn't allow much time for observation. Certainly she's aged, as well, but John looks like he's been through five very rough years. And yet he still looks good, she thinks, still looks enough like the man in the army uniform who'd caught her attention ten years ago.
Of the two of them, she would have thought she'd be the one to break down. And she does cry when he locks his arms around her in a tight embrace, cries for the feeling of finally being truly safe; she has some sense of what he's capable of, and no one will get to her, now. But John is the one who presses his head into her shoulder, audibly weeping. She hears a faint electronic whirring as the driver closes the privacy barrier, and she is alone with the man who'd hurt her more than she thought possible, the man she still can't help but love, in spite of this.