The Hospital Road Part 2

“You’re white as paper.”

“Good. Means less blood to clean up.”

“Can you not?”

“Apparently not.”

The nurse taped fresh dressing down and pressed around the edges with fingers that knew what they were doing.

“You’ll keep that dry,” she said. “And you’ll try very hard not to do anything stupid with it.”

“That narrows nothing down.”

“It isn’t meant to.”

She left.

Nobody said much for a minute after that. Hospitals flatten people out. The noise drops away and you’re left with bright lights, plastic furniture, and whatever nobody managed to avoid saying on the drive in.

Mum was first.

“What happened?”

It sounded simple when she asked it.

It wasn’t.

Because there was what happened in the dark behind the hall. Then there was why Renee had come looking for me in the first place. Then under that, old enough to have grown roots, was Ellie.

You can answer one question and still lie by about three suburbs.

“The lights went out,” I said.

Mia looked at me like she was deciding between swearing and throwing something.

“Start before that.”

I rubbed at my forehead with the heel of my hand. My head still felt wrong. Not dramatic. Just wrong. Like somebody had shifted the room half an inch sideways without checking whether I was in it.

“Renee came looking for me.”

“Why?” Mum asked.

“She said Nathan told her to keep her mouth shut.”

“About what?” Mia said.

“Ellie.”

That took the shape out of the room.

Mum looked down at Dad’s handkerchief in her lap. Mia stopped shifting her weight. Jonah looked at the floor, then at the opposite wall, then finally back at me.

“She said that?” Mum asked.

“Yeah.”

“And then?”

“Then the lights went. Someone grabbed her. I went after him.”

“Him?” Jonah said.

“Felt like a him.”

“That’s not much.”

“No.”

He nodded once like that was all he expected from me. It probably was.

Mia folded her arms. “What did she say after?”

I knew what she meant. Not the attack. Not the cut. After I came back out of the trees and Renee looked at me like she’d seen a ghost walk in wearing my face.

“She said he knows what I did that night.”

Mum shut her eyes.

Mia just stared.

Jonah finally looked up.

“What did you do?” Mia said.

Straight to it. That’s my sister. No gentle run-up. No chance to organise your own lie into something less embarrassing.

I laughed once because the room had gone so still I felt like if I didn’t make some kind of sound I’d stop breathing.

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

“Mia.”

“No. Dad’s dead. You’ve got blood all over you. Some bloke in a mask tried to stab you behind Dad’s wake. Don’t give me now like we’ve got a better time pencilled in for it.”

Mum said her name, tired rather than sharp.

Mia didn’t look away from me.

So I gave them the part I could get out without choking on it.

“I saw Ellie that night.”

Mum went very still.

Jonah didn’t move at all.

Mia said, “Where?”

“At the old house on Creek Road.”

“The one near the empty lot now.”

“Yeah.”

“You told police you were at the river.”

“Yeah.”

“You lied.”

“Yeah.”

There isn’t much you can do with honesty once it turns up that late. It doesn’t clean anything. It just drags more dirt into the light and makes the room smell worse.

Mum looked up from the handkerchief. “Why?”

That was the question, wasn’t it. The big pathetic why underneath the whole rotten thing.

Because I was sixteen. Because I was scared. Because I knew enough to know the truth would not land evenly. Because Ellie Voss was already the kind of girl half the town blamed before they even had a reason. Because I thought if I shut my mouth the ugliness would stay outside me.

All true. None of them good enough.

“She told me I hadn’t seen her,” I said.

Mia made a face like the answer itself had offended her. “And you just did what she said?”

“No.”

“No?”

“There was a car.”

That got rid of everything else in the room.

“What car?” Jonah asked.

“Don’t know.”

He kept looking at me.

I looked away first.

Wrong move. It always was with him.

Mia said my name the way she does when she knows there’s another sentence under the one I’ve already given her.

“I didn’t know for sure.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“I know.”

Mum’s voice came out small. “Did she get in the car?”

“Yeah.”

“Willingly?”

I thought about Ellie on the verandah. Angry. Shaky. Looking like somebody holding herself together out of spite and not much else.

“She got in.”

Not the answer they wanted. The only one I had.

Mia started pacing then. Four steps one way, turn, four back. She’s done that since she was a kid, like movement will stop the first ugly thing in her head from making it to her mouth.

“You kept this to yourself all this time?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“That’s fair.”

“Don’t tell me what’s fair.”

Jonah spoke then, quiet enough that it nearly missed the room.

“I asked you.”

I looked at him.

“What?”

“That week,” he said. “I asked if you’d seen her.”

I remembered straight away. River bank. Warm beer. Mosquitoes. Both of us pretending the town wasn’t already turning itself inside out over Ellie. He asked. I said no too fast. He looked at me for a second and let it go.

Or seemed to.

“Yeah,” I said.

“And you lied to me too.”

Nobody said anything to that.

Not Mum. Not Mia. Not me.

Because there wasn’t anything to say that wouldn’t make it worse.

Mum saved me from answering by speaking first.

“I told them not to push you.”

We all looked at her.

“What?” Mia said.

Mum’s fingers tightened around the handkerchief. “After. When the police came back. He wasn’t sleeping. He jumped every time a car slowed outside. I told them he was a boy and they were scaring him.”

I sat there with my arm throbbing and my head not quite right and had the deeply unpleasant experience of feeling angry at my mother for trying to protect me.

Mia got there first.

“Mum—”

“I know,” she said. “I know how it sounds. But he was sixteen and white as chalk and I thought if they kept at him the wrong way, he’d either tell them anything or never tell them anything again.”

That was the truest sentence in the room.

It also didn’t help.

Before anybody could start on what it meant, the curtain shifted and Nathan Mercer stepped in.

Black shirt from the wake. Dirt still on one sleeve. Split in his lip I hadn’t noticed before. Hair shoved back with one hand like he’d been doing it all night. He stopped when he saw all of us looking at him and for one second he looked young enough to scare, not old enough to be the sort of man people quietly make excuses for.

“Renee wants her aunt,” he said.

Mum stood straight away.

“How is she?” Mia asked.

“Shaken.”

“That tells me nothing.”

Nathan’s jaw moved once. “Bruised. Crying. Wants her aunt.”

Mum went with him before anybody else could get in her way.

The second the curtain shut behind them, I said, “What did she tell police?”

Nathan looked at me properly then.

If you’ve known someone since school, they can stand there grown and broader and wearing adult clothes and still look fifteen when they’re annoyed. Nathan had that. The whole old shape of him came back the second his face set.

“Nothing yet,” he said.

“Nothing?”

“She’s in shock.”

“You seem very sure.”

“What’s that meant to mean?”

There wasn’t much point pretending at this stage.

“It means why was she looking for me in the first place?”

Nathan took a step closer. “You tell me.”

Jonah pushed off the wall.

“Ease up.”

Nathan didn’t look at him. “I’m talking to Luke.”

“Unlucky,” Jonah said. “So am I.”

Mia stepped between them before anybody did something embarrassing in a hospital cubicle.

“Not here.”

Nathan looked at her, then at me.

“She shouldn’t have gone out there,” he said.

That one stayed in the room after he left.

Not because it was useful.

Because it was strange.

Mia heard it too. I could tell by the way she stopped pacing.

“What did he mean by that?”

I shook my head. “No idea.”

“You’re lying again.”

“No. I’d say so if I knew.”

Would I? Maybe. Hard to say. I wasn’t exactly building a convincing case for myself in the honesty department.

Mum came back a few minutes later looking wrung out.

“Her aunt’s with her now,” she said.

Nobody asked about Nathan. Nobody needed to.

Mum sat down and looked at me.

“You’re not coming home alone tonight.”

I almost laughed.

“Mum.”

“No.”

“Mum, whoever it was—”

“Whoever it was knew where you were tonight.” She looked at the dressing on my arm. “That’s enough for me.”

Mia nodded. “She’s right.”

I looked at Jonah because there wasn’t much else to do with that.

He said, “He can come to mine.”

Nobody made anything of it.

Not then.

Mum just nodded straight away like the practical part mattered more than the rest. Mia looked between us once, quick and unreadable, then said, “Fine.”

I said, “You don’t have to do that.”

Jonah looked at me. “Yeah. I do.”

That went into me harder than I wanted it to.

The nurse came back after that and checked the dressing again. Told me to come back if I got dizzy enough to vomit, feverish enough to shake, or stupid enough to pretend the arm was fine.

That last one was implied, but not by much.

By the time they let us go, the sky outside had started turning that ugly pre-dawn grey that makes every building look tired. Mum went with Mia. I ended up back in Jonah’s ute because apparently surviving a knife in a ditch does not win you your own car back.

He drove.

I watched the road.

After a while he said, “Did you think it was Nathan in the car?”

Straight into it.

“No.”

He waited.

I said, “Maybe.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“No.”

He drove on a bit. Fence lines. Machinery in paddocks. One set of lights far off where somebody was already up for milking or hadn’t slept at all.

“I asked you that week,” he said.

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

That one didn’t need dressing up. It was bad enough on its own.

“I don’t know.”

“Bullshit.”

I turned and looked at him. “Alright. I was scared.”

“That’s part of it.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the other part?”

I looked back out the window.

“The other part is if I’d said it out loud, it became real in a way I couldn’t push sideways anymore.”

He didn’t answer straight away.

Then: “That’s at least honest.”

We turned into his road as the sun started showing properly over the paddocks. His old place sat behind the shed the way it always had. Weatherboard house. Ute parts in the grass. Dog already barking because apparently that animal viewed dawn as a personal insult.

I got out slow. My side had started complaining properly by then.

Jonah came around the front of the ute and stood there while I found my balance. The dog kept barking. A bird took off from the pepper tree. Somewhere inside the house a radio started up.

I said, “You don’t have to make this weird.”

He looked at me.

“That’s rich.”

Fair.

He jerked his head toward the house.

“Come inside before you fall over.”

I went.

Not because I trusted the morning.

Because I didn’t trust anything else.