Marie Sexton - Promises

“Why didn’t they call you?”

He suddenly looked sheepish. “The battery on my phone is dead, and the charger is at home.” By which I knew he meant at my place, where he hadn’t been all week. I felt my eyebrows go up, and he gave me the pseudo-smile. “I know. I’m an idiot. I’m going to catch hell for it later. Right now, they want me to go and help with the search.” He reached out and grabbed my wrist. “Jared, stay here. Don’t go anywhere until you hear from me.” Then to the rest of them, “In fact, you should all go inside and lock the doors. If he knew to go to Jared’s house, then he might know to come here next.” Lizzy’s hand flew up to her mouth, and Mom clutched James to her like she thought Dan was going to jump out of the bushes and try to snatch him out of her arms. “I tried to talk them into leaving an officer here, but they don’t think I’m right.”

Just then, Grant ran back up to Matt. “I found a gun for you. It’s in the car. Are you ready to go?”

Matt looked over to where his parents were standing. Joseph had his arms crossed and was staring at the sky, and Lucy was talking quietly to him. They didn’t seem to notice the chaos around them. “Give me one minute, Grant.”

“Hurry.” Grant turned and went back to his car. The other cops were all back in their cars too. Some of them had left already. The ones that remained were just waiting for him.

Matt took a deep breath and then walked over to his parents. His dad turned his back on him and walked away, but Lucy was listening as he started to explain what was going on. Lizzy, Brian, and Mom went up the steps back into the house. I watched until they were inside and then turned back to where Matt was talking to his mom. That’s when I saw Dan.

He stepped out of the dark shadows next to the garage. We were three points of a triangle—Dan on one point, me on the second, and Matt with his mom on the third. I saw his hand come up. I saw the gun. It was pointed right at Matt.

Everything was in slow motion. I was running toward Matt, yelling his name. He and Lucy were just turning to face me when I reached them, and that was when I heard the gun go off. Something slammed into me. Matt pushed past me and ran full speed, straight at Dan. Dan squeezed off another shot, but he was obviously thrown off guard by Matt bearing down on him, because the shot went wide. Matt barreled into him in a tackle worthy of the NFL, knocking the gun out of his hand, and had him pinned on the ground in record time.

I was feeling a little wobbly and turned to see that Lucy was hanging on to me. “I’m so glad I’m not the only one he can do that to,” I told her.

For some reason, she didn’t laugh. She looked scared. “Jared, I think you need to sit down.”

And suddenly I realized she wasn’t hanging on to me. She was trying to hold me up.

And then I was on the ground.

“Matt!” she yelled. The whole thing had only taken seconds. The cops were just now getting out of their cars and rushing toward us. I saw Matt, who was still holding Dan to the ground, look over at me and his face went white.

“Somebody bring me some fucking cuffs!”

I was trying to stand up when I heard Lucy say, “Jared, hold still.” I realized she was sitting on the ground next to me. “Jared, you’ve been shot. You need to be still.” She pulled the scarf from around her neck and held it against my side.

And suddenly, it hurt.

A lot!

I heard somebody say, “The ambulance is on the way.” And then Matt was next to me, holding my hand and looking down into my face.

“Hang in there, Jared.”

“He shot me?”

“Yes.” His eyes left mine as he glanced down to where his mom was pushing hard on my side. Then he looked back at me. “There’s a lot of blood.”

“Rub some dirt on it.”

“He’s delirious,” Lucy said, but Matt shook his head, a tiny hint of a smile in his eyes.

“No. He’s not. He’s going to be fine. Right, Jared?”

“Yeah. I feel great. What’s for dessert?” He squeezed my hand.

Dan was yelling—I couldn’t tell what. Cops were all around, and there was so much noise. I could hear Lizzy and mom crying. And now, it was really starting to hurt, and I could hear Grant saying, “Stay back. Give them some room.”

“It’s just like the movies,” I said to Matt. Now he started to look concerned. He was obviously re-evaluating his denial that I was delirious. “Jesus Christ, Matt, it hurts.”

“Hang on.”

I was feeling very light, like I might float up off of the ground. It seemed good that Lucy was holding me down, although I wished she didn’t have to make it hurt so much. There seemed to be lights floating around that I couldn’t focus on. I heard Lucy say, “He’s going into shock.”

“Jared.” And now Matt sounded scared. “Jared, I love you. Don’t you dare die on me.”

I tried to put my hand up to touch his face, but I couldn’t quite get it there. My vision was starting to fade. “Matt, I think I’m going to faint now.”

“No, Jared! Stay with me!”

I didn’t hear anything after that.

THE first few times I woke, I was heavily drugged. I was vaguely aware of a parade of faces: one gray-faced doctor and an army of nurses, all interchangeable in their blue scrubs. Lizzy, Brian, Mom, Matt. Lucy? My molasses brain caught on that one, ripples of confusion, before flowing along into oblivion. I was vaguely aware that there were often people in my room I couldn’t see. They talked a lot, but only random phrases stuck with me—“replace the window” and “like a nanny”—but I couldn’t make any sense of them.

I kept feeling things crawling on me, but nobody seemed to notice. I finally managed to catch one of the nurses and said, “Bugs on my skin.”

She patted my hand and said, “It’s the Oxycodone.”

I heard the words but had no idea what they meant. I was trying to break the sentence down. It was definitely in English.

I fell asleep again before I got any further than that.

THE time finally came when I woke up, and the world made sense again. The fog in my brain had receded and become only a cloudy blotch in my memory. I was relieved that, at that moment, the only person in the room with me was Matt. He was leaning against the wall, looking out the window.

“Oxycodone makes me itch,” I said. Well, maybe there was still a little bit of fog left. I wasn’t exactly sure why that was the first thing to come out of my mouth.

His head whipped my direction. “What?”

“The painkiller they were giving me. It makes my skin crawl.”

He smiled and came to sit on the bed next to me. “That explains a lot. You kept saying ‘bugs.’”

“Next time I get shot, tell them I want Vicodin instead.”

“I will.” But then his face became serious. “You look like hell. How do you feel?”

“Like I need a shower.” I was looking around a little more and realized there were flowers everywhere. “Who are all those from?”

“Mostly your students and various members of the Coda Police Department. The school. Mr. Stevens. A lot of them are from people I don’t know. You’re a hero, you know?”

“Do I get a cape? I want red.”

“The way the story is being told, you bravely jumped in front of Mom and me in order to save our lives.” His eyes were crinkling at me, and his voice was light. “You took a bullet for us.”

“What am I, the secret service? I was just trying to get your attention. I wasn’t planning on getting shot.”

He smiled. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

We didn’t talk for a minute, and I started thinking about the scene at the table, before the incident in the front yard. Matt had actually told his dad about us.

“Why did you do it?”

He must have been thinking about it, too, because he didn’t have to ask what I was talking about.

“That day, I just kept thinking about the choices I had made in my life. Some of the hardest ones were decisions I knew he would hate if he knew about them. But they all turned out to be good. First, I decided not to join the military. And I think that was the right choice. Second.” He was ticking them off on his fingers as he talked. “I decided a few years ago to quit dating. I’ve already told you that my life got a lot easier after that. Then, I decided that your friendship was more important to me than what my coworkers were saying. And that turned out to be a good decision. And then when Cherie died, I decided to accept the fact that I wanted to fuck your brains out.”

“And that,” I interjected, “was a very wise decision.”

He smiled and winked at me. “It was.” His face grew serious again. “So we were all sitting there at the table, and he was screaming. And I was thinking about all of those decisions and how they had brought me to this place in my life where I was really, truly happy for the first time ever. So I asked myself, what’s the worst he can do to me? And I knew the answer right away—he could disown me. And I wasn’t really sure anymore why that seemed like a bad thing. It was like the solution was right there in front of me, and I was just being too fucking stupid to see it.” He was looking down at where our hands were clasped together on the bed by my side. “It’s actually a relief. I don’t have to waste another second of my life trying to make him happy.”

“What about your mom?”

He brightened a little. “Once she calmed down, she told me that she had suspected all along.” Funny how that works, I thought, remembering my conversation with Brian so many years ago. “I can’t really say that she’s happy about it, but she knows I’m happy. And that means something to her, I think.”