Free The Wooden Sea by Jonathan Carroll Page A

checking herself in the mirror to see how they looked, how she walked in them, how she came across as a Doc Martens girl.

    But the worst part was her socks. They were fire-engine red with little white hearts all over them.
    Her skin above the socks was a different white and so transparent you could see a swarm of fine blue veins just below the surface.

    I am only a policeman in a small town. But over the years have seen enough violence and death both here and in Vietnam, where I was a medic to vouch for this--most times it is the small, irrelevant things that burn the horror into your heart. The dead are only that--finished. But what surrounds them afterward, or what they brought with them to their final minute, survives. A teenage girl overdoses on heroin but what flattens you are her socks with white hearts on them.
    A man wraps his silver car around a tree killing him and his whole family, but what makes it unforgettable is diat that song you love, "Sally Go Round the Roses," is still playing on the radio in the wreck when you get to it. A blue New York Mets baseball cap spotted with blood on a living room floor, the scorched family cat in the yard of the burnt house, the Bible the suicide left opened to Song of Solomon on the bed next to him. These are what you remember because they are the last scraps of their last day, their last moments with a heartbeat.
    And those things remain after they're gone, the final snapshots in their album. Antonya went to her drawer that morning and specifically chose the red socks with the white hearts.
    How could that image not crush you, knowing where she would end up three hours later?

    Redmond began to cry. Bill and I looked at each other. I motioned him to take the principal out.
    There was no reason for him to be in the bathroom anymore.
    "I'm sorry. I just can't believe it."

    My assistant Bill Pegg is a good man. A few years ago he lost his daughter to cystic fibrosis and that ordeal turned him into a different person. He now has a special manner with the shocked or grieving; a way to keep them balanced in the first unbearable minutes after real horror has entered their lives. When they're trying to understand the new language of grief, as well as cope with the loss of gravity, the _weightlessness _that comes with desolation or great suffering.
    When I asked Bill how he did it he said, "I just go there with them and tell them what I know about it. That's all you can do."

    After they left and the door hissed shut I went over to Antonya. 1 got down on one knee in front of her. If someone had come in then how silly it would have looked--like I was proposing to a sleeping girl sitting on the toilet.

    One arm hung straight down at her side. The other lay across her leg.
    I assumed she had been right-handed, so I looked at her left arm to see if I could find the needle mark. Her head rested against the white tile wall, eyes closed. The needle mark was a small red welt just below the crease lines in her left elbow. I unconsciously felt for a pulse. Of course there wasn't one.
    Then I reached up and touched that mark.

    "This is where you died, stupid kid." Holding her elbow in my hand, I ran my thumb tenderly Page 44

    over the mark and whispered to her, "Right here."

    "I'm not stupid."

    Empty-headed, refusing to believe, I automatically looked up from her arm upon hearing the soft, slurry voice.

    Antonya's head rolled slowly from left to right until it faced me. She opened her eyes and spoke again in that same, not-quite-there voice.
    "I wasn't supposed to die."

    "You're alive!"

    "No. But I _can _still feel your hand. I feel your warmth." Her voice was a halting whisper, a trickle. Her tap had been turned off but some water was still left in the pipe, a dribble. "Tell my mother I didn't do this. Tell her they did it to me."

    "Who did it? Who's _they!"_

    "Find the dog." Her eyes stayed open but emptied. Every trace of life oozed out, into the air, back into life. I saw it go.