Free Out of Order by Casey Lawrence Page B

puffing like he’d run down a flight of stairs and bearing in his arms a pair of children’s pajamas patterned with koala bears.
    “It was all they had,” my father explained breathlessly as he placed the pajamas on the bed, his eyes apologetically searching my face for embarrassment or resentment toward him. I felt neither.
    I sat down on the edge of the bed and began to peel off my tights while my mother ushered the policemen around the curtain. The tights clung to my skin, glued by dried blood at the knees and calves. Pulling them free stung my skin, like ripping off Band-Aids.
    My mother helped unzip my dress from the back, her delicate fingers brushing my shoulders as she pulled down the straps, and the dress fell into a heap on the floor. I stepped out of the pile of tulle deftly and picked up the pajamas, not once looking at either of my parents as I pulled the top over my head and struggled to get my legs into the bottoms. The elastic cuffs hit me at the elbows and midcalf, constricting my movements. I rolled up the sleeves so that I could bend my arms, though it felt like the cuffs were cutting off blood flow.
    “I want to go home,” I said again, finally looking at my father’s face and acknowledging the look of sympathy and sadness washing across it in waves. “Now.”
    My mother handed my clothes to the officers as my father led me around the curtain and into the brightly lit hospital ward. Barefoot, I walked gingerly over cold, sterile tiles and tried to ignore the strange looks being shot my way as I was marched down corridors that smelled like Pine-Sol. I felt extremely conspicuous in too-small pajamas and with my hair curled and pinned up still, styled by Kate in the hours before prom.
    We took an elevator down into the underground garage where my father had parked, and without a word, he bent his back and knees as the doors opened to asphalt and concrete. I put my arms around his shoulders and allowed myself to be lifted, wrapping my legs securely around his thin waist. I felt like a child again, being carried around on my strong father’s back, though in the six or seven years since I’d done it, he’d become more hunched and bony than I remembered, and his footfalls seemed to echo loudly through the garage until we reached the car.
    My feet never had to touch the ground as I was dropped into the backseat of the Volvo my mother drove to work each morning, commuting an hour and a half each way into the city, where there was work for a prosecutor. I leaned my head against the cool glass of the window while my parents climbed into the front seats of the car and pulled out of the small garage and out into the night, which seemed already to be brightening with a touch of dawn.
    Nothing ever happened in the town where we lived, with its long, quiet lanes and acres of apple trees that blossomed with big, pinkish flowers every spring. I watched those same trees flash by the window, illuminated into strange dark shapes with mushroomed tops by the low-hanging, old-fashioned streetlamps I often admired in the daytime. Our police station had six regular employees and a troop of volunteers who donned their uniforms only for the big parade that rolled through town at Christmastime to stand at the street corners directing traffic and spectators. In the winter, the streetlamps were piled with snow and icicles that the volunteers knocked off with old broom handles so they wouldn’t fall on the smattering of people who would line the streets to cheer on the high school band and road-roughened floats covered each year by boughs of fresh-cut evergreen.
    I closed my eyes as the streetlamps flashing by triggered my nausea. Last winter Jessa had gone around with her younger sisters bringing cookies door-to-door to the elderly women on Surrey Lane and to friends of the family, which was just about everyone in town. The three of them, in matching knitted toques and mittens, had looked like something out of a TV Christmas