Where It Began

XXVIII

“SO,” MR. HEALY SAYS, “ARE WE ON THE SAME PAGE?”

Given that the only other page involves me going to juvie jail and being a car-thief drunk-driver with a criminal record for about ten minutes until a gang girl stabs me to death with a stiletto-sharp, rat-tailed comb, you bet we’re on the same page.

But now that I can barely breathe because it feels as if my throat is closing up, there’s The Bright Side. It’s my first offense; nobody got all that hurt; and probation is a real good option.

This is so so not totally reassuring.

“So,” he says, making a brave but unsuccessful attempt to push his sleeves half an inch up his arms. “When you were arrested, do you recall what you said to the police?”

“I was arrested?”

“You don’t recall being arrested?” Mr. Healy starts thumbing through the files with increased interest.

“Uh-uh.”

“This is interesting,” he says, plucking papers from the file. “Let’s see what we have here. . . . Wait a minute, is this the LAPD or the sheriff or what?”

I am trying to look as calm as possible while waiting for this to make sense.

Mr. Healy looks perturbed. “I don’t see an unbooked DUI, I don’t see a citation. . . . Wait . . . okay, this paperwork is not in your name.”

“What isn’t?”

Mr. Healy heaves a giant sigh. “Tell me you didn’t give them a false name. Heidi?”

“No way! It must have been the nurse or someone, seriously. I was delirious. I was in some kind of coma.” It is hard to tell if he believes me.

“We’re going to have to fix this,” he says, frowning at my file. “I’m going to have to take you in there.”

I’m too scared to ask what the this we have to fix is, and where we have to go to do the fixing.

“And you weren’t handcuffed to the hospital bed?”

“What? No!”

Mr. Healy shakes his head. He looks somewhat disgusted with the wrong-name paperwork, or me, or both. “Okay, do you remember talking to a sheriff at the hospital?”

What I remember is the gun lady and the vigilant nurse. I remember telling people who, when you think about it, had no reason to be there if they weren’t police, things like “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember” and “I really don’t remember” and shutting my eyes and pretending they weren’t there and falling asleep. I remember drip bags full of clear liquids that greatly enhanced the possibility of falling fast asleep in the middle of a sentence.

“Well, I know they wanted to talk to me. But the nurses kept telling them I was comatose and they couldn’t come in. And that they had my blood alcohol level so what else did they need.”

“I see,” Mr. Healy says, apparently pleased with this turn of events. “Blood draw. Blood draw? I see the blood draw. What I don’t see is a warrant. And I don’t see a consent form. And I don’t see that a certified nurse or a phlebotomist did the draw either. You don’t recall signing a consent form, do you?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, well,” Mr. Healy says. “This might give us something to work with. No bottles in the car or at the scene. And maybe no usable blood work. Just maybe they’re going to have to break more of a sweat than they like breaking to find someone who saw you putting it away.”

“Good luck with that one,” I say. “No one will say they saw me. Are you kidding me?”

“Pardon?”

“No one will ever say anything like that.”

Mr. Healy looks up from the file. “How can you know that?”

How could he not know that? That no one would ever tell. That Winston and every place else like it is a sacrosanct no-snitch zone, the Citadels of Silence of the Western World. Even in seventh grade, when Buddy Geiss and his eighth-grade a-hole pals were sticking little kids’ heads in the toilet and flushing for no apparent reason and everybody hated his guts and was afraid they’d be the next upside down, little seventh-grade kid with pee in their hair, nobody said a single word.

And because I’m Billy Nash’s girlfriend, sort of, if anyone does say a single word, they’ll come out of this looking worse than me, which is, all things considered, someplace pretty damn far south of happy.

Not to mention, it seems somewhat beside the point given what you would think any reasonable lawyer would have to see as the main event of the Gabby Gardiner Crime Spree and Amnesia Fest: the car.

“What about the car?” I say.

“Well, insurance should take care of that,” Mr. Healy says, not even looking up. “And you won’t be driving for a while, of course.”

Excuse me?

“Because I took the car?”

“Because you drove it drunk into a tree,” he sighs. “Okay, let me explain this to you again.”

“Wait! My boyfriend . . . my former boyfriend is like Mr. DUI and he’s still driving,” I say. The thought of being stranded in that house on Estrada with Vivian and John and no possible means of escape is somewhat horrifying. “When can I drive?”

Mr. Healy hems and haws and makes a lawyer joke about how my former boyfriend’s lawyer must have something on the DA hardy har har. “And even if the blood alcohol is out as evidence,” he says, “then we’ve still got some pretty reckless driving on our hands.”

He seems determined to completely avoid the thing with me stealing the car, which seems like it could be a serious crime.

“The car?” I say again.

He just sits there in the squeaky chair looking concerned but clueless.

“Uh . . . stealing the car . . .”

“You stole a car!” Mr. Healy says, trying to sound calm as his chair squeaks back to its full upright position.

“There’s no way Billy would have given me the keys to that car. That car is his baby. I mean, it was his baby. Before I wrecked it. So it seems like I must have just, I don’t know, sort of taken it. Won’t the police figure that out?”

Mr. Healy is suddenly taking a lot of notes. “And, uh, what does Billy say?”

“Pretty much nothing. He pretty much says not to worry about it, and his mom pretty much says the same thing.”

“This would be Agnes Nash who says not to worry about it?”

“Uh-huh.”

At which point, Mr. Healy puts down his yellow legal pad and smiles at me.

“Okay, then,” he says, settling back down into the chair which squeaks an even more hideous protest. “You just might not have anything to worry about on that aspect of it. The police and the prosecutor haven’t brought it up, and I don’t think we’ll be bringing it up either, eh?” Hardy har har.

So if nobody says anything about the car, we can all join hands and have group amnesia together?

Like if no one says it happened, then it didn’t happen?

As if Billy had said: Here, drunken girl, take my stu