Authors: J. Wachowski
They all look at me, the faces of my work. Brown skin, black skin. Hungry eyes. Haunted. They come from everywhere.
Listen to me!
I pound the heels of my hands against my eyes.
Stop. Stop. Stop.
Worst of all, my family’s small pains were nothing—nothing!—in comparison to some of what I’d seen—the worst on earth. All my common pains, all Jenny’s. Not worth a photo or a sound bite’s worth of time.
Now, here in front of me, my sister’s eyes in my niece’s face. And I still felt the pain, exactly the same. Despite all I’d seen.
“Oh God,” I croaked. My stomach folded in on itself with pain.
“Maddy!” Curzon shouted through the interference. He was behind me, holding me back, or up, one arm across my chest and a hand gripping my shoulder. “She’s alive. Don’t bail. Get your ass in that ambulance.”
I did.
9:52:34 p.m.
Doctors jabbered at me in the emergency room. Their voices were hard to hold on to. The sounds of buzzers and elevator bells and metal carts kept jumping to the foreground, as if my internal audio B-track had a mind of its own. I kept nodding, hoping they’d just get the hell away from me or shut up for a minute. The last three hours had been hell.
“We’re going to transfer her to peds ICU, Ms. O’Hara. Her oxygen levels are still pretty low. The seizures will probably pass but she has to stay under observation.”
“I understand.”
“She’s all right for now. Everything seems to be stabilizing. The paramedics found the blister pack. It was some kind of trial pack of anti-anxiety medicine. Nasty stuff for a kid. Any idea where she got it?”
“No.”
“Do you take any medications?”
“I had something prescribed for my knee on Sunday. I had stitches, in the emergency room. Could she have—?”
The doctor rejected that idea. He showed me the foil packet. “This is a sample. Doctors give them out to test a medication, to see if it’s effective for a specific patient. The drug companies often provide them free of charge. This particular drug is the rage on the club scene right now. Mixed with alcohol it creates a very uninhibited evening.”
“Where did she get something like that?” I recognized the blister packaging. Tonya had something similar for her back medicine. And I’d seen some in the emergency bucket Jenny had pulled out of the garage. “A friend of mine had been visiting this weekend. She has back problems. I know Jenny saw her take something, heard us talking about painkillers.”
“…the pleasant land of counter pane.”
A grinding nausea returned to my stomach. All those questions about pain. Tonya was going to freak.
“Jenny didn’t take painkillers,” he said. “She took something a lot harder to find.”
“My sister is—was—a nurse. Here, actually. She’s got a huge bucket of medicine and stuff.” I rubbed my head. I should have taken the bucket away from Jenny. Put it somewhere safe. It never even occurred to me. “I’ll have to check. That might be where Jenny found them. How many did she take?”
“Not many. More than a couple and her liver—” He frowned, shook his head. He was a young guy with the ashy complexion of doctors indentured to the emergency room. Pale blue eyes behind glasses, he didn’t make eye contact easily; he kept looking toward the window. “She’s going to need more than my kind of doctoring when she comes around. You do understand that?”
“Her mother died a couple months ago.” There was too much to explain. It would take too long for both of us. His impatience to move along to the next patient, next crisis was like the buzz of a live current between us.
“I’ll have to report this to a social worker. She’ll be able to get you a referral.”
“I understand.” Tiredness swamped me all of a sudden. “I need to stay here. Jenny gets nightmares. I want to stay with her.”
“Of course. We’re moving her up to a room. You can stay as long as you want.” He made the effort to meet my eyes and I realized that some of the awkwardness was meant as empathy. He nodded at Curzon and left us alone. Finally.
Curzon announced he was headed down to the cafeteria and promised to return with some warm caffeine-alive, fully sugared for both of us.
Jenny was moved upstairs to a small double room with two empty beds. The last time I spent any time in a hospital, there were crucifixes over every bed. My mother was comforted by the statued suffering hanging on the wall. Jenny’s bed was surrounded by cables, electronics, tubes and sound effects. A television was mounted high on the opposite wall. I left it off, but I had to fight a constant urge to stare at the distorted gray reflection it created.
Nurses clucked in and out, double checking all Jenny’s monitors. They told me she was fine, better, not to worry.
I sat down on the second bed and watched the girl sleep, wondering how she could look so much the same after all that had happened in the last few hours.
Curzon returned with coffee, as well as cups of salty chicken soup and oyster crackers. I made room for him beside me on the bed and when he sat it was a comfort, not an intrusion.
“She’s gonna be all right,” I said, as if I’d always believed.
“That’s good.” He sipped his soup.
“Yeah.” I smiled. “Thanks. For…everything.”
We were having a moment. It’s been a long time since I made a friend. My instincts aren’t always good in that department. I wasn’t quite sure what should happen next.
Jenny’s breathing changed and it caught my attention. Her eyes shifted back and forth beneath the lids, her head twitching with tiny vibrations. Unconscious, she was on the lookout for trouble. The words Grace Ott had spoken to me earlier would not stop looping through my head.
“Do you think Jenny expects bad things to happen to her?” I asked. “Do you think she believes good things won’t ever come again?”
“Kids learn from what they see around them,” Curzon answered. “How about you? Do you expect the worst? Or something better?”
A ripple of something like panic hit me low and deep, but I pushed it off. Who was I to judge Old Man Jost? I had watched while bad things happened my whole career. My whole life.
I picked up our empty cups, stood and tossed them into the trash. He stood too, as if those kind of manners were his habit, and faced me.
“I believe there’s something better,” he said. And then he reached across the space between us. All I could see was that fine warm hand coming toward me…almost…barely, his fingertips touched my cheek.
Perhaps, I closed my eyes.
Maybe I turned my head into his hand.
It’s possible I wanted to feel him against my cheek, my lips. Touching me.
But I never asked for what I saw when my eyes opened.
Longing.
“Jack?” I whispered. “Oh come on now—”
And he did. He scooped me into the wall of his body, arms and thighs and chest making contact, following my clumsy retreat, pressing until I was against the window, nowhere else to go, the metal sill behind my thighs, cold glass at my back. His body was solid and more real than anything I’d felt in months, years, forever.
He pushed his fingers through my hair and tilted my head, my face, my lips up to him.
“You,” he whispered, and then took away those last few molecules of separation.
Mouth soft, everything else hard. What a contrast.
Kissing
…how long since I’d been kissed? Soft, so softly.
Please?
Pleasing. Hard as in inevitable. Deal with me.
Now.
Just like that, I’m gone.
I don’t even know what happened next. Honestly. I couldn’t tell you. My brain reverted to something lower than lizard-level function. I was all the way back to spineless protoplasm.
Next thing I know, Curzon’s pushing himself back, eyes locked on me. The look on his face—oh! I’m not Maddy. I’m like food.
I’m survival.
I’m
it.
Nobody’s ever looked at me like that. Every small hair on my skin lifted. I stood there like an idiot, mouth gaping, lips burning.
Which is right about when I realized Curzon’s cell was ringing, and here comes a nurse shoving her way through the door. I shuffled sideways, the sheriff and I still staring, not even blinking.
“Somebody’s phone is ringing,” the nurse said, glancing back and forth between us. “They will kill you dead if they catch you with that thing turned on anywhere near the telemetry machines. Sign outside says
all
phones off.”
“Turning it off. Right now.” Curzon pulled out his phone. Breaking the law every now and then was a law-enforcement perk, after all. “Sheriff here.”
The nurse bustled around the room, checking Jenny’s gadgets for her temperature and pulse, while I focused on getting my own vital signs back into the normal range.
“Christ, you gotta be kidding me. Who responded?” Curzon asked. He continued staring at me while listening. “On the way.” He snapped the phone shut. “I’ve got to go.”
“Okay,” I mumbled like a half-wit. “Thanks—”
For everything?
The words stuck in my throat, blocking some key artery and causing my face to flush with heat. Junior high social gaff #101.
Curzon raised his hand once again and pointed at me.
You.
He turned and walked out.
I stood there. The nurse did some fiddling with Jenny’s IV. She told me they were pushing fluids to help her body flush the toxic stuff faster. I lay down on the second bed and watched it bubble and drip, counting the seconds, measuring out increments of guilt and confusion.
One one-thousand,
Two one-thousand,
Three one-thousand,
drip.
One—not again,
Two—not today,
Three—not now,
drip.
Jenny slept on. When the ten o’clock news started, I went looking for a can of pop and called Tonya. She was out, so I left a message with the bare bones of what had happened. I knew she’d probably come flying out to the hospital as soon as she heard it, but there was no holding back on this kind of info.
I went back to the room and lay down on the second bed. When pressure ratchets my world down to an impossibly narrow range of positives, my body hums with something that’s a cross between dreaming and a downhill bike ride. I’m hollow inside. My chest echoes with each heartbeat. My eyes burn the world to a soft-focus haze. As a kid it felt like going to heaven, the empty quiet gave me such relief. It still gives me relief, although it never lasts.
My head has been trained to keep busy. All my work is broken into increasingly smaller increments: quarterly, monthly, weekly.
Critical.
Six minutes. :30 seconds.
Out.
One one-thousand,
Two one-thousand,
Three one-thousand,
drip.
Lists of things undone began to crowd my mind. I’d have to cobble together the final piece for the satellite feed tomorrow, tomorrow night latest. Network does not stop for me. Maybe Ainsley could bring the equipment to me so I wouldn’t have to leave Jenny.
A small noise, soft as a lover’s altered breath, came from the bed beside me. Jenny twitched. Her chin thrust up, then froze stiff and still. Without warning, her eyes snapped open. She looked straight up at the ceiling.
One step put me within reach. I touched her wrist with my fingertips.
“I was pretty worried about you.” My voice sounded like I smoked a pack-a-day.
Jenny blinked. I had no idea how blank-faced a child could look. I rubbed up and down her forearm, warming her skin, keeping her with me. The blank face melted as I watched, first the mouth sagged, then the eyes welled with tears.
There was that look again, the one I’d seen flash across Curzon’s face—need.
I was it.
Me?
The thought echoed between my awe and panic for two, three, a dozen heartbeats. Is this what a woman feels like when she becomes a mother? When someone hands her a baby and just like that, who she’s been and who she must become are measured in the eyes of her child?
I dropped the guardrail on the bed and dragged her as close to me as the rubber tubes and strapping would allow. Something started beeping. I ignored it.
“We’ll figure this out. We’ll figure something out. You hear me?”
Her head bumped against my shoulder. I pulled back so I could see her face. Her eyes had rolled back and the whites were all that was visible. Her body shook from inside. It lasted just long enough for me to register what was happening.
Before I could panic, the nurse was standing there. “She’s had another seizure. It’s not unusual.” After checking the monitors, she helped me straighten Jenny in the bed and smooth her covers. On the way out, she added, “Why don’t you try to rest, too?”
“This is me—resting.”
As soon as the nurse was out the door, I crawled into bed with Jenny on her tubeless side. She was so slight, it was easy enough to shove her over and make a little room. I put one arm around the top of her head and propped the extra pillow behind me. Our bodies touched all down the side.
I couldn’t create the white calm of resting. It was too quiet. When I was a kid I used to pray at times like these, repeating words of comfort over and over. Without thinking, the lonely perjury of a
please God
slipped out. Once upon a time, I was a good Catholic girl. Until I grew up and saw what havoc it wrecked on the people around me. Total abstinence has been my answer. No more guardian angels. No more saints. No mass. No confession. No absolution. And no prayer. Still sometimes, I crave it like a junkie—just a taste of heaven, so to speak.
Listening to Rachel the other day had whetted my appetite for some reason. I thought of the pictures I’d taken of the Amish, their faces turning away even as they saw my camera. I would never use them without consent. I snapped those pictures for myself, to keep, to look at later. Sometimes pictures help me figure things out.
I got my first camera when I was eleven. Took pictures of everything—my sister’s baby toys, the tree stump in our yard, the rust on our Pinto wagon, my mom in front of the sewing machine, my dad in his work clothes, my dad on the floor. I kept them all. When things got worse, I took more. I kept those, too.