She opened her eyes to see the outline of Maya’s features, her familiar eyes compassionate and love-lit in the dark. “Thanks,” she said. She let her lids go heavy. “Can you turn the bathroom light back off?”
“Your eyes are closed. You can’t see it.”
“No, I’ll be able to tell.”
“Not if you’re asleep.”
“But I won’t be able to fall asleep with the light on.”
“Yes, you will. Just let the kind pharmaceutical fairies take you away.”
“But,” Hannah said, “why does the light need to be on?”
“Gently taking you away off to dreamland...”
“Wait a minute.” Hannah sat up. “Are you afraid of the dark?”
“What? No!”
“You are!” she shrieked. “I can’t believe it. Is it the boogeyman you’re worried about?”
“I’m not afraid of the dark.”
“Boogey, boogey, boogey, boogey!”
They were both laughing now.
“I can’t wait to tell Blue!”
“When did this become about me?”
“Oh my God, you’re scared of the dark—and you know what’s the best part? That’s, like, the one thing I’m not afraid of.”
“Oh, piss off.”
“Speaking of being pissed,” Hannah said, turning serious. “I feel really bad about Blue. I think she was genuinely upset about the whole Renee thing.”
“Oh, whatever! She’s being ridiculous.”
Hannah sighed. “We don’t know that. Maybe Renee did something really bad.”
“What could possibly be that bad? Blue’s just queen of the grudge. Remember that time she didn’t speak to Renee for like two months because Renee ran over her pet lizard?”
“Well, yeah, but... Blue loved Edward.”
“It wasn’t intentional! As far as I know... Look, don’t worry about it. I have a feeling they’ll be friends again soon enough.”
“Really?” Hannah said doubtfully. “I don’t see how, but...good night, then.” She watched Maya’s shadow move to the bathroom. “Maya?” she said. She knew she shouldn’t but couldn’t stop herself. “Henry’s okay, right? Do you think he’s wondering where I am?”
She heard the bathroom door close.
MAYA
Maya stood on the other side of the door, leaned against it, breathed. She didn’t understand the point of asking a question when you didn’t want the answer. Sometimes Hannah’s issues felt like a personal attack on her, forcing Maya to remember over and over again why they were there. She knew this was unfair.
She looked at Hannah’s Xanax bottle. About ten pills left out of sixty and it was filled less than three weeks before. Maya envisioned shaking them out into the chipped white toilet, flushing them down like she used to do with her mother’s pills no matter how many times it got her in trouble. She would do anything to exorcise the terrified animal who had taken over her friend’s body, made her need drugs and plastic bags and antibacterial soaps. Anything to return the Hannah who existed before Henry had been stuffed into an ambulance like a couch into a moving van, rushed to the ER in a dizzying blur of blue light and howling, the smooth black summer night shattered with emergency.
Maya had been so sure in those first days when Henry was in the ICU that everything would be fine, that Henry was young and strong and that life would not allow such an injustice. She visited, she talked to him, she brought him presents for when he woke up. But once he was moved into a home—his condition accepted as it was—she found excuses not to go. There was always something she had to do, a reason she had to put it off one more day and then another. Just like she’d done with those bills that kept piling up on her kitchen table. Better to stuff them into a drawer, pretend it wasn’t happening. What else was she supposed to do? She couldn’t fix it. And she knew she had to keep moving or she’d end up like Hannah, stuck inside that night, roaming the halls and rattling the chains of fear like a ghost.
She sighed, looked around at the bathroom, the tiles skin pink, the natty white towels neatly folded over the bar, the white bath mat draped upon the tub. All the people who had paused here on their way to somewhere else, on their way home. She thought about her house, the only thing that had ever belonged to her. Why couldn’t she hold on to anything?
Don’t pick at it, she told herself. This was what she thought when something was wrong in her life. When she was a kid, her father always reprimanded her when she scratched at the scabs on her knees. It turned out to be the only useful thing he’d ever taught her. Don’t pick at a wound. It just makes it worse.
A sudden familiar restlessness kicked up in her, an itch. She’d always enjoyed attention, but in moments like this, something happened in her, a craving so strong and wiggly that she had to sate it just to sit still again. She pulled out her phone, scrolled her contacts, called the twenty-one-year-old with the scaphoid fracture. What was his name? Justin, Dustin? Jeff? Whatever. Irrelevant.
“Yo.” He picked up. His voice was thick with sleep.
Yo? She removed the phone briefly from her ear and stared at it, annoyed. “Hey, it’s Maya!”
There was a silence, one second, two, eternity, and then, “Oh yeah, the nurse with the big boobs.”
“Medical transporter with the big boobs.”
“Right. Come over. I miss you.”
Maya rolled her eyes and gave her phone the middle finger. Usually it was enough—the cheap thrill of men’s desire—so easy to provoke—a momentary distraction. But tonight, a tiny sadness, the size of a single tear, welled inside. She didn’t understand why. What was she expecting? She flashed back to Steve at work asking, “When are you going to have a real relationship?”
Was that what she wanted? A real relationship? She peeked her head out of the bathroom, saw Hannah’s shadow in the dark, clutching her blanket to her chin.
No.
She wanted a good time. He just wasn’t it.
“I think you have the wrong number!” she said into the phone.
“But you called—”
She hung up, smiled into the mirror to cheer herself. Behind her, the leaky bathtub faucet dripped—tock, tock, tock—the sound of insanity. She got undressed for bed, caught sight of the small constellation of scars on her back from the time when she was seven and her mother had thrown plates at her in a fit of rage. The lines were faded now, a mark of time.