To lose that expression in his eyes was a raw, unending grief.
But she’d get it back someday. She would.
Now she adjusted the blanket around his shoulders, wiped his mouth, smoothed back his hair. Her fingers grazed the scar. Even after all this time, she could still see the memory of the smile in his face, still hear his voice, hear the laugh now locked away. She sat down beside him.
“I talked to Maya and Blue yesterday,” she said, shivering in the air conditioning. “They’re going back to Montauk. They want me to go with them. Some sort of turning-thirty-even-though-I-already-am trip. So stupid, right?” She searched his empty eyes. Not that she thought he’d actually respond. But sometimes it seemed like she could see the answer there. Or maybe it was in his eyes that she got permission to see the answer she already knew. “Obviously I’m not going.” She could hear her voice sounding strange, sped up. “I would never leave you for that long.” She waited. “I’m just saying that I know you need me.” She scanned his face again, looking for a reaction, one clue, anything. The rain outside was coming down harder, sounding like a constant blast of radio static. “You do need me. Right?”
His mouth was slack, his glassy eyes staring into some world she could not see.
“I just need a sign.”
Some stupid machine behind her in the hall would not stop its monotonous beeping.
“For God’s sake, just say something!”
Hannah sat back, startled. She looked behind her, terrified that her voice had carried into the hall. Then she turned back to Henry, somehow expecting to see rage on his face, but the lights were still out. There was not even the courtesy of anger.
“Oh, Henry, I’m so sorry.” A small sob choked her. “This isn’t what I meant to do at all.” She stood up, nearly knocking over her chair. “I don’t know what got into me.” But Hannah did know. She was going to do it. She didn’t know how, but she was. “I think I have to go. Or want to go. I’m not sure which. On the trip, I mean. Please forgive me. I’ll be back in three days. Just three. I promise.” She bent down and hugged him. “I love you, Henry,” she said. “Please don’t be sad. I’ll be back before you can even miss me.” She knew if she lingered a moment longer, she’d change her mind. With one last look she rushed out and down the hall.
Mrs. Miller was sitting in her usual spot in the doorway. “Leaving so soon?” she called as Hannah neared.
“I’m... Yes,” Hannah stammered, pausing as she reached her, not wanting to be rude. “I’ll be going away for a little while. Just the long weekend.” She stared at her shoes. “I’m...” She took a deep breath, willing herself to say it, to try it on. “Uh...my friends and I are going on a trip. To the beach.” She glanced up, daring to meet Mrs. Miller’s eyes, fearing judgment. Instead, the corners of Mrs. Miller’s mouth curved into a smile.
“Oh, how wonderful!” she said. “I always loved a good adventure! Bring me something back, would you? A lifeguard perhaps. Preferably a young one. They’ll need to keep up.”
Hannah smiled with relief, with permission, and Mrs. Miller put up her delicate arthritic hand. “High five.”
MAYA
Three states away in northern New Jersey, Maya stood in the middle of the ER and asked, “Where is everybody? It’s too freaking quiet in here.” The last two hours of her shift were always the deadest, the ones Maya liked the least. Being busy was one of the things about the job that worked for her, the constant running around. She liked to say it kept her thin, though of course it didn’t, because she wasn’t. Not that she cared. She was a firm believer in conscious self-deception as a life philosophy.
She’d gotten her job as a patient transporter through Blue and her endless connections right after she was fired from her last job. Which Blue had also gotten her. At the time, it had seemed like the worst idea in the world.
“I don’t do hospitals,” she’d said.
“You don’t have a choice,” Blue said. “Just be happy you have a job.”
“I am happy to have a job. I’m just not happy that I actually have to do it.”
Blue had sighed in acceptance of the fact that Maya was hopelessly irresponsible and that deep down this was one of the things she loved most about her. Or at least that’s what Maya decided the sigh meant.
Now Maya slipped into the locker room for her purse, hoping to scrounge up enough change for a snack. She pulled out her wallet, which was empty, of course. It was always slightly surprising to find no money in it, such was the extent of her optimism. The foreclosure letter she’d received was jammed in the bottom of her purse, unopened. She’d known it was coming. But the sight of it still made her stomach sink anew. She stuffed her bag back into her locker, paused at the single, fraying picture she’d taped to the inside door—the girls in the photo booth at the Bridgehampton fair that last summer, their smiles so big, so easy. She glanced at the small mirror she’d hung above it, fluffed her hair, noticed the first signs of wrinkles under her eyes. She smiled to brighten her face. Still the prettiest, she said to the picture. She laughed to herself, imagining her friends giving her the finger as they always had when she said that.
The month of July always snuck up on her, skipped her thoughts and went straight into her body, like a quiet ache in an old broken bone before rain. She refused to give energy to memory, sure that this was why her friends were all screwed up now. They couldn’t climb out of its dark well. But sometimes she could still feel it slipping under her closed door, not in words or images, but as a sense of dislocation, as if that night had done more than traumatize them all; it had ejected her from the only sense of home she’d ever known. Considering the letter in her purse, she felt that dislodgment now more than ever. Carefully she untaped the picture, tucked it in her bag, closed the locker door and returned to the insult of harsh lighting in the ER.
Two nurses were sitting at the station, chatting in low voices. Steve, a first-year medical student and world-class pain in her ass, was flipping through a chart, ever eager to find an exciting diagnosis, a patient with something other than the flu or chest pain, an opportunity to be a hero.
“Another day without a rare deadly virus to cure. How will you go on?” she said.
He stared unamused from beneath a mop of hair overdue for a cut. In return, she flashed him her most winning smile. Just to annoy. He gave her the finger. Victory!
“Seriously, though, where is everybody?” She glanced at her watch. She was antsy for work to be over so she could run home to pack. She’d planned on doing it last night, but then she’d bumped into the twenty-one-year-old who’d come in for a follow-up on his broken wrist. She wondered now if he was still in her bed and, if so, if she could borrow a twenty from him when she got home. In a matter of hours, she would be hopping the bus to Blue’s and she needed some snacks for the road.