'Be alive,' she ordered in more than a whisper. 'Be alive when I get there.'
She hurried through the deserted courthouse. The alarm bell from years past hung in a glass case reserved for memorabilia. 'Not today,' Helena said as she remembered her childhood during the oil boom. 'I'll hear no bell today. Not for my J.D.'
In a town marinated in secrets, hinted at but never told, Meredith Allen played Alice, innocently lost in Wonderland. At thirty-four, she still wore her hair long with a ribbon and faced life as if all she saw made sense.
Her path would not have been so tragic if she had wandered blind, but she knew… she knew and she still pretended.
When pulled from the refuge of teaching her second-grade class to report to the office, Meredith saw a lie in the principal's eyes. Something he refused to say. Something he could not reveal as he told her she was needed at the hospital. Kevin had been involved in an oil rig accident.
She asked no questions as they walked back to her classroom, brightly decorated in a papier-mache autumn. Principal Pickett offered to read the students a story while Meredith gathered her things and organized her desk, putting markers in order and papers in line. She was in no hurry. The lie in what he had not said could wait.
Meredith compiled lies, organizing them, ranking each, but never confronting any. Her father had been the first master of the craft. Her first memories of Christmas echoed with stories and half truths. 'Things will be better next year.'
'This is just as good as what you wanted.' He kept up the falsehoods until finally he told his last, 'Don't worry, princess, I'm not going to die and leave you.'
As Meredith left the school, she thought of how Kevin had fallen right into the shoes of her father with his lies. Only last week he had sworn he no longer left the bank except to eat lunch. He must have lied, for oil rigs did not spring up over cafes. He was probably still leaving the office every chance he got, still staying away too long. His boss would be furious if Kevin lost hours of work or was hurt bad enough to have to take sick days. He might even be fired.
Ten minutes later, Meredith parked in front of the twenty bed hospital, straightened her sweater appliqued with the alphabet and lifted her head, carefully erasing all anger from her face.
County Memorial Hospital stood exactly as it had since the early '70s when Meredith had played on the grass out front while her father died inside. The trees had grown larger. A slice of lawn had been paved over in the '80s to allow for three handicap parking spaces. The eaves, built without any thought of architectural style, now sported aluminum siding and gutters. All else, even the putty-colored door frames, remained the same. Twenty beds available for a town that had never needed ten.
As a young girl, she had tried to imagine a big city hospital where people rushed about shouting orders, and groups huddled in corners speaking in foreign tongues. The busiest night at Memorial had probably been three years prior when the Miller triplets were born. Memorial was not much of a hospital. Even the name, Wichita County Memorial Hospital, that had once been lettered across the front had been shortened to simply County Memorial. It was mostly where the people of Clifton Creek came to give birth and die. If anyone needed surgery or faced a long stay, they drove the hour to Wichita Falls.
Meredith slammed her aging blue Mustang's door three times before it stayed closed. Kevin had promised to fix it a month ago. But he had not, just as he had not done a hundred other things. Or was it a thousand by now? Things had been piling up since they started dating at sixteen and married five years later.
It must be at least a thousand, she thought: the car door, the front lock, the garbage disposal… their marriage. Not that their marriage was crumbling, only cracked, Meredith decided. She had no doubt they both still loved one another. But sometimes, it felt uneven, like a table with one short leg, never in danger of falling, but irritating all the same.
Meredith fought the wind as she hurried into the emergency entrance. She glanced back at the bank of dark, boiling clouds forming to the north. The storm was moving in quickly. She should be in reading circle, not standing in a tiny foyer with the smell of bleach and antiseptic death thickening the air around her.
A swirl of dried leaves charged the automatic door as it closed behind her. She arranged her sweater once more and touched the ribbon that held her natural curly auburn hair away from her face.
Shaking her head, she tried to figure out what Kevin had managed to do now. With all his sports activities and weekend drinking, the hospital was a familiar place. As a junior officer at the bank, he had no business being out at an oil rig. If he had ruined another suit, she would say something this time.
Last summer, she had sat quietly as Kevin told his latest adventure to his friends. He had been looking over land near the south fork of the Red River when an old football buddy begged him to catch one more long pass.
In the end, the buddy got his loan from the bank, and Meredith used half her paycheck for stitches across Kevin's forehead and the other half to replace the three-piece suit he used as 'game clothes.'
I'm already working two jobs to keep us out of bankruptcy, she reasoned. Every year Kevin found more football buddies who remembered the great games over beer, and every year he found another job after he fumbled.
Amid it all, he somehow managed to remind her of how she had been the lucky one to catch him. Right now she did not feel lucky. She felt frightened and tired to the bone of worrying about money… and guilty for even thinking about it when the only man she had ever loved might be hurt.
'Morning, Mrs. Allen.' A candy striper greeted Meredith where three short hallways merged. The center passage doorway had been closed and a sign, No Unauthorized Personnel, taped across the seam.
The girl had that do-you-remember-me? look in her eyes.
'Good morning, Kimberly.' Meredith forced a smile. Kimberly had not changed in ten years. She had been a timid second-grader who grew into a hesitant woman. Her age and bust size were well beyond her youthful uniform, but the girl's insecurity clung to one more year of childhood.
'I'm looking for my husband.' When Kimberly did not answer, Meredith added, 'Kevin Allen.'
Meredith glanced at the reception desk but, as usual, it was deserted. Paperwork was usually handled at the nurses' station, or in an emergency room while waiting for one of the town's three doctors.
'This way.' Kimberly hurried down the hallway marked with a number 3 above the entrance. Her head low. Her hair curtained her face.
'Has Kevin been admitted?' Meredith hoped not. They could not afford a hospital stay. If he was laid up, she would take a few days of emergency leave and take care of him. Lately, everything in her life boiled down to how to save money, nothing more.
Kimberly did not answer.
'Has he seen the doctor yet?' With the center doors closed maybe the doctors were busy with a birth or a car wreck, and had not had time to get to him yet. 'Were there others hurt in the rig accident?'
The timid girl seemed to have gone deaf as well as mute.
Meredith stopped her with a touch. 'What is it?' The thought that Kevin might be behind the No Unauthorized Personnel sign worried its way into her thoughts.
Kimberly shook her head. 'I don't know nothing. I was just told to ask the widows to wait in the break room.'
'Widows,' Meredith whispered.
Kimberly shoved open a door at the end of the third hallway and waited for Meredith to step inside a room lined with vending machines.
The blood in Meredith's head sought gravity, leaving her brain suddenly light and airy. She felt nothing, absolutely nothing, as she peered into the cavelike room at the other women who, with one word, had become her clan, her tribe. Widows.
Black mascara tears trailed down Crystal Howard's tanned face as she stepped into the break room. She looked
