but I am empty. Blank. I take her hand and…
They all look at me, the faces of my work. Brown skin, black skin. Hungry eyes. Haunted. They come from everywhere.
I pound the heels of my hands against my eyes.
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.
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.”
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.
