And then, for the first time in almost two years, I want to do something with a guy other than wait for him to go away. I want to touch him. Not in a just-thinking-about-it way, but for real. Not like—not like I did with Jack, I’m not that stupid, I’m not going to pretend I could ever be someone Eli would real y want to see—but I want him to hold my hand, tel me without words that everything wil be okay. That someone is here with me.
I haven’t wanted someone to comfort me in a long time, but I want it now.
“You don’t have to wait,” I tel Eli, because wanting something and acting on it are two very different things and I trust my heart and body about as much as I believe that the nurse who said she paged the doctor actual y paged him.
Which is to say, not much.
“I don’t mind,” he says, making another box on the right hand side of the paper, then the left.
“The doctor’s not going to come.”
“He’l come,” Eli says.
“No,” I say. “No one … no one believes me.”
Eli stops drawing and looks at me. “I believe you.”
I fold my hands into themselves so I won’t reach for him. I force myself to think about Tess. About what she needs. “Can you—if you asked Clement, would he be able to get a doctor here?”
Eli shakes his head. “He’s not—he doesn’t have any real power.”
“But he gave al that money—”
“He can’t—it doesn’t work like that,” Eli says, and when I laugh because, hel o, of course money does things everywhere, he touches my arm.
“People in Milford think he’s strange and I don’t think—I don’t think anyone would even talk to him if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s, you know.”
“Rich.”
Eli looks down at his notebook. “Yeah.”
I go back to Tess’s room. She’s lying there, perfectly stil like her eyes didn’t move, like there wasn’t something she was watching behind her closed lids, like there wasn’t something she saw with her eyes wide shut.
“Wake up,” I say, my voice angry, a whispered hiss, and when she doesn’t move I grab her chart—yes, I know I’m not supposed to touch it, and no, I don’t care—and write a note about what I saw on the blank back of a card that was once tied to a bunch of flowers blooming brightly in the corner. And then I stick that card on her chart’s clipboard.
Those flowers … they wilted into nothing ages ago, but my parents have kept the cards, have them waiting for Tess to look at. I figure she won’t miss the back of the one that’s been signed by Beth, stupid Beth with her boxing up al of Tess’s things and her stupid signature, al swooping capital letters like she’s some sort of star.
The nurse who paged the doctor comes in then, sees me sticking the card onto Tess’s chart, and says, “You need to leave now.”
“I’m waiting for the doctor,” I say, and she puts her hand on my shoulder.
“Abby,” she says, and I’m startled that she knows my name. Almost no one uses it here; I’m just a visitor, I am just Tess’s sister. “Sometimes patients move a little. It’s not—it’s a good sign, of course, but it doesn’t mean she’s going to wake up tonight.”
“I know what I saw.”
“You miss her,” the nurse says, and I start to laugh because I do miss Tess, but not like she thinks. I’m not the devoted sister, I’m not the noble, plain girl who sacrifices al for her sister to come back. I want Tess to wake up so she’l go away.
I want her back in her life and out of mine.
“Maybe you want to take her somewhere—a walk, maybe?” the nurse says to Eli, like I’m a toddler or dog or just a teenager not worth listening to because Tess isn’t moving now.
“Tess,” I say, looking at her.
Nothing.
“Can you—?” the nurse says, gesturing at me to Eli, giving him a help-me-out-here look.
“I saw it too,” Eli says. “So why can’t we wait for the doctor?”
It works. I can’t believe it, but it does, and so we wait. Me and him, sitting in Tess’s room, on either side of her bed.
It takes me a long time to say it, not because I don’t know how, but because I’m afraid to say it.
“Thanks,” I get out, after we’ve sat there for a while, and I was right to be afraid to say it because when he says, “Sure,” easily, like it was nothing, I want him to have said something else, and I don’t even look at Tess to see if his voice has moved her again. I just—
I’m too busy thinking about how he’s moved me.
I ask if I can wait anyway, knowing I’l be told no.
I am, but the nurse who said she paged the doctor, the one who put her hand on my arm and said “You miss her,” like what I feel for Tess is that simple, says, “If the doctor has anything to report, we’l be sure to let you know,” as I’m headed out of the unit.
“Thanks again for, you know, before,” I tel Eli as we leave the hospital. “See you tomorrow?”
