Between Here and Forever (2 page)

three

“How was the ferry?” Mom calls out from the kitchen
as I come in. I stop, shrug at her, and then walk upstairs to my bedroom.

My parents have to take the ferry home from the hospital too, so they know what it’s like. There’s no other way to get from Milford to Ferrisville, and the ferry is what it is, a slow boat on a river.

There was talk, once, of building a bridge, but nothing ever came of it. My guess is that if Milford wanted a bridge across the river, it’d be built in a heartbeat. But why would they want to connect to Ferrisville? We’re a small, poor town near nothing but acres of government-owned land that’s supposedly a national park or reserve. Not that we get any visitors. Who wants to see something called “The Great Dismal Forest”?

Even more importantly, who wants to live near it?

Well, my parents, for one. They think it’s nice we live near a river, that on the weekend we can walk down to the water and trip along the sand-studded rocks (that’s “the beach”) and look at people grilling or riding around in tiny boats, their motors roaring as they pass each other going back and forth, back and forth.

But of course my parents like it. They didn’t grow up here. They grew up in a nice suburban neighborhood, with shopping malls and neighbors who aren’t all related to each other in some way. Or so they say. My mother’s parents are both dead, and my dad doesn’t talk to his parents at all, and they only ever mention where they’re from once in a while.

Tess used to love to look at pictures of them from back when they first started dating, and even before, from when they were in high school together. She asked all sorts of questions that neither of my parents ever really answered. It’s like they didn’t exist until they met each other and moved here.

Tess used to say our parents had secrets, and lots of them, but that was back when she was stressing out over going to college, and had also stopped talking to her best friend just because she got pregnant. And that made her into someone I had no desire to listen to.

I figure there won’t be any follow-up questions to the nonquestion I got about the ferry, but just when I’m feeling almost relaxed for the first time all day, Mom comes up and knocks on my door.

“Abby, what are you doing?”

“Homework.”

I’m not. I don’t need to, because Ferrisville High is a joke, but I need to be alone right now. Try to figure out what to do about Tess.

“I wanted to tell you that your uncles sent Tess flowers again,” she says. “Did you see them?”

“I must have missed them. Sorry.” I’d seen them, and read the cards.
Get Well Soon
on each of them, and nothing more. My mom’s brothers, Harold and Gerald, seem nice enough, but they don’t come to visit often.

Mom’s not that much older than they are, but it’s like—well, the couple of times they’ve been here, they treat Mom like she’s way older than they are. They treat her like she’s their mother, with a weird sort of respect and anger. I don’t know what they have to be mad about. They don’t live here.

“I’m going to go and make something to eat for your father and me,” Mom says. “Maybe heat up the leftover pancakes from this morning. Do you want to join us?”

I want to, but I don’t. If I do, I will see Tess’s chair. I will think about it.

I will know we are all thinking about it.

“I’d better finish my homework,” I say.

“All right then, good night,” she says, with a little sigh, and I listen to her footsteps fade away.

four

After school the next day, I grab my bike from the
ferry dock (amazing how no one took it, right?) and head to the hospital. I weave through the ground floor, past the waiting room full of people doing just what the room wants them to, down the hall past the gift shop (run by cheery old Milford ladies who chat about their prize-winning dogs or flowers while they sell gum for the outrageous price of two bucks a pack), and around to the elevators.

Everything about Milford Hospital is depressing.

Well, not everything. I like the cafeteria. It looks out over the river, and Ferrisville is far enough away that you can’t really see it. You just get an impression of houses on carefully laid out streets, a factory nestled at one end, and a rocky strip of beach dotted with the weathered ferry station.

Plus the cafeteria is the one place in the hospital that doesn’t smell bad. Everywhere else smells like chemicals, like the kind of clean that can strip away your skin if you get too close. And underneath that chemical smell there’s always another one, fainter but never ever gone.

Underneath, you can smell unwashed flesh and fear and how off everything is. How everyone who’s in here, all the patients lying in all their beds, aren’t here because they want to be. They’re here because they have to be. Or because this is the last place they’ll ever see.

The elevator comes and I step inside, prepare to see Tess.

After I’m buzzed in to her unit, I walk to her room. She looks the same; thin, pale, somehow gone but yet still here. Her hair’s been washed, though, and it shines, golden against the white of her pillow. A nurse is fixing one of her IVs, and sighs when she sees me.

Tess was—is—always good at getting people to like her.

I suck at it.

“I’m going to change her sheets,” the nurse says, and I nod, sit down to wait even though the nurse sighs again, and then Claire walks by like I’ve somehow summoned her. I start to wave, but she isn’t looking at me. She’s looking at the unit entrance, and I realize everyone else is too, that all the nurses are turned toward it like something’s going to happen. Weird.

Then the buzzer sounds and a guy comes in.

“Tess,” I say, leaning over and whispering in her ear. “You’re missing your big chance. Everyone’s staring just because some guy’s come in here, and you know what that means. He must be cute.”

Nothing.

“I’m not kidding,” I say. “One guy, and all the nurses are looking at him. That means very cute. Just like when you walk into a room.”

Then, weirdly, the guy is actually coming toward the room, toward Tess, the nurse who was babbling at me about sheets before hurrying over to him.

“Thank you so much for doing this,” she says, all giddy-voiced. “I can’t tell you how nice it is of you to help out, and—”

And then she stops talking because she walks right into the door.

I shouldn’t laugh, but I do because it’s impossible not to—she walked into a door, after all—and she glares at me as she ushers the guy in. I get an impression of dark hair and eyes, but not much more because the nurse is fluttering all around him. And also because I just don’t care.

“Now, I thought you could help me lift the patient up,” the nurse says to him. “Then I’ll—oh, I didn’t get the sheets, hold on. Claire—Claire! Oh good, there you are. Would you grab some sheets, please?”

Claire rolls her eyes at me, fast, and then says, “Of course,” and heads off.

“It’ll be just a moment,” the nurse says to the guy, still all fluttery-voiced, and when I look at her, she’s blushing.

She should be. She’s my mom’s age, at least, and the guy is about mine, I think, which makes what I’m sure she’s thinking a felony.

As for the guy, he’s pretty disappointing now that I’m finally looking at him. I mean, he’s staring at the floor like a lump. He’s probably uncomfortable being here, where everything is so silent, and everyone’s in the kind of sleep you never ever want to fall into, but still.

Then he looks up and …

He looks up, and my brain actually stops working for a moment, because the guy is
gorgeous
. Not gorgeous in the oh-hey-hot-guy way, but actually truly gorgeous.

Beautiful, even. His skin is caramel colored, a warm glowing golden brown, and his hair is so black that even the hideous fluorescent lights do nothing to it, don’t make it look greenish or stringy. He’s got the kind of cheekbones I’ve only seen on guys in magazines. Ditto for his nose and chin and forehead, and his dark eyes framed by lashes that Tess would murder someone for.

He is, in short, human perfection. Even if he has gone back to staring at the floor and has his arms folded across his chest, fingers tapping against his skin like he’s bored. I lean over and nudge Tess.

“Come on, Tess, open your eyes. This guy is so pretty, I swear he’s better-looking than you.”

The guy clears his throat at that, and I look at him again.

“What? Oh, right, I called you pretty. Sorry. But you are. I mean …” I trail off.

He actually looks at me then, and I feel my face heat, turn back to Tess.

“Okay, here we are,” Claire says, coming back and handing the nurse the sheets.

“Thank you,” the nurse says. “You can stay and take the soiled sheets away. Abby, can you step out for a minute, please?”

I nod, leave Tess’s room, and wander out of the unit to the waiting area. Today there’s a middle-aged woman sitting in there, head in her hands. She’s wearing sneakers, and both of them are untied. I can tell she’s either going to cry or start yelling at any second, so I go sit in the stairwell.

I wait. I’m good at it, I’ve learned a lot about it the past few months, but when I go back to Tess’s room, the nurse, Claire, and the guy are still there, the nurse and Claire talking quietly.

When I walk in, the guy clears his throat again and speaks for the first time, saying, “Um, can I go?”

“Oh, something something something,” the nurse says to him but I don’t hear it because Tess’s eyes twitch. They don’t open, but there’s definitely movement there, under her closed eyelids.

She’s coming back.

“Wait, please,” I tell the nurse, who does, and turn to the guy. “Say something.”

“Abby,” Claire hisses, and the guy says, “What?” Even his voice is gorgeous, low and soft.

I look at Tess. Yes, there was definitely a sort of twitch there.

“Did you see that?” I say to the nurse. “When he talks, Tess can hear him!”

five

The nurse doesn’t agree with me. She says I’m
overwrought, and then me and Clement take a little ride in the elevator. The nurse is pissed that it’s him who comes and gets me, and not someone from security, but Clement points out that at least I’m leaving.

The thing about Clement is that he’s about seventy years old and barely comes up to my shoulder. He sometimes gives bored little kids a “top secret” tour of the hospital, but mostly he just walks around talking to people.

He’s not a real security guard, obviously. But he did give about ten million dollars to the hospital three years ago. For that kind of money, if you want to spend your days walking around the hospital greeting people, fine.

“Are you all right?” he says, and Clement is one of those people who means what he says. I like that about him, so I tell him the truth because I know he’ll listen.

“Tess’s eyes moved.”

“Really? That’s wonderful! What did the doctor say?”

I shrug. “Nothing. The nurse won’t call him. She said she didn’t see anything. She made me leave.”

“Do you think that maybe … sometimes we see things we want to.”

I know about that. I fooled myself into it once, and won’t make that mistake again. “Hey, I like you, but not that much, so don’t think I did all this just to see you,” I say, and Clement laughs his wheezy laugh and then pulls out one of the seemingly endless supply of cough drops he’s always got on him.

“You shouldn’t be so worried all the time,” he says. “You’ll give yourself gas.”

I laugh then too, and he grins at me as we walk outside.

“Go on home,” he says. “And take care of yourself.”

“Me?” I say. “I don’t—I’m fine.”

Before he can reply, I get on my bike and head to the ferry.

When I get home, I fry up an egg, and then wedge it between some bread and eat it while I watch television. Mom and Dad get home when I’m flipping through the channels trying to decide if I want to watch the gritty crime drama about detectives who track down missing people, or the other gritty crime drama about detectives who track down missing people.

Mom turns off the television. “You want to tell me about what happened today?”

“Tess moved. Her eyes were closed, but I saw them moving, like she might blink. Or was going to blink.”

“Abby …” Mom says, and sits down on the sofa. “You can’t …” She looks down at her hands. My mother’s nails are always neatly polished. This week they are a pale pink. “You don’t know how much your father and I want Tess to wake up, and saying things like that only—”

“Hurts,” Dad finishes, coming in and sitting down next to Mom.

“But I did see her eyes move.” This is a good thing, and I don’t see why my parents don’t believe me and why they are sitting on the sofa looking miserable.

“Remember the first week?” Dad says. “You and me and Mom were there, and you swore she moved her hand when Beth was talking to her?”

“Her little finger,” I say. “And it happened.”

“Beth didn’t see it. And Beth is her roommate and friend, honey.”

“She was looking at Tess.”

“Exactly.”

“No, I mean she was looking at her face.”

Dad rubs a hand over his forehead and then leans back into the sofa, closing his eyes. “Abby, we don’t want you to think that your sister—” He breaks off, clearing his throat. “Don’t be angry at Tess.”

“I’m not,” I say, but he gives me this look, this I-see-through-you look, and I go upstairs and slam my bedroom door.

I know what I saw today. Tess heard something in that guy’s voice, something that grabbed her, and now I know exactly what I need to do.

I can’t reach her, but maybe someone else can.

I get up, open my door as quietly as possible, and slip down the hall into Tess’s room. It hasn’t been touched since the accident, and her bags from school are still on the floor, and photos of her and her college friends are sprinkled all over her desk.

I slide my hands over them, see Tess smiling in the sunshine. She has my dad’s bright smile, all warmth, and I wonder about the guy she was smiling at. Did she like him? Or did she like the guy with the black shirt who shows up in the next photo, eyes on Tess and full of longing as she reads something he’s holding in one hand?

Or what about the guy two photos later, the one who is grinning at her as she examines a tattoo on his arm, watching her fingers on his skin? Or is it the guy holding the camera in all the photos?

Whoever he is, he hasn’t come to see her—none of them has—and Beth, as nice as she is, is just her roommate and can’t and won’t make up for that.

But that guy today could. I can almost see her sitting up and smiling at him now.

I wonder if she can see it too, and think that maybe, just maybe, she can.