Tell Me a Secret (18 page)

I spent the next couple of weeks living at the hospital like a homeless person—taking showers in the NICU bathroom, using hospital soap, wearing a hospital gown, pants, and robe and swapping them out whenever I could, using the shampoo left behind by other NICU parents. I slept in the NICU waiting room until the security guard started hounding me. Then I moved to Oncology, Cardiology, Urology…anywhere I could find an empty bench and a security guard out to lunch. Going home was not an option.

Coffee and Jell-O from the hospital fridge kept me from starving, plus whatever Shelley brought me when she visited—usually a bag full of pretzels, fruit roll-ups, and trail mix. She couldn’t come into the NICU with me, but we could
sit together at the window outside.

I had just come from a ketchup and cream cheese raid in the cafeteria when I heard a voice that could freeze my soul: “But I’m her grandmother!”

I stopped in my tracks and backed around the corner. As far as I knew, there was no alternate route to the NICU—my mother formed a wall between us. I peeked around the corner. I had a quarter view of her face—enough to see the tightness of her mouth and the judgment in her eyes. She wore her navy wool coat and clutched a paper bag brimming with clothes.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” a nurse was saying, “but you could be the president and we wouldn’t be allowed to let you in without the parent’s express permission. And she has asked for privacy.” The nurse shook her head, brows downcast. “I really am very sorry. I wish there was something I could do.”

“Well, there is. You can tell her—tell her, her mother…her mom came by to see her. And the baby. A girl? What’s the baby’s name?”

The nurse sighed. “Lexi,” she said.

My mom’s face turned white, jaw dropped. “As in, Alexandra?”

“I think so. But really, I’m not even supposed to give out that kind of information.” The nurse began to turn away. “I’ll tell her you were here.”

“Thank you.”

“But…you should keep trying. She might change her mind.”

My mother huffed. I was already backing away, before she could storm right into me on her way to the elevator. I ducked into the restroom around the corner and locked myself in the farthest stall.

Seconds later, the door opened with a
whoosh
.

Damn.

Slam
. She was in the first stall, yanking toilet paper out of the holder like Rapunzel’s witch mother yanking on her hair.

“I don’t believe this,” she muttered, but the end of the sentence caught. All the things she used to say to Xanda echoed in my head:
dressed like a streetwalker
…
playing with fire…don’t you see what you’re doing to your life?

I knew what I was doing, and Lexi would be with me.

Her door swung wide and crashed into the block of stalls, rattling the metal walls around me like a little earthquake. I imagined her peering through the half inch of space between the stalls with X-ray eyes—suspicious, hungry.

Instead, she went to the mirror. And what I saw was the last thing I expected.

The mask she wore, tightened and steeled against the world, slipped as she stared at herself. She blotted her eyes—rimmed red—with the wad of tissue and wiped the hair away from her face. She looked more than sad. She looked frightened, the same face I had seen on myself the day I came home last summer. Then the moment passed, making me question whether I had seen it at all. One final sniff, and she had disappeared behind that old door—
NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY
.

I stayed in the stall until my legs tingled, long after she was gone. But her presence was still in the room, a pair of eyes watching. I didn’t dare look into the mirror as I rushed out of the bathroom. Who knew what eyes would be staring back at me.

Nik would show up in a few hours. Maybe by then I wouldn’t be shaking.

She brought me a curried egg-salad sandwich from home. I scarfed it down while we looked through the window at Lexi. The baby had gained a pound since she had been born, going from a scrawny pink stick baby to a slightly less scrawny peachy one. Some days they put her in the light jacket to keep her from getting jaundiced.

“If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” said Shelley. “She’ll be like that for the rest of your life.”

“You mean parenting?” I asked, rolling my eyes. Suddenly everyone had parenting advice for me.

“I mean the feeling that her life is out of your control.” She smiled and patted me on the head, “Which is to say, yes. Parenting.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something, actually,” I said, taking another giant chomp of the sandwich. “Oooh, you brought chips, too. Thanks.” I dove into the bag and crunched happily. I guess I was hungrier than I had realized.

“I just wondered…you’ve been coming here so much…is it bothering you to see Lexi and me? I mean, this has got to be painful. I don’t know,” I finished lamely.

But Shelley didn’t grab the chips or take off running. Instead, she put her arm around me and squeezed my shoulders. “You’ve come a long way to ask that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I think you have to get to a certain place, get past your own needs to care about somebody else like that. So, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” I shrugged, loosening my grip on the chips. “What I wanted to ask, though…remember what you said about the future?”

“You mean when you were screaming?” She smiled.

“Yeah. Well, I wanted to know what you meant.” All at once, everything juggling in my head for all these months came spilling out. I told her about Kamran’s wormholes, and about the whys and hows of choices, hoping I managed to make sense.

“So what you said—about reasons being in the future,” I finished in a jumble, “what did you mean?”

These were Nik kinds of questions. The kind you could ask someone who had lost something huge. A sister. Or a baby.

“Life is constantly weaving together, and we can look back and see all of the threads. Like your boyfriend’s wormhole theory, except backward. We don’t always know why things happen until down the road. That’s what I meant.”

My head was spinning like it did after Lexi came and I didn’t have enough blood in my veins.

“Maybe she’s going to die because I messed everything up.
Living with me would be a punishment anyway.”

For the first time, Shelley looked like she might very well hit me. “Don’t talk like that. Living is not a punishment.”

“It takes a lot of faith to think like that.”

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

I was skeptical. Even though I wanted to believe what she was saying, to give some meaning to what happened to Xanda, what was happening to Lexi. “What about Micah James? Do you think you’ll find some reason for him?”

I knew I sounded angry, and I was—for Xanda’s death, the randomness of it, at Xanda for making the choice to jump out of the car, at my mother for driving Xanda away, at my father for introducing Andre to us. At the wrong turns I had taken, landing me without a sister, a friend, and a boyfriend and leaving me with a baby I wasn’t even sure I could take care of, one that may or may not live. How could she talk about reasons?

“If something happened differently,” I said, “maybe Micah James would still be here. Maybe Xanda would be, too. Why do these things happen?”

“I don’t know. But I do know if it wasn’t for Micah James, I might not be here with you.”

Lexi went from the ventilator to the incubator, upgraded out of critical status. I could hold her close to my skin, tucked onto my chest, helping to stabilize her breathing, heart rate, and the strange twitches the nurses told me were common to premature babies who didn’t yet have muscle control.

“Now that she can breathe on her own,” said the pediatrician, “you’re almost out of the woods. We’re pleased with her progress so far. Another month, and she might be able to go home.” Until then, the more I held her, the faster she grew. When I wasn’t evading the hospital security guards or the nurse rounds, I spent a lot of time in the NICU rocking chair.

The day they declared Lexi could have visitors was the day Shelley brought cupcakes—plus her old “skinny” pants (still
huge on me) and a couple of First Washington Credit Union T-shirts. Gold wasn’t my color, but it was better than stolen hospital gowns. When I told her about my mom’s visit, she said sometimes people’s sadness looked like anger and judgment. What I didn’t tell her about was the security guard finding me in an empty patient bed and chasing me all the way to the cafeteria.

On her eight-week birthday, Lexi was almost old enough to graduate from the hospital. The doctors were guessing another week, as long as she passed a critical series of tests. I dropped several hints to Shelley that brownies would be an excellent way to celebrate. More and more hours of the day were spent rocking Lexi, touching her skin tenderly and singing softly—every song I could think of, and when I couldn’t think of any, I made them up. I was singing “Happy Birthday”—quietly and off key—when the nurse came into the room and said, “You have a visitor.” I cuddled Lexi further into myself and sang, “Happy brownies for meeeee, happy brownies for meeeee.”

“Wow,” said a loud, familiar voice. “You look even worse than you sound.”

I jerked in surprise, and Lexi jerked, too, snuffing and letting out a tiny mew. “Shhhh,” I whispered in her ear and held her tighter, hoping she wouldn’t be able to sense my heart racing. Her fist, the size of a cherry tomato, clutched my finger.

“Essence. What are you doing here?” I wouldn’t have recognized her if it weren’t for the voice, because she looked amazing, an echo of the face I used to know as well as my
own sister’s. Like the star she was becoming.

“I came because I heard the baby died.”

“What?”

“That’s what Delaney told everyone. She saw you pass out in a pool of blood and saved your life by calling nine-one-one.”

And I suddenly felt like a sci-fi character, sucked back into the vortex of time and space and landing squarely back into my old life. “She would say that.”

“You’re not friends anymore?” She was such a good actor now, I almost missed the sarcasm.

“No,” I said. “We’re not friends anymore.” I waited for the smirk, but it didn’t come.

“Well, then you’ll probably be happy to know she and Kamran are no longer an item. They broke up right after the Winter Ball.”

“They did?” Lexi nestled further into my skin and raised her face toward me. Kamran’s features echoed there—in the shape of her cheekbones, her head, her brow. “What happened?”

“He’s not a complete jerk, apparently—he dumped Delaney after he saw her flip out on you at the dance. Then she transferred to Roosevelt.”

On to reinvent herself again.

“That’s what Kamran’s telling everybody?”

“No. But that’s what he told me. Right after you kicked him out of the hospital.”

I couldn’t believe she’d taken time out of her celebrity schedule to tell me all of this. Kamran and Essence were talking. Delaney was out of the picture. “I didn’t kick him out,” I said, not wanting to meet her eyes. At least half of the messages on my phone were from him, even though I never listened. “Well, not exactly.”

“Geez, what is it about your family that nobody ever wants to tell the truth about anything?” She rummaged in her bag, pulling out a tiny pink knit hat with three butterflies embroidered on the front. “Here,” she said, tossing it to me. “This is for the baby. I was supposed to tell you it’s from me, but I’m sick of lying for everyone. It’s from your mom. She’s the one who told me you were here.”

I dropped the hat into my lap. “So you’re her messenger now. Of course you are.”

“Oh, get over yourself, Rand. She saw the baby in the nursery and was worried about her head getting cold. So if you decide to get all huffy because it’s from her, then whatever. It’s a hat, not a pitchfork. And your mom isn’t the devil. She cares a lot more about you than you give her credit for.”

“And you know this because you’ve become her new best friend? Right after you stole my part in the montage?”

Essence’s eyes narrowed. “Are you serious? I thought you never wanted to be on your mom’s main stage again! You’ve been telling me that for how long now?”

I didn’t say anything. She threw up her hands in exasperation.

“You don’t get what you want, and you’re not happy. You get what you want, and you’re still not happy. You wouldn’t even be happy if Xanda was still alive.” The words stung more than if she had slapped me in the face. “You’d still be having problems with your mom, with or without your sister.”

The baby in my arms was crying now, the cord between us severed but not entirely lost. I held her tightly, shushing her back into a state of peace. “That’s enough! Enough.”

“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to upset you or the baby. But lately, or at least back when we were still friends, all I ever did was upset you. So I guess it’s probably better we’re
not
friends anymore.”

“Don’t say that, Essence.”

“Why not?”

She was giving me a chance to apologize. For humiliating her in front of everyone at Milo’s party. For choosing Delaney. For resenting when her life got better without me. For coveting the approval my mom gave her so readily now.

If I didn’t, she would walk out that door and both of our lives would go on as they had, with regret scraping away at the edges of my heart even as I went on in my life with Lexi.

If I did, maybe the friendship we had wouldn’t be lost. Nik would say it was a step of faith. Not knowing what the future would hold, but hoping somehow, somewhere, there was a plan for things to work out.

“Because…because I’m sorry.” The tears came, and I didn’t even bother trying to stop them. They came so easily,
now that Lexi was born. “I’m sorry for everything. I don’t want to not be friends anymore, Essence.”

“That’s a double negative.
And
a split infinitive.” A half-smile pulled at her cheek. “But if that’s your grammatically deficient excuse for an apology, then I will consider it.”

I don’t know why I thought she wouldn’t. Essence had always cut me a lot of slack. Or maybe she knew I just wasn’t used to blaming myself. It ran in the family.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t have to do some groveling. I realize you were under the spell of the Dazzling Delaney Pratt—”

“You mean the Despicable Delaney Pratt?”

“—the Depraved, Dreadful, Dangerous Delaney Pratt…but that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook.” Her face went completely somber. “You were pretty mean to me this year.”

I nodded. It was the truth.

“You made fun of me. You ditched me. You humiliated me. Then you blamed me for something I didn’t even do. And you resented me for getting the stupid part you didn’t even want.”

Even worse, I had walked the path of Xanda’s life alone, without the friend I needed most. I couldn’t say anything to that.

“So I guess we’ll have to see what happens. I don’t know if I can trust you anymore.”

I didn’t know if I could trust myself.

“You should go home, Rand. Believe it or not, your mom misses you.”

“Yeah, like she misses Xanda.”

Essence gave me a penetrating look. “Maybe you should give her a chance. Things have changed…you should talk to her.”

I wasn’t so sure she would think so if I told her about my trip with Andre. Lexi made a snuffly sound, the signal she would want food soon. “But anyway,” she continued, “I was hoping you’d let me see your baby. What’s her name?”

If there was anyone in the world who would understand the connection, it was Essence. I fingered the safety-pin necklace around my neck and took a deep breath.

Then I told Xanda’s story for the first time.