Wonder When You’ll Miss Me (6 page)

“We're near South Cherry and the pawns,” I said. We'd stopped at the intersection and the fat girl nodded from the curb.

I took a deep breath. “But I want to go to the hospital.”

She jerked her head like I'd spit and stared at me with narrowed eyes. “You want to skip Fern to go to the fucking hospital? Why?”

I wanted to see Andrea Dutton. I didn't know why. It had something to do with the way I thought everyone missed her. With the enormous get well card that the cheerleaders had posted in the lobby so that the whole school could sign it. With the way that no one had noticed I'd been gone. She was who Tony Giobambera loved. I couldn't explain it, didn't want to explain it, but I needed to see her.

I started walking again. The fat girl called after me, but I just put my hands over my ears and walked faster, listening to the sound of my blood and my breath and the cars that sped past. It all kept time. I didn't turn
around or even look over my shoulder to see if she was following. I didn't care. I was going to push through the double doors of Gleryton Hospital and find my way to Andrea Dutton's room.

After a while I took my hands from my ears and stuffed them in the pockets of my coat. And I kept going.

It took almost forty minutes to reach the main entrance and the closer I got the more I doubted my plan. I didn't want anyone to see me visiting Andrea Dutton, most of all Andrea Dutton herself. What if she pointed that accusatory finger again,
I know what you did.

What if I ran into folks from school—cheerleaders, football players, all those people who Andrea knew, who she talked to and whispered with in the hall? Or what if her church group or her parents were there? What would I say to her parents?

All at once I wanted the fat girl. I stopped and turned around, but she wasn't trailing behind me as I'd thought. I couldn't even see her big blue form off in the distance. It was just me and the empty day, sky clear, sun sinking. Afternoon fading away.

And I was there. I was at the hospital. The world was made of a million tiny choices and I held one of them in my palm.

 

When they pumped my stomach it was in Gleryton Hospital, though I didn't remember it. The coma vigil was there and my first few days in a psych ward. Those few days I remembered, though only vaguely, in sudden shadowy images that it took a while to place. But when I pushed through those doors the smell brought it all back, fiercer and more immediate than I could ever have imagined. Gleryton Hospital smelled of ammonia and stale air and illness. It smelled of fluorescent light and color-coded pathways through the building's bowels, and it smelled of hope and desperation, of midnight anxiety and catnaps and pain.

I stood in the entrance and inhaled. Things washed over me faster than I could track them. I floated and plummeted all at once. And then I turned and saw the fat girl behind me, a blue flash beyond the glass, watching me from the other side.

I went to the front desk. There were flyers under the glass on the countertop.
Winston's Grief Counseling
, one read,
Helping Time Do Its Job, Helping You Move On.

“Room twelve sixteen,” the nurse said, and pointed towards a bank of elevators.

 

The twelfth floor had the wide hallways and cold bright lights I remembered. My stint at Gleryton swept up on me, but I shook it off. That was over, I told myself. All that had happened long ago, nearly a year ago, no one would recognize me. It was a closed chapter, a done deal. Still the speckled linoleum floors and the ceiling tiles and the rounded gray Formica nurses' station were uncomfortably familiar.

A calm disembodied voice flooded the corridor at regular intervals.
Kchshhskksh. Dr. Samuels to Radiology. Dr. Samuels to Radiology.
Even this was like a newly remembered dream.

I found 1216 easily but instead of going in, I walked around the floor trying to appear inconspicuous and peeking in other rooms. There were lots of legs and feet and ends of beds. Lots of IV stands and the clattering sound of curtains being pulled back, skittering along their metal tracks. There were a few people: the occasional bored or distracted patient in a pale, flapping gown walking slowly or being pushed in a wheelchair down the hall, or just sitting there, not even taking it in anymore, their faces all the same, blank and tired. I kept going, strolling as though I knew where I was headed, my face warm, my head pounding. I wasn't quite ready to face Andrea Dutton.

I found a rest room and went in, leaning into the mirror to study my face. I looked more like me now. Which is not to say that I looked so different from the girl my mother had brought home from Berrybrook those months ago, only that now I knew she was supposed to be me.

I took a deep breath. If I was going to be brave, then I'd better be brave. I threw my shoulders back and swallowed. “Hi!” I said to the mirror. Too cheerful. “Hello there,” I said with more tragedy in my voice.

 

The nurses' station hummed and bustled behind me and ahead there was an empty gurney in the hall. Men and women in pale blue scrubs sauntered by. I didn't look at them, just straight ahead, as though I knew exactly what I was doing.

Then I reached 1216. It had a plain brown door with a high small window. I peeked in and through the crosshatched glass I could make out the foot of a hospital bed with a dark green curtain partially drawn, and beyond that, by the window, another bed. So Andrea Dutton didn't have a private room. There were flowers on a table by the window, ordinary
cheerful bouquets of bright carnations and baby's breath with small stiff cards peeking from between their petals.

A face stared back at me, eyes even with mine. I jumped back and froze. A blond woman in a pale yellow sweater opened the door. She had bags under her eyes and a brittle smile. “Are you a friend of Andie's?” she said. Her voice was breathy.

I wasn't sure how to answer. I smiled and gave a half-nod while trying to peer around her and into the room. The green curtain moved and a nurse walked out, stepping past me into the hall.

“They were just taking blood,” the woman said. She looked like Andrea, but grown up. “Did you want to come in?”

I nodded and she stepped aside to let me pass.

Andrea Dutton lay small and limp, arms by her side, hooked to machines that beeped and hummed. Without the customary veil of makeup, she looked as though she were made of porcelain, except that a yellowish bruise covered part of her cheek, neck, and the collarbone that peeked through her pale gown. Her head had been shaved; her skull was bandaged.

“It's nice that you're visiting,” Mrs. Dutton said. “She was awake for a while today.” She sat on a chair near the bed and her small reddish hands rubbed themselves up and down on her denim thighs. “What's your name, so I can tell Andie you stopped by?”

The air in the room was dizzying, so bright and stale. All the energy came from the voice of machines. Over where the curtain around the next bed ended, feet, covered by a thin white sheet, poked out. I didn't know what to say. Andrea Dutton. When I spoke my voice sounded too loud for the room.

“Annabelle. Tell her Annabelle visited.” Mrs. Dutton nodded.

“She's feeling better?”

Mrs. Dutton took her daughter's limp right hand in hers. “Yes,” she said cheerily. “Maybe you heard that she got out of the ICU a week ago? The doctors say we're right on schedule.” She smiled at me for just a moment and then her eyes focused on something behind me, high up the wall. I resisted the urge to turn around. “It just takes a long time,” she said, but now she sounded like she was talking to herself.

“I really hope she feels better.”

“I come every day.” Mrs. Dutton leaned forward and fluffed Andrea's pillows. “And her brothers come after school. Her father comes when he can but I think it's the school friends that do her the most good.”

I looked at Andrea, who hadn't moved at all, not even to blink or wiggle, and wondered how Mrs. Dutton could tell.

“I know everyone's worried about her.”

“I'm sorry, Annabelle,” she said, smiling and wiping at one eye. She laughed. “I don't know why I'm so wound up. Sometimes this even feels normal.” She gave a short laugh. Her eyes were incredibly sad.

I backed towards the door. I wanted to run out of that room.

“Come back soon,” she said. “If you see Missy or Jenny at school, tell them to come and see her. Andie loves visitors. They don't have to stay long.”

“I will,” I said, nodding. “I'll do that.” And then I took off down the hall as fast as I could.

 

By the time I got home it was late. The hall light was on and my mother had pinned a note beneath the vase on the table.
F,
it said.
No Fern? What happened this afternoon? Am at GHFA mtg. Home by 8, then we
talk!
Lv, M
.

“Shit,” I said.

The fat girl plopped down on the living room couch. “What did you expect?”

I walked past her and into the kitchen. I took an apple from a bowl on the table and bit hard as I sat down, but it was mealy so I got up and tossed it in the garbage. In the fridge there was a pint of skim milk, half a bottle of white wine, something brown in a Tupperware container, a package of Weight Watcher's lasagna with a yellow Post-it on it (
Faith
), and some white cheese.

The night seemed incredibly quiet. I sat there with my feet on the table, telling myself lasagna was fine, but then my mind drifted to the hospital and Andrea Dutton, to her mother's bright voice, and then to the “talk” with my mother, which I could almost map out word for word before she even got home. All about my
need to take responsibility
and my
incredible insensitivity and selfishness…
There were only a few variations on how self-centered I was and how much my mother sacrificed to do well by me since my father's departure. Even
departure,
a word she often used when yelling at me, made it sound like he'd left her on purpose, not keeled over. I sat in the growing darkness, waiting for her to return.

“Let's have a glass of wine,” the fat girl said. “One little glass.”

I closed my eyes and sighed.

“Come on,” she said. “You want to sit here and wait to get into trouble?”

No. I rose and went to the fridge again and got out the lasagna. I took a cold bite, standing at the counter, but it seemed to grow in my mouth. I forced myself to chew and swallow and took another, and a third, then dumped the rest down the garbage disposal and switched it on.

The fat girl was watching me. “Well?” she said.

“I haven't had anything to drink since a certain red punch. I thought you were supposed to look after me.”

“Says who?” The fat girl winked. “Come on. We're practicing for the real world.”

I grabbed the bottle by the neck and followed her out the door.

 

When I returned home for the second time that evening I was cold and drunk. The fat girl and I had wandered around drinking from the bottle and sneaking through the darkness until the damp ground and icy air got to be too much.

My mother was asleep on the couch in the living room with an empty glass on the floor by her head and a magazine by her feet. I closed the front door carefully and tiptoed up the stairs holding my breath to be as silent as possible.

“Faith?”

I froze.

“Faith?”

“Yes.” My lips were rubbery and thick. I concentrated on sounding normal. “I'm really tired. I'm going to bed.”

“I want to talk to you.” Her drowsy voice still came from the living room and I weighed the idea of running up the stairs and locking my door but thought better of it. Reason was nearly always the best approach to my mother.

“Can we do it in the morning?” I took a deep breath. “Mom, it was an accident about Fern. I should have called.”

Wrong thing to say. I heard her rise and thump down the hall.

“You're damn right you should have called! You think money is free? I have to pay for your therapy even if you don't show up, and you wasted Fern's
time
, Faith. That's a very
arrogant
thing to do.”

I didn't say anything. My back was still to her, my hand on the banister heading up. My cheeks were hot.

“Turn around and answer me, young lady.”

“I'm sorry, Mom.” I turned around but kept my eyes lowered, staring at the brown carpet and my mother's stocking feet, the tiny black seam across her toes. “I stayed after for help in chemistry and…” I tried to control my voice, but my words were blurry and I felt myself sway. My mother didn't seem to notice.

“This is a warning, Faith,” she said. “I want you to think about your actions. Understand?”

I stifled a sigh.

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

She seemed satisfied and turned to go. “Oh, by the way,” she said over her shoulder, “some woman from Clark's restaurant called and left a phone number. Didn't say what it was about.”

She hovered for a minute, her back to me. She seemed to be waiting for something.

“Job,” I said. “I applied for a job.”

“Oh.” She straightened a picture on the wall. “I see. You don't have time to go to Fern, but you have time to run across town? Is this
job
going to interfere with your schoolwork? With your therapy?”

“No. I promise.”

“We'll see,” she said, and left.

Gratefully I made my way to bed.

 

In the morning I stumbled to the bathroom and drank glass after glass of water, head pounding, mouth full of sand. My skin smelled sour, like wine. A shower helped immensely, and by the time I'd made it downstairs, dressed and ready to go, the evening before had diminished to a dull throb and some wooziness. Not entirely pleasant, but manageable.