Between Here and Forever
Read Between Here and Forever Online
Authors: Elizabeth Scott
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Family, #Siblings, #Love & Romance, #Social Issues, #General, #Death & Dying
BETWEEN HERE AND FOREVER
Also by Elizabeth Scott
Bloom
Perfect You
Living Dead Girl
Something, Maybe
The Unwritten Rule
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to
historical events, real people, or real locales are
used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and
incidents are the product of the author’s imagination,
and any resemblance to actual events or locales or
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
First Simon Pulse hardcover edition May 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Spencer
All rights reserved, including the right
of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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Designed by Tom Daly
The text of this book was set in Berkeley Oldstyle.
Manufactured in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scott, Elizabeth, 1972—
Between here and forever / by Elizabeth Scott. —
1st Simon Pulse hardcover ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When her older, “perfect” sister Tess has a car accident
that puts her in a coma, seventeen-year-old Abby, who has always
felt unseen in Tess’s shadow, plans to bring her back with the help
of Eli, a gorgeous boy she has met at the hospital, but her plans
go awry when she learns some secrets about both Tess and Eli,
enabling her to make some decisions about her own life.
ISBN 978-1-4169-9484-8
[1. Coming of age—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction. 3. Secrets—Fiction.
4. Coma—Fiction. 5. Self-perception—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S4195Be 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2010051366
ISBN 978-1-4169-9486-2 (eBook)
Contents
Many thanks to Jennifer Klonsky and everyone at Simon Pulse for all they do, for their continual faith in me, and for making this book possible.
As always, thanks go to Jess, Diana, Clara, Robin, and everyone else who read drafts and held my hand and supported me, with a special shout-out to Jess, who always finds time to tell me that yes, I can do this.
I also want to thank the following readers for being such amazing and supportive people: Morgan Mavetz, Brittani Zarate, Jenny Davies, Katy Williams, Jessica Launius, Lucile Ogie-Kristianson, Denise Jimenez, Kalie Spurgas, Amber White, Andrea Burdette, Christina Rose Groff, Jhenne’ Martinez, Kat Werner, Stacey Mac, Sarah Wethern, Marina Ornelas, and Jess Faulkingham.
one
I lean forward and look at Tess.
She’s still.
Silent.
The machines that keep Tess alive beep at me. I’ve been here so often that sometimes I think they’re her way of replying. But today that’s not enough. Sunday is a day of prayer after all, isn’t it? So here’s mine:
Today I want Tess to wake up.
Today she has to wake up.
I lean in, so close I can see the tiny blue lines on her eyelids marking where her blood still pumps, still flows. Shows that her heart still beats.
“If you don’t do something, Tess, I—I’ll sing for you.”
Nothing.
“I mean it,” I say.
Still nothing. Tess’s eyes stay closed, and her body lies limp, punctured with needles and surrounded by machines. I used to visit Tess with Mom and Dad, used to wait with them for the doctor, but the news never changed and I got so I couldn’t bear to see my parents’ faces, washed out and exhausted and sad.
Like a princess in a fairy tale, Tess is asleep. Deeply asleep.
I guess “coma” doesn’t sound as good when you’re trying to sell stories where everything ends up okay.
Sleeping means you’ll wake up.
Coma … well, coma doesn’t. And Tess has been in this bed, in this room, in this hospital, for six weeks. She was in a car accident on New Year’s Day, driving home the morning after a party. She’d waited to come home because she didn’t want to risk getting into an accident with a drunk driver.
Instead, her car hit a patch of ice and slammed into a tree.
Tess was always so good at being safe. At doing the right thing, at making people happy. And now she’s here. She turned twenty in this room, four days after the call that sent us all rushing here. My parents got her balloons. They floated around for a while and then wilted, fell.
Tess never saw them.
I turned seventeen in this room too. It was two weeks and two days after the accident. I was still visiting Tess with my parents. They got me cupcakes from the vending machine and sang when I opened them.
Tess didn’t say a word. Didn’t even open her eyes. I chewed and swallowed and chewed and swallowed even though the cupcakes tasted like rubber, and my parents watched Tess’s face, waiting. Hoping.
That’s when I realized I had to start coming by myself.
When I realized I had to bring Tess back.
“Wake up, Tess,” I say, loud enough for my breath to stir her hair, and pick up the glass unicorn Beth brought the first time she visited. She said she knew Tess would like it, that it was all about impossibilities. I thought that sounded a bit beyond Tess, who dealt in the here and now and in being adored, but when Beth put the thing in Tess’s limp hands, I swear she almost blinked.
Now Tess doesn’t do anything, and I put the unicorn down.
I miss the little ledge where it sits though, and it hits the floor. It doesn’t break, but a crack appears, running from one end of the unicorn to the other.
A nurse comes in and frowns at me.
“Accident,” I say, and she says, “Love is what your sister needs, not attitude,” like it wasn’t an accident, like she knows me, like she and all the other nurses who have only ever seen Tess in this not-life, this twilight state, know her.
They don’t, they can’t. But I do. Tess believes in happily ever after, in dreams come true, and I’ve decided that’s how I’m going to reach her.
Now I just have to figure out how to do it.
I leave the hospital and ride my bike down to the ferry.
Once I’m on board, I stand by the side of the boat. Most people stand up front; the wind in their hair, the river all around them, and Ferrisville up ahead looking almost quaint and not like a big pile of nothing.
I look at the water. It’s dark, muddy brown, and slaps hard against the ferry. I can see my shadow in it, all chopped up, bits and pieces scattered among the churning waves. I turn away, because I already know I’m broken, that there’s nothing in me worth seeing. I already know there’s nothing worth believing. It’s just how I am.
two
I run into Claire when the ferry’s drifted into the
dock at Ferrisville and people are heading to their cars.
“Hey you,” she says through the three inches her window will roll down, jamming her fingers through the opening into a sort of wave. “Wanna ride home?”
I gesture at my bike. “You got room for this?” Claire’s car is about the size of a cracker, and littered with Cole’s stuff. There’s barely room in it for Claire.
She rolls her eyes at me. “Yes, but go ahead and leave it at the dock. You know nobody’s going to steal it.”
“Are you saying my bike is shit?”
“Yeah,” she says, and I grin at her because it is a pretty shitty bike. It was nice when Tess got it—back when she was ten—but now it looks like a beat-up old bicycle that someone’s younger sister got stuck with.
Which, of course, it is.
I ask Daryl, who normally stands around scratching himself but today is standing around coiling rope, if I can leave my bike on the dock.
“Sorry, no,” he says, and then, “How’s Tess?” in the voice everyone uses on me now, the oh-it’s-such-a-shame voice. The oh-we-all-miss-Tess-so-much voice.
“Not dead yet,” I say, my voice cracking, and drop my bike by his feet before I stomp over to Claire’s car.
I hate how I am when people talk to me about Tess. I hate how everyone sounds. I hate how she’s already been reduced to the past when she isn’t.
She’s still here.
“You okay?” Claire says when I get in.
“Not really,” I say, pushing a box filled with what I hope are new diapers onto the floor. “I just … the way people talk about Tess. Like she’s gone.”
“I don’t think it’s totally like that,” Claire says. “I just think they miss her.”
“Do you miss her?”
Claire looks at her hands on the steering wheel. “Me and Tess stopped talking a long time ago.”
“You mean she stopped talking to you because you dropped out of high school to have Cole.”
Claire sighs. “It wasn’t—it wasn’t like that, Abby.”
But it was pretty much exactly like that, and we both know it.
“How is Cole?” I ask, finding an open pack of gum on the floor. I wave it at her. “Is this stuff still good?”
Claire takes the package and sniffs it. “Smells like fake fruit. Go for it. And Cole’s fine. I have the only two-year-old who’s afraid of toilets, but he’s fine.”
“Maybe he just doesn’t like your bathroom,” I tell her, popping a piece of gum in my mouth. The flavor bursts sweet and fruity across my tongue, but only lasts about two chews. “I know
I’m
afraid to go in there. It’s like being inside a cross-stitch classroom, with all the reminders to put the seat down and wash my hands.”
“So funny. Like your mother’s collection of towels no one but ‘guests’ can use is better.”
I shrug and shove another stick of gum in my mouth. “I heard one of the nurses talking about her kid today. He’s four and sometimes takes off his pants and poops on the rug. So I figure you’re doing okay with Cole.”
“No! Who is it?”
“Kathleen.”
We grin at each other. Kathleen is Claire’s supervisor, and is always making Claire run and fetch things for her, like Claire’s her slave and not a nurse’s aide.
“That almost makes up for how she acted today,” Claire says. “She spent five minutes yelling at me for having a stain on my pants when she knew the reason I had the stain was because she made me wash Mrs. Green, who always pees the second you start to bathe her.”
We pull onto Claire’s street, which is also my street. Cole is out in the front yard, running around after Claire’s dad’s hunting dogs in that weird way little kids have, where for a second it seems like they’re going so fast they’re going to fall right over their own feet.
“Momma!” Cole yells at Claire when we get out of the car. He can say about ten words now, although Claire swears he’s talking when I think he’s babbling.
“Hi, baby,” Claire says. “Wanna say hi to Abby?”
“No!” Cole says, which I don’t take personally because of the ten words I know for sure that Cole knows, his favorite is “no.”
“Hey,” I say, and pat the top of his grubby little head. “Claire, thanks for the ride.”
“Sure,” she says. “Tell your parents I said hi, okay?”
I nod, but I won’t. Telling my parents anyone said anything would mean actually talking to them, and that’s something that doesn’t happen much these days.
After all, what is there to say? We all know what’s going on. We’ve all waited and waited for Tess to wake up.
We are all still waiting.