Between Here and Forever (9 page)

twenty-five

Claire is in Tess’s room when we get there.

“Hey,” I say, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

“Someone called in sick, and here I am. You know I’m not turning down extra pay.”

I walk over to her and look at Tess. “How is she?”

“I’m just checking her IVs,” Claire says. “They’re more short-staffed than usual, so I’m making sure no one’s running low on anything.”

I sit down in my usual chair and Eli comes in then, looking a little worried and hesitant.

“So, you’re Eli, who’s here to talk to Tess,” Claire says, and Eli nods, crossing his arms over his chest. I’m starting to think he’s shy. The fidgeting, the whole arm crossing thing—it’s all stuff people do when they’re nervous.

Claire looks at me, raising one eyebrow like she knows something, and then says, “Well, I’ve got to get back to work, check more IVs and things. Have fun.”

“Bye,” Eli says at the same time Claire says, “fun,” and that’s when I see Tess’s eyes move again. Under her closed lids, there is motion, like she’s seeing something. Like something—someone—is reaching her.

“Did you see that?” I say, standing up and leaning over Tess, willing her to open her eyes.

“See what?” Claire says, and Eli says, “Yes.”

The next few minutes are maddeningly slow. Tess doesn’t open her eyes, but the doctor on call is paged, and I sit, impatiently waiting for him.

Claire won’t stay, though. She says she didn’t see anything.

“I’m sorry,” she says, after I’ve asked her for what feels like the thousandth time. “I wasn’t looking at Tess. I was talking to you.”

“But—”

“Abby, I really do have to get back to work,” she says, and moves past me, not even looking back as she leaves the unit.

“Are you sure you paged the doctor?” I ask the nurse who supposedly made the call, and she says, “I’m sure,” her voice filled with something that sounds an awful lot like pity.

I swallow.

As I stand near the nursing station, waiting, Eli is a silent and weirdly reassuring presence. I like that he’s not trying to tell me how the doctor will be here soon or anything like that. I glance at him a couple of times and he smiles at me, then goes back to drawing on a piece of paper he must have gotten from one of the nurses.

I walk over to him—not to stand near him, but to see what he’s drawing. I know it for the lie it is—I do want to see what he’s doing, but I also just want to be near him—and still walk over there anyway.

Eli is not an artist. He’s just doodling, like I do sometimes, like lots of people do, squiggly lines and boxes, and it really hits me that he’s a guy, past all his beauty, he’s a person, and then—

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 really want to see—but I want him to hold my hand, tell me without words that everything will 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 tell 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 actually 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’ll 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 all that money—”

“He can’t—it doesn’t work like that,” Eli says, and when I laugh because, hello, 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 still 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 all of Tess’s things and her stupid signature, all 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 all for her sister to come back. I want Tess to wake up so she’ll 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.
“Please.”

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.

twenty-six

The doctor doesn’t come, and visiting hours end.

I ask if I can wait anyway, knowing I’ll 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’ll be sure to let you know,” as I’m headed out of the unit.

“Thanks again for, you know, before,” I tell Eli as we leave the hospital. “See you tomorrow?”

He shakes his head. “Clement and I go to church, and then I have—there’s some family stuff.”

“Oh, right.” Stupid. He just gave up his Saturday night to be here, so why would he want to give up his Sunday too?

“I can meet you on Monday, though,” he says. “Regular time?”

I shrug, like I don’t care if he shows up or not.

But I am supposed to care. For Tess, at least. So I let myself say, “I know Tess will like that,” before I start to walk away.

“Hey, can I—can I take you home?”

I freeze. I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. No one has ever asked me that before. Jack would sometimes walk me back to the house after we talked, but he never asked, and we both knew he only did it for a chance to see Tess.

I take a deep breath.

“You want to talk about Tess some more or something?” I ask, mostly to remind myself why I’m here, why he’s here, but when he says, “Yeah, sure,” I feel the bits of me I broke with Jack, those stupid hopeful bits, bleed open.

I feel grubby in his car, my crappy clothes a reminder that I don’t belong here. Tess belonged—belongs—in this car. Not me.

“Tess belongs here,” I say, and Eli, pulling out of the hospital lot, looks at me like he doesn’t understand.

“This is her kind of car,” I say. “I can see her in here, you know? She’d like it.”

“I don’t like it,” Eli says. “It’s like driving a bus. I used to … I used to have my own car. My parents told me I could get a car when I turned sixteen because that’s what everyone did, and they wanted—they wanted me to be like everyone else. I was going to get a, you know—”

“Super-fast sports car?” I say. “Let me guess, you wanted a red one too, right?”

“Silver,” he says with a quick grin at me. “But we got to the lot and there was this car over in the corner, some car an old lady owned and that her kids had gotten rid of when she died, and it looked so sad. All alone out there, you know? And her kids hadn’t even bothered to clean out the glove box. When I looked in it, there was a shopping list. Eggs, bread, tea, all in this tiny, old-lady handwriting. And I kept thinking, What if that’s the last thing she ever wrote? What if she’d made the list and put it in the car so she’d remember it when she went out and she never got to go out and just—I don’t know.”

I stare at him, entranced in spite of myself. “So you didn’t get a sports car?”

“Nope,” he says. “I got a baby blue sedan with low mileage. It had this huge, soft plastic thing on the gearshift, I guess because the old lady had bad hands or something. When I was upset, I’d pick at it. My parents—” He taps his fingers against the steering wheel. “My parents thought I was crazy.”

“So what happened to it?”

“My parents sold it,” he says. “Before I came here, they weren’t … they weren’t real happy with me.”

“No, I mean, what happened to the shopping list?”

“What?” he says.

“The shopping list. What happened to it?”

“I left it in the glove box,” he says. “I didn’t want to throw it away. It was her car first, you know? Plus—I don’t know. My parents have never done anything like make a shopping list.”

“They don’t like shopping?”

“They like shopping,” Eli says. “But not for food. They have people who do that. Pick out menus, buy the food, and make it. All that stuff.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. They don’t—they like the house to be run for them. Someone to cook, someone to clean, someone to take care of the laundry.”

“Right,” I say, like it’s no big deal, but inwardly I’m feeling even grubbier. Jack’s parents had money but not like this, not money to have someone do all the little things that make a house run for them. “You must miss having all of that.”

“No,” he says simply. “So, how come you don’t drive?”

I wonder what kind of trouble he got into with his parents. A guy who’d buy an old lady’s car because her relatives couldn’t be bothered to notice that she’d left behind a shopping list didn’t really seem like the kind of guy who’d be shipped off to live here.

But then, once upon a time Tess and Claire were such good friends that Tess had talked about the two of them as if they were practically one person, and then she cut Claire out of her heart like she was a stone that needed to be cast aside.

“I don’t have a car,” I say. “I did, but it was Tess’s—she bought it to drive back and forth to school with money she earned working at Organic Gourmet. She gave it to me after her first semester was over, when she decided she didn’t need to come home so much, and if she did, she and Beth could—”

“Beth. Is that the—?”

“Yeah,” I say. “The girl from before. Anyway, she and Beth came here back then, and Tess left her car. She said I could drive it if I wanted. When I first got my license, every time I went somewhere people would come up to the car and say, ‘Tess?’ and then look disappointed and try to cover it up when they saw it was only me.”

“Every time?”

“Close enough,” I say lightly, like the memory of those first few months I had the car, of people asking for Tess and their eyes dimming when they saw me, didn’t still sting.

“Why?” he says. “I mean, she’s pretty, but I don’t get why—you make it sound like you’re nothing compared to her.”

“I’m not nothing,” I say, although I think it’s actually pretty accurate. It sounds like self-pity to say it though, and I don’t want to start going there. I wallowed in it after Jack, in between my bouts of fury at him and Tess and myself, and what did it get me? Nothing. “I just—one thing about living with someone like Tess is that it makes you face up to things. Even if you don’t want to.”

It’s the closest I’ve ever come to talking about Jack with anyone but Claire. I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s strange how easy it is for me to talk to Eli.

It’s nice.

Eli’s silent for a long moment, and then we turn onto the road that leads to the ferry landing. There are a few cars waiting, parked with their lights on, casting a dim glow into the dark. “So, you still haven’t answered my question about why you don’t drive.”

I swallow, and almost wish he’d asked about the things I’ve had to face up to, that he’d push me to talk in a way that would lead to Jack. That, I could deflect. This, I can’t. It is why I am here. Why he is here with me.

“She was driving my—her—car,” I say. “It was New Year’s Day, the actual day part. The safe-to-drive-in part. She’d spent the night before at a friend’s house, after a party, and she—there was an accident. Her car was totaled and she … well, you know the rest.”

“So do you think—do you think that if you’d drove that night, you might—?”

“No,” I say. “It was an accident. A terrible, tragic accident. If I could have driven the car, I would. I don’t—I’m not crazy about my bike.” My bike that I used to ride around the summer I fell for Jack. My bike that I put away only to take out when Tess’s accident took away my car. My life as I knew it.

“Oh,” Eli says, as the ferry blows its horn, signaling that passengers will be loading soon. I get out and motion for him to pop the trunk before I shut the door.

There aren’t any cars behind him, but he doesn’t start to back up as I move up along beside him, doesn’t start to turn and drive away. Instead, he rolls his window down.

“Abby,” he says, and I look over at him, breath catching even though I was just in the car with him, even though I have spent all night near him.

“What?” I say, and I’m off-kilter, breathless, because I’ve spent all this time with him and he keeps talking to me, keeps acting like I’m actually interesting, and it keeps throwing me off. Keeps making me think stupid things like how I could ask him to come on the ferry with me. Come home with me.

I shake my head, but it’s too late. I’m shaking.

“Is there anything you’re afraid of?” Eli says.

You,
I think. I am terrified of you. Of how your kindness makes me like you in spite of myself. Of how you make me dream things I haven’t dreamed in forever.

You,
I think. But I don’t say it.