Darkest Day (16 page)

“Really bad. She doesn’t look like our Zoe, but she is. I could tell. She’s just so … beaten.”

Mary reached out a hand and Suze took it, entwining his fingers with hers. “You’re a good man to be here for her family.”

I sat back against the chair and closed my eyes, trying to picture Zoe as anything but the cheerful, lively, gregarious, over-the-top
sister
I’d come to love.

“It’s impossible to imagine life without someone, isn’t it?” Mary asked.

“I wasn’t thinking that,” I said.

“Good, dear. Good.” She put her hands on both sides of the chair and pushed up. The motion took at least thirty seconds. “Life … as most know it, ceases to exist when a loved one passes. For some, though, they have a far better place to go.”

Whatever, lady.

Mary placed a hand on her tripod cane and took a step. She turned back and faced me. “It’s in our heart that we hurt most. For some of us, it’s listening to what’s there that allows us to heal.”

I didn’t comment as she both confused me and made me wonder. She’d just plopped herself down with us—a stranger among our family. She didn’t know Zoe. She didn’t know any of us.

“You take care, now, dear. I’m just going to walk on back.”

“Would you like some assistance?” Suze asked.

“Oh, yes, dear. I very much would.”

Suze took her arm and together they followed the path Bernie had taken, leaving me alone.

Crazy old lady.

I kicked out my legs.

I crossed and re-crossed my arms.

I stood and paced to the window and returned to my seat.

Up. Down. Back. Forth.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

The doors swung open again, arcing outward to expose the full entry into the Intensive Care Unit. Winn staggered out. He leaned into the wall, eyes closed.

I ran to him and wrapped my arms around him as he, too, hiccupped air like his dad had. With a touch to his hip, I tugged him toward the chairs and managed to get him to sit before he fell over.

“She’s—she’s—she’s just laying there with all these tubes and monitors and—” Hurt ebbed from him in an invisible waves. “—and I just wanted her to wake up. To sit up and say ‘surprise’ like she used to do when she was little. Or to slip off the bed and into mine with me to read a book. Or to yell at me for being loud in my room when it really wasn’t me.”

I let him talk, not stopping him, not walking away, just rubbing his back and hoping the shudders that wracked him would subside.

“You—you need to go in, Mac. In case, you know? To see her?”

She’s not going to die.
“I don’t want to leave you.” Of course, as soon as I said it, Bernie showed up, his pace slow. “Your dad’s coming.”

“Okay.” Winn didn’t even look up.

It took a minute, but Bernie finally reached us and sat across from us.

“I guess it’s my turn,” I said.

15

Mac

I stood outside the double doors, waiting for them to open. When they did, I stayed stuck in the middle, facing a hallway of nurses and doctors, curtains and doors, nothing like when Winn had been in the hospital. What lay before me included more pain and suffering than I ever expected to see.

Immortals didn’t die over time. If they went, fast and furious would best describe the moment.

I walked in, one step at a time, the overpowering scent of antiseptics filling my sinuses. Even after two hours, Dr. George still waited, leaning over the counter, scribbling on an electronic tablet of some sort.

She turned to me as I approached. “Mackenzie, right?”

I nodded.

The doctor faced me. “I’ll take you back.”

Following her, we navigated our way through the ICU, passing glass doors, curtains, weeping families, sleeping patients and a night-time bustle of quiet activity. As we passed room ‘14’, the woman in the chair at the door tilted up.

Clara’s mom—the one who’d walked through the waiting room before. If she sat outside a door, did that mean Clara had been the other one who’d been brought to the hospital? If so, who died? Who’d been driving? Why had Zoe gotten in the car with them? What were they doing?

“Here she is,” Dr. George said, pulling me from my thoughts.

Zoe lay in bed, her body still, a ventilator beeping every few seconds and her chest expanding with its effort. Her entire face had been wrapped in white gauze and under the hospital sheets, wires and monitors surrounded her. She didn’t even resemble the annoying freshman I’d grown attached to.

Attachments.
Exactly the connections I hadn’t wanted to make and did anyway.
At the last moment, too.

“You can stay as long as you like,” Dr. George said. “I’ll just be at the counter, where you met me, if you need something. And nurses are stationed throughout this floor, if there’s an emergency. They’re monitoring all her vitals and check in every thirty minutes.” She exited, the door swooshing as she closed me in with Zoe.

I tiptoed around the bed and ran my hands along the sheets to find her hand. For all I knew, since I could barely make out her face, they’d ID’d the wrong girl. Around the middle of the bed, I found her fingers and ran mine up the length of one.

The ring, the one our mother had given us both, remained.

Oh, god.

I dropped to the chair next to Zoe, my chest hurting with the pain of a thousand stabs and my head throbbing.

Why?

Why?

Why her?

Why, when I’ve just learned what it means to be a sister?

Why, when she’s the only one who can speak to my mom and relay messages?

Why, when she just learned who she is?

Why would you do this to Winn?

A series of beeps had me popping up. I expected to turn and find Zoe staring at me, her big eyes blinking back confusion at her state, with a smile to say, ‘Just kidding!’

Nothing.

Her chest continued to move to the rhythm of the vent.

I reached under the sheet again and took her hand in mine, dropping my head to our connection. “You have to fight, Zoe. There’s so much you still have to experience. You have to meet the Council. You have to learn about your heritage. You have to grow up … and go to the prom … and love boys … and everything else you’re supposed to do in life. Okay? All of it. You know, marriage and kids and family, and all that crap I’m not going to get to do. You have to do that for me. I was counting on it. You were going to be my conduit to Winn later. You can’t leave me to deal with all this alone. It’s all about me, remember?” I laughed at myself.

Zoe and I had had that conversation several times. I’d say ‘It’s all about me, remember’? and she’d roll her eyes. Later, she’d say it to me in some other context.

The door to the room slid open.

I lifted my head to find Mary, the little old woman from the waiting room, entering. She didn’t look like a nurse or doctor, so with furrowed brow, I asked, “Um … can I help you?”

“Oh, carry on, dear. I’m just here to check on her.”

With a little more force, I said, “The nurses said only family could come back here. And only one at a time.”

Mary waved a crinkly hand at me, her eyes glassy. “Ah … yes. That.”

I wanted to tell her to get out, that my private time came as
my
private time. I would have done that, too, months ago, but something inside me wanted her—a little old lady I’d never met until half an hour before—to stay. A deep, internal something-or-other warred with the rules playing through my head, even as I said, “There’s a chair over there.”

Mary had already begun lowering herself into it. “You care very deeply for her, don’t you?”

Facing Zoe, I said, “Yeah. She’s my only sister.”

“I know.”

My head whipped up. “How do you know?”

“Your father told me.”

She must have met Bernie outside and misunderstood. “Oh,” I said. “Right.” Of course he hadn’t fathered either one of us. “Why are you here?” I asked with genuine interest, hoping, for some reason, she’d say, ‘I’m a witch come to heal Zoe’ or something similar.

Mary chuckled, a small, old lady sound. “For you, dear.”

“Me?” Surprise coated my tone.

She nodded. “I noticed there was no mother-figure in your group and thought you might need a little support from one of your own.”

Oh. One of my own. A Council member, then.
With my head in my hands, I rethought my assumption. According to Suze, the Council couldn’t intervene in Zoe’s care, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t—that someone on the Council wouldn’t just help Zoe anyway. If I asked Mary, ‘Hey, is your name really Josie? Alina? Cleo?’ and she said ‘no’, I’d look stupid. Deciding to forget the rules and just be thankful she’d been let in, I asked, “Have you had to … go through something like this before?”

“In a way, once. Yes.” Mary adjusted in her seat.

“And did she live?”

She gave me a slow head nod. “She did.”

A bubble of hope rose up in me. “Did she … have any problems?”

“We all have problems. What one person considers a challenge, another sees it as part of their life.”

“Did she wish things were different?”

“All the time, but she learned, in the end, that what mattered most was what she had right in front of her.”

For some reason, her words didn’t seem applicable to anyone but to me. That couldn’t be possible, but it seemed like it. If Maddie were even my friend anymore, I’d have asked her about the psychology of our conversation. She’d always analyzed me even when I hadn’t requested it.

“This sucks,” I said.

Mary smiled. “Yes, dear, I expect it does. As young as you are, I would presume you’ve never considered your own fate–in terms of what you’d want to do, if you were in a similar situation.”

She had that right. Who would have at eighteen? “I’d want to be with my mom …”
in the in-between.
Couldn’t say that part out loud though or I’d give away one of the many secrets, and if a Council member truly had taken the role of Mary, would give away their cover, too.

“At the bosom of our mothers,” Mary said after a few moments of silence. “I believe men and women alike ask for their mothers. The care and comfort from a maternal source is deeply desired by many.” Mary started her upward rise again, bones creaking. “Life at my age is simply not what it’s cracked up to be.” She giggled.

I stood, too, figuring I ought to help her since she’d been so nice and stayed with me.

“No, no, dear. I’m okay. You just take care of your sister. And yourself.” When she reached the door, she pushed it open as if she had Suze’s strength.

Definitely a Council member.

“Just remember, dear, no matter your station in life, mothers are always watching.”

As I sat back down, Mary slipped through the door, her hand still on the inside frame.

“Be caref—” I started, not wanting her to pinch her fingers when the ring on her right ring finger made me do a double-take.

Her hand passed through, and she stepped away toward the curtain as I jumped up, grabbed the handle and yanked. It wouldn’t budge.

“Mom!
Mom
!”

I pulled harder on the door, trying to get it to slide.

It gave way, and I raced through, turning the way I’d seen her go and running to the end of the hall.

No Mary.

Back to the left, I turned.

Nurses faced me, their faces a mixture of confusion and worry, interest and uncertainty.

Dr. George scurried down the hall toward me. “Miss Thorne? Are you okay?”

I stared at her, hurt coursing through my body, all the calm Mary brought evaporating like steam on a cold winter’s day.

My mom had come in corporeal form. She’d sat with me twice, and I didn’t know it. She’d left me at a time when I could have used her most.

“My … mom—”

Dr. George put her arm around me. “Come. Let me get you something to drink.” She directed me down a hall. “Some rest would probably do you a lot of good, too. I promise to call if anything changes.”

Everything had already changed.

In my heart, I understood my mother’s advice.

Winn

Three days passed, and Zoe had shown no sign of improvement. Mac and I stood at our lockers, both of us silent, both of us stuck as if in a cartoon where the scenery doesn’t really go by but sticks in place even though the characters keep moving.

Dad made me go back to school, to give me something to do other than mope around and ask him ten times a day if I thought she’d be okay. Alina had pushed Mac for the same reason.

Instead of lethargically moving around them, we did so together under the scrutiny of our friends.

“Hey,” Caroline said, Pete in her wake.

I gave her a nod.

“Did you hear the news report this morning?” She plunked herself against the locker next to me.

“Haven’t watched any—”

“They charged Clara’s sister with texting while driving, manslaughter for Kieran’s death and malicious intent, but are holding charges for Clara and Zoe … you know … for when they get out of the hospital.”

Or die
, I wanted to say.

“Kieran’s funeral is this Saturday. I think I’m going to go even though I didn’t know her. A bunch of the sophomores are going. And they brought in a bunch of counselors, so you know … maybe you guys should both—”

“No,” Mac and I said at the same time. “She’ll be fine,” Mac said. “We don’t need help for someone who’ll be okay—”

“All right,” Caroline said. “I’m with you. You know, just in case.”

“I’m really sorry, man,” Pete said.

I nodded again. The bell rang and Pete and Caroline walked away, but Mac and I still stood there as if being late didn’t matter—as if life itself didn’t matter. “I should be at the hospital,” I said.

“Me, too.” Mac pushed off the wall and turned.

Ridge walked toward us.

“Not now,” I said.

He held up his hands. “Hey, I was just going to class, minding my own business. Got nothing against you, man. Just wanted to say I heard about your sister and wanted to tell you I’m sorry.”