Tell Me a Secret (19 page)

“Hey, what are you doing here?” a voice roared in my ear, dragging me up through a thousand layers of sleep. “I thought I told you not to hang around!”

The person in my face was huge. Angry. Spewing spit and breath that stank of old garlic. Steely eyes penetrated me like needles.

The security guard.

He wasn’t supposed to be here. He had chased me out of a bed in the Gastroenterology wing, two floors down. Didn’t he? Wasn’t this Oncology? Didn’t I have a few more days before I needed to find a new waiting room?

“Where’s your patient I.D.? Who are you here to see?” He stood over me like a bulldog while I sat up, my heart
pumping with adrenaline.

“I’m a patient,” I stammered. “I was a patient. I mean…” I rummaged through my satchel.

He would let his guard down any second.

Fight or flight?

I wasn’t even sure which I would choose until I found myself dashing over the other side of the bench and heading for the nearest stairwell, shaking off the sleep and clutching my satchel to my chest.

What floor was this again?

Footsteps thudded behind me in the corridor, empty in the early morning fluorescence. I glanced behind me to see my lead. He was heavy and muscular, like a wrestler,
thud thud thudding
in his boots. The sound echoed in the halls.

The door to the stairwell gave way under my weight. Something grabbed my First Washington Credit Union T-shirt—once gold, now a hazy yellow-gray—but it was only the handle, hooked around the hem.

Thud, thud, thud
. “Hey, you come back here!”

Then the click of the door behind me muffled his voice.

I flew down the stairs two, three at a time, leaping to the bottom and struggling to direct my momentum to the next flight. He was in the stairwell, calling for backup on his walkie-talkie.
Teen, possible runaway
.
Headed down the south stairs.

I hadn’t run for months, but it came back to me in an instant. I was fast, faster than a middle-aged cop who’d eaten too many garlic bagels in the hospital cafeteria. I kept circling
down, down the stairs, metal and gray and echoing my precise coordinates. I had to get out of here before someone caught me on the other end.

I burst out into an unfamiliar hallway, narrow and lined with rows of gray lockers, broken only by the occasional classroom door. The lights were low, the area deserted on a Sunday morning. I tried a few of the doors. Locked.

“Hey, stop right there!” The guard tripped, dropping his walkie-talkie. He went back for it, as well as for the battery that had skittered across the floor, buying me a few more seconds.

I nearly careened into an emergency shower in the hall, just in case I accidentally set myself on fire with hospital chemicals. My lungs were already on fire.

Past the elevator shaft, I found a second set of stairs and kept on running—through the corridors, winding and coiling like a serpent’s tail into the very depths of the hospital. I stopped, tucking myself into an alcove, and listened.

Nothing.

I didn’t know where I was, except I had reached the end of the line. Gigantic double doors barred my entrance with a sign,
NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY
in red and white, and a smaller sign reading,
WARNING: FORMALDEHYDE IRRITANT AND POTENTIAL CANCER HAZARD
.

I’d been here before, though something was off. The sign I’d seen before had a corner curled up from below, revealing a silver edge. Slowly, with my back in the alcove, I slid down the
wall until I was the height of a twelve-year-old girl, crouching on the ground. The words loomed over me like they were ten feet tall.

And the corner, I realized with a chill. The corner curled up on the bottom edge, sharp and shiny as a razor. Exactly like the one I’d seen before, the night Xanda died.

Voices echoed down the hall—the security guard and someone else. “Maybe she went down this way.” A grunt. Footsteps, coming my way. Which door was this?

There was no time to decide.

I tried the handle, slipped through, and closed the door with an airy thud.

The formaldehyde hit my nose first, bringing everything flooding back.

My eyes stung from the chemical, from the bright lights in this mostly metal room, lined with identical square drawers. The skin on my arms pricked with the cold, underscored by an electric hum. It was like the NICU, but vast and hollow, with a row of tables for full-sized people instead of babies.

One of the tables had a lumpy blue sheet, carefully laid out. Over a person.

A dead person.

A woman person, whose pale hair flowed out from under the sheet and dangled prettily off the edge. Her feet peeked out the other end, nails painted a jagged black, a tiny star tattoo twinkling on her toe. Like she was just sleeping, after a long party.

I would have cried out, but I could only gasp, and not even a full gasp, because the realization all but sucked the air out of me. A scream could summon the living and the dead.

Memory blurred into reality, like the razor’s edge of the sign outside.

Everything was slipping out of my control.

I had to get out of here.

Footsteps pounded up to the other side of the door. “Think she went in here?” a new voice said—the other guard. Across the room, another exit sign signaled a stairwell, but there was no time. As the latch turned, I dove into a recessed corner.

Click. Swoosh
. The guard poked his head into the room as I folded myself further.

“Nope, nobody in here,” he called to the other guard. “Did you check the other corridor?” The door closed with an airy thud.

“I’ll keep looking,” said the other guard. “I hope she doesn’t show up in here one of these days.” Steps and voices faded away.

I slipped through another door and somehow found my way back to the NICU, as if Lexi had a homing beacon to draw me to her. When I reached the desk, Shelley sat there, waiting for me with a paper bag.

“I brought you a dress, just in case you wanted to go to church with me today. I know Lexi is going to be discharged in a few days, but I thought you might like to get outside.”

“Church?” She had to be joking. I had just been to the depths of hell itself.

“Honey, are you all right? You look like you could faint dead away.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled, not meeting her eyes. “I’m fine.” I had to be as pale as the body I’d seen. I put my hand over my nose, trying to wipe away the smell clinging to me like a shadow.

“Because if you—”

“Wait,” I pleaded. “I have to ask you something. When Lexi can leave…when we can leave, can we live with you?”

Shelley’s face transformed from smiling to something else, something I didn’t want to see.

“We could ride to work together,” I continued. “We could…eat curried egg-salad sandwiches together. I could take care of DaShawn when I’m not working—I still have the bank job, right?” I talked faster and faster as the adrenaline worked its way out of my system in a fevered rush.

She shook her head sadly.

The rush flooded into panic. “But why not? Things have been so great here! You could love Lexi, too. And you’re like—well, not really like my mom anymore, you’d be more like a big sister. It would be like—”

“Rand. No.”

Panic turned to tears, and I found I was running out of words. “But…why? Don’t you care about us?”

Shelley sighed heavily. “Yes, I do. That’s why you can’t live with me. Even though it would be wonderful, and I would get
to love Lexi, and DaShawn would be thrilled. But you would still be running away.”

Damn it, why did I trust her? I could see my future crumbling, cracking open, and the floodwaters swallowing me up. “You’re not listening,” I accused.

“I have listened to every word you ever said, and even things you haven’t said. You’ve been holing up here in the hospital for months now, feeling sorry for yourself and trying to make a future out of your past. You can’t find yourself in other people, Rand. You can only be yourself. And you have someone right here in front of you who needs your whole heart, not just a piece of it while you’re off looking for something else. A lot of people around you love you and want to love that baby, if you’d give them a chance. You’ve got to stop. You need to go home.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Home?

No, I wasn’t going back there. And if my parents wanted to love Lexi, good. They could feel what it felt like to love someone and lose them. Maybe then they could take a good, hard look at themselves and see what they had done. And then they could be sorry. So, so sorry.

“Fine,” I said, wishing I could say the hundred other angry words backed up like a simmering volcano. “Well, you should go to church. Confess, or whatever it is you do there. I’ve gotta go see Lexi now.”

“We pray,” she said quietly. “And we try to learn how to forgive.”

When she was gone, I checked in with the nurses and grabbed my satchel. Nobody would be home on a Sunday morning. They would be off at church, praying for the sinners and hating the sin. I could hop a bus, run inside, and be gone before they said their last
Amen
.

Because as soon as Lexi was strong enough, we were out of here.

After Xanda stormed out on Christmas Eve with Andre in tow and her skirt still crackling in the fire, Mom patted her forehead. “I’m so glad that’s over for the year. Mandy, get your things together so we can head to the church.” As if it was all so…
normal
. I scrambled to get my boots and coat. Dad rolled his eyes and tossed a wad of wrapping paper into the fire, obliterating the skirt forever.

I felt like a defector, going with my parents after Xanda left, wearing the safety-pin necklace I gave her and not much else. She had squealed when she opened the little package from me. Delicately, she lifted the safety-pin chain out and held it up to the light.

“Look, Andre!” He draped across the couch like it was his
personal chaise. I knew Mom was angry at his cigarette smell, soaking into the fabric. We would hear about it later, even though she was glad that for once, Andre and Xanda were at our house instead of going
God knows where
and doing
God knows what
. He nodded. A nod of approval. “Rand made it for me. To go with my
dress
.” A giggle hiccupped on that last word. The sly smile spread across his face. I wished with all my heart that smile had been for me.

After they left, the memory of his smile lingered, so when I went onstage for the closing performance, I wasn’t thinking of my mom’s shouting or the skirt Xanda threw in the fire. I was thinking of his smile and nod of approval. I floated past the monstrous audience, all eyes pinning me to the sets my dad designed. I was only the girl in the white dress, lit up like an angel, or a white bird soaring out of the church and into the seat between my sister and Andre, where we would all fly away together.

My mother’s choked gasp broke through my dream.

A murmur rose up in the crowd, and I was suddenly aware of the hundreds of dark heads watching me, listening, whispering among themselves. I heard my sister’s name spoken in the crowd. If something had gone wrong, of course it had to do with her. The gossip, the snickering never stopped.
My poor mother. My poor father. And poor me, who had to follow in her footsteps.

A police officer was standing backstage with my parents, speaking in a low voice.

My dad came out on the stage. Somehow he looked splintered, like the weight of our family had finally broken him. I looked to the wings, where my mother—her face a contradiction of red swelling and white angles—hissed,
“Don’t.”

He started to speak. Haltingly, with deep cracks, the sound of pipes breaking through concrete. “Folks, there has been—”

In the split second before he could say “an accident,” my mother’s face transformed, anything vulnerable having been washed over by a clean hardness that could score glass. She was so beautiful, so formidable. And she strode out on the stage like a queen and smiled at the crowd, whose murmur had risen to a tight thrum of anxiety. She held out her hands for a ripple of calm. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she announced, “we’ve had some technical difficulties, but our program will resume shortly. Please take a few minutes to get some cocoa in the lobby and enjoy the music while we get our act together.” She said this last part with a chuckle.

The crowd visibly relaxed. Crisis averted. Still, I couldn’t stop the panic flooding up through me. I inched my way closer to the wings where Dad stood, waiting for Mom.

He was not chuckling. He was crying.

And I started crying. Because a terrible fear had taken hold of me, to see my daddy cry and my mother crystallize into a diamond. She didn’t even notice me standing there.

“Pull yourself together,” she said in a low voice. “They need us to identify her.”

I didn’t even realize I was clutching my white dress in my hands, still standing on the stage with hundreds of people watching me. I couldn’t stop the flood overtaking me, filling up my lungs and throat and eye sockets and spilling over and soaking into my white dress, or the sob escaping my lips. “What happened?”

All I could see was my daddy’s red eyes, and my mother’s tight face. I didn’t hear how my voice had carried into the rafters of the church, echoing through the space and stopping everyone in their tracks. “Where’s Xanda?” Everyone waited to hear the answer.

My mother enfolded me in her grasp, and I saw how a tear landed near my shoe and seeped into the wooden cracks of the stage. “Now look what you’ve done,” she was saying to my father, all the while hugging me into her thin, cashmered body. My face scraped against the pearls around her neck.

“What
I’ve
done?” asked my father. He was gathering coats. Making himself useful. Ignoring the stagehands waiting to hear exactly what.

“This is all your doing,
Chuck
,” she spat. “You hired him, you brought him into our house, you stood by and did nothing while he was out front…out front
screwing
our daughter.” I felt my ears stinging, as if she had said the words to me. “And now…”

My dad stood, stunned, watching while she held me under her arm and steered me toward the back door. He meekly followed.

The words still echoed in my mind as I sat in the backseat of the car. They stayed with me when we disappeared into the white fortress of the hospital and traveled its corridors. They settled when they left me outside a door blaring
NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY
, where they went in as my parents and came out as people I didn’t know at all.

Andre killed her. My dad killed her. My mother killed her. I wondered if somehow I had killed her, too.

Now, in the same hospital, Lexi had escaped death. She was days away from release.

Freedom.

I could be the bird to take us both away. All I had to do was pack a suitcase and go.