“Do you remember,” she asked her big sister, “what you were thinking in the lake? When the ice broke?”
Serena’s brow crinkled. “You mean, besides fuck, it’s cold?” Sydney almost smiled. Serena didn’t. Her hand slid from Sydney’s face. “I just remember thinking no. No, not like this.” She set the box she’d been holding on the side table. “Happy birthday, Syd.”
And then Serena left. And Sydney didn’t. She asked to leave, and they refused. She pleaded and begged and promised she was fine, and they refused. It was her birthday, and she didn’t want to spend it alone in a place like this. She couldn’t spend it here. But they still said no.
Her parents both worked. They had to go.
A week, they promised her. Stay a week.
Sydney didn’t have much choice. She stayed.
*
SYDNEY hated evenings at the hospital.
The whole floor was too quiet, too settled. It was the only time the heavy panic set in, panic that she would never leave, never get to go home. She would be forgotten here, wearing the same pale clothes as everyone else, blending in with the patients and the nurses and the walls, and her family would be outside in the world and she would bleed away like a memory, like a colorful shirt washed too many times. As if Serena knew exactly what she’d need, the box by Sydney’s bed contained a purple scarf. It was brighter than anything in her small suitcase.
She clung to the strip of color, wrapped the scarf around her neck despite the fact that she wasn’t very cold (well, she was, according to the doctors, but she didn’t feel very cold), and began to walk. She paced the hospital wing, relishing the moments when the nurses’ eyes flicked her way. They saw her, and they didn’t stop her, and that made Sydney feel like Serena, around whom the seas kept parting. When Sydney had walked the entire floor three times, she took the stairs to the next one. It was a different shade of beige. The change was so subtle that visitors would never notice, but Sydney had been staring at the walls on her own floor enough to pick out their paint chip on one of those walls with ten thousand colors, two hundred kinds of white.
People were sicker on this floor. Sydney could smell it even before she heard the coughing or saw the stretcher being wheeled from a room, bare but for a large sheet. It smelled like stronger disinfectants here. Someone in a room down the hall shouted, and the nurse wheeling the stretcher paused, left it in the hall, and hurried into the patient’s room. Sydney followed to see what the fuss was about.
A man in the room at the end of the hall was unhappy, but she couldn’t understand why. Sydney stood in the hall and tried to catch a glimpse, but a curtain was drawn in the room, bisecting it and shielding the shouting man from view, and the stretcher was blocking her way. She leaned on the gurney, just a little, and shivered.
The sheet she was touching had been put there to cover something. The something was a body. And when she brushed against it, the body twitched. Sydney jumped back, and covered her mouth to keep from shouting. Pressed against the beige wall she looked from the nurses in the patient’s room to the body under the sheet on the stretcher. It twitched a second time. Sydney wrapped the tails of her purple scarf around her hands. She felt frozen all over again but in a different way. It wasn’t icy water. It was fear.
“What are you doing here?” asked a nurse in an unflattering shade of beige-green. Sydney had no idea what to say, so she simply pointed. The nurse took her wrist and began to lead her down the hall.
“No,” said Syd, finally. “Look.”
The nurse sighed and glanced back at the sheet, which twitched again.
The nurse screamed.
*
SYDNEY was assigned therapy.
The doctors said it was to help her cope with the trauma of seeing a dead body (even though she didn’t actually see it) and Sydney would have protested, but after her unsupervised trip to the next floor up she found herself confined to her room, and there wasn’t any other way for her to spend her time, so she agreed. She refrained, however, from mentioning the fact that she had touched the body a moment before it came back to life.
They called the person’s recovery a miracle.
Sydney laughed, mostly because that’s what they had called her recovery.
She wondered if someone had accidentally touched her, too.
*
AFTER a week, Sydney’s body temperature still hadn’t come back up, but she seemed otherwise stable, and the doctors finally agreed to release her the next day. That night, Sydney snuck out of her hospital room and went down to the morgue, to find out for sure if what had happened in that hall was truly a miracle, a happy accident, a fluke, or if she somehow had something to do with it.
Half an hour later she hurried out of the morgue, thoroughly disgusted and spotted with stale blood, but with her hypothesis confirmed.
Sydney Clarke could raise the dead.
XXX
YESTERDAY
THE ESQUIRE HOTEL