Edie stepped forward. “I brought her here, Mama.”
Penny turned three shades of red, huffed twice, and swallowed down what was clearly an uprush of pain. “You brought her? Then you get rid of her!” She turned her face away.
I can’t explain how, but right then, I had the clearest knowing that, as angry as Penny was, she was far angrier at herself than she was at either me or Edie.
“Miz Walton, please—” I tried.
“Get out!” she roared, then grunted—with the strain of shouting, I imagined. “I don’t want to hear a word you have to say! Nurse!” She reached for her call button and mashed it with both thumbs. “Nurse!”
Tom stepped forward. “Penny, please, hear us out.”
“Oh-ho! You’re behind this! Mister Alternative Treatment! Mister Fluff-My-Aura Man! Tell you what.” She pointed a trembling finger. “You’re fired. I want a new day nurse. Get your supervisor. We’ll deal with this right now.” Penny mashed the button again. “Nurse! A real nurse, please!”
A real nurse did come in, and a supervisor, and two other folks who I reckoned were some kind of orderlies.
Penny waved an arm. “I want these five, including my daughter and this—this nurse-of-false-hopes, out of my room! I told you people I didn’t want any homeopathic pseudo-medicine anything, and I meant it!”
And there it was. Just as fast as we came, a security guard was muscling us out of Penny’s room.
I was so stunned, I nearly let it happen.
But all at once, I saw a glint of silver through the window. The sky was blanketed with glowing clouds, as if a full moon hung beyond them. One lone star, just one, shone out.
A wisp of music, the faintest breath of it, whispered behind my ear. All shall be well.
“Waaaaait!” I bellowed.
Everybody—Penny, nurses, guard man, everyone—froze.
Now what?
I had one chance to get this right. I had to let Penny know that a wish might yet heal her.
“Please! Miz Walton!” I called. “My ma never tried to cure your sister. Loreen asked my ma to let her die!”
As soon as the words were out, I knew I’d yapped up heartily.
Penny turned small and smaller, folding in on herself. Sass’s bold real estate lady was gone. The tiny woman who took her place was something like the husk of a person who’d wandered a desert for weeks but never found a watering hole. She didn’t even seem angry anymore. Just . . . empty.
“That’s enough from you,” muttered the guard. “Let’s go.”
As he strode us down the hall and toward the lobby, Edie called back to her mama, but Penny didn’t reply.
It was a fairly bleak scene, there in that lobby, with Edie sobbing her eyes out and Tom standing stiff as a statue while his supervisor fired him on the spot.
Here’s what comes of it, I recalled Gram saying.
I could only nod and agree.
“I’m sorry,” I said to no one in particular.
Then I walked out.
I didn’t know where I was going, precisely, so I wandered for a time. Around the parking lot, into a pretty little garden that—if the cold kept coming—wouldn’t make it through the night. On the far side of some roses, a staircase clung to the outside wall of the building. I squinted at it, following it up to a landing on the roof. Again, there shone a bit of silver, that same lonely star overhead.
I climbed the stairs like a sleepwalker, dazed. I wasn’t sure why I bothered. High up or down low, this would still be my biggest gaum-up yet.
I just had to come, I poked myself. All for the sake of fixin’ things that wasn’t mine to fix. Edie’s ma not speaking to her. Tom fired. Penny’s spark snuffed out, maybe for good. Not to mention the starving folks whose biscuits didn’t get made tonight!
I glanced up and around, as if the night sky might hold some answer as to how things had gotten so strained. Of course, it didn’t. And as for the rooftop, there were only a few flower pots and a bench for sitting. Ardenville was prettier than I imagined a city could be, though. From up high, its lights twinkled like low-to-earth stars.
The wind gusted then, so I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard another scuffle down below. Tom’s voice, maybe, and Travis’s.
After a time, Travis called clearly from the parking lot, “Genuine? You around?”
I walked to the tippy edge of the roof and shouted down, “I’m here! You can just let the police know where to find me when they get here.” For, surely, they were coming to arrest us all.
I was walking the roof’s edge, imagining what it might be like to jump off and suddenly find I could fly, when a chunk-thunk sounded behind me. I turned to see a pair of doors opening. It was a freight elevator.
Edie stepped out, pushing Penny Walton along in a wheelchair.
They didn’t say anything as they came my way, so I held my tongue and let the rush of cars on the highway fill the silence.
Edie wheeled Penny up to me, reached out and squeezed my hand, then left without a word.
“I don’t like you, you know,” was how Penny started us off.
“I was figurin’ that.” My feelings weren’t hurt. Truth to tell, after yapping Pa’s chances for that handyman job, Penny wasn’t at the top of my list, neither.
She grunted, her face gone tight with pain. It was a while before she managed to go on, “Did you make that up, what you said about Loreen asking Cristabel to let her—?”
“I’m no liar, Miz Walton.” I said it harshly, I’ll admit. But looking at that poor shuck of a lady before me, I couldn’t stay mad. “And it was told to me by the most truthful man I know. I believe him.”
Penny let out a sigh.
“Darn it,” she said.
For a time, Penny and I just looked out over Ardenville. A few snowflakes started to fall.
She said, “I used to love the snow.”
“Used to?” I asked.
“These days, all I can think of is how gray it’ll look after it’s been sitting a while.”
“Most days it melts while it’s still white,” I replied.