I stare at the untouched mint iced tea, the sweat from the glass bleeding onto the note, the ink blurring as the words all run together.
Sighing, I text Kim she can meet me at the outdoor café now, and a few minutes later she appears, sliding into the seat across from me, wearing a pair of dark sunglasses, an iced coffee still clutched in her hand.
“All right,” she says, her business face on. She’s taking her role in this very seriously, darting around the hospital like a secret agent. “It took a minute to find someone who even knew who the hell I was talking about, but I finally got a nurse to talk to me on her way out on shift change. She stays here when her mother works,” she says, pulling out a color-coded schedule and pushing her sunglasses up on her forehead.
“How did you get that…?”
Kim peers around, eyeing a table next to us suspiciously, still in full recon mode. “Don’t ask,” she says, scanning the sheet and pointing at a blue block labeled CATHERINE PHELPS. “Anyway, her mom works twelve-hour shifts Monday, Tuesday, and Friday through Sunday. They let Marley hang around because she keeps to herself. She reads a lot. Takes a walk around the hospital grounds every day before she has lunch, alone, by the fountain.”
She shrugs and slides the schedule across the table to me.
I fold it up and shove it in my pocket, more than a little impressed at how much Kim found out, but she’s not done.
“The weirdest thing, though? You’re not the only one she won’t talk to. She doesn’t talk at all. So I’m not sure you actually can break through to her.”
But I know I can. Because I did before. She might not talk to anyone else, but at some point she talked to me. I just have to figure it out, but I can’t explain that to Kim right now.
Kim leans back in her chair and takes a long sip of her iced coffee, thoughtful. “I wonder why, though? Who refuses to talk when they can?”
I think about Marley’s hair covering her face, her arms crossed tightly over her chest as she walked away, holding every part of her in, like a snail.
“Someone who’s hiding from life.”
39
She doesn’t come see me.
Two days go by, and then three. Dr. Benefield says we can start talking about discharge soon. The most recent scans on my brain came back normal, and the bones in my leg are healing much better now that I’m not lying unconscious 24/7. My mom is pretty thrilled, but I can’t help feeling nervous.
I’m afraid she won’t come in time.
On the fourth day, I head down to the physical therapy room alone to distract myself, slowly working my way through a list of strength exercises Henry gave me to do whenever I feel up for it.
I pause at the top on my seventh straight leg raise as my mind drifts to Marley at the outdoor café. I can still see the debating look in her eyes after she read my note.
Maybe I can do something like that again.…
No. I shake my head and sit up. I told her to come when she’s ready to talk to me. If she hasn’t come yet, it means she isn’t ready. Or… maybe it means everyone was right.
I fight back against the sinking feeling in my chest, reaching out to grab ahold of a rail and pull myself back up onto my feet.
Maybe she’s not my Marley after all.
I move to do a standing calf stretch, stopping short when I look up through the glass door into the hallway to see…
Marley. Watching me.
Her eyes widen and she turns, darting out of sight.
Or maybe she is.
I try to hurry after her, but my leg slows me down so much she’s long gone by the time I get out into the hallway.
Dr. Benefield may have let me lose the crutches, but I would probably still get smoked by a turtle.
I head back upstairs to the Cardiology wing, the elevator moving frustratingly slowly. When the doors slide open, I limp my way over to the waiting room I once found her in, my heart hammering noisily in my chest.
Only it’s empty. Not a single trace of her backpack or her yellow notebook or the book she was reading a few days ago. Nothing.
I let out a long exhale and plop into one of the chairs.
I sit there for a long moment, listening to the hum of the TV across the room, the sound of a nurse’s squeaking shoes moving down the hallway.
She was watching me.
She didn’t say anything, but she was there. Standing in the doorway of the physical therapy room. If she thought I was crazy, she never would’ve come looking for me. Right?
Sighing, I head back to my room and collapse onto my bed, my leg aching from all this running around. I look over as water loudly batters the window, then cuts off completely in the next second. It reappears a moment later.
The sprinklers in the courtyard. Where I saw her the first time. I’m up and moving before the spray returns.
I limp as fast as I can down the long hallway and slip quietly through the exit door when I see the nurse on duty caught up in a conversation down the hall. The late-summer air feels warm and sticky. Humid. The sweet aroma of the flowers lining the path fills the air.
The daylight is fading, and lampposts have flicked on, giving off a warm yellow glow, so much softer than the fluorescent lights of the hospital.
I zero in on a figure with long hair plucking snails out from under drenched greenery and moving them onto a stone ledge. I hesitate before cautiously walking over, smiling as I see the look of concentration on her face. It feels like déjà vu. A memory come to life.
“I remember the first time I saw you do this,” I say. She doesn’t look up. “It rained on us at our spot by the pond, and on the way to the car, you stopped to pick up every snail on the path. You were afraid someone would step on them.”
She just keeps picking them up and moving them, over and over again, as if she can’t hear me.
“That was one of the first moments I knew I was in trouble,” I say, remembering how she had all the patience in the world to get each and every snail. “I’d never met anyone quite like you before, Marley. I still haven’t.”