“Nah. I’ll call him from the road.”
The moment she left the room, she heard Berber’s heavy footsteps trail her down the hall. He had to wait for a shrieking emergency vehicle to pass the building before he could speak.
“That can’t happen again, nurse. You hear me?”
Amanda turned around to face him. “Mr. Berber—”
“I don’t want his chances going down just ’cause you people don’t have your shit together. You get him his doses on time. You understand?”
She understood all too well. In her two years as a cancer nurse, Amanda had seen every breed of desolate parent—the weepers, the shouters, the sputtering deniers. The tough dads were always the worst. They wore their helplessness like a coat of flames, scorching everything around them.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Berber. I’ll do better next time.”
“You’re just giving me lip service now.”
“I am,” she admitted. “Ask me why.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t fix computers and I can’t conjure nurses out of thin air. All I can do is apologize and remind you that your beautiful son has a seventy-eight percent chance of outliving the both of us. Being twenty minutes late with the cisplatin won’t affect those odds. Not one bit.”
“You don’t know that for—”
“Not one bit,” she repeated. “You understand me?”
Berber recoiled like she’d just sprouted horns. Amanda had seen that look countless times before on others. You can be a little intense, Derek had told her. You may not see it, but it’s there.
Soon the biker’s heavy brow unfurled. He vented a sigh. “Got any kids of your own?”
Amanda’s face remained impassive as a cold gust of grief blew through her. She once had a son for seventeen minutes. Those memories stayed locked in the cellar, along with her father’s last days and the incident on the Massachusetts Turnpike.
“No,” she said.
Berber eyed her golden cross necklace. “But you do have faith.”
“Yes.”
“How do you reconcile? How do you spend all day with sick, dying kids and then thank the God who lets it happen?”
Still fumbling in dark memories, Amanda lost hold of her usual response. I thank Him for the ones who live. I thank Him for the ones who have loving parents like you.
All she could do now was roll her shoulders in a feeble shrug. “I don’t know, Mr. Berber. I guess I’d rather live in a world where bad things happen for some reason than no reason.”
Her answer clearly didn’t comfort him. He scratched his hairy cheek and threw a tense glare over his shoulder.
“I should get back to him.”
“Okay.”
Amanda heard a high young giggle. She turned her gaze to the reception desk, where Derek charmed the fetching young office clerk with his witty repartee. The moment he caught Amanda’s gaze, his smile went flat. His eyes narrowed in a momentary flinch that filled her with unbearable dread and loathing.
Her fingers twitched in panic as the chorus in her head told her to run. Run. Run from the husband. Run from the house. Run from the sister and the sick little children. Don’t even pack. Just pick a direction. Run.
The overhead lights flickered. A second, then a third chemo dispenser began to beep. Another wave of emergency vehicles screamed their way down the street. Things were falling apart at record speed. To Amanda, this seemed a perfect time to go outside for a smoke.
—
Three hours after her sister rolled out of bed, a half-dazed Hannah finally joined the world in egress. Her Salvador Dalí wall clock—now warped in more ways than one—told her it was 9:41. In actuality, it was nine and a half minutes short. But to Hannah and millions of other battery-powered-clock owners, 9:41 was the new 9:50. There was little reason to think otherwise.
She woke up in a foul mood carried over from last night. An hour after her spat with Amanda, she came home to an unscheduled hootenanny in the apartment. Her two flighty roommates had ditched her premiere in favor of barhopping and eventually stumbled back with a trio of frat boys from the alma mater.
Knowing she’d never sleep in this racket, the actress stayed up with them, brandishing a forced grin as she nursed a Sprite and suffered their drunken prattle. Sometime after the group blacked out, and shortly before the world did, Hannah retreated into her room and drifted off into uneasy sleep.