After Hours (InterMix)

chapter Fifteen


The worst thing about my non-breakup with Kelly was working with him the next day.

And not because he glared at me or ignored me or undermined my duties. It was because he treated me exactly how he always did.

Cool and professional. No sign I’d hurt him. No sign he cared what had happened. No sign that we’d ever been anything to each other besides colleagues, and that transformed my dread and embarrassment to pure regret. It was a splinter in my heart, a sharp, ragged pain that pierced me anew with every beat.

These past couple of weeks, I’d scaled Kelly’s massive wall and peeked at what lay beyond. But I’d made myself too comfortable, and he’d tossed me back out, stacked his defenses thicker and taller and coiled it with a halo of concertina wire. Offering nothing but a cold gray shadow, long as a Starling shift.

At lunch I sat with Lee Paleckas, and my mood wasn’t lost on him. I’d been short with everyone all morning—not testy, but curt and monosyllabic.

“What’s up your ass?”

I looked up from my macaroni and cheese and offered a sardonic smile.

“PMS?” Lee asked, no trace of sexual mischief in his tone.

“Can’t I just have an off day?”

“I guess. Seems unfair, though, how if one us inmates has one, we get jabbed in the ass and sent to bed early.”

I rolled my eyes. “If we sedated people just for being grumpy, you’d be in a perpetual coma, Lee.”

He laughed at that—one of the rare, high wheezing sounds I’d begun collecting like merit badges. Getting Lee to laugh put a gold star on my day. Though today I’d need more than that to feel much aside from miserable.

Steering the topic off of me, I told him, “It’s perceptive of you to notice my mood. Are you good at that—picking up on how people are feeling?”

He shrugged. “I guess.”

“That takes a lot of empathy.” A quality not in line with Lee’s pre-Larkhaven diagnoses. It boded well for his psychotic episodes being attributable to substance abuse, not his own natural chemistry. I hoped I’d find a chance to share this interaction with Dr. Morris, and ask if he’d noted the same thing. “And a lot of clarity. Have you noticed yourself feeling any different, since Dr. Morris changed your meds?”

He nodded, grudgingly at first, then with some enthusiasm. “I have, yeah. I feel kind of . . . awake, for the first time in a while. A long while. Like when you first open the windows in the spring, and air everything out.” He blushed, like he didn’t know where those words had come from.

“How about your voices?”

“I haven’t heard any in days.”

“That’s great!”

“Tell me about it. Feels like I finally got a volume button.”

“Amazing what the right medication can do, huh?”

“Yeah . . . Just sucks they couldn’t have put me on whatever they did, like fifteen years ago.”

“Well, you’re on a better path now. Focus on that. Everyone wishes they could change something about what’s happened to them, or because of them . . .” With a bolt of awareness, I sensed exactly where Kelly’s body was in the room, in relation to mine. “But it just doesn’t work that way.”

* * *

My mood tripped and tumbled back downhill after lunch, the highlight of my shift being a chance to share my encouraging conversation with Lee during evening hand-off. Dr. Morris was working, and he nodded thoughtfully as I spoke and scribbled a note, which made me feel important and proud. But as I changed out of my scrubs and headed for home, the sadness descended once more.

My phone vibrated when I was halfway across campus. Hope spiked for a breath then died just as quickly. Amber.

“Hi,” I said, no clue what greeting to expect in return.

She sounded bored, a vast improvement over our last conversation. “Hey. I’m just calling to let you know you don’t have to watch Jack on Monday.”

My heart sank. “Oh. Okay.”

Amber sighed, and when she next spoke, her voice was softer. “Not because of what happened.”

“No?”

“Nah. Your boyfriend’s an a*shole, but that’s not your fault, that he did that.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

Amber snorted. “Sure.”

I opened my mouth to say that even if he sort of had been, he sure wasn’t now . . . but it hurt too much to think about, let alone explain. “How come you don’t need a sitter?” You didn’t get fired again, did you?

“Jack’s had the flu for a couple days. I don’t want anybody else catching it, and work said it was fine to take the next few shifts off.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. You know I’d risk a bug to hang out with him, right?”

“Course I do, Auntie Er’n. But it’s a nasty one, nothing you want your patients catching—trust me. This one’s too gross. He’s like a snot dispenser.”

“Okay then. Let me know if you need me to grab anything for him.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure . . . Hey, Amber?”

“Yeah?”

“How’s Marco been? Since everything went down. Is he being nice to you?”

“I haven’t seen him in a few days. Before that, he was super-pissed off for a while, then just sort of . . . blah. Maybe he’s got the same flu. Who knows?”

Licking his wounds, more like, if I knew that man at all.

“But he’s been just the same as always, with me and Jack.”

“I was worried maybe . . . you know.”

“I know he can be a hothead—he’s a passionate guy.”

I rolled my eyes, so not finding that synonym in my own mental thesaurus entry for grown-ass spoiled brat.

“But he’s not gonna punish us for what happened with what’s-his-name.”

“He better not.” I thought about telling her not to worry, no chance what’s-his-name would be coming around with me again . . . But it stung too much. Some other time.

Amber’s voice drifted from the receiver a moment. “It’s not medicine, honey—it’s a smoothie. No. That was jelly in the spoon. Now drink.”

I smiled at my sister’s bald-faced lies. “I’ll let you go. Give him a telephone kiss from me.”

“That’s probably safest, with this cough.” I listened to a distant mwah smooch sound and the muffled noise as she pressed her phone to Jack’s cheek. “Talk to you soon.”

“You, too. Love you both.”

“Love you.”

And just like that, we were good again. I pocketed my cell and resumed my walk, feeling a bit lighter.

Amber’s temper arrived and retreated in the same fashion—frequent but fleeting downpours. Kelly’s had manifested with no warning, a bolt out of an otherwise clear sky, drawn by what must have been a rare and perfect lightning rod, waved around idiotically by me. Even when he’d messed Marco up, he’d been calm. He’d been in control, his actions conscious choices. What I’d brought out in him was something else entirely—the type of knee-jerk emotional reflex I’d assumed he was immune to.

Assumed. That’s what I’d done, exactly as he’d called it.

But what could I do? I could apologize again, after he’d cooled off for a day or two. Drop the forty bucks and the twelve-pack off on his stoop as a peace offering. But I didn’t get the sense that he’d want those things. I knew something about him now, something intensely awful, something he’d never even spoken to his mother about. Something he didn’t want to talk about, a fact so obvious in hindsight, I blushed at my own selfish, selective blindness.

I locked my door when I got to my room, knowing I wouldn’t be roused by a knock. No tall, uninvited visitor bearing stolen flowers or sexual advances. Not tonight and probably not ever again.

* * *

I moped through my weekend, trying not to think too hard about Kelly. On Monday morning I told myself for the fiftieth time in my life that I might like jogging, if I gave it another try, and so I laced my sneakers and discovered for the fiftieth time what a miserable hobby it was. Now I had shin splints to match my heartache.

I holed up in my room and researched BSN programs. I browsed apartment listings. I’d been ending my shifts with dull twinges in my lower back, so I bit the bullet and checked out a brand of shoe Jenny had recommended. Some of them were nearly cute, and I ordered a pair of red orthopedic clogs, embracing the inevitable.

Nothing I had in the communal kitchen was appetizing in any way, so I let my restless taste buds trick me into thinking I’d find the solution at the grocery store. The solution would probably take the shape of an entire bag of Fritos or a tub of sorbet. So be it. I climbed into my car by the last glow of dusk and hit the road.

The store was quiet, just me and a few other shoppers and the softly echoing Top Forty hits droning from the speakers. I piled junk in my basket, my mopey inner child plotting to alternately pickle and sugar-glaze our sadness. Canned ravioli, Junior Mints, frozen egg rolls, butterscotch pudding. I was debating which was healthier, puffy Cheetos or crunchy ones, when my phone buzzed at my hip.

Setting my basket down, I checked the screen. Amber. I hit Talk, scanning the nutrition facts on a sack of kettle chips. “Hey, sister.”

“Oh my God. Erin.” There was panic in her voice—quavering dread that I caught in a heartbeat.

“What’s wrong?”

Gaspy little breaths answered me, and behind that muted siren wails.

The bag fell from my hand. “Amber? What’s going on?” I could already feel Marco’s thick neck between my strangling hands, but—

“It’s Jack. We’re in an ambulance. We have to go to the ER at the children’s hospital in Darren.”

I abandoned my basket, feet dragging me toward the front of the store. “Why? His flu?” A million terrifying thoughts visited me in the half second it took her to reply—pneumonia, infection, hundred-and-six-degree fever.

“They don’t know what’s wrong. He’s burning up, and . . .”

Her words were swallowed by frantic sobs, and I began to march, fishing my keys from my purse. “I’m leaving now. I’ll see you there.”

“Oh Erin. Tell me he’s gonna be okay.”

And I gave her the only answer I was willing to hear, myself. “He’s going to be fine.”

We hung up and I jogged for the exit, swearing when the automatic doors parted too slowly. I shoved between them and out into the cool night air.

I was in my car and already a mile down the road when I realized I had no idea where the children’s hospital was, only the main one affiliated with Larkhaven. Lamenting my ancient phone, I pulled onto the shoulder and cued up a contact I’d really been hoping to not need a favor from ever again. I stared at the passing traffic, grinding my teeth and counting the rings. One. Two.

“C’mon, Kelly, answer.” Three. “Please answer.”

After the fourth tone, a cold, “Yeah.”

“Kelly. Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Can you tell me how to get to the children’s hospital in Darren? I can’t get online and—”

“What’s going on?”

Don’t, I begged myself, but the second I started speaking, the tears were stinging my eyes. “My nephew’s being taken there. They don’t know what’s wrong.”

“You know the major road that runs past my neighborhood? You take that like you’re coming to visit me, but keep going, about a mile and a half, and it’ll be on the left. You’ll see signs.”

“Thank you.”

“Was it him?” Kelly asked. Was it that piece of shit that landed the kid in the f*cking ER?

“No. Thank you, Kelly.” And I hung up. Any more talking and I’d be crying too hard to drive.

I sped, sixty-five in a forty-five the entire way, but karma was on my side. I ditched my car in the lot and jogged through the sliding doors to the reception area, shin splints screaming.

I hurried to the desk.

“Yes?” asked the bony older woman on duty.

“My sister Amber and her three-year-old—an ambulance was bringing them here.”

“Yes, the boy was checked in about ten minutes ago.”

“I need to see them.”

“This blue corridor,” she said, pointing. “Down all the way to the end, take a right, then a left after the elevators. Pediatric emergency department.”

She probably didn’t even catch my muttered thank-you; I was already halfway down the hall.

I heard Amber before I saw her. She was in the pediatric ER’s lounge, demanding information from a woman in scrubs in a high, broken voice, answered by a hushed tone and gentle hand on her arm. I skidded to a halt beside her, my sneakers squeaking on the linoleum.

“What’s happening?”

Amber squeezed her eyes shut, mouthing a soundless, “They don’t know,” and dissolving into sobs. I steered her to a chair and went back to the nurse.

“I’m her sister. What’s wrong with my nephew?”

“The doctors don’t know yet. But he’s got a very high fever, so they’re working hard to treat that, first and foremost.”

“We can’t be with him?”

The nurse shook her head, frowning apologetically. “Not until we know what’s going on.”

“I’m an LPN,” I said, desperate for any extra clues. Throw me a f*cking bone here, lady.

She lowered her voice. “Your nephew is ill-appearing.”

My blood turned to ice at the term. A child could arrive at the hospital with the nastiest flu their parent had ever seen, and still get labeled well-appearing. “What?”

“We’ve got too many staff in with your nephew to allow family at the moment. What we really need is for your sister to stay calm, and stay close. We’ll need her on hand as we work to get to the bottom of this.”

My brain knew full well this was completely reasonable, but an angry sigh shuddered from my throat. I rubbed my face, willing myself to be calm. I was the rational one. The one who kept it together. I was a f*cking nurse. Amber was a mother, but I was hers, and I had to be strong now, when she couldn’t be.

I took a seat beside her. She was doubled over, head on her knees, arms wrapped around her shins. Exactly the position she’d always adopted on the front stoop of our apartment building when she “ran away,” following a fight with our mom. Just folded herself into a wretched ball and waited for someone to take pity. One day I’d come home after school and found her just that way, with her stuffed turtle and a family-sized bag of pretzels. For nutrition, she’d explained. For when I go and live in the woods and never come home again, ever.

I rubbed her back, just as I surely had all those years ago. “He’s going to be fine,” I said, at a loss for any other words.

She sat up, face beet red. “Is that what she said?”

“No, she didn’t, honey.” Ill-appearing, my brain echoed. Panic surged and I stuffed it down. “But I know. I know Jack and I know he’s going to be okay.”

“You didn’t feel him, Erin. He was so. Hot. I went to wake him from his nap and . . . Jesus.”

I kept rubbing her back and shoulders, doing my damnedest to act calm, when all I wanted to do was scream, scream until my lungs burst, until somebody fixed this.

“Where’s Marco?”

“I left him a message after I called the ambulance.” She checked her phone. “Nothing yet. He’s working way over past Mount Pleasant this week. He must be driving back.”

He f*cking better be, to ignore a call like that. The thought boiled my blood.

“Hang tight,” I said. “I’m going to find you a water or something.” In truth, I didn’t want her to see it when I started crying. If ever my sister needed a steadying anchor to latch onto, now was the time, and I was it.

In the ladies’ room, I gave myself two minutes to speed-cry, then pulled myself together, splashing cold water on my mottled face. I bought Amber a water and some M&M’s from the vending machines and found her just as I’d left her, in a snotty, panicked heap. A nurse or aide was trying to calm her down, but I gently asked her to leave us be until there was news.

I set the water and candy at Amber’s feet, and grabbed her a box of tissues from a coffee table. She blew her nose and gulped a couple hitching breaths before turning to me and saying, “I’m a terrible mother.”

“Oh, honey. No you’re not.” I crouched in front of her and squeezed her knees. “Kids get sick. Kids get fevers. You remember when you were like, four, and you ate a whole tub of French onion dip and had diarrhea for two days?”

She laughed weakly. “No.”

“Kids are always getting sick. And Jack’s going to get better.” Ill-appearing. “We just need to stay calm, so when the doctor has more information, we don’t miss anything, okay?”

She nodded, shoulders bucking with a few tearless sobs.

“Good girl.” I moved to the chair next to hers and let her rest her cheek on my shoulder, stroking her hair. We probably looked silly to any witnesses, two matching, baby-faced urchins, doomed to get carded until we were forty. But I felt ancient. I felt like a mom must when her child’s threatened—ten feet tall and singularly focused, a force not to f*ck with. How I felt on the ward, on a good day.

For a long time, we waited.

After a week masquerading as forty-five minutes, my patience snapped and I marched to the desk.

“Any updates on Jack?”

She shook her head with a tight smile. “We’ll tell you as soon as we know.”

Was no news good news? Had his fever come down at all? I plopped back beside Amber. “Nothing yet.”

She’d run out of tears for the time being, her irises looking violet from how red the crying had made her eyes. “I can’t stand this.”

I put my arm around her. “I know, honey.”

A funny noise cut the silence—Amber’s message alert crowing like a rooster. She fumbled in her pocket, the screen turning her pink cheeks ice blue. She frowned.

“Marco?”

Looking disturbed, she passed it to me.

that sucks. ill try 2 get over there

“I’ll try to get over there?” she asked me, blinking.

“Here.” I texted him back, judging from Amber’s expression that she was only apt to make things worse. Jack’s in the ER. Need you here. I asked the attendant for the hospital’s address and sent the message.

“There. I’m sure he’ll come as quick as he can.” I passed her the water. “Here. Drink something.”

Grudgingly, she did.

The first real update didn’t come for another hour and a half—not until after Amber had been called away three times, to speak with three different pediatric staff. She’d returned from each interview more hysterical than ever. At long last, a new nurse appeared from the hall and called, “Amber?”

She shot to her feet, me right on her heels.

Probably unsure which panicked woman was Jack’s mom, the nurse’s attention jumped between the two of us. “They’re still not sure exactly what’s wrong, but his fever’s down to one-oh-four, which is an improvement.”

Amber looked to me. “That’s good, right?”

“But it’s not looking like any bug we’ve been seeing.”

“Maybe a different doctor should look at him,” Amber said.

She smiled tightly at my sister’s tone. “Dr. Chandra is one of our most experienced pediatricians.”

“Does he have kids, this doctor?” Amber demanded.

“Dr. Chandra is a mother, yes,” the nurse assured her. “And we’ve got specialists consulting from other departments as well.”

This revelation seemed to calm my sister somewhat, and I added, “I’m sure Jack’s getting the best care possible.”

Amber took a moment to breathe, cheeks puffing, eyes shut. I rubbed her back.

Having ascertained that the more shrill of the two of us must be Jack’s mom, the nurse told Amber, “I’d like to take you to a private room and ask you some questions, to help the doctors narrow down the potential causes, okay?”

“I’ve been answering questions! The same ones, over and over and over!”

“Yes, but this flu is tricky, and we need all the details we can get.”

“Can I see Jack?”

“Not yet. His room’s still too chaotic. But you can help by answering these questions, and hopefully we’ll know what’s going on real soon.”

I patted Amber’s arm. “Go on.”

“What if I don’t know the answers?” she asked me over her shoulder, following the nurse, just like she might have panicked over a looming test as I dropped her at the middle school on a hundred bygone morning walks. I told her what I would have then.

“Just do your best.”

A couple of women in the waiting room watched me as I took my seat. One smiled weakly, seeming to say, Hang in there. The other looked away when our eyes met, hiding in her paperback.

Whatever new questions the nurse had to ask Amber, they must’ve been numerous—she was gone for ages. I prayed she’d be back before Marco got here. The last thing I needed was to deal with his bluster, without Amber there to cling to him, placate him, snap him into big, tough man-mode.

I glanced up at the clock as I finished skimming a magazine, and it was past eleven. My stomach growled and I ate Amber’s M&M’s. I saved the blue ones for last, just as Jack would, and I cried a little when they were gone.

My shins hurt. My chest ached. My eyes stung and I felt scared and useless. Like a fraud. I’d come here to be the strong one, but I felt anything but strong. I felt more alone than I could remember, trapped in this too-bright room between cheerful nurses and frightened parents. I rubbed the floor with the toe of my sneaker, to see if a fleck there was actual glitter or just some mica in the tile.

A shadow killed the sparkle, and a pair of black shoes stopped before me. Shit. Marco.

And I looked up, and there was Kelly.