What if it’s worse?
It was worse, about ten feet farther in. Bobby Murphy looked up from the desk. Last time I’d seen him, he’d been on the basketball team with me, hassling me for getting dumped at that dance by Ethan-Loving turned Ethan-Hating Emily Asher. I let him do it, too. He had been varsity point guard three years running, and nobody messed with him. Now Bobby was sitting behind the reception desk in a peach-colored orderly’s uniform, and he didn’t look so tough. He also didn’t look all that happy to see me. Probably didn’t help that his laminated nametag said BOOBY.
“Hey, Bobby. Thought you were over at Summerville Community College.”
“Ethan Wate. Here you are, an’ here I am. Don’t know which one a us I feel sorrier for.” His eyes flickered over to Lena, but he didn’t say hello. Talk was talk, and I was sure he was up on all the latest, even way out here at County Care, where half the folks couldn’t make a sound.
I tried to laugh, but it came out more like a cough, and the silence swept back in between us.
“Yeah. ’Bout time you showed up, anyway. Your Aunt Prudence has been askin’ for you.” He grinned, shoving a clipboard across the counter.
“Really?” I froze up for a minute, though I should have known better.
“Nah. Just pullin’ your leg. Here, give me your John Hancock and you can head on down to the garden.”
“Garden?” I handed him back the clipboard.
“Sure. Out back in the residential wing. Where we grow all the good vegetables.” He smiled, and I remembered him back in the locker room. Man up, Wate. Letting a freshman skirt push you around? You’re makin’ us all look bad.
Lena leaned over the counter. “That line ever get old, Booby?”
“Not as old as that one.” He stood up out of his chair. “How about, ‘I’ll show you mine, you show me yours’?” He stared at the place where Lena’s shirt dove into a V at her chest. My hand clenched into a fist.
I could see her hair curling around her shoulders as she leaned even closer to him. “I’m thinking now would be a great time for you to stop talking.”
Bobby opened and shut his mouth like he was a catfish stuck wriggling on the bottom of dried-up Lake Moultrie. He didn’t say a word.
“That’s more like it.” Lena smiled and picked up our visitor badges from the counter.
“So long, Bobby,” I said as we headed out back.
The farther we made it down the hall, the sweeter the air and the thicker the smell. I looked in the doors of the rooms we passed, each one like some kind of messed-up Norman Rockwell painting—where only crappy things were happening, frozen into little snapshots of pathetic life.
An old man sat in a hospital bed, his head wrapped in white bandages that made it appear gigantic and surreal. He looked like some kind of alien, flipping a little yo-yo on a metal track, back and forth. A woman sat in the chair across from him, stitching something inside a wood hoop. Probably part of some needlepoint he would never see. She didn’t look up, and I didn’t slow down.
A teenage boy lay in another bed, his hand moving across some paper on top of a fake wood-grain tray table. He was staring off into space, drooling, but his hand kept writing and writing, as if it couldn’t help itself. The pen didn’t seem to be moving across the paper; it was more like the letters were writing themselves. Maybe every word he’d ever written was in that one big pile of letters, each one stacked up on top of the next. Maybe it was his whole life story. Maybe it was his masterpiece. Who knew? Who cared? Not Bobby Murphy.
I resisted the urge to go take the paper and try to decode it.
Motorcycle accident?
Probably. I don’t want to think about it, L.
Lena squeezed my hand, and I tried not to remember her, barefoot and helmetless, on the back of John Breed’s Harley.
I know it was stupid.
I pulled her away from that door.
A little girl at the end of the hall had a roomful of folks, but it was the saddest birthday party I’d ever seen. She had a Stop & Steal cake and a table covered with cups of what looked like cranberry juice, covered with plastic wrap. That was about it. The cake had a number five on it, and the family was singing. The matches weren’t lit.
Probably can’t light them in here, Ethan.
What kind of crappy birthday is that?
The thick sweetness of the air grew worse, and I glanced through an open doorway that led into some kind of hallway kitchen. Cases of Ensure, liquid food, were piled from floor to ceiling. That was the smell—the food that wasn’t food. For these lives that weren’t lives.
For my Aunt Prue, who had slipped away into the vast unknown when she was supposed to be asleep in her bed. My Aunt Prue, who had charted unknown Caster Tunnels with the precision of Amma working on one of her crossword puzzles.