“Are you members of Eileen’s sorority?” The woman capped the jar of Vaseline and tossed the Q-tip in the trash, which was filled with used cotton balls and gauze dressings, the grayish white of bodily fluids exposed to air. Though I was certain my face was the same sickly shade, I dug deep to lift my chin and extend my hand.
“I’m Pamela Schumacher, chapter president.” I tried to smile, but I was still wincing. No one tells you how painful it is to be afraid, like a bee sting to the entirety of your central nervous system.
“Martina Cannon,” the woman said, giving my hand one taut tug. “Most people call me Tina.” She was nearly as tall as Denise, and she smiled down at me with something that felt like reverence, but all these years later, I know it wasn’t that. It was optimism dueling fear. When Tina saw me, she saw her last hope.
“Are you family of Eileen’s?” I asked, wanting to know everything about this beautiful woman with the rotating selection of stylish hats. She looked to be in her early thirties. Maybe a cousin or a young aunt.
“I’m not.” Tina noticed that the sun was hitting Eileen directly in the eyes, and she went over to the window and adjusted the blinds.
I frowned at her. “Are you a nurse?”
“Just helping the families out,” Tina said with an evasive smile that infuriated me.
Eileen lifted her hands, miming the act of writing something down. Her brother handed her a pen and a pad, on which I read dispatches from her new one-word world. Socks. No. Yes. Day? We all waited while she scribbled her note, then handed it to her brother to read out loud. His eyes traveled the message, and his face tightened.
“Eileen wants to know if Denise and Roger got back together last night, Pamela.”
I must have looked horrified. We all must have, because I realized we were frightening Eileen.
“Tell her, Pamela,” Bernadette said, shooting me a panicked look.
I remembered what Mrs. McCall had said about diction. “He regrets breaking up with her for sure,” I told Eileen.
Eileen couldn’t smile, but she looked pleased.
I smelled Mrs. Neilson before I saw her. Another cigarette, another lung-wrenching layer of perfume. “How’s it going in here?”
I coughed into the crook of my elbow. Eileen’s shoulder blades tensed, released, and tensed again. I realized she was trying to cough herself but couldn’t, not with her mouth armored shut. Her eyes watered, and soupy bile dribbled out of one cracked corner of her mouth, pooling in the depression of her collarbone. Mrs. Neilson looked around for something to wipe it up, considered the yellow blanket we’d brought, and ultimately removed the silk scarf from her neck.
“I think it’s time for Eileen to rest,” Mrs. Neilson said in this awful, broken voice. She was dabbing at poor Eileen’s chin like she must have done when she was a baby. But I want you to know something about Eileen, which is that after she got out of the hospital and the hair on the left side of her head grew back, she realized she looked better with it short, tougher and cooler. She moved to Tampa for business school, and to get over her fear of strange men she began driving taxicabs at night. She met her husband while shuttling him home from the airport—he could only see her from the back and he called her “sir”—she turned around and they had a good laugh about it. Eileen could have chosen to view the world as an ugly and hostile place, but instead she was nimble in her life in a way that most everyday people can’t manage. Next month, it will be twenty-four years she’s been married to her soul mate.
“We’ll see you soon, Eileen!” I said with that strange jangly cheer, and I went out in the hallway and bent over, putting my hands on my knees. For a moment, I couldn’t tell if I was going to cry or throw up. Then I did both.
* * *
I was in such poor shape that I couldn’t remember where I’d parked the car Mrs. McCall had lent us. Bernadette and the others were of no help. Upon arrival, I’d dropped them off at the entrance to the hospital, like men do when their wives wear heels.
We were going to catch a ride back to The House with my police escort when Tina appeared and insisted on being the one to take us, though she had to transfer a bunch of stuff into her trunk to make room—loose bottles of shampoo and soda, old newspapers, and half-eaten bags of pretzels. To my surprise she drove slowly, like someone much older or, more likely, someone who didn’t know her way around town.
“Fuck you,” Tina said to the third red light we hit on Miccosukee Road.
“If you don’t mind,” I protested weakly. The girls had given me the front seat, and I was slumped over with my forehead pressed up against the glass, breathing hotly through my mouth. Some electrifying wartime president I was.
“Why are there so many red lights on this road?” Tina demanded. “And why do they look like that?” In Florida, the traffic lights are mounted horizontally. I’d always thought it gave them a sentient quality, like squat little robots, winking and blinking at you. They’re sort of adorable, Denise said once, and I’d laughed admiringly and told her that was such an artist’s thing to say.
“Hurricanes,” explained Bernadette, ever Miss Florida. “The winds.”
The little robot opened his green eye, and we continued on our way.
“It was really nice of you girls to visit Eileen and play along with everything,” Tina said. “I don’t agree with the family’s decision not to tell her, by the way. It’s infantilizing.”
This new, exotic word rolled off Tina’s tongue and activated the part of me that sought out the attention of bawdy, glamorous women, women like Denise and Tina, who, in their own ways, reminded me of my mother.
“What is”—Bernadette paused a moment, playing back the pronunciation in her head—“in-fan-til-iz-ing?”
“It’s when people treat perfectly capable adults like children,” Tina said, “and they tend to do it to young women.”
“They just don’t want her to get hysterical,” I said in the family’s defense. I had to speak with my eyes closed, licking my dry lips between words. I flailed a hand aimlessly. “You saw what just happened.”
Tina scoffed. “And so? What’s wrong with being hysterical? It’s a hysterical thing that happened.”
“We have more dignity than that,” I said, lifting my head with enormous effort. Never let them see you sweat, I was always saying, except I could see the filmy residue my glands had deposited on the window.
“I’ll tell you something from experience,” Tina said, flexing her fingers on the wheel. “They will call you hysterical no matter how much dignity you have. So you might as well do whatever the hell you want.”
“Right,” I told her at the four-way stop on Copeland, because she was clearly not from around here.
Tina approached the back entrance to The House at a respectful crawl, though the street was mostly deserted. Low, heavy clouds had overtaken the sun, and there was no one to crunch over the dead leaves and pine cones on any of the paths that cut between Seminole Street and the south gates of the university. Someone’s father was hurriedly throwing her suitcase into the trunk of a station wagon parked outside the Delta house, rushing around to the driver’s side and yelling at his daughter that they needed to get on the road. The back of my neck prickled. On that block alone were three sororities, a cheeseburger joint, a popular bar, and an even more popular church. It was always bustling with activity, and yet at the moment, it felt fled and war-torn, under siege. Everyone getting out while they had the chance.
Tina parked at the curb, parallel to the metal police barricade that fenced off the back lot of The House. The officer on duty crouched down low to observe us. He straightened, appeased, seeing it was only a car full of women.
“Do you girls feel safe here at night?” Tina asked us. There were police and crime scene technicians all over The House, but they would be gone by dinnertime, their fingernails scrubbed of blood and their minds numbed with cold beer. I envied them, that this was merely a part of their life and not their life. “Because if you don’t, I might be able to help you.”