“YOU have to let me see her,” I tell Rita the next morning. “Please. I know it’s early, and I know she hates me, but I have to talk to her. I’ll do anything, Rita. Please.” My face feels like rubber and my head is full of hot air, three times its usual size. I am one of those giant blow-up people, bobbing and waving from the parking lot of a dealership on Atlantic. A flimsy cartoon version of a distraught girl. My eyes are bloodshot. My tongue is thick. I haven’t slept. Eaten. I have to talk to her. She is the only person in the world who can help me.
Rita sucks in a deep breath and releases it slowly, ballooning her cheeks and then deflating them. Life has wrung her out. She turns off the television. The metal chair shrieks when she pushes herself to standing. She leans into the truck and pats my arm. There is a red lipstick gash on her front teeth.
“You can’t talk to her, honey.”
“No. I know. I know she’s mad, but this is an emergency.” I want to shake her.
She closes her eyes. “I mean, you really can’t talk to her. Miss Minna had a fall last night and hit her head. They haven’t been able to wake her.”
My blood runs cold. “But she’s going to wake up, right? People don’t just fall and not wake up.” I feel better as soon as I say it. Women like Minna don’t expire this way. She is bigger than that. She’ll go out fighting, in some sweeping, grand way. Giving the world the finger. Spelling LATER, MOTHERFUCKERS on a giant Scrabble board.
“I’m real sorry, honey.” Rita rests her hand on my arm and leaves it there.
“Can I at least see her?” I close my eyes and picture the truck mowing through the gate. I’ll do it. I am just sad and lonely and crazy enough to do it.
She squeezes my arm. “Let me call up to the nurse’s station and see what I can do.” She ducks back into the cottage and closes a door I didn’t know existed. I watch her red lips move.
Rita opens the door again. “Her daughter said you’re welcome to stop in.”
“Her daughter?” I parrot back.
“Yeah. Lady from Winter Park, drove up late last night when we called. Brought the granddaughter, too.” Rita winks. “I guess somebody’s letter did some good, after all.”
I shake my head. Lift my hand and block the words. I won’t take them.
“Anyway, Miss Minna’s in room 302. Just follow this road past her place to the center of the development. She’s in the—”
“Epicenter of Death,” I mumble.
She squints at me. “Hospital.”
“Right.”
“Hold on.” Rita rummages around her desk and unearths a bag of mini chocolate chip cookies. “Take these. Just in case she wakes up. The Jell-O around here is shit.”
I pull through the gate and wind around and around until the hospital looms up, several stories high. I take the elevator to the third floor. It opens directly to a nurse’s station. It’s quieter than I expected. Slower. Nothing like the hospitals on television. There’s a nurse on the phone, sipping Starbucks, and when she sees me, she raises her index finger, like Just a second. But the call is personal, so obviously personal, the way she’s smiling into the receiver and laughing like Minna isn’t somewhere on this floor, not waking up.
Finally, the nurse slides the phone into its cradle. “Here for Mrs. Asher?”
“Ms. Asher, I think,” I say.
“Second room on your left, there.”
Outside room 302 are a few plastic chairs, the kind we use for assemblies at school. The kind in the police station. I wonder how many people have sat in these chairs and cried. Waited. Sipped bad coffee. I wonder how many people were sitting here when they heard that their mother or father or grandmother or great-uncle was never coming back.
The door is open a crack, and I knock lightly. There’s no answer. The crack is person-sized, and I slip through it and close the door behind me. She is lying in a hospital bed, eyes closed. Her hair is down, pretty but tangled. She looks like Minna sleeping, like the morning I slipped into bed with her, only there’s a deep purple mark on her forehead. A small cut, and a teeny bit of dried blood. I pull a tissue from the dispenser on the bed and I wet it with my tongue. I dab the blood away. I can’t find a trash can, so I stuff the tissue in my back pocket.
“Hey, Minna,” I say out loud, and I feel stupid and embarrassed.
There’s a chair pulled next to the bed, and I sit. She is plugged into too many things. Recharging. My eyes fill with angry tears and I want to sprint into the hall and yell that there is someone in here who needs help, does anybody know that?
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” I say. I pat her hair. “Or if you got my letter? But just in case, it said how sorry I was for mailing that letter to your daughter. It was, ah, stupid, and just . . . I didn’t think. Which isn’t an excuse.”
I think I see her lips move.
“Leigh says I stick my nose into other peoples’ business. Micah says that, too. Like, all the time. He says I’m controlling.” I exhale, and it comes out sounding like a laugh. “That’s not an excuse, either.”
I lean back in the chair. I am so tired. I want to twist the blinds shut and crawl into bed with her and sleep until we both wake up. I want her to tell me the right thing, because she will know the right thing. This is the one decision I can’t make on my own, the one time I don’t want to make the call.
“I have to tell you something.” I lean close, and lower my voice. I get it over with, fast. “Wil killed his dad. Did you know that already? On the way over here, I was thinking that maybe you had a feeling. I didn’t. I didn’t know.
“He asked me not to tell.” My face is hot and full again. “And I don’t know what to do, because I know he had to do it. And I know what kind of person he is, and I just wish he’d told the truth from the very beginning, because I don’t think I can carry this secret around. What am I supposed to do? Go off to college without saying anything? Come back on weekends, and have breakfast at Nina’s and sit across from each other and talk about pancakes?”
I watch her for a sign, but her face is blank. Empty.