I turn to get Nurse Merchant, but Trevor points at the water glass, and I fetch it instead. After a couple of sips, he says, “You gotta get the wig.”
Lexi’s shoulders are high, tense; she isn’t sure she should relax yet. She’s ready to back me up with more water if Trevor needs it. “No way.”
“Come on,” I say. “How bad could it be?” Except that I’ve met Lexi’s mother, and I’m pretty sure I have a good idea exactly how bad it could be.
“Anyway. It’s my very special day.” Trevor has pulled out the big guns, and he’s a crack shot.
Lexi pretends to think about it, but I know there’s no way she can refuse. It’s all pretense at this point. “Fine. But only this one time, and don’t you dare laugh at me.” She points at us both to make sure we know we’ve been warned, and then she drags her IV stand out of the room.
The moment Lexi’s gone, Trevor begins adjusting his nasal cannula and fussing over his hospital gown. “I can’t believe you told her that I thought she was gonna grow monster mutts.”
Trevor’s heart rate spikes, and I can’t help smiling. “Dude, she likes you.”
“How can she? Look at me.” Trevor’s lost about fifteen pounds since he checked into the hospital. I used to call him Skeletor, until it stopped being funny. “She likes that guy,” he says, motioning at his picture.
“You are that guy.”
Trevor frowns because he knows I’m patronizing him. But what else can I do? He’s dying.
“Senior year was supposed to be the best year of my life. That’s what everyone said. But I’ll be here.” He thumps a fist against the side of his mattress.
“Alive,” I remind him.
“This ain’t living, Droopy.”
I’m not sure what to say. He’s right about everything.
Lexi saves me when she returns wearing something that looks like a scraggly, dead raccoon on her head. The wig is bushy and brownish and hangs limply around her face. I prefer her bald.
“I think you have it on backward,” I say.
“Thanks.” Lexi stands in the doorway, adjusting her wig. “How about now?” She strikes a pose that makes her look like a funhouse-mirror reflection of a supermodel.
Trevor, who’s been staring with his mouth hanging open for the past ten seconds, finally finds his tongue and says, “Dead cat?”
“I was thinking wet dog,” I say.
Lexi endures our wisecracks with her arms crossed over her chest and a deadly frown. “Anything else?” Now she’s daring us to mock her, and Trevor rises to the challenge.
“I don’t know, Drew. She’s getting a bit snippy, so we might want to cut this short.”
It’s not particularly funny, but Lexi grins, and we all start laughing. We can’t stop. The laughter lightens the mood of Trevor’s very special day—until he starts coughing and we have to call the nurse.
• • •
Nurse Merchant kicks me out after a couple of hours because Lexi and Trevor need their rest. I haven’t visited Grandma Brawley in a few days, so I wander toward her room. The nurse at the desk recognizes me, even though I don’t remember his name. There are too many nurses at this hospital to remember them all.
I try to sneak by Mr. Kelly’s room, but he’s awake and yells at me from his bed. “Andrew! Andrew, they’re trying to kill me!”
Mr. Kelly is hooked up to more wires than a marionette. He’s a wrinkled bag of apples with white hair in his ears and nose, and none on his head.
I duck into Mr. Kelly’s room but stay near the door. “I don’t have time to chat today, Mr. Kelly.”
He points at the tray on his table. “But they’re trying to kill me. Look at this swill.”
I lift the top off the tray. Green beans and apple juice and some beige-colored meat. There’s even pudding for dessert. “I’ve built up a tolerance. I’ll take it if you want.”
“Take it.” Mr. Kelly waves his bony hand at the tray. “My Gloria is bringing me a burger. A burger!” He yells loud enough for the nurse to hear. For the whole hall to hear, really. Too bad nobody’s listening.
I pick up the tray and head for the door. “Thanks, Mr. Kelly. Enjoy your burger.”
Grandma Brawley is in room 1184. She’s a tiny woman with silver hair that spills out over her pillow like tinsel. Her chest rises and falls with the sound of the equipment that monitors her vital signs. The only time she moves is when the nurses come in to change her sheets or exercise her limbs to make sure she doesn’t get bedsores. Other than that, she’s a sleeping princess. A fairy tale that someone forgot to finish.
“Trevor’s probably going to die,” I tell her matter-of-factly. I tell Grandma Brawley everything. She’s a vault. Best secret keeper ever. She even knows how I ended up in this hospital. But she’ll never tell.
“And Lexi’s in love with him but won’t do anything about it. She doesn’t know how to live in the moment.” I shovel Mr. Kelly’s food into my mouth, trying not to taste it on the way down. It’s worse than Arnold’s cooking, which is saying quite a lot.
“Trevor doesn’t have the confidence to tell Lexi that he’s in love with her, too. They’ve spent so long being sick, they don’t know how to be in love.”
I call her Gran even though she’s not my grandma. I have no idea who she is. The only indication of her life outside this hospital room is the picture frame by her bed with a lock of red hair pressed between the glass.
“I wish I could do something for Trevor.” As I say the words, I realize that I can do something. Not much, but for someone like him, every bit of joy counts. As soon as I finish eating, I start sketching.
It takes most of the day to finish the drawing. When I finish, I run out of Grandma Brawley’s room, through the halls, hoping I’ll make it to Peds before visiting hours end.
Nurse Merchant is still hanging around, chatting with another nurse. “Oh dear, Drew,” Nurse Merchant says when she sees me. “I’m afraid I can’t let you in to see Trevor.”
I hold out the folded piece of paper, the one I’ve been working on for hours. “Come on, I only need two minutes.” I try to flash my winningest smile, but I can already sense that something is wrong.
“Trevor’s on a ventilator.”
I drop my sketchpad and paper. I don’t know how I’m still standing. Nurse Merchant is by my side in an instant.
“But today’s a very special day,” I whisper.
“I know, sweetie.”
The other nurse is mute, but Nurse Merchant knows what to do. She wraps her arms around my shoulders and hugs me.
“What happened?” I ask, though I’m not sure I want the answer.
Nurse Merchant sighs. “Being sick is exhausting, Drew. Sometimes the body needs help. That’s what the ventilator’s for. It’ll help Trevor breathe so that he can save his strength.”
I slip out of her hug and pick up my drawing, hold it out to Nurse Merchant. It’s Trevor, dressed like a superhero, ready for battle. He looks fit and powerful and alive. Just like in the photograph. “I wanted Trevor to see himself the way we do.”
Nurse Merchant nods. “Why don’t we leave it in his room so that he can spot it right when he wakes up?”
I don’t think I’m strong enough to see Trevor like this. I was in his room once when he coded. That was when I could barely tell he was sick. We were playing cards, and Trevor was alive. Then he wasn’t. I huddled unseen in the corner while the doctor shocked Trevor’s quivering heart back to life. When he opened his eyes, he laughed. The fucker actually laughed.
But he’s not laughing now, and I can hardly stand to look at him with that accordion tube snaking out of his mouth, machines forcing his lungs to expand and contract.
Nurse Merchant rests her hand on my shoulder. “I know it’s tough.”
I put the drawing on the edge of Trevor’s mattress and retreat to the door. “I’ve seen worse.”
“That shouldn’t be true for someone your age,” Nurse Merchant says.
And
she’s right. But it doesn’t change anything. Words never do.
Patient F is an enigma even to me, his creator.
I sketch in the cafeteria because I have nowhere else to go. With the events of the past week fresh in my mind, I’m in no mood to socialize, but I don’t want to be alone, either. Every time I close my eyes, I see Rusty burning. Every time I open them, I see Trevor in a state of half death, gasping for breath that doesn’t come. It’s been a couple of days since I’ve visited either of them. For all I know, Death could have carried off one or both. She’s ruthlessly efficient.
But I think I would know.
Patient F is my only distraction. When I’m drawing, it’s as if I, too, become unstuck in time, sharing in his dark adventures, bathing in the same blood. Lexi was right about one thing: I spend too much time focusing on his origin. The problem is that I’m unsure where to take Patient F next, and he’s not talking. Who can guess the desires of the dead?
“Why didn’t you tell me you could draw so well?” Arnold sits down with a thump and scares me so badly that I break the tip of my pencil and smudge the panel I was working on. I try to mask the murder in my eyes, but it doesn’t matter: Arnold is oblivious.
I pull out my earbuds and shove them in my pocket. “Because I didn’t want people bothering me to draw stuff for them all the time.”
Arnold fires off a laugh like he thinks I’m joking. “I don’t suppose you’d give the menu board a spruce.” He hikes his thumb over his shoulder at the black dry-erase board. It looks like it hasn’t been used in decades and displays the same picture as the day I was hired: a constipated fish that Arnold must have drawn with his feet while blindfolded.
“No,” I say. With most people, if you avoid eye contact, they’ll take the hint and leave. But Arnold isn’t like most people. We’re alone in the caf, and he’s determined to annoy me.
“You’d be doing me a huge favor. I don’t know if you noticed, but I don’t draw so well.”
I glance at the board again. “What? No, that fish is a real winner. It belongs in the Louvre.”
Arnold misses my sarcasm and beams from behind his bushy beard—which grows more unruly every day. “I did take an art class in college. Easy credit, lots of pretty girls.”
“Oh, yeah? So are you a breast or a thigh man?” I ask, trying to embarrass him. It works. He blushes fiercely.
“No changing the subject.” Arnold wags his finger. “Now, about that board . . .”
I drop my pencil. I’m not going to get anything done until I (A) agree to draw on his board or (B) dodge the question until he gets so angry that he storms off. I’m game for plan B except that it runs the risk of also costing me my job, and I need my job to avoid suspicion. Working for Arnold gives me a reason to be in the hospital. Without it, people might notice that I never seem to leave, and that I resemble a certain missing boy—and that’s a gamble I’m unwilling to take. “If I do it, will you leave me alone?”
“Yes,” Arnold says. “Let’s get started. You can draw tomorrow’s menu.” He beelines for the board before I have a chance to change my mind.
I gather my pencils and sketchpad and follow. He shows me where the markers are and tells me to draw vegetable lasagna and meat loaf.
While I work, Arnold babbles about his family. His wife keeps telling him to stop wasting his life working in a cafeteria, cooking substandard food.
“If you’re so smart, then why are you here?” I quickly draw the outline of a meaty loaf in an appetizing shade of neon orange.
“I could ask you the same thing,” Arnold retorts. He busies himself disinfecting the counters. It’s past closing, and I should be long gone.
“No fair evading the question, Ah-nold.”
This makes him laugh. He’s the inquisitive type, and I know that someday he’ll figure out the truth about me. For now, he’s happy to talk about himself. “I make good food for people who have terrible heartache. They grieve for their loved ones, and I do what I can for them: I feed them.” It sounds like something Grandma Brawley would say—the Grandma Brawley I’ve cooked up in my mind, anyway.
I scribble some finishing touches on the vegetable lasagna. It looks more like two slices of bread hugging a jumble of emo veggies. Not a terrible drawing—definitely better than Arnold’s fish—but not my magnum opus.
“Calling it good food is a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?” I ask. Arnold belly-laughs, and I say, “Seriously, though, you could teach or write a book or something.”
“I like it here.”
“Sounds to me like you’re hiding.” I don’t mean to say the words; they just jump out of my mouth. It’s not so much that I regret saying them but that they come dangerously close to violating our unspoken agreement.
Arnold tosses his rag into a bucket of bleach water and pops open the cash register. “The menu board looks good. How much do I owe you?”
Despite that it’s late and Arnold is annoying me, I still don’t want to be alone. But I can tell when I’m being dismissed. “How about I just take the leftover doughnuts off your hands and we call it even?”
Arnold acts as though he’s thinking it over, but he’s already closing the cash drawer. “You drive a hard bargain, Andrew. The doughnuts are yours.”
• • •
The emergency room is quiet this time of the night, and Steven, Jo, and Emma are gathered around the nurse’s station, staring at something that I can’t see but assume must be pretty amusing by the way Steven is cackling like a cartoon villain. I stand off to the side, just watching the three of them. They’re a makeshift family. They take care of each other, laugh with each other, and if Steven weren’t gay, they’d probably sleep with each other too.
They make me long for my family. My friends. The people in my life that I cared about without reservation. I have Lexi and Trevor now, but it’s not the same because they have their own people outside these walls.
There’s the hospital, and there’s everything that happens outside it. My ER nurses and Lexi and Trevor and the burned boy Rusty—they all have lives out there.
Everything I have is in here.
“Surprise!” I say, and stride forward, offering up the doughnuts in outstretched hands. “I come bearing gifts.”
Steven leaps to his feet, trying to look busy. When he realizes that I’m not one of the doctors, his momentary terror is replaced by a smile wide as the Grand Canyon. “Hey, Drew. What are you doing here so late?”
Emma turns the laptop toward me. “Have you seen this video? This chick’s a one-woman library of Joss Whedon characters.” She snorts and laughs. “Seriously, she went into a grocery store and slayed a box of Count Chocula.”
Jo rolls her eyes. “I don’t get it.” She spies what I’m carrying and says, “You gonna show us the goods or just tease us?”
I lift the lid and expose the sugary treasures inside. “I got glazed for Steven, jelly for Jo, and sprinkles for Emma.”
Emma squeals. “Yay! I’m so totally eating carbs again.”
“Carbs everywhere—beware,” Steven says. He strolls to the box, looking rather uninterested. “What makes you think I like glazed?”
“Because you like shiny things.” I nudge the box. Steven daintily picks up the glazed with his first finger and thumb and tears off a bite.
Emma kisses my cheek in thanks, and that only leaves Jo. “Come on, Jo. You know you want it.”
“Sugar, I’m on a diet.” She reaches behind the counter and pulls out a rumpled plastic bag of carrot sticks.
“Come on,” I say, pushing the box closer and closer. “Don’t deny your high-fructose desires.”
Jo wavers. Steven and Emma watch while they munch happily on their doughnuts. Jo reaches out but retreats. She reaches out and pulls back again. The third time she reaches out, Emma sticks her hand into the box and says, “Well, if you’re not going to eat it, I am.”
“I will cut you, Emma.” Jo snatches the jelly doughnut and savors a slow, sugarl
icious bite.
Steven’s practically on the floor now, convulsing with laughter, and I can’t help smiling. Soon, we’re all sitting around the laptop, eating doughnuts and watching funny videos. It’s barely ten, and there’s only one patient in the emergency room, a regular who gets dumped off by the police whenever they find him passed out drunk in a parking lot. As we’re finishing a clip of a blind dog that spends five minutes running into walls, the phone rings and Steven runs to answer it.
“Any news on the burned kid?”
Emma sighs while Jo sneaks another doughnut. “He’s doing better than expected. Third-degree burns over most of his legs, some of his torso, and his right arm. He’s pretty lucky.” She glances over her shoulder. “Steven’s been taking shifts in ICU. I think it hit him pretty hard.”
Before I can ask any more questions, Steven strides into the room looking deadly serious. “Incoming! I already paged the doc.”
Jo pushes me toward the wall. “Stay here and out of the way.” She purses her lips and frowns. “Better yet, you should probably leave.”
There’s no way I’m leaving, but I make myself small and try not to be seen. It’s sick, but I hope we’re in for something gory. A splintered bone or a bloody gash that needs a slew of stitches. Anything to get the taste of the burned boy out of my mouth.
Emma, Steven, and Jo glove up and prepare for the incoming patient. Steven’s rattling off the details, but I’m so busy fantasizing about someone else’s pain that I don’t hear them. The nurses look so grave, which only excites me. It’s not like I’m some gore hound, but the rush of an emergency leaves me no time to dwell on my own tragedies.
My breathing is rapid, and my stomach is tangled and sick with anticipation. I love the moment right before all hell breaks loose. The calm before the proverbial shit storm.
The doctor waltzes into the ER, pulling on gloves and calling for the situation. He’s a little man with razor burn and tufts of hair sprouting out of the neckline of his scrubs. Probably the kind of guy that no one paid attention to in high school, but here, now, he’s God.