Don't Fail Me Now(61)
SIXTEEN
Early Sunday Morning, Part 1
Flagstaff, AZ
I can’t sleep—big surprise. But the thing about hospitals is that the lights never go out, and while the cast of doctors might rotate, they never stop moving, even when the big round clock above the nurse’s station reads three fifteen A.M., like it does now. The bitter irony is that after four days, we’ve finally found a free, twenty-four-hour shelter. Denny is stretched out on one of the loveseats with Mom’s purple sweatpants covering his face. Leah’s on the other one, wrapped in one of the Walmart blankets. Tim is slumped in a chair across the room, head bobbing against his chest. He’s frowning while he sleeps, making me feel guilty even while he’s unconscious. That didn’t mean anything. Of course it did. Of course he does. But I can’t think about that right now. Until I see Cass’s eyes open, I won’t be able to think about anything else.
The latest news from Dr. Chowdhury is that she’s breathing on her own (good) but still on seizure watch (bad). They’ve been slowly easing up on the barbiturates and expect her to wake up fully in the morning, which everyone acts like is great, jump-on-Oprah’s-couch news. But a part of me is dreading the moment when she realizes she’s still alive. Will she be relieved, or will it feel like one more failure? All I know is that I have to be there.
I feel a vibration against my leg and dig my phone out of my pocket. But it’s off, and when I turn it on there’s nothing new, no texts or voicemail. Who would be texting me anyway? Yvonne’s given up since I ignored her last text on Thursday—Thought any more about that asst mgr gig?—Mom can only make calls from eight A.M. to ten P.M., and I don’t think anyone else even has my number, except for Cass. But then something vibrates again, and I realize it’s coming from Cass’s bag. It’s her phone, not mine. I didn’t even think she’d turned it on since we left Maryland. I open the backpack and dig through her laundry until I find it, a slim black rectangle housed in an unmatched sock. I smile down at my sister’s DIY phone case and then, feeling more than a little bit guilty, take it out and look.
The voicemail is from a restricted number, which instantly raises my blood pressure. On the same day my sister decides to end her own life, she gets a shady, anonymous call in the middle of the night? I try to access the message but get prompted for a password, and after various combinations of the numbers of Cass’s birthday fail, I give up and scroll through her texts instead.
Other than one-word missives to Mom and me, her only texts are to Erica. There’s an endless string of short, boring back-and-forth, mostly “Where u?” “My house today?” “There soon,” that kind of thing. But then the pattern breaks abruptly. On April 2nd—three and a half weeks ago—Cass writes: Hey
?
U around?
Need 2 talk
On April 3rd:
I’m sorry
Don’t ignore me
Fine
On April 10th:
Who did u tell??????
Fucking bitch
April 13th:
I hate you
April 14th:
No I don’t
You hate me tho
Right
??
Thought so
And then Wednesday, the day we left: Leaving 4 a few days Can u talk now?
Please???
Thursday:
Might not be back Last chance
And then Friday, finally, a response from Erica, two words long: Good riddence
While I’m somewhat gratified that the bitch can’t spell, my heart breaks. I don’t know exactly what happened, but clearly Cass said or did something that made Erica turn on her. And while Erica barely spoke, and Cass rarely talked about her, I know what their friendship meant. That was her safety net. Lord knows we don’t have one—we Devereaux stumble across high wires like the down-market Flying Wallendas (of course, we’re falling, not flying, but the wind’s moving fast enough we can’t tell the difference). I try to imagine what my sister must have felt getting that text on Friday, on the heels of seeing Mom dragged off, finding out about Buck, and Leah, all of her life’s rejection getting thrown back in her face at once. And not having anyone she could talk to about it. Not even me.
I turn off the phone and shove it back in her bag. It’s three twenty-five now, and the hall is quiet, except for the distant beeps of monitors. The nurse at the desk—not the Munch painting, a new one who looks like Mrs. Mastino’s good-witch twin—is on the phone, turned away from me. I can see the double doors that Dr. Chowdhury comes in and out of just fifty feet down the corridor. There’s a button on the wall he pushes to make them open. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t have to swipe an ID.
I stand and start walking to the water fountain; Nurse Mastino doesn’t flinch. So I don’t waste any time. I walk quickly and keep my head down, punching the red button and slipping through the doors to the ICU just as she hangs up.
? ? ?
I first see her through a thick wall of glass, like she’s a diorama in a museum, lined up with a bunch of other, equally static and depressing scenes. And it’s easier to think of her as a wax figure, lying there motionless, hooked up to so many machines. Her normally coffee-colored complexion has an ashen pallor, and her closed eyelids are dark, like she’s wearing shadow for the first time. There’s a thin tube emerging from her nose, and the tape used to secure it gives her the look of a boxer after a bad KO. Not my sister but a stand-in, an actress—one of our childhood fantasy scenes come to life. The deathly ill “orphan” princess waiting for a kiss from her long-lost father to bring her back. (That was a real one; sometimes they got weird.) There’s a nurse attending to one of the patients at the end of the hall, so I tiptoe around the glass partition and sit in the empty chair next to Cass’s bed. The room feels like the set of a play: Everything’s on wheels; nothing seems permanent. Someone else must have been in here yesterday, with different equipment, different injuries. Either they moved on to another floor, or . . . my shoulders sag as the tears start up again. My sister isn’t going to die this time, but if she tried once, what’s stopping her from doing it again? No. I can’t think like that. I have to keep it together.