This Close to Okay(68)

Holidays were difficult, but Christine had loved decorating for Halloween, draping their shrubs in fake spiderwebs and putting pumpkins on the porch. And she’d loved their house from the moment they’d seen it. The color: honeybee yellow.

She called it their Honeybee House, wanting to name it after his grandmother’s beekeeper occupation, the same way the characters in the old-timey books she liked to read named their vast estates. “Let’s go back to the Honeybee House,” she’d said when they were out in the world and she’d had enough. Emmett held the image of their Honeybee House in his mind and put Tallie’s house right there beside it.

*



Zora, no longer in her Halloween costume, sat in the hospital hallway, texting. After greeting Tallie and Emmett, she launched into the details, telling them where Lionel’s second-and third-degree burns were. His arm, torso, and leg. There would be more than one skin-graft surgery in his future. He’d been admitted to a room in the burn unit with a two-visitor-maximum rule; Gus and Glory were in there with him.

“It’s less than fifteen percent of his body, and apparently fifteen percent is the scary number, so that’s a relief. He’s still knocked out,” Zora said, taking a deep breath.

“Oh, wow. Thank You, Jesus,” Tallie said.

“My parents are bringing River by later.”

“I can hang out with him if you need me to,” Tallie said.

“River would love that. You know he’s crazy about Auntie Lulah,” Zora said before turning to Emmett and adding, “Lionel was asking if you were okay.”

“Me?” Emmett asked.

Zora nodded. “He worried you’d gotten burned trying to help him.”

Tallie touched his elbow and nudged, lifting one of his hands up.

“His hands…a little. He won’t let a doctor look at them,” Tallie said.

“I’m okay,” he said.

“He appreciates what you did for him. We all do,” Zora said, tearing up. She stood and hugged Emmett, melting in his arms like sweet powder.

(Zora is shorter than Tallie, but not by much. They are both taller than Christine was. There is a lot of beeping in a hospital. A lot of announcements. Intercom clicks. Someone calls for Dr. Dorman. Someone’s phone chimes; another’s whooshes.)

“He’s a good man,” Emmett said confidently into Zora’s storm of hair. Emmett had known men, both good and bad, who’d made terrible mistakes in their lives, in their marriages. He truly believed Lionel was one of the good ones. He felt a radiating tenderness toward the women of the world for having to deal with all of it, a tenderness toward Zora as she nodded against his shoulder. “You have a beautiful family,” he said.

Zora sniffed and blew her nose. “I hope you’re around to meet River.”

“I hope so, too,” Emmett said.

“Gus and Glory will be back there for a bit. I’ll let you know when he wakes up,” Zora said.

*



Members of Tallie’s family came and went. Outside for fresh air, to the cafeteria for coffee and tea and snacks, or to the canteen area humming with glowing vending machines. Tallie’s parents avoided each other. Judith left and returned with her friend Connie, the two of them stepping outside to the benched smoking oasis in the middle of the parking lot, away from the hospital entrance. Tallie’s stepmother, Glory, had left to go home and get some rest. Gus sat in the crowded waiting room talking quietly with Tallie’s uncle. The TV flashed car and lawyer and medicine commercials, turned down low. The mood was respectful of the hospital and its surroundings, but there was an air of hope and relief within the Clark family, with everyone knowing Lionel’s burns weren’t life-threatening. Emmett wanted to wait for Lionel to wake up before he left, so he could say goodbye to him and see with his own eyes that he was lucid and okay.

*



The more of Tallie’s family Emmett met, the more he felt welcomed by them. He talked and laughed with her dad and uncle; he listened to her mother let out everything that had ever been on her mind. The more he hung around the hospital, the more he didn’t want to leave. And the worse he felt about contacting Joel and keeping up that ruse. The betrayal weighed on him heavier and heavier. Emmett and Tallie had been inseparable since Lionel’s party; Emmett hadn’t even stepped outside to smoke alone.

*



Emmett and Tallie left the hospital to get chili dogs and apple cider slushies from a fall festival at a nearby church. They lunched on the trunk of her car, under the kind of forever-blue swimming pool sky and orange-gold light only autumn allowed. His brain was still processing what had happened in her bedroom, what it did and didn’t mean. But knowing goodbye was coming soon, he kissed her—soft and slow—their slushie-cold mouths warming sweet.

*



“Last night was like our own episode of X-Files. So surreal,” Tallie said as they walked through the parking lot of the hospital. She tugged at the sleeve of his flannel shirt and stopped him, the afternoon sun glinting off everything like diamonds.

“The entire weekend, really. Even before all this. Woman meets strange man on bridge who could be an alien. Or maybe she’s the alien?”

“Glitches in the electrical grids.”

“Mos def. And not to mention cryptozoology,” Emmett said.