Beautiful Chaos(43)

I was done.

There was one person who wasn’t there, though. A person who smelled like copper and salt and red-eye gravy. A person who might have played the tiles to spell DURNED-FOOL— while she was the farthest thing from one. A person who could single-handedly map out most of the Caster Tunnels in the South.

A few days later, I couldn’t take it anymore. So when Lena insisted on going to see Aunt Prue, I didn’t refuse. The truth was, I wanted to see her. I wasn’t sure what Aunt Prue was going to be like. Would she look like she was sleeping—the way she did when she fell asleep on the sofa? Or would she look the way she had in the ambulance? There was no way to tell, and I felt guilty and scared.

More than anything, I didn’t want to feel alone.




County Care was a rehab facility—a cross between a nursing home and a place where you went after a hard-core ATV accident. Or when you flipped a dirt bike, crashed a truck, got sideswiped by a big rig. Some folks thought you were lucky if that happened, since you could make a lot of money if the right truck hit you. Or you could end up dead. Or both, as in the case of Deacon Harrigan, who ended up with the nicest headstone in town, while his wife and kids got all new siding and an in-ground trampoline, and started eating out at Applebee’s in Summerville five nights a week. Carlton Eaton told Mrs. Lincoln, who told Link, who told me. The checks came every month straight from the capitol building over in Columbia, rain or shine. That’s what you got when the trash truck ran you down, anyway.

Walking inside County Care didn’t make me feel like Aunt Prue was lucky, though. Even the strange, sudden quiet and the hospital-strength air conditioning didn’t make me feel better. The whole place smelled like something sickly sweet, almost powdery. Something bad trying to smell like something good. Even worse, the lobby, the hallways, and the bumpy cottage cheese ceiling were painted Gatlin peach. Sort of like a whole tub of Thousand Island dressing poured over a salad bar’s worth of cottage cheese and slapped up on the ceiling.

Maybe French dressing.

Lena was trying to cheer me up.

Yeah? Either way I feel like puking.

It’s okay, Ethan. Maybe it won’t be so bad once we see her.

What if it’s worse?

It was worse, about ten feet farther in. Bobby Murphy looked up from the desk. Last time I’d seen him, he’d been on the basketball team with me, hassling me for getting dumped at that dance by Ethan-Loving turned Ethan-Hating Emily Asher. I let him do it, too. He had been varsity point guard three years running, and nobody messed with him. Now Bobby was sitting behind the reception desk in a peach-colored orderly’s uniform, and he didn’t look so tough. He also didn’t look all that happy to see me. Probably didn’t help that his laminated nametag said BOOBY.

“Hey, Bobby. Thought you were over at Summerville Community College.”

“Ethan Wate. Here you are, an’ here I am. Don’t know which one a us I feel sorrier for.” His eyes flickered over to Lena, but he didn’t say hello. Talk was talk, and I was sure he was up on all the latest, even way out here at County Care, where half the folks couldn’t make a sound.

I tried to laugh, but it came out more like a cough, and the silence swept back in between us.

“Yeah. ’Bout time you showed up, anyway. Your Aunt Prudence has been askin’ for you.” He grinned, shoving a clipboard across the counter.

“Really?” I froze up for a minute, though I should have known better.

“Nah. Just pullin’ your leg. Here, give me your John Hancock and you can head on down to the garden.”

“Garden?” I handed him back the clipboard.

“Sure. Out back in the residential wing. Where we grow all the good vegetables.” He smiled, and I remembered him back in the locker room. Man up, Wate. Letting a freshman skirt push you around? You’re makin’ us all look bad.

Lena leaned over the counter. “That line ever get old, Booby?”

“Not as old as that one.” He stood up out of his chair. “How about, ‘I’ll show you mine, you show me yours’?” He stared at the place where Lena’s shirt dove into a V at her chest. My hand clenched into a fist.

I could see her hair curling around her shoulders as she leaned even closer to him. “I’m thinking now would be a great time for you to stop talking.”

Bobby opened and shut his mouth like he was a catfish stuck wriggling on the bottom of dried-up Lake Moultrie. He didn’t say a word.

“That’s more like it.” Lena smiled and picked up our visitor badges from the counter.

“So long, Bobby,” I said as we headed out back.


The farther we made it down the hall, the sweeter the air and the thicker the smell. I looked in the doors of the rooms we passed, each one like some kind of messed-up Norman Rockwell painting—where only crappy things were happening, frozen into little snapshots of pathetic life.

An old man sat in a hospital bed, his head wrapped in white bandages that made it appear gigantic and surreal. He looked like some kind of alien, flipping a little yo-yo on a metal track, back and forth. A woman sat in the chair across from him, stitching something inside a wood hoop. Probably part of some needlepoint he would never see. She didn’t look up, and I didn’t slow down.

A teenage boy lay in another bed, his hand moving across some paper on top of a fake wood-grain tray table. He was staring off into space, drooling, but his hand kept writing and writing, as if it couldn’t help itself. The pen didn’t seem to be moving across the paper; it was more like the letters were writing themselves. Maybe every word he’d ever written was in that one big pile of letters, each one stacked up on top of the next. Maybe it was his whole life story. Maybe it was his masterpiece. Who knew? Who cared? Not Bobby Murphy.