The Girls I've Been(78)
Just as long as it’s not today. Today has been bad enough. I want to sleep for a month. I want to never wake up. And I really, really want my mouth and shoulder to stop hurting.
“Will you go and check on Wes and Iris for me now?” I ask.
“Nora,” she says, and it’s just my name, but then she starts crying, and it’s the most surprising thing that has happened all day. That’s when it hits me: She hasn’t been refusing to find Wes and Iris so she could stay with me. She’s been refusing because someone’s hurt. Wes. Wes is hurt, and this is when she’s going to tell me. When we’re alone and I’m already sitting down and my entire vision tunnels like there’s no light left in the world, and I’m trying to breathe, trying to steel myself to hear it for real, but she just keeps crying and not talking and I really need her to talk now.
“Oh, God, what did you do to her?”
I croak out his name.
He’s standing in the doorway, and even from here, I can smell the smoke on his skin and clothes. There’s a bandage on his arm, but that’s it. I start to scramble out of the hospital bed, but I’m yanked back by the IV. I feel sick and reeling, from Wes is trapped to Wes is okay to worst-case scenario. Because it’s almost always the worst-case scenario. But not today.
“I just got away from my mom and checked on Iris,” he says. “She’s good. They just need to do a few more tests. Um, Lee?”
Lee is trying her hardest to sniff back the tears, and failing.
“Nora?” he asks, needing a life raft when it comes to my crying sister because, well, it isn’t really a sight anyone has seen, in, you know, ever.
I shake my aching head and try really hard to hold it back.
But the tears trickle down my cheeks all the same, and instead of running away—which, let’s be honest, is what I would’ve done if confronted with two people in tears—Wes walks into the room. He sits down on the edge of the bed and he curls his hand around my foot like it’s the one place he’s sure I’m not hurt, and the three of us sit there, a broke-then-taped-together little unit we’ve somehow formed through love and movie nights and hikes through the woods, patched-up wounds and shared books and blackmail schemes I will never regret. A family reunited when I was sure we wouldn’t be again.
The world outside of this is harsh, and so am I. But here, with them, it is safe to cry.
— 63 —
3:00 p.m. (138 minutes free)
2 safe-deposit keys (hidden in jeans pocket)
After they’ve cleaned all the gunk out of my shoulder and side and made sure I’m not gonna slip into a coma, they finally let me see Iris. Then they release me, and the doctor gives me the number of a dentist—I have an emergency appointment tomorrow morning with her to fix that back molar.
Lee agrees to go downstairs to get my antibiotics at the pharmacy while I sit with Iris, and Wes has to go appease his own parents, so it’s just me, hovering in her doorway.
She’s repurposed her hospital gown as a robe over her pink rayon slip. I know the little blue flowers embroidered along the neck very well . . . or my fingers do. Getting through all Iris’s layers—metaphorical and decorative—is a slow and careful practice.
At first, I think she’s sleeping, but the second I step into the room, her eyes fly open.
“Nora,” she breathes.
“Hey.” I shuffle closer. My side is throbbing, and I don’t think that’s gonna change anytime soon, so I’m trying to ignore it.
“Are you okay? I saw Wes—”
“Me too. I’m fine. Lee’s just getting the meds for me. Are you okay?”
Apparently the hospital is the place for crying, because her eyes well up.
“Please get me out of this hospital,” she says, her brown eyes getting so big and liquid and miserable, they’re bordering into Bambi-after-his-mother-was-shot territory. “Please. I hate hospitals. They said my head was fine. They gave me painkillers. They’re just not letting me go because my mom’s still in New York.”
“Did you get ahold of her?”
She nods and then winces, her hand flying up to touch the huge bump on her forehead. It’s a deeper purple than before. She looks awful, pale and bruised and smoke-smudged. She looks beautiful, alive and breathing and as much mine as I am hers. I want to crawl into that bed and curl around her and take every inch of her pain away.
“She’s flying home. But she won’t get back until tomorrow morning. I don’t want to stay here. Please. I want out of here and a heating pad and a silly movie to zone out in front of. Nora. Please.”
She grabs my hand and she squeezes almost harder than she did in the bank.
“Okay,” I say, because the way she looks at me is tinged with the kind of bad that makes the back of my throat bitter. “I’ll get Lee to fix it.”
“You will?”
“Promise.”
It takes two phone calls, an argument with the head nurse, and a hushed three-way conversation with Iris’s doctor and her mother on the phone before they release Iris into Lee’s custody. When they finally come in to unhook her and let her get dressed, the smile that blooms over her face is like sunshine across miles of snow.
They put her in a wheelchair, too, but she doesn’t protest. “Where’s Wes?” she asks. “He was going to come back.”