First Girl Gone(84)

“He’s stable for now, but if his condition worsens…”

As the doctor turned to go, the nurse reached out and squeezed Charlie’s arm.

“The lights will be on for another few minutes. Take your time.”

Charlie hovered there before the window, frozen. The chicken wire embedded in the glass divided Frank and the room into tiny squares, like a mosaic.

Her phone buzzed. Without even looking to see who it was, Charlie reached into her pocket and turned the phone off. People had been calling and texting regularly since she got here, wanting updates on Frank. But she couldn’t deal with that just now. Didn’t want the responsibility of either delivering bad news or trying to bolster someone else’s hopes.

Movement caught her eye through the glass. Frank’s eyelids lurched. The skin shifting.

Dreaming, Charlie thought. He must be dreaming. That was good, wasn’t it? But somehow, she didn’t want to get her hopes up.

As if on cue, the lights in the hall snapped off. All the bulbs up and down the corridor blinking out one after another.

That was it, then. There was nothing left to do but go sit in the waiting room and… wait.





Chapter Sixty-Eight





Charlie wound her way down the darkened hallways, the distant glow of the nursing station lighting her path. Familiar faces occupied the waiting room, three of Frank’s neighbors. Betty Humphrey from next door, Linda Markowitz from down the street, and the one Charlie had only ever known as Tootsie.

She flinched as she came around the corner and saw them there, and words flung at her from all sides, buffeting her like a strong wind. How is he? What did the doctor say? Do they know what’s wrong?

They meant well, she knew, but it didn’t help. Not here and now. Her shoulders hunched out of reflex, head angled down to stare at the floor. Like maybe she could flinch back from all of this human contact.

Instead one of the women pulled her into a hug, arms coiling and flexing around her like constricting snakes.

Panicky feelings churned inside of her. Too many people. Too much stimulation. All of the contact made her feel separate. Strange and numb.

She withdrew then into herself like a snail retracting into its shell. Some defense mechanism overtaking her. Keeping her distant from the physical world. All the nerves deadened. Semi-catatonic.

The camera looking out from her eyes zoomed out, shifted its angle, pointed itself inward. Like she was looking at reality out of the corner of her eye now, never straight on.

Someone steered her onto a cushioned bench. They held her hand, talking right in her face. But it sounded like they were underwater. The words all muffled and swirling. Meaningless.

Charlie tried to focus on the face before her, but her body tingled with alienation, the throb of pins and needles rippling over her skin, until she could feel the sweat sliming her shirt under her arms. A slick membrane of dampness. It made her shudder.

And the words catapulted at her. All the faces pointed at her, jabbering away. Conversations she couldn’t quite keep up with, even if she was a participant in many of them.

She didn’t dwell on it. Didn’t focus on it. Detached from the present. Let the time drift past. Her mind going all the way blank, eyeballs staring out at the TV on the wall or the beige ceramic tiles beneath her feet.

It felt, in many ways, like she was floating above this scene. Looking down on the waiting room from afar, from above. Apart from it. Apart from all the people. Focusing, somehow, on her two black shoes resting on that khaki floor.

She drifted like that for what felt like a long time. Gliding. Apart. Alone again, even in the crowd.

She remembered feeling this way at Allie’s funeral. Empty and separate from everything. She wondered sometimes if she would have stayed that way, in a semi-catatonic state, had Allie’s voice not beamed into her head and jolted her back to reality.

“This is going to sound egotistical, complaining about my own funeral,” her sister had said, “but I kind of thought there’d be a better turnout, if I’m being honest. The demographics alone… lotta white hairs, am I right? We’re like a couple boxes of wine away from a full-blown lemon party in here.”

“They did a thing at school. For the kids,” Charlie had explained. “Mom wanted to keep the actual ceremony to blood relatives, not have it, you know, overrun with a bunch of kids. Her words.”

“Nice. Better for my funeral to look like a Cialis commercial or something, I guess. There are twelve guys here who look exactly like Mitt Romney. And those are the youngsters, relatively speaking.”

Charlie had laughed at that. Gotten a few dirty looks from the geriatric funeral crowd.

“I wonder if the mortician was disappointed.”

“Disappointed?”

“I mean, there wasn’t much for him to do, right? Usually there’s a whole procedure. Draining the blood and pumping in the pink embalming goo. Reconstructing any broken bits with various epoxies and putties. It’d take quite a bit of putty to reconstruct this one, I’m afraid.” Allie sighed. “One closed casket to go, thank you very much. It’s really a shame they don’t make shoe-box-sized coffins, now that I think about it. All that wasted space. You think they put the foot up on the pillow, where my head should be? Or is it down at the bottom, where my feet would normally go?”

When Charlie hadn’t answered, Allie continued her monologue.