A Bad Case of You

by Taylor Holloway

  17

  Eric

  What do vegetarians eat for breakfast? I stared into the cavernous interior of my refrigerator in confusion. I had eggs, bacon, sausage, milk, and butter. Animal products galore. In fact, aside from some spinach leaves and condiments, that was all I had. With those ingredients I could conjure up about a dozen different tasty variations on breakfast, but none of them would for sure be Faith-compatible. I wasn’t sure if she avoided all animal products or just meat, but I didn’t want her to start her day by being grossed out. After dancing from foot to foot in indecision for about five minutes, I settled on toast with margarine and jam, coffee, and orange juice.

  As I expertly toasted the bread and carefully arranged everything on a little tray, I contented myself with the knowledge that Faith was still in my bed, fast asleep in the other room. She’d been curled up around me to such an extent that I’d had to break out some yoga moves to extricate myself from her sleeping clutches (and I don’t do yoga). She’d made some sweet, mewling little protest noises when I got up, but then she quickly quieted and went back to sleep. I couldn’t wait to get back to her.

  I was about to head toward the kitchen when a text came in from work and brought my mood crashing right back down. Dr. Ortega had confirmed via text that Faith’s mom was going to be discharged this morning, but then he dropped a bomb on me.

  Daniel Ortega [8:30 a.m.]: Hey, when you get in tomorrow, I want you for a consult on a trauma case. It’s a really ugly one.

  Eric Carter [8:35 a.m.]: Who’s the patient?

  Daniel Ortega [8:40 a.m.]: Twenty-four-year-old female paramedic. She and her partner were in an ambulance when their occupant went psycho, pulled a gun, and shot them both. Her partner and the original patient died in the ensuing collision and fire, and the female lost half an arm, suffered some very bad burns on her legs, and a single gunshot wound to the abdomen. She’s about to go into surgery to attempt to remove the bullet and reattach the forearm (police found it in a ditch more-or-less intact), and I think we’ve got the burns under control, but she’s got a heart murmur that I want to discuss. I hope it’s nothing, and the surgery for her arm obviously can’t wait, but if she makes it through until tomorrow, I want to talk to you.

  Eric Carter [8:45 a.m.]: Ok. I’ll find you when I get in.

  Then I reread his text.

  Oh shit.

  Eric Carter [8:46 a.m.]: You said it was a paramedic. Anyone we know?

  Daniel Ortega [8:50 a.m.]: Unfortunately, yes. I can’t put the name in text to you—HIPAA you know. But it’s that one with red hair. You know the one.

  I did. There was a tall, pretty, red-haired paramedic named Vanessa that was well known and liked by the ER doctors and nurses. Especially the male ones. They called her, literally, The Redhead. She was the stuff of legends among some of the younger doctors due to her uncanny resemblance to Jessica Rabbit. I’d actually talked to her a couple of times during my rotations down there, and while I acknowledged she was hot, she was also not my type (I’m all about the petite brunettes). She and her partner were also an item, if I recalled correctly.

  Eric Carter [8:56 a.m.]: The Redhead? Was it her regular partner that died?

  Daniel Ortega [8:50 a.m.]: I don’t know. He died on the table. It was a young guy. Dark hair. Tattooed hands, if that helps jog your memory.

  Yeah, it did. He had some weird tattoos on his hands. I wracked my brain for his name. Sean? Steven? Seth? No, it was Sam. That was his name. He was a tall, friendly guy, probably about my age. He had a similar reputation among the females of the hospital that Vanessa had with the men. I knew he played baseball in college. Now he was dead, just like that.

  I shook my head in dismay, staring down at the now burnt toast and tossing it into the trash to start again. God, poor Vanessa. Poor Sam. More lives gone, and more lives ruined, and for what?

  There were times when my profession really got in the way of staying in a good mood about anything. Right now, several miles from where I was preparing to feed Faith some toast, another woman her same age had just been in a horrible accident. A horrible accident that would change the course of her life forever.

  I thanked my lucky stars that Faith and I were both safe this morning and not having any of our limbs reattached from where someone else had scooped them out of a ditch. Surgeries like one that was facing Vanessa were incredibly complex, extremely long (often twelve hours or longer) and despite what people think from television, they fail pretty often. The more distal the limb being reattached, that is the farther from the heart, the more likely the chance of success. A forearm is pretty close to the heart (you want to be reattaching toes, they’re the easiest).

  Without knowing more details, I’d give Vanessa a fifty-fifty chance of recovering her arm, a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the surgery, the gunshot wound, and her burns, and then a fifty-fifty chance of not having lasting damage to her heart. Altogether, that computed to an optimistic thirteen percent chance of ever recovering. From totally healthy to a thirteen percent shot at life in the blink of an eye.

  I shook my head and picked up the tray, thankful that I wasn’t the one in that bed today. Dr. Ortega was very good, but he couldn’t perform miracles. Only God could do that, and sometimes it felt like he was very fickle indeed.

  I tried to shake the troubling thoughts loose. I didn’t want to focus on illness, tragedy, and death. I wanted to focus on Faith. We might not have forever, nobody did, but we had this morning. Just for now, for this moment, we could choose to be happy and together. Despite all my pessimism and personal hang ups about relationships, all I wanted this morning was a little more time with my unlikely wife.

  18

  Faith

  I woke up in Eric’s bed for the second time in a month. This time there was no sudden rush of fear, confusion, or hangover headache. There was also no shame. I’d done something new, but it didn’t feel dirty or wrong. In fact, I felt great. I felt nothing but satisfaction.

  Well, satisfaction and hunger and worry about my mom, that is. I hadn’t eaten dinner last night. Or lunch. Everything with my mom had sort-of eclipsed my normal routine. Now, however, my body wanted to make up for lost time and missing calories.

  Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait very long for food. Eric was already sitting next to me, brushing my hair out of my eyes and offering me some orange juice. He looked almost too-good in just his loose-fitting shorts.

  “A girl could get used to this,” I said, yawning and sitting up enough to accept it. There was toast too. “I’ve never had someone serve me breakfast in bed before.”

  “I would have made you an omelet, but I wasn’t sure if you ate eggs.” He looked just the slightest bit embarrassed by his lack of knowledge about my eating habits.

  I shrugged and went for the toast. “It’s more than ok. I do eat eggs and dairy, but I appreciate you checking first.”

  He looked proud of himself. I knew the steakhouse thing from a couple of weeks ago had bothered him. I’d been out on plenty of dates with guys that thought my vegetarianism was just plain old stupid, or something I was willing to compromise on if they were just annoying or dismissive enough. Having my choices respected made me feel encouraged about Eric.

  “We need to go pick up your mom,” Eric said after a little while. I stretched, looking for my clothes and then remembering that they were mostly in the kitchen. Eric much have read my face, however, because he pointed at a neat little pile at the foot of his bed. He’d gathered everything up and folded it for me.

  How sweet. Breakfast in bed and not having to walk around naked to locate my clothes? I hadn’t expected him to be that sweet.

  Maybe this fake marriage will turn out ok. I could easily see myself putting up with three months of this. When I was being pampered and lavished with attention, it was easy to forget about all the lies that existed outside of this apartment. I could almost pretend this wasn’t all just an elaborate lie.

  I grabbed my bra and panties, pu
tting them on in between bites of toast. “Yeah. And I need to talk to my friend Caroline. Apparently, that was what started my mom’s panic reaction yesterday. Caroline called my house looking for me, she said that she was fine, but there was something about an accident involving her roommate Vanessa.” I shook my head. “When I finally got ahold of her, Caroline said she’d talk to me about it later since my mom was having such a freak out, but I want to know what happened.”

  Eric went very still. “I think I know what happened.”

  Something about his sudden lack of expression made me fearful. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re talking about Vanessa, the paramedic, aren’t you?”

  I nodded. Vanessa and Caroline had been roommates for the past three or so years, although Vanessa and Sam were engaged now. She was due to move out at the end of the month. The four of us hung out now and then. I liked them. “Yeah. Vanessa Evans.”

  “Vanessa was in a bad accident last night,” Eric told me. “She’s in surgery now. Her chances are so-so. But her partner Sam is dead.”

  I felt my heart rate triple. The toast suddenly tasted like ashes. Distantly, I heard Eric explaining to me about the gunshot, the crash, and the fire. My mind was a thousand miles away.

  “Now, everything with my mom makes sense,” I managed to say after Eric finished telling the sad story. I was shaking again.

  Perhaps sensing that I was about to melt down, Eric scooped me up in arms. I folded myself against his chest like I had the evening before in the hospital waiting room. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  I frowned against Eric’s shoulder. When I continued, my voice was half-muffled by his body. “Caroline couldn’t have known it when she called looking for me, but almost exactly eleven years ago, my dad died in an accident not so different from that.”

  Eric squeezed me tighter on his lap. “Oh no, Faith…”

  Once I got started, there was no stopping the story. “My dad was a cop. A guy he was arresting, somehow managed to get out of his handcuffs and get hold of a knife. He stabbed my dad’s partner, who was driving the cop car. The patrol car careened into a ditch and caught on fire. There were no survivors.” I sobbed against the memory. I sure was crying a lot in front of Eric lately. It was embarrassing.

  Eric’s voice was sympathetic above my head. “You don’t have to tell me this if you don’t want to. If it’s too painful, Faith, you don’t have to…”

  I shook my head. Once the floodgates were open, they couldn’t be closed again. “That’s why I don’t eat meat.”

  Eric was quiet. “I don’t understand,” he said eventually.

  “My mom had to go identify the body. She didn’t bring me, obviously. But when she came out of the morgue, there was this barbeque smell all over her. You know, because my dad got so badly burned in the fire…”

  It turns out that all cooked meat smells like, well, cooked meat. Even human bodies. Ever since that moment as a kid, I hadn’t been able to smell cooked red meat without wanting to vomit. Apparently, at least according to Caroline, you can get secondhand PTSD. Maybe that’s what I had.

  PTSD was definitely what my mom had. Now everything she’d been saying on the phone to me made sense. She’d been babbling incoherently about ‘the fire’. I’d thought she was having delusions, or a stroke brought on from the lack of oxygen of a heart attack. In reality, it was just a memory too horrible for her to bear.

  “I want to go get my mom now,” I told Eric. The time for pretending that everything was ok was past. All my fear and indecision rushed back in a dizzy whirl. “It’s time for her to go home.”

  19

  Eric

  The ride back to the hospital was as quiet and tense as the ride home had been last night. Faith was staring blankly out the window, clutching her phone between her fingers and texting with Caroline, whoever that was. All the good feelings and optimism I’d woken up with were gone, and tense indecision had taken their place.

  Faith had become quiet and distant again. Her dark eyes stayed fixed on things in the distance, never on me. When she did look at me (seemingly on accident), there were clouds and unsaid things in her expression that I didn’t know how to interpret. When we got with a few feet of the front desk at the hospital, she turned to me and brought us both to a halt. At least now she was holding my hand instead of acting like I was going to give her cooties.

  “You don’t have to stay and help with this, Eric.” Her voice said she didn’t want me to.

  “I want to help.” If it were anyone else after a night of hooking up, I’d have taken off already. But it wasn’t anyone. It was Faith. I wanted to be with her, to help her.

  She shook her head. “You already have.” Faith reached up and brushed my hair back. “You really have.” My treacherous heart leapt at the physical contact.

  I grabbed her hand in mine and held to my cheek. “But now you want me to go?”

  She sighed and pulled her hand away. “Is that bad?”

  Not bad, but it does kind of hurt. I’d never felt used for sex before, even when I demonstrably had been. I’d always been ok with it before. Now, not so much. I don’t know what I’d been expecting from Faith last night but being rejected the morning after wasn’t part of it.

  I shook my head. “Of course not.” I stepped back a step. “Faith, are you going to start avoiding me again?” Maybe it was immature and selfish to ask such a thing at this moment, but I really wanted to know. I felt like I deserved honesty too. I tried to be honest with Faith.

  Faith’s eyes got wider. “No.” Then she paused. “I don’t know.” Her voice got softer. “Maybe.” She shook her head.

  As eager as I was to press my advantage with Faith, this was the wrong time to have this conversation. She was upset and vulnerable. “We can talk about it later.” But I was determined to talk about it later. “Just please don’t freeze me out again.” I had to let her run, if that was what she wanted to do, but I was done being played with. I felt like I was forever condemned to a respectful distance, and to her indecision, her privacy. Sometimes she’d tease me, let me in just a little bit through texts—or a lot, like she did last night, but then she’d retreat. She was doing it now. I ground my teeth in frustration. If only she didn’t have such good reasons for wanting to keep me away…

  “Hey kids.” The familiar voice came up out of nowhere and we both froze.

  Koels swept up from behind Faith and put a hand on both our shoulders. “What’s this I heard about Rosary McNamara still being in the hospital?”

  He knew? How the hell did he know? How was he on a first name basis with Mrs. McNamara?

  Faith’s skin was always fair, but it had turned an unhealthy shade of palest alabaster. Her full lips parted, and her dark eyes now begged me to stay.

  Now you want my help to distract him, don’t you? I asked her back with my own expression. I arched an eyebrow at her. She nodded urgently in reply. Somehow, being useful wasn’t as good as being wanted. I swallowed my frustration.

  Objectively, it was bad for both of us if Koels spilled the beans to Faith’s mom. We were less than three weeks into a three-and-a-half-month con job. It wouldn’t do for everything to come crashing down the moment Faith’s mom came within the hospital walls.

  “Mrs. McNamara is being discharged right now,” I told Koels. I nodded toward Faith and the reception desk that was being manned at the moment by Lucy. “Faith was just going to let them know we’re here to take her home.” At my cue, Faith nodded herself, eased forward and started talking to the man behind the desk about releasing her mother.

  Koels stayed back with me. “I saw her last night while I was making my evening rounds,” he replied. I froze. I hadn’t realized that Koels made rounds as he didn’t directly treat patients anymore. Perhaps he thought of everyone in the hospital as his patient. “She was asleep,” he added. Then his tone went wistful. “Even in her sleep, she was so beautiful. Like sleeping beauty. I had to find out who she was. Ima
gine my surprise when I found out she was Faith’s mother!”

  I’m sorry, what? I blinked. Koels had a thing for Faith’s mom? He was smiling dreamily at his creepy memory of watching a stranger sleeping.

  Of all the things that could have happened to make things more complicated, the idea that Koels might have a crush on Faith’s mom was among the most random. The two weren’t even that close in age. Mrs. McNamara couldn’t be older than fifty-five. I had it on good authority that Koels was in his mid-sixties. He’d outlived two prior wives and survived at least one divorce. Apparently, he was on the lookout for a new Mrs. Koels.

  I could somewhat understand where Koels was coming from though. Rosary McNamara looked like Faith plus thirty years. In fact, except for the fact that Faith’s hair was black, and Rosary’s was entirely silver-white, they could have passed for sisters rather than mother and daughter. They had the same piercing dark gaze, the same smooth skin, and the same even features. If I were in the market for a woman my mother’s age, I’d be interested in Rosary too.

  “She’s a widow, isn’t she?” Koels was asking me. His voice was eager.

  I frowned at him. I considered lying but wasn’t sure what good it would do. Koels could easily look Rosary up in the hospital database. “Yes. She is.”

  “Does she go to St. Austin’s?” He was fishing for information.

  There was no way, no way in hell, that I was setting them up on any sort of a date. “Why do you ask?”

  Koels smiled. “I’ll just ask Faith if you don’t tell me.” His tone had gone teasing. I didn’t trust him one bit.