Nobody, Somebody, Anybody

by Kelly McClorey

  “You wish it was.” It sounded like I might be crying, but I was too groggy to know for sure.

  “I would never wish something like that.” Roula braced her hands on the arms of her chair and gently rose to her feet. “I’ll go. I’m sorry. I just wanted you to know I was praying for you. And I’ll keep you in my prayers.” She kept her head bowed. “Oh, and your bag. I picked it up. So you’d have it.” She signaled to my backpack on the floor. I could only imagine what she’d done to it.

  The nurse watched Roula leave, her lips parted as though she might speak. She turned back to me. “You’re lucky your friend found you when she did. She probably saved your life.”

  “No,” I said quietly. Her words tumbled around my brain. Roula had saved a life? And worst of all, it was my own. Now I knew I was crying. The nurse didn’t acknowledge it—I appreciated that. All she said was, “That was pretty scary today, huh?”

  She placed the tinny end of her stethoscope against my chest. “Take a deep breath. Another one, good.” She took the earpieces out and said, “Can you tell me a little more about what happened? I just want to make sure I’ve got the story straight. That’s part of my job.”

  I sucked my cheeks, trying to get some saliva into my dry mouth. “I was just trying to clean. There was something stuck in there. The toilet. And I guess I just got too focused on it, so I didn’t realize.”

  “Okay, I understand.”

  Doug strode back in. “Sorry about that.” He rolled his eyes at his phone and slipped it into a holster connected to his belt.

  The nurse seemed to get the impression that she should leave. “I’m going to let you rest for a minute,” she said. “I’ll bring up something to drink. Juice? Okay. Press this if you need me.”

  Doug picked up the chair Roula had been sitting in and moved it beside my bed. “How are you feeling? You sure had us going back there.”

  “I’m sorry.” It felt strange having him so close to my bed, but at the same time I wished he would reach over and hug me.

  “Quite the dramatic exit! It’s not every day we get a visit from an ambulance.”

  “The ambulance?” I shook with humiliation. An ambulance meant EMTs, maybe even one who had been in my training course, rushing up to find me passed out next to a flooded toilet, full of counterfeit goods . . .

  “Don’t worry about any of that. I just want you to take care of yourself. Let’s make sure you get all the rest you need, huh? We can call this your last day—you only had one more week anyway, and this way you can take some time, regroup. Sound good? Amy?”

  “That’s okay. I want to finish.”

  “I don’t want you to worry about that. You’ve been a huge help this summer. And we’ve got most people heading out on the cruise tomorrow anyway. It’ll be a ghost town before you know it. A lot of our summer hires end up ducking out a little early, once things start winding down. It’s no problem at all.”

  “I don’t mind coming in one more week. Even longer, through the fall. I could keep up with the dusting and the floors and that kind of thing. You shouldn’t leave the rooms unattended for too long. Mold could—”

  “Listen, Amy, I’m glad you’re passionate. But we’ve got Roula to take care of all that, and she’s been with us for years now, so you see, I’ve got to defer to her. I’ve always liked you, you know that. You’ve gone above and beyond. And regardless of what happened today, the fact is that the season’s ending and this was always meant to be a summer position, you knew that from the start.” He checked his phone. “Look, I’ve got to get back. I’m glad you’re okay, that’s the important thing. Oh, and the bill, everything, that’s all been taken care of. I figured you probably aren’t on any insurance, and you’ve got enough on your plate.”

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “That’s okay. I know you’re going to move on to bigger and better things after this. Just don’t forget all us little people who knew you way back when. Stop in anytime, let me know how you’re doing. I mean it.” He touched my arm as he stood.

  Once he was gone, I gasped for air—how long had I been holding my breath? I inhaled, exhaled, trying to concentrate only on that. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, oxygen, carbon dioxide. But as usual my brain rebelled. It insisted on taking inventory: no job, no friends, no apartment, no EMT certification, and no plan. It felt like the world was trying to erase me. I watched liquid move through the plastic tube into my arm. The nurse brought juice and crackers and I devoured them. Then I was overcome by fatigue and fell asleep.

  * * *

  I awoke to noise at the door, someone knocking and opening it at the same time, before I could respond. Gary lifted his hand in a reluctant, wooden hello.

  “Doug called,” he said. “He thought you might need a ride home. Guess he didn’t know who else to call. I figured we should at least stop by and make sure you’re okay.”

  “We?”

  He gestured behind him, and a woman emerged. He hooked his arm around her waist and let the door close behind them. “This is Irina.” She nodded blankly.

  “Oh,” I said. “Hi.” She was a less sophisticated version of the woman in the picture, with brassy dyed hair, a tight skirt, and lips that seemed artificial. But for whatever reason, these things only made her seem more endearing and benign, nothing like the venomous maneater I’d come to expect. What did I understand about her, about anything, after all? In spite of myself, I almost felt happy for them.

  He whispered to her, then stepped closer and said in a muted voice, “Look, you didn’t do this on purpose, did you? Because of—well, you know.”

  I felt a twinge behind my eyes and channeled all my energy into killing it. “It was an accident,” I said at last.

  The nurse entered and began puttering around my IV bag. Irina scrutinized her, along with the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the medical instruments beside my bed. Gary was doing his best to appear calm, cool, and collected—as though he’d come up with that all on his own.

  “Anyway, we’re actually on our way to the Cape. Hank and Samantha are on their honeymoon, so they offered up their house for the weekend.” He seemed annoyed that he couldn’t fully enjoy rubbing this in my face, given my current condition. If Irina had ever considered me a threat, this scene certainly nullified it. “But it’s not like I want you to be stranded here. We can wait if it won’t hold us up too long.” He said this more for the nurse’s sake than mine.

  “We just need to go through a few more things,” she said. “Her vitals look good. We’ll get a quick urine sample, then I’ll get the machine in here and do a quick set of chest X-rays. If everything looks okay, she should be good to go. I’d say about an hour or so.”

  Gary scrunched his nose.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “You can go. I have a ride. My friend Ward is coming.”

  “Guess we came all the way down here for nothing, then. Ah well, everything’s exciting for Irina, even a trip to the hospital. She wants to see it all. This is her first day in the US.”

  “Oh, wow,” the nurse said. “Welcome.”

  “Well then, we’ll get out of your hair.” He approached the edge of the bed. “We won’t be back until Sunday night,” he said. “So, you know, you can have until then.”

  * * *

  The room smelled like wool blankets and urine and the antibacterial gel they pumped from the hive on the wall. My mother’s hospital room smelled exactly like this, but with a hint of coconut from her hand cream, which she was always asking us to lather on for her. Florence Nightingale criticized the way people act around deathbeds, showering the dying with advice, urging them to get a second opinion, trying to cheer them up with fake optimism. Silly hopes and encouragements, she called it. But even that would have been better than how it was with my mother. Instead, I’d been indifferent and unbelieving, too stubborn to offer a single word of hope or encouragement, even the silly kind.

  I would use college as the excuse for why I couldn’t visit or why I
had to leave so quickly; I had a big course load and couldn’t afford to fall behind. It didn’t matter, I told myself, since she was hamming it up for the doctors anyway—we all knew how she could be. The queen of hyperbole and attention-seeking behavior, famous for her soap-opera sighs—of course she would be the one to get cancer. Now that she had the Big C to work with and a new, larger audience, who knew how far she would go. I’d picture her fainting across the bed the moment visiting hours ended, the gullible doctors pacing and wringing their hands as she whispered “No, please, don’t worry about me,” in the breathy voice of a practiced martyr. As time went on, that theory became less and less plausible, though I became more and more attached to it.

  At one point, when she was getting worse and I said I had to go, I had a paper due the next day, my brother followed me into the hall. “Come on,” he said. His face had no color in it. “You’re killing her.” And I knew even then that it was true. As sick as she was, it was me, I was killing her. And yet I couldn’t not do it. It was as if time had already run out, she was already dead and I was already sinking into a life of misery, knowing I had been a thorn, a curse to the end; I was lower than the dirt that would rain down on top of her.

  In the week after the funeral, Nnenna begged me to come with her to a chapel service on campus, just this once, just to try it. “It’s really peaceful and relaxing, completely low-key. You could fall asleep if you want, no one would care. And if you decide you want to leave at any point, I’ll go with you. I promise. Okay?” I sat comatose at my desk while she brushed my hair. “It might be nice to just get out and walk around a little. We don’t even have to go in if you don’t want to.” She unlaced my shoes and set them by my feet. She brought my coat from the closet and held the sleeve open. But back then I was still foolish and arrogant enough to believe that faith was the enemy of intelligence. Now I can see why research shows religious people tend to live longer and recover from illness faster; if you’re able to close your eyes and make a wish and believe that someone is listening, the ritual is not unlike an obecalp treatment. Still, not every obecalp can be successful, and not every prayer can be answered.

  I turned to the empty chair Doug had pulled to my bedside. I tried to imagine my mother sitting there, watching me, her only daughter, the one the world was now trying to erase. For the first time in six years, it happened. The shapes of her hair and her shoulders took form, just the outlines first, then gradually filling in with color and texture until every detail was in its place. She was here, alive. I could feel the light whisper of her breath. She’d finally come back for me. I reached out, then caught myself, shrinking back into my pillow. The only reason for her to come back now was to gloat, to revel in the ultimate display of karmic justice: me lying in a hospital bed, defeated and miserably alone. I waited, shivering, gritting my teeth, terrified but also glad for her. She could finally unleash every last ounce of her wrath and scorn upon me. I deserved that and much, much worse.

  But instead her hand moved, softly, slowly, to my forehead. She held it there, as though checking for a fever, gentle but unmistakable. I could feel it tingling all the way through my skull—like she was drawing something out of me or sending something in, or both. I opened my mouth. But then I saw there was nothing to say, nothing that needed to be said, nothing to be afraid of. My mouth closed, and I stopped shaking. I took what seemed like the first true deep breath of my entire life, as though I had been doing it wrong all these years. Warmth radiated out from her body, rising through the room. I felt it circle around me and cover me like a shell.

  * * *

  I thought about Peter, the most remarkable professor I ever had, while I lay on the bed under a spray of radiation. A technician had draped a lead apron over my legs and cranked the machine’s arm down until it hovered a few inches above me. “Try not to move,” he’d said, then disappeared around the corner with the cord. If Peter was right, if the things we do during a difficult time don’t define us, then what does? I couldn’t say I had a calling anymore. I couldn’t say I had much of anything right now. But I could still do as the technician said: I could refuse to move—unflinching, unafraid—and lay bare all I held inside me. No matter what was exposed, I would not blink or turn away. I would probe deeper. As I lay there, I felt my body dismantling into its most basic parts, organs into tissues into cells. Then I held my breath and tried to reassemble in a slightly new and better way.

  Thirteen

  The X-rays came back clear. By the time they released me, I could hardly hold my head up, I was so exhausted. I did a lap of the parking lot, then walked back through the automatic doors. I spent the night in the ER waiting room, folded up in an upholstered chair, using my backpack for a pillow. The twenty-four-hour news channel flashed color and light, and the arms of the chair rammed into my sides. At one point a man jostled my shoulder, and I told him I was waiting for my sister, she was going to call when she was ready. In the morning, before dawn, I massaged the feeling back into my legs and stumbled out the door.

  After forty minutes at the bus stop, I caught one heading in the direction of home. Well, what used to be home. Even though Gary said they’d be away until Sunday, I couldn’t bring myself to go back there. I tried to think of somewhere else to go. When we approached Magnolia Drive, I instinctively pulled the cord and headed for the bushes outside number 8. I’d never taken more than one berry at a time, but now I couldn’t resist. I was famished and greedy and didn’t know where I would have my next meal or even my next sip of water. I popped the ripest in my mouth, savoring each one. I’d never tasted anything so good. I loaded them into the front pocket of my backpack until it bulged.

  I roamed, making expectant eyes at the houses as I passed, hoping one of them might take pity and open its doors to me. The streets were cool, dewy, empty. Not even the early joggers had ventured out yet. Just me and a bunch of dead worms that must’ve crawled out during the storm and then gotten fried by the sun. I took haphazard lefts and rights, rights and lefts, with no destination in mind. But when I finally looked up, I found myself on a familiar street, in front of a familiar building. The clubhouse, with its blue awning and white shutters, the parking lot glittering from a high-pressure wash. The alley by the employee entrance was deserted. Someone unlocked the employee door before the breakfast shift, but I didn’t know when exactly. I tried pulling, and it gave.

  Somehow I felt surprised to see the rosewood clock in its usual place on the wall, as though nothing on the hotel floor could possibly look the same as it had yesterday. The clock read 6:39. Roula wouldn’t be in for at least another two hours. I entered the housekeeping closet. When I saw Roula’s pots arranged on the desk, still glaringly, depressingly empty, I felt compelled to unzip my backpack. I transferred the berries into one of the pots. They almost filled it up. I stacked the other pots under it, to be sure she would notice. A pittance, after all I’d put her through. I felt mortified thinking of how I’d acted, how I’d twisted everything, trying to make myself superior. And still she’d decided I was worth saving. Making sure she never had to deal with me again—that was probably the best gift I could give her.

  I heard voices in the hall and peeked through the cracked door. A young couple was exiting room 6, carrying big canvas tote bags and snuggling as they walked off, the tips of his fingers sinking into the back of her shorts. When their sounds had faded, I grabbed the keys off the loop in the closet and entered the room.

  It felt weird to be inside, as though I hadn’t spent all summer haunting these rooms, inspecting, polishing every inch. They’d left the sheets askew and a pile of Kleenex in the trash can. Through the window, I could see the cruise ship parked out in the harbor. It wasn’t one of the mammoth ones you see advertised on TV with an indoor pool and a climbing wall and multiple theaters, but still grand and dignified, like a multitiered cake, each layer frosted white and lined with windows, and a deck sitting at the top. I knew from the flyer on the events board that it would begin boarding at 7:00
a.m. and would stop in Bar Harbor on the way to Halifax, Nova Scotia. The couple had left their things behind, so it seemed safe to assume they weren’t planning to be passengers. Most likely, they were off to enjoy a romantic day on their private sailboat.

  I entered the bathroom. I undressed, cautiously, so as not to disturb anything in the room. How bizarre, exhilarating even, to find myself naked here, to feel my bare feet against the cold tiles that I’d only ever touched through a layer of bristles or cloth or sponge. I had a brisk, glorious shower, using one pump of soap for everything, including my hair.

  I brushed my teeth at the sink. I looked into the mirror, at the top half of my naked body. Water running off my chin, my wet hair molded to my head, the ends dripping. If the world wanted to erase me, why not let it, and then draw up a new version in her place? Maybe it wasn’t an assault but an opportunity. I put on a clean pair of underwear and got the change of clothes from my backpack. I held them up: a nondescript T-shirt and a pair of athletic shorts, an outfit I’d worn countless times here this summer. I set them back down and walked into the bedroom.

  I was going to have to borrow a few things. I wished there was another way, but I had limited time and so I needed to work with the situation at hand, as delicately and graciously as possible, and hope they would understand. In the closet I found suitcases, a nylon bag of golf clubs, and a few fancy dresses—too fancy. I knew now what I was meant to do, and to overdress for it would be a mistake. My mother once said that the poorest man in the room is the one in the most expensive suit. We were visiting Dad’s family in Ohio, and had snuck into a holiday party at the hotel, just the two of us, giggling in a corner, judging everybody. That was a good time. In fact, there had been many, many good times.

  I chose a pair of beige shorts from the suitcase and a blue shirt with embroidery around the collar. The shirt fit all right when tucked in but the shorts sagged off my hips, which stuck out like two horns—I must have lost a few more pounds. I didn’t want to take a belt on top of everything else. So I unzipped a large pouch that said “Leave a little sparkle wherever you go” and gently foraged through the cosmetics and hair accessories until I located an elastic, which I used to gather the extra fabric. That left me with a bulge on one side, so I had to untuck the shirt and billow it out to mask it. Her loafers pooled around my feet; my sneakers would have to do.