by Ruth Vincent
Chapter 11
True to his word, Obadiah’s messenger pigeon tapped on my window in the morning. I was already awake. The hospital had called. They’d moved Eva out of the ICU into a regular room, which meant she could have visitors.
“I’m going over there to see her,” I wrote, scribbling down the room number on the little scrap of paper. “You can come too, if you want.” I was touched that he cared. I mean, who was Eva to him? The cynical part of my brain said he was just trying to protect himself. The cops could arrest him any day now for attempted murder—and even if not, he could still be sued for her accident happening at his club. But I didn’t believe it. His concern for her seemed genuine, and it touched me deeply.
“If there’s anything you need, Mab,” he had written, “anything at all . . .”
I blushed as I read the words. I was still feeling awkward about our kiss last night. What had I been thinking? I hadn’t been thinking; that was the problem. Anyway, I didn’t have time for any distractions right now. Eva needed me, and I was going to be there for her. I bustled on my hat and coat.
I waited on the subway platform, clutching the little pot of African violets I’d bought her from the corner bodega, as the express train hurtled past. African violets were Eva’s favorite. She used to grow them on her windowsill next to her altar stuff. I just hoped they didn’t freeze before I got to the hospital. The wind whipping around the subway platform could cut glass. I cupped the fragile purple blooms with my hands, trying to protect them from the gusting air, and breathing my warm breath on them. It didn’t do much good—the petals still shook as if they were in a hurricane. I didn’t feel like I could do anything right these days.
Exiting the subway, I could see the redbrick-and-glass monolith of Woodhull Medical Center looming ahead. The little patch of grass outside was a pretty sorry excuse for a park—a couple of trees with iron fences around them breaking out of the frozen ground on either side of the walkway. The trees were all bare now, making them seem even scrawnier. One or two had a solitary dry brown leaf clinging tenaciously to the branch, but otherwise they were barren as skeletons, twigs rattling in the wind.
I entered through the sliding glass doors and approached the information kiosk. The woman sitting behind the desk regarded me with a bored expression.
“I’m here to see Eva Morales, room 817,” I said.
The woman didn’t respond; she just typed something into a computer with her long, gold-tipped fake fingernails.
“May I go see her?” I asked tentatively.
She nodded.
“Thanks.” I smiled, but she didn’t smile back. At first I felt affronted, but these people saw death and injury every day walking in and out of these doors. To me it was all new—to her, it was so commonplace as to be boring.
I walked towards the bank of elevators, aware of my boots squeaking on the shiny linoleum floor.
The hospital atrium was crowded with visitors. It was close to Christmas and everyone was here to see their loved ones. People were holding flowers and balloons. A few held stuffed animals and children’s toys, which just made me even sadder.
We all crowded into the elevator together.
From the other side, wedged deep into the crowd, I heard a woman crying softly.
No one said anything. Everyone kept their eyes fixed on the dinging lights over the door, letting us know what floor we were passing.
None of us knew what to do.
I wanted to say something—but what could you say? Unless someone was going to the maternity ward, no one was ever in a hospital for good news. Still, her soft crying made my chest ache.
I tried to give her a smile as the woman exited at her floor, but she shuffled out of the doors, wrapped in her own solitary world of grief.
At last the elevator dinged for the eighth floor. The doors opened and I walked out.
The hallway of the hospital wing smelled sterile, like hand sanitizer. Everything was clean and white. Nurses in blue scrubs bustled to and fro. Something about that sterile smell made me even more nervous than I already was.
I finally reached room 817.
The door was propped open.
I could see a figure inside.
Taking a deep breath, I knocked softly.
An old woman stepped out.
She was short, even shorter than I was, with weathered brown skin and black, haunted eyes. I could tell by the rumpled sweats she had on she wasn’t one of the nurses. She was wearing a gold chain around her wrinkled neck, strung with charms—a cross and two medals, one with a Virgin of Guadalupe on it, and the other a depiction of Saint Anthony. Something about the structure of her round face seemed so familiar, and then it hit me. This was Eva’s grandmother.
“Mrs. Morales?” I said.
I had heard Eva tell all sorts of stories about her grandma, the woman who had raised her, but I had never met her before. She lived in the Dominican Republic. The old woman fixed her eyes on me but she didn’t smile. With that haunted, serious expression on her face, she looked nothing like Eva—Eva was always smiling.
“I’m so sorry about your granddaughter,” I said.
Again, the woman said nothing.
Maybe Eva’s grandma didn’t speak English. I’d always assumed that she was bilingual like Eva was. Or perhaps she was just so grief-stricken she was past communicating?
There was a beat of extremely awkward silence between us.
“How is Eva this morning?” I asked, trying to speak slowly, hoping to make myself easier to understand. I wished I spoke her language.
Eva’s grandmother looked over to the hospital bed at the mention of her granddaughter’s name. I tried to peer over her shoulder and catch a glimpse of Eva. When I did, I felt like my heart thudded to a stop.
Eva lay limp as a doll on the hospital cot, her skin the color of dried, dead leaves. Her eyes were closed but her mouth was open, like a baby bird gaping into the air for nourishment. Her arms hung limp at her sides and there was plastic tubing coming out of them. Beside her, some kind of machine was making a rhythmic beep-beep noise.
Seeing her like this, I felt like crying.
I could feel Eva’s grandmother’s eyes on me and I turned back towards her. There was a cold intensity in the old woman’s stare—it was an accusation.
“I’m so sorry about Eva,” I said again.
No response.
“It was an accident.”
She didn’t respond, but I thought I detected rage beneath the dull stare of her eyes.
I didn’t know what to say.
I held out the little pot of African violets.
She picked it up, but there was no register of emotion in her eyes. Mechanically, she set it on the empty chair on the other side of Eva’s bed.
Giving me another long, hard, accusatory stare, she left the room.
She thinks Eva’s fall was your fault, was all I could think as I watched the small woman walk down the hallway. Where she was going I had no idea.
But I couldn’t help but sigh in relief that she was gone. I wanted some time alone with Eva.
I walked towards Eva’s bedside. I could hear her breathing, a soft whistling sound. The machine kept beeping.
“Eva?” I asked.
There was no answer, no change in her limp face.
“Can you hear me?”
Her face was blank, expressionless.
I’d heard that sometimes unconscious people can hear you, even though they can’t respond. It was all I could hope.
Her breath whistled in and out. The machine continued its regular beep-beep. The sound was growing annoying and part of me wished it would just stop, so we could stand in silence together. But of course I didn’t want it would stop, because this machine, whatever it was—Eva would know, she was the nur
se—was the only sign of life she had. I just hoped it kept on beeping.
There was a knock on the door. I walked towards it, but whoever had knocked didn’t wait for an answer. I assumed, as the door opened, that it would be her grandmother again, but it wasn’t.
Instead a doctor in a white lab coat walked in. He was tall and thin, of Indian descent, and quite young. Maybe right out of med school. He seemed startled to see me. I think he’d been expecting Eva’s grandmother.
“Are you a relative of Ms. Morales?” he asked, glancing down at his chart to check Eva’s name.
“I’m a friend.”
The doctor walked over to the machine, fiddled with one of the dials and made a notation on the small pad he carried. He smiled at me, his manner brisk but not unkind.
I decided to cut right to the chase.
“Is she going to be okay?”
He stopped what he was doing and turned to me.
“There is really no way to know that,” he began, and I could tell he was giving me his standard answer.
“I know, but, do you think she’s going to be okay?”
The doctor, whose name tag said “R. Mehta, M.D.,” paused, as if weighing his words.
“Your friend is a very unusual case,” he said, putting down his clipboard.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s really quite remarkable.” He looked back and forth between Eva and me. “In many ways, she’s quite lucky.”
I stared at him, aghast—I couldn’t see how any of this was “luck.”
“What I mean is, considering her fall, I would have expected a lot more injuries,” the doctor added, explaining himself, “but she doesn’t have a single broken bone.”
“She doesn’t? But she fell from over fifty . . .”
“I know,” the doctor interrupted me. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”
“But why is she unconscious? Does she have a head injury?” I asked.
Dr. Mehta sighed.
“That’s what’s so strange about it. We did an MRI, and we could find no sign of brain damage.”
“But something is wrong—I mean, why is she unconscious?”
He paused, and I could see the fear in his eyes. I knew in that moment that he had no idea what was wrong with Eva, and it really, really bothered him. Smart people are used to knowing the answers—and when they don’t, it scares them.
“We don’t know,” he said at last, and I knew that had been hard for him to say.
“All we can hope is that, given there is no detectable damage, your friend will recover consciousness.”
He gave me a nod goodbye and then, clipboard in hand, he left the room.
It was indeed strange—that she could have fallen so far and not broken a single bone. I mean, I was glad to hear that, of course—but it was strange. It must have been the Elixir, was all I could think. Somehow having magic in her system at the time of the fall had prevented her from becoming injured. It had saved her life. And yet, if the doctor said she had no signs of head injury, what was this inexplicable coma?
I bent down and picked up Eva’s hand, which was lying limply by her side.
The instant my fingers touched her skin, I recoiled.
Eva’s hand didn’t feel like flesh. It felt hard and rubbery—like rotten wood.
For a second I couldn’t breathe—I was so afraid she was dead. But the machine that I’d figured out by now measured her heart rate went on beeping regularly. She was alive. But something was very, very wrong.
There was a plastic folding chair next to the bed and I sat down on it, scooting myself closer to her. I leaned down, my face inches over her body.
As soon as I did, I smelled something. Instantly I knew what it was.
Mixed in with all the awful scents of a hospital—the rubbing alcohol, the bleach, the stale coffee—was a faint whiff of something utterly different. Something clean and unpolluted—the smell of rain—the smell just before the storm, when the air is crackling with life.
“Elixir,” I said to myself.
But it wasn’t just Elixir. There was another smell too, underneath it. I picked up Eva’s hand. I didn’t want to. It was clammy and cold, and my heart clenched as I felt it, but I drew her limp fingers up to my face.
A realization was dawning in my mind.
Eva’s skin didn’t smell like Elixir—even though the smell was all around. It smelled like the forest—earthy, woodsy, damp—like something slowly rotting.
My brain was whirring fast. It couldn’t be—but it was the only explanation that made sense—how she could have sustained the fall without injuries, why she seemed alive and unharmed, yet totally unresponsive, no longer herself.
My breath was coming in short, sharp heaves. I couldn’t believe it—and yet what other answer was there?
“You’re not Eva,” I whispered to the body lying in bed. “You’re a Fetch.”
Chapter 12
I’d seen the Fairy Queen do it so many times. We would replace a human child with an enchanted copy made of Elixir-soaked wood. It would last a few days or weeks, and then “fail to thrive.” I’d believed in what we were doing back then. Why had I believed her? I was cursing myself now.
Had the same thing happened to Eva?
Had the fairies somehow switched her when she fell?
But why Eva? The Fey didn’t take adults. And of every adult on the planet they could take, why my roommate?
I looked back at “Eva” on the bed. I wasn’t even sure I was right about this. Maybe my mind was just spinning ideas, trying anything to distract me from the horrible reality that my friend was in a coma and that it was my fault.
I needed to get a second opinion. There was only one person I could call. The only person I knew in this world who might understand what I was talking about.
Obadiah.
It was just at that moment that I heard the familiar sound of heavy boots clomping in the hall. My heart leapt up. He had come to the hospital to visit Eva, just like he’d said he would. I couldn’t help but smile, knowing he’d been true to his word.
I turned to look through the open door.
I could see him striding down the hall. How was it that Obadiah was comfortable wherever he was? On the crowded floor of supernatural dancers, or in the sterile corridors of a hospital—he seemed to belong everywhere. Maybe because he didn’t truly belong anywhere, I thought, watching that sad expression that returned to his face when he thought no one was watching him.
I noticed Eva’s grandmother was out in the hallway, talking to one of the nurses in Spanish. As Obadiah walked by, he nodded at her, and I detected a slight smile in her despairing eyes. Somehow he’d gotten her to smile. How had he done that, when I couldn’t? There were things I still couldn’t understand about Obadiah. But I liked them.
He knocked on the door, though it was open. I saw that he was holding a bouquet of get-well flowers. He was classy like that.
“How is she?” he asked, but he saw his answer in my eyes. “That bad?”
“It’s not the fall,” I said. “I don’t think that’s really Eva. I think someone replaced her with a Fetch.”
Obadiah looked at me gravely.
“I know it’s hard to accept, when something terrible happens to someone you love . . .”
“No! I’m not deluding myself!” I shot back at him, insulted that he would think I was just in denial. “I know what you’re thinking, but no. I know what I’m seeing. I can smell it, Obadiah. Touch her, smell her skin. The heart monitor keeps beeping but she’s not alive. Don’t tell me you can’t smell the Elixir in this room!”
“I thought it was just residual.”
“I don’t think it is. And you can smell something else too. Something rotting.” I grimaced.
He nodded.
“Someone took my friend,” I said, my voice tense, blistering with the anger that had begun to flow through me. “Someone replaced her. If this was the Queen’s work, I’m going to kill her.”
Obadiah folded his hands over his chest.
“Are you really sure?”
“Obadiah, I used to help the Fairy Queen on her rescue missions.”
“But they don’t take grown-ups,” Obadiah said. “Why her? Did your roommate have any business with the Fey?”
“Certainly not that I know of,” I said miserably.
“Then why would she be taken?”
I sighed, covering my face with my hands.
“That’s what I don’t understand.”
A nurse popped her head in the door. She looked back and forth between Obadiah and me—clearly she knew she had interrupted something, but she didn’t know what.
“I’m here to change her IV,” said the nurse, politely smiling and then turning her back to us, towards the machine.
“We should go,” I said to Obadiah. “There’s nothing more we can do here.”
The nurse shot me a sad, sympathetic smile. I tried to smile back at her. I had so much admiration for nurses. I didn’t know how they did it—deal with sickness and injury, death all day long and yet always stay so cheerful. Eva would be able to do that. She was going to be a great nurse. Dammit, I was trying so hard not to cry—and I was failing.
Obadiah took my hand. “Come on,” he said, “you’re right, there’s nothing more we can do.”
We walked out of the hospital room together. From behind me I could still hear the rhythmic beep-beep.
Out in the sterile hallway, I turned to Obadiah.
“If she’s a Fetch, that means she’s somewhere in the Vale. I have to get back there somehow. I have to find her. If the Queen took her—she’s in danger, and I need to get her back. I don’t know how to travel to the Vale.” I looked up at Obadiah. “But I know you do. If you’ve found a way to smuggle the Elixir out, it means you know a way in.”
