by Faye, Amy
The first-aid kit was in there, and she was going to need it for him. And then, once she was done getting him patched up, she might just be able to avoid the need to use it a second time.
32
Shannen's expression didn't do anything to make her feel better. In fact, if anything, he was just making her feel worse. When the phone rang, it was practically a godsend. At least now, finally, she'd have some sort of excuse to leave. It felt like the right thing to do.
She didn't look at the caller ID until she'd already stepped out the door. The name felt as if it should have been familiar, but she slid the answer button over and put the phone to her head not sure who she was going to be speaking to, precisely. "Hello?"
The woman on the other end of the line had a husky voice, one that Caroline guessed would have been appealing to a man. "Caroline Rice? I got your number from Sarah, this is Charlotte Edwards, from the hospital?"
"Oh, right. We've met, haven't we? You were my Dad's nurse. Right?"
She was an older woman, with hips that made it less than a surprise to learn that she had no less than three children at home, watched most of the time by her work-from-home husband.
"That's right," Carolotte confirmed.
"Is there something the matter? Do I need to come in for work, or…"
"It's not about work," the woman said. "But I thought you should know. Mr. Rice, he's not looking great. I didn't know whether or not I should go through any official channels on this, so I just called from my personal number, but if you were to come in, I don't think you would regret it."
"How bad is it?" Her heart pounded in her chest, the problem child inside temporarily forgotten. "Should I be worried?"
She slid easily into the seat of the Toyota and the engine came to life easily at the turn of her key. It seemed to sense that she didn't want any of its nonsense today.
"Worried…? I don't know. I'm not you. Maybe it's nothing, but I wouldn't want to risk it."
"Thanks. I'm about to be on the road, so… thanks. Maybe I'll see you when I get there?"
"I'm sure you will," the woman answered.
"Thank you again," Caroline repeated.
"It's no trouble. I know that when my father went, I would have wanted to know if there was even a little bit of risk."
"You're right. So again, thank you. I'll be there in twenty minutes."
She pressed the button to hang up and dropped the phone in her passenger seat, and stepped on the gas. It was a twenty minute drive, on most days, if she were taking anything close to a reasonable route there. The ride home, she noted, usually took at least thirty, when it was Shannen driving.
She didn't have any confusion over why that might be. One only needed to notice his attempts to surreptitiously glance over at her to figure out what precisely was on his mind. She couldn't help smiling at the thought.
The smile faded as she drove. She couldn't afford the distraction. Her foot got heavier and the car got louder as she drove, a whine coming from the engine that she'd been ignoring for months and was planning to continue ignoring indefinitely into the future in the hopes that it might go away all on its own.
If there was one thing that Caroline was thankful for, out of everything, it was the hospital. It felt strange to think of it that way, but as she drove up, the stark familiarity of it was almost grounding. There could be a thousand things going wrong. Inside the hospital, if her experience was any indicator, she knew there were probably more than that just in those tall concrete walls.
Hundreds of people were having days worse than hers. Months worse than hers. People who had no warning, crying over their Mom who just had a stroke out of the blue. Healthy and young and there was no reason that they should be taken away, but they were.
The mood that Caroline was in found that almost to be a comfort. She at least had some warning, however small. Too many people don't get any warning at all, just a dinnertime phone call that somewhere on the other side of the country, a simple appendectomy didn't go right and now you've got to make new plans for holiday break.
She took a deep breath in and closed her eyes. There was nothing to worry about. She was going to be fine. Dad was going to be fine. Charlotte had been over-cautious. The words repeated in her head until she stopped arguing with them. She forced them over and over.
Everything would be fine. Everything was going to be figured out, and there was absolutely no reason to be worried. If something happened to come up, some reason that she should worry, then she'd reevaluate when the time came. But it hadn't arrived yet.
She closed her eyes, the elevator going up. The sound of the elevator creaking pulled her out of the bubble of forced positivity for a moment, but only a moment. Then she pushed herself back in and just stared. Her breath came in, deep and slow. Everything was fine. Everything was going to be fine. She held it there for as long as she could, and then the doors to the elevator opened slowly and she let the breath out and forced herself to move mechanically.
There had been a long time to worry about Dad. There was no reason that she should be any more worried now than she had been when he was first diagnosed. Nothing to worry about at all, really. She blinked. Deep breath, straight back, eyes forward. Chin up. She put on a smile like it was liquid eyeliner, heavy and obvious and if it was too much then that was the right way to go.
Then she took her step inside, breathed deeply, and took care to use her least worried voice. "Hey, dude."
Dad looked up at her mildly. He seemed tired. As tired as she'd ever seen him, worn down by the pills and the surgery and whatever else had been happening to him behind the scenes. Whatever he hadn't been telling her, and apparently neither had any of his doctors.
"You look good."
"You look good yourself," Caroline answered, silently cursing that she wasn't the first one to say it. The carefully-balanced false sense of serenity inside her threatened to explode into a thousand pieces, like an old corelle plate. It would have felt good to break down, to scream and cry and throw a temper tantrum.
But she didn't, because it wouldn't have helped. So instead, she sat down beside him, pulled out her phone to set it on the bedside table, and smiled at her father.
"You didn't have to come early, you know," he said. "I can keep. I'm not like milk, about to curdle if you leave it for a second."
He sounded bad, she thought. The control wavered again. Less, this time. She was learning to hold it together better, bit by bit. His eyes sparkled at her.
"I don't have to do anything, but I'm here. They told me I had to come and get you, to be honest."
He arched an eyebrow and gave her a curious smile. "Is that right?"
"The nurses said that they were having trouble resisting your impossible charms."
"Well," he said, affecting a dignified expression. "I can't help how other people think about me, can I? It's not my fault that I was born with such a magnetic personality."
"I know, but you can't let it get you kicked out of the hospital, either."
He made a dissatisfied noise. "I hope they kick me out. I've been in here too long anyways."
"Need I remind you that you've got no room right now," she offered. Her voice was calm because the rest of her was calm. She wasn't sure how much she could fake relaxed, but she could fake calm. Serene was something she could do, and the rest would have to come along with it.
"You can sleep on the couch," he offered.
"I could, if I wanted to never sleep again." Something deep down inside her threatened to get upset and she forced it back down again. "Are you okay, Dad?"
The confusion in his face almost seemed genuine, but Dad's facade was cracking, and as she watched it, her own started to give as well. "Yeah, of course I am, sweetheart. Why wouldn't I be alright?"
She took a deep breath, ignoring how unsteady she felt doing it. "No reason," she said. "You been keeping track of election news?"
"No I haven't," he told her. "Anything good?"
"
Rumors, mostly," she said. "Talk about Senator Green, mostly."
"Oh yeah?" He raised an eyebrow. "What are they saying?"
"Tabloids are talking about a woman he's been seen with. They say she's his lover, or something."
"Well, I wouldn't be surprised."
With a wife as oily as the Senator's, Caroline wouldn't have been, either. She clung to the conversation and hoped that it would be enough to patch up the cracks in her shell before it was too late.
33
Caroline's eyes burned as she drove away. There was a great deal that she ought to have been doing, right now. She should have been sitting in Dad's room. She ought to have been studying. She ought to have been trying to understand precisely why it was that nobody had thought to tell her that he was turning bad until he looked this bad.
She ought to have been thinking about any number of things.
Instead, she was worrying about Shannen, and the feeling in her gut wasn't a pleasant one. She shook her head and with it tried to shake out that feeling of worry. At least, she should have been able to replace it with worry about Dad, or about herself and how she was going to handle life with a mountain of medical debt and little in the way of ways to get rid of that debt except to work longer and longer hours.
Her fingers flexed around the steering wheel, trying to find some warmth in the cold car. The weather varied, somewhere between mild and freezing cold, and today of all days the world had chosen to make it quite cold. Cold enough that it cut right through the fabric of her jeans and raised sensitive goosebumps on her thighs.
In spite of herself, Caroline called Shannen. He'd been eating with her after work almost every day, and whether she was supposed to be worrying about him or not, whether she was allowed to worry about him when there were other, more important things to worry about, she wasn't going to suddenly get rid of her meal partner and she wasn't about to pretend that she wasn't worried about him.
The phone rang and rang. She frowned and looked away from the road long enough to watch the green of the 'call' app turn into a bright red that signaled a missed call. She dropped the phone on the chair beside her, turned the radio back up and kept driving.
She pinched her lips together and watched the road, keeping her mind carefully empty. At least, as empty as she could make herself feel. After all the practice that she'd gotten with it, she was almost starting to feel like it was natural. The emptiness in her gut shouldn't have felt natural under any circumstance, but that didn't change the reality. She eased the car off the mile road and onto her street, the sun already down in spite of the fact that it was only just suppertime.
She frowned. The street in front of her house was empty. That was wrong. Shannen shouldn't have gone out at all, with the shape he was in. She hadn't asked him for a promise because it meant nothing coming from him, but Caroline really hadn't expected him to go. If he were going to work, for whatever he could do without tearing open his flank, then he would have been home by now.
Which brought her back to the fact that whatever 'logic' told her, there was a clearly empty street in front of her house. The door was locked when she came up, which was another hint. When she found the front room empty, it wasn't a hint.
Caroline called out Shannen's name, and waited a moment for an answer, stepping through the living room towards the back of the house. No one called back. She called out again.
His room was empty when she got there. It had been bare before, but now it was something else. The bed had the sheets stripped and folded neatly on top of the mattress, and the gym bag he'd stuffed into the corner was nowhere to be seen. It was only a matter of confirmation when she opened the drawers to find them stripped as well, down to the bare wood.
She frowned, stepped back out into the hall, and then she saw it. On the half-wall that separated the kitchen from the living room, was a pair of keys on a key ring, and an envelope. The envelope bulged with its contents, and when she picked that up first, the front only said 'Caroline.'
Inside was a stack of money. It had the rough, tumbled texture of well-worn cash, and was a mixture of twenties, tens, and fives. The total couldn't have been less than a thousand dollars, if she didn't miss her guess. She frowned.
There was no note inside, though, and nothing to explain his absence. She picked up the keys without needing to examine them and dropped the pair into her junk drawer, knowing that they were the keys she'd given him the first night.
Her eyes stung again, worse this time. From inside the emptiness that she'd been trying desperately to hold together, Caroline could feel something crying out and threatening to rip tears from her eyes. She scratched an imaginary itch on her hip and hoped that her body would take that as a sufficient answer.
Then she took a deep breath, pulled out a kitchen chair and slumped down into it. There was the answer to her problem, she knew. She should have been paying more attention to her studies, more attention to her father, and more attention to her work.
Something had been distracting her, ever since Shannen moved in, and she needed to move away from it. She needed to move away from him, to make him understand that no matter what happened from that point on, she needed to have her space.
It would have taken everything that she had to push him away. So much of what had happened the past weeks had been a nightmare, and so much of it had been caused, however unintentionally, by his actions.
She should have been relieved at his absence. She should have thought of it all as being a perfect ending to the story. A brief little romance, and when she'd needed him to go, so that she could spend time on other things, he stepped away.
'Should have' didn't make her feel any better. If anything, it made her feel that much worse, knowing that not only was she suffering but she was a fool for feeling this way.
She slumped down and let her head fall into her hands. When the tears finally came, in spite of her best efforts, she didn't fight them. Her stomach twisted up in sadness and wrung out all the hunger that she'd been feeling up to that point. She could still smell him, faintly, all over the house. The effect he'd had on her was undeniable. She stood up and tried to force it all back inside her.
With an audible hiccup her face shrunk into a mask of misery again and she sobbed even as she tried to keep herself upright. One foot went in front of the other and she made her way to the bookshelf. An anatomy book stood halfway pushed in, just the way she'd left it. She eased it out of its place and hefted the heavy weight between her arms and took it over to the little half-wall.
She let the book fall open and started scanning through it, tracing the lines of text with her hands without actually reading the words. She needed some kind of structure, and apparently, chance had chosen the bones of the hand. The carpal bones connected to the metacarpals; then, there were the knuckles, followed by the finger-bones.
'Phalanges,' they were called. The proximal, the intermediate, and the distal. Proximal came from the lain 'proximus,' meaning 'nearest.' Distal, also from the Latin 'distare,' which meant precisely the exact opposite. To stand away from.
The words formed the basis for a great many English words; approximate, for example. Proximity. Distal was familiar, as well. Distant, for one.
Distant fit so many things in her life. A father who wouldn't tell her the first thing about his condition even though she was, herself, a medical professional. A boyfriend, if he even were her boyfriend, who told her nothing at all, and offered her nothing except flirtation, a wink, and then perhaps just a little but more than flirting as well.
She turned the page and continued reading. Her eyes couldn't focus. There was something in the way, something making her entire vision too blurry to see anything at all. The page blurred up completely to the point where she couldn't see her finger pointing at the text as it moved, and when she finally could see, there was a dark spot on the page where wetness had fallen from her eyes.
She tried to summon the feeling of emptiness again, but it was too late, now
, and all she could do was close the book and lean her full weight against the half-wall and hope that it could hold her up, because nothing else in her life seemed to be able to right now.
34
Caroline Rice swallowed hard, the panic threatening to rise in her throat even as she edged towards feeling some semblance of control. The entire city was hers, now, in the way that he hadn't been for months. She had entire days of being able to do anything she wanted.
An hour here or there was taken up by obligation, of course. But that was nothing compared to the fact that there was nobody there to tell her what to do any longer.
Her eyes scanned the road as she drove. Her fingers gripped the wheel tightly, and then she loosened them up again. She'd gotten too used to the little coupe taking her around town, and now the Toyota felt surprisingly roomy, and at the same time felt like it was pushing the limits of what a car its size should even be capable of.
She let out a long breath and looked into the passenger-side mirror, watching to make sure she hadn't wildly mis-estimated the distance between her and the car behind, and then finally eased into the next lane, and then the off-ramp.
The second car behind did the same, and Caroline watched him do it in her mirror.
It was probably nothing at all. Whatever it was that he was doing, it was almost certainly not what it seemed like. That was what she told herself and it was what she chose to believe in spite of the evidence in front of her.
Still, it was hard not to imagine that she was being followed. After all, he'd gotten on only an instant after she had. He'd gotten off at the same exit, as well. Before that, she'd seen him behind her most of the way from her house to the freeway.
There was no special reason to go to the Whole Foods. She couldn't afford to buy her food there, especially not when her roommate had walked away from the property. It was far away, involved at least three turnabouts, which Caroline hated, and it was a long way away.
