SW01 - The Edge of Nowhere

by Elizabeth George

  Hayley . . . Hayley was present the entire time he spoke, though, and the soreness of her name was a bruise of sound.

  This reminded Becca of what Jenn had said. There were scores of things to be found out here in this car with Seth Darrow, and because of Hayley Hayley Becca wanted to know them. She wasn’t sure how to go about this, though, so she began with, “I saw Jenn McDaniels the first night I got to the island. She was on the ferry. I think she was with some stoners.”

  “Like I’m surprised about that? There’s one chick with serious issues. She needs to get a life.”

  “She said something the other day . . .” Becca went for the truth in a rush. “She told me that one of the cheerleaders has a thing for Derric and that everyone knows it. So I sort of wondered if what you said about Hayley and Derric hooking up . . . ?”

  Utter silence. Not even a whisper. Becca went on. “Anyway, I remember you told me that you and Hayley broke up because she and Derric . . . ?”

  “What about them?” This your business, chick?

  Becca swallowed. That one whisper came through loud and clear. She nearly answered him. “So I was wondering something.” Becca hurried on before he could say anything in reply to that. “Maybe they never hooked up at all. Could you have been wrong?”

  His head jerked in her direction. His eyes were narrow. “And exactly why do you want to know this stuff, Becca?”

  Seth usually sounded laid-back, but with this question he sounded rough. He sounded sinister, in a way. Becca looked out the window at the passing scenery. She thought about the sandals he wore and the soles of those sandals, and she thought about what she had seen and what the sight of a single footprint in soft earth could mean about the boy she was with.

  She finally said, “I don’t know. I s’pose it doesn’t really make any difference. Just that sometimes people make a big deal out of stuff that turns out to be nothing.”

  Seth shifted in his seat. “Yeah? Well, this wasn’t nothing to me.”

  Becca wished that he had said something else.

  * * *

  EIGHTEEN

  Whidbey General Hospital was on the main street of Coupeville, which dipped down toward the waters of Penn Cove. Becca discovered from Seth that it would be a two-bus ride to get to the place from Langley, and including the wait for the buses and the stops along the way, she knew it wasn’t going to be easy to see Derric as often as she would have liked. That was one of the reasons she asked Seth for yet another favor when they arrived.

  Would he give her a few minutes to run inside the hospital? She wanted to see how Derric was doing. Was that okay?

  Seth said, “I’m easy,” with a shrug.

  She said, “You sure?”

  He said, “Yeah. I’ll wait for you here. The door’s over—” He’d been pointing in the direction of the hospital, but something had caught his attention.

  Becca looked to see what it was. As she did so Hayl brushed against her hair like her grandmother’s fingers. She searched for Hayley Cartwright, but she saw that what Seth was looking at was a pickup truck. She recognized it from the logo on its door: SMUGGLERS COVE FARM AND FLOWERS.

  As Becca got out of the VW, so did Seth. He said, “I think I’ll go inside with you. Want something from the cafeteria?”

  Becca didn’t need a whisper to tell her he wasn’t going into the hospital to get a snack. He was going in to find Hayley. She didn’t see how anything good could come out of this, especially if Hayley was at the hospital because of Derric, but she didn’t say anything except, “Think they have fruit? A banana or something? Here’s some money.” She handed over the cash she’d tried to give him for the gas, and this time he took it. Her hope was that he’d go to the cafeteria and not go on a search for Hayley.

  Inside the hospital, there were too many people, which added up to too many whispers. Becca winced at the unexpected assault of noise and she set herself up with the AUD box.

  She and Seth went to the reception desk, where they asked a heavyset woman where they could find Derric Mathieson’s room. The woman put a hand on her heart, and she smiled at them winningly. She said, “I have just got to say it. This is a real fine thing you kids’re doing for that boy and his family.” She shook her head with one of those looks that said wonders would never cease, and she picked up a clipboard and handed it over. She said, “Just check your name off. The undersheriff wants to keep track.”

  Becca saw that the clipboard held a copy of the sign-up list that Jenn McDaniels had devised. She also saw that the next name on the list was Jenn’s own. That told her that her visit to Derric was going to have to be very brief since the last thing she wanted was to be there when Jenn showed up. She’d chosen her own particular visiting day precisely because Jenn McDaniels wasn’t going to be there.

  She checked off Jenn’s name and handed the sign-up sheet to Seth. He glanced at it, glanced back at her, then checked off the name beneath Jenn’s. It was Terry Grove, a convenient AC/DC name. He flashed a smile at the receptionist and handed the clipboard back to her. She told them where they could find Derric, and she said she hoped they’d brought something to read to him. “Reading’s best,” she said. “The sound of voices is what’s important, but sometimes when people get with a patient who’s unconscious and hooked up to machines, they run out of things to say pretty fast.”

  “We’ll do okay,” Becca said. “We’ve got lots to tell him.”

  They were on their way to Derric’s room when they saw Hayley. All three of them stopped in their tracks. Hayley got sunburn red, and Becca heard Seth swallow something that sounded like a piece of concrete going down his throat.

  “Hi,” Hayley said. She looked from Seth to Becca to Seth.

  Seth said, “What’s happenin’, Hayley,” and drove his fists into the pockets of his jeans.

  Becca said hello and reached for her AUD box to turn it down. If any whisper was going to help her know what to do next, she wanted to be ready to hear it. But all she got was more lying . . . nice . . . Hayl and then understand is what before Hayley spoke.

  “Going in to see Derric?” She was looking at Seth but Becca answered.

  “How is he? Is anyone else here?”

  “His dad just left to talk to someone. You want to go in?” Like the receptionist, Hayley gave the room number. Still she looked at Seth, so he was the one to reply this time.

  He said, “I’ll wait. You go ahead, Bec.”

  Becca knew he meant to talk to Hayley. She didn’t think this was the best idea in the world, but she also knew there were times when you couldn’t stop people from doing things no matter how crazy you thought their plan was. So she left Seth as he was approaching Hayley and Hayley as she was holding up a hand as if to tell him to keep his distance.

  Becca didn’t turn the AUD box back on as she entered Derric’s room. Because of this, as the door silently closed behind her, what she noticed at once was music. At first she thought it was coming from a speaker in the ceiling. Then she realized that it felt like something surrounding her because it was actually inside her head, just like a whisper because it was a whisper, a swelling of sound that was coming from Derric.

  As she approached the bed, the music got louder. It was brass music, Becca thought. Saxophones, trumpets, trombones, a tuba, drums. All of them were hesitantly playing but the sound grew more assured the closer Becca got to the boy in the bed.

  Derric was perfectly still, a contrast in hues. The sheets, the pillows, the blankets were white. The bandage on his head was white. But his skin was bittersweet chocolate, and this single color was broken only by the muted pink of his fingernails, clipped short to his fingertips and smooth like the inside of seashells.

  He was hooked up to an IV drip, its connection taped down to his arm. He had a tube through his nose and a monitor attached to his chest to keep track of his heartbeat. But he was breathing on his own.

  His lips were chapped. They looked painful. Becca wished she’d brought some lip balm
with her. She knew he probably couldn’t feel the hurt of them, but she didn’t want him to suffer anything that she could do something about. She hated to be so useless to him. At least, she thought, she could talk to him.

  She said hello. She said, “It’s me, Becca King, from school.” And then she understood the receptionist’s point. What do you say to someone who was somewhere between life and another place?

  She cast about for something to say. She looked around the room. That was when she first became aware of the flowers, the balloons, the cards, the stuffed animals, an old letterman’s jacket hanging on the back of the door, the map of Africa pinned to the wall.

  She went to this. She saw that Uganda had been highlighted in blue marker and that three little flags were pinned to the country. One stuck out of Kampala, with “Derric” written on it. One said “Mom” and the other said “Dad.” These two were close to each other but some distance from Kampala, and Becca figured they marked the places where Derric’s African mother and father had been born.

  She went on to look at some of the cards strung around the room. She pulled on the strings of the balloons. She read the messages attached to the flowers. She wondered what it was like to be so popular. She’d had a small group of friends in San Diego, but nothing like this. Finally, she realized that she’d come empty-handed to see Derric, with nothing at all to leave him that would show her affection for him on the chance that he would suddenly awaken.

  She realized that, despite her feelings for him, she had no actual place in his life. She was the new girl at school and the rest of the kids represented by the cards and the flowers and the balloons all shared a long history with Derric. But still she wanted to be a part somehow, and she wished she had something. . . . She drove her hands into her jacket pocket to see if she had anything, even a stick of gum.

  Her fingers made contact with a piece of paper. She brought it out. She saw that it was the phone number that Derric had given to her on her first day at school: his name, the number, and that was it. She turned it over and grabbed a pencil from the bedside table. “Give this back to me when you’re well,” she wrote. Instead of signing her name, she put the letter B. Then she reached for his hand to place the slip of paper into his palm.

  Something strange happened as her fingers touched his. The music altered. It became fast and high and it suddenly sounded like a whole band of professionals playing. Along with the music came rejoice rejoice and Becca knew this was Derric’s whisper as his mind expanded over that one word.

  She felt a surge move from his hand to hers. It was like a wave, but unlike a wave it didn’t recede. It remained just there, sweeping between them, and Becca recognized it as joy. Pure happiness, she thought, and because she felt it, too, she didn’t want to let go of Derric. It had been so long since she’d felt so flooded by peace.

  She looked at his face. She searched it for some kind of meaning to attach to what he was feeling, and she was sure she found it in his sweet chapped lips. For they moved slightly and he seemed to smile, and she looked from his lips to the crescent of white where his eyes didn’t close completely.

  She wanted to enter there. It would be so pleasant to drift for a while inside his head. But the whispers didn’t give her that kind of access. Only this brief contact of her fingers with Derric’s would do that for her.

  But there was also a problem. No matter what he was feeling and no matter how much she wanted to feel it as well, Becca knew that Derric was in the dark place of coma. He needed to emerge from this, returning to the world of the people who loved him. Yet she knew for certain that he didn’t want to. And without wanting to return, he would remain where he was.

  “No,” she said to him. “Derric, you can’t.”

  Will was the whisper. Rejoice. Will.

  BECCA WENT TO find Seth. She wanted someone to tell her what to do with what she’d learned in Derric’s room, but she knew the only two people who could do that were the two people unavailable to her. They were out of range in the most profound way. Her grandmother was buried and Laurel was in possession of a cell phone whose number Becca did not have.

  She found Seth in the lobby of the hospital. He was talking to Hayley. From across the room Becca could see that their conversation was heated. They were sending out no whispers. This was because they were saying their whispers, which was bad in the extreme. “That’s what we mean when we refer to thinking before speaking, hon,” Becca’s grandmother would say. “Don’t ever do both at once.”

  Well, Seth and Hayley were doing both at once, and that wasn’t going to lead anywhere good.

  Becca went over to them. It was time to save Seth, even if she couldn’t save Derric. She said to him, “Hi. I’m ready to go,” pretending that she didn’t have a clue that he and Hayley were arguing.

  He said, “Give me a minute, okay?” and then a whisper came from one of them. It sounded like don’t make me and Becca wanted to say, “Don’t make you what?” but she didn’t. Instead she said, “Okay. I’ll wait over there,” and she pointed to a plastic philodendron across the room, a safe distance from them. Seth didn’t answer and neither did Hayley. They were too intent on each other.

  Becca went to the chair next to the plastic plant. But then the worst thing happened. Derric’s father came into the lobby. He wore his undersheriff’s uniform, and he wasn’t alone. Jenn McDaniels was with him. They saw Seth and Hayley, and they walked over to them, and that was Becca’s one piece of luck.

  The last person she wanted to be known to was the undersheriff of Island County, no matter that he was Derric’s father. She couldn’t afford to be on his radar while Jeff Corrie was an unresolved problem in her life.

  She couldn’t leave the lobby without being seen if she tried to make it out the front door of the hospital. So she ducked back into the bowels of the place. There had to be another way out, she told herself. All she needed to do was to find it as quickly as she could.

  She ended up in the emergency room, bursting through the doors like someone being chased. All of sudden, sounds came at her. They were whispers and words. They were everything at once.

  Someone was howling behind a curtained cubicle. Someone else was shouting “My head, it hurts,” a loudspeaker was asking for “Dr. Shapiro, Dr. La Rue,” and with all of this flying at her like paintballs being shot from a gun, Becca could barely breathe and she certainly couldn’t think. She only knew she had to escape, and she saw a glass door in the distance. She dashed for this and made her way, thankfully, outside.

  THERE, SHE FELT like someone having an asthma attack. It took a while before her chest loosened enough for her to get sufficient air. When she felt somewhat normal once again, she looked for the bus stop. She couldn’t rely on Seth to take her back to Langley. With the undersheriff there, with Jenn probably causing trouble, with Hayley on his mind . . . Who knew how long it would be before it occurred to Seth to look around for Becca and wonder what had happened to her.

  The bus stop was across the busy main street that dipped down into the center of Coupeville. Becca made for this, hurrying across in advance of an oncoming vehicle. This was a pickup truck, and it honked twice sharply, as if whoever was driving it was expecting to run Becca over if she didn’t get out of the way. The truck pulled to the curb, too, and for a moment Becca thought the driver would get out and lecture her about the dangers of jaywalking. But then Becca saw the dogs moving in the bed of the truck and the shape of another dog in the passenger seat, and at that same moment the driver opened her door, and she got halfway out.

  Diana Kinsale called, “Hello there, Becca King. I’ve seen you more often in the last few weeks than I’ve seen people I’ve known for thirty years. What are you doing in Coupeville? You didn’t ride your bike here, did you?”

  Becca approached the truck. The dogs in the bed all crowded over the side to greet her, a mass of wagging tails. Inside the truck Oscar blinked a dignified poodle hello. Diana said, “Do you need a ride to Blue Lady Lane aga
in?”

  Becca told Diana she wasn’t going to Blue Lady Lane but she was indeed going to Langley. Diana told her to hop in. “You’ll have to share the space with Oscar again.” The poodle was belted in as usual. Diana unhooked him and moved him over. “Where to, then?” she asked as she pulled back into the traffic.

  Becca told Diana that she was staying at the Cliff Motel with Debbie Grieder. She thought about adding the fiction that Debbie Grieder was her aunt but she stopped herself. The first night she’d met Diana, Becca had been heading to Blue Lady Lane. It wouldn’t make much sense that she would have been heading there if Debbie Grieder was her aunt.

  Because she was alone in the truck with Diana and because she didn’t have the AUD box turned on, Becca should have picked up at least part of a whisper from Diana in reaction to what she’d just told her. But as before, she picked up nothing. Becca considered what this could possibly mean beyond what she’d learned from her grandmother, which was that no whispers meant someone was dead because everyone had whispers. “Even the Buddha had whispers,” her grandmother would say. “The Pope has whispers, even Jesus Christ had whispers.”

  Yet her grandmother had been able to control them. So Becca looked at Diana in an entirely new way, wondering if she knew there were listeners in the world, people like Becca who would sense the thoughts of others.

  Diana said, “How’s that working out, then?” and for a moment Becca thought she meant “How’s listening to whispers working out?” But then Becca remembered they’d been talking about Debbie Grieder, so she answered, “It’s okay ’cause I help out around the motel. I like the kids a lot. Debbie doesn’t like one of my friends, though.”

  “Which friend would that be?”

  “Seth Darrow. He’s who brought me up here this afternoon.”

  “Did he just drop you off?”

  “He got involved in a conversation with this girl. Hayley Cartwright?”