by Amy Faye
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 s
he 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.
But something had drawn her to go out there, some little voice inside her that reminded Caroline that she hadn't gone in years. So she was driving out in spite of herself and pretending that she would buy something when she got there to try to avoid the entire trip being a waste.
The man behind her, though, the one who was almost certainly not following her, because that would be crazy, had her nervous.
So she eased the car around a corner and down a side street, knowing it was the wrong way. She'd be stuck inside of a subdivision, one that she'd need to drive right back out of.
She drove through the streets slowly, unsure what she was looking for except that she was looking for something. Then, a few minutes later, she drove back out. The swoopy Blue sedan didn't seem to be following her, per se. It looped around the streets on its own, and yet…
When she pulled up to the stop sign to leave the subdivision behind, and leave him to whoever it was that he was visiting on the ritzy side of town, there he was again.
Her heart thumped and she eased the car out of the stop sign and into a gap that she wasn't totally confident in. But she wasn't about to leave herself to get gutted by some maniac. Or, worse, a man who knew exactly what he was doing, and had decided that being reasonable and not murdering women wasn't his job.
Two minutes later she was stalking through the parking lot, the neck of her coat pulled up high. If he'd kept up with her, she didn't see it. There was no blue sedan in the parking lot, as large as it was. The blue was bright, a factory job but a premium one. Distinctive.
She stepped through the door of the Whole Foods, browsed a while, and came within inches of buying some 'organic' pasta, and then looked at the price again and reconsidered. Then, empty-handed, she walked out again. Much the same as the subdivision, except that this had been her whole reason for coming out this far in the first place.
A guy at least a foot taller than her, his nose broken and never reset properly, stepped into her as she passed a pillar. From the way that his arm wrapped around her to stop her from falling without a beat, she knew instinctively that it was no accident.
"Caroline Rice?" The man spoke in a low voice, not threatening in the least, but she shivered regardless.
"Who are you and why are you following me?"
He looked up from her face, at something behind her. She turned but there was nothing, and when she turned back there was something hard, metal, and bulky pressed into her ribs. "Be careful. You understand?"
He slipped a hand into her coat pocket and when he pulled away from her, he slipped the other hand into his own coat pocket.
There hadn't been anything in the pocket before, but if there had it wouldn't have changed her reaction even slightly. Her hand shot to the pocket, her eyes wild even as the cold wind stung them and made her wish she had them closed.
Inside was a photo, with writing on the back. The writing said 'Sorry about our unprofessional behavior,' in a clear, blocky print. The front was a polaroid of three men. The photo was not well-lit, but it was enough to see that something unpleasant had happened to the men, and it was enough to see their faces. Immediately familiar, and not faces she wanted to see again.
The nurse looked up, her eyes wide, and looked for the big man. He didn't seem like the type who could disappear into a crowd, but he wasn't there, nonetheless. She looked back down at the photo in her hands, stuffed it into her pocket and hoped she would forget about it before too long. There wasn't much hope for that happening, though, she knew.
Her gut twisted up. Whatever happened next, she didn't want to think about what she'd just seen. As soon as she found a way to get rid of it without risking someone connecting it to her, she would.
Her hands were shaking when she set them on the steering wheel. She told herself it was the cold, but it didn't stop when the heat finally kicked on, blowing hot and comfortable against her fingers.
It didn't stop until she was sitting in the parking garage outside the Hospital, rapping her fingers on her leg and telling herself that there was nothing to worry about. Telling herself that the extended hospital stay wasn't a bad sign.
Then she pushed herself out of the driver's seat and slipped the keys into her pocket. Her fingers brushed against the polaroid picture and it sent a fresh shiver up her spine. The hallways of the facility were becoming more and more familiar, more and more certain.
> The sight of a bright blue Ford almost sent shivers running up her spine, but the car itself was too small, she realized. She was becoming paranoid. A factory-painted car had her thinking that anyone else who drove a Ford might be stalking her. That was a new one.
If she told anyone, she'd be sent to a shrink right away, and if she were being honest with that, Caroline wasn't sure that was such a bad idea. If money weren't an issue, then it would have been a downright good one.
She let out a long breath, stepped into an elevator, went up to the fourth floor. This route wasn't quite as familiar as any of the others. It was only a matter of time before she got to know it like the back of her hand, like she knew every other part of the hospital.
She put her smile back on, tried to hide the nervousness in her expression, and stepped inside.
Dad had a platter in front of him, with food stuffed into it and looking as unappetizing to her as it must have to him. No doubt there was a much higher incidence of 'anorexia' among patients when they were staying at the hospital, and without a doubt the directors were pulling their hair out over it.
All that while any nurse could have told them that it was because the food looked about as appetizing as canned dog food.
"Hey, squirt," he said. Caroline smiled.
"You need to eat, Dad."
"Can't you sneak me in some McDonald's or something? Just something that almost resembles real food. Just a little bit. For me?"
She rolled her eyes. "Don't be melodramatic."
"Come on, you fly, I'll buy."
"You know that's against the rules."
"Bah," he said. "Rules. Who needs them? You make the rules, and I'm telling you I want something to eat."
She looked down at the tray and up at her father. "Okay, fine." She stood up and started towards the door. It wasn't like he was going to eat any better once he was out of the hospital, might as well wean him back onto crap food.
The door was full, though, when she started to head out, and she instinctively pressed herself flat against the wall to let the orderly through.
