A Time for Us

by Amy Knupp

  As he backed into the wall, making the mental transition between being wholly responsible for this woman’s life and letting others take over, he swore under his breath the most vulgar stream of words he could concoct when he finally had the chance to observe and realized...

  The doctor on duty was Rachel.

  Unless there was a major turnaround, this situation had the potential to seriously mess with her head like other patient deaths hadn’t.

  Though Cale was out in the E.R. hallway, sagging against the wall a short distance down from the room with the asthma patient, he knew the minute Rachel called the death. The frenzied din of medical personnel had petered out, and the energy in the air had disappeared.

  He knocked his head back against the wall in defeat.

  The woman’s family members were crowded into a private room, and as Cale looked in that direction, he fought to get air past the choking lump in his throat to his lungs, all too aware of the devastation they were about to have thrust upon them.

  Rachel emerged from the exam room, her face as white as the drab, institutional walls around her. Generally speaking, her professional demeanor remained intact. However, there was a second when Cale saw it falter, saw her swallow, close her eyes for a moment longer than a blink and exhale slowly, as if to expel any personal pain so she could carry on with the task at hand.

  She looked up then, met his eyes for the briefest instant, and there was no mistaking the toll the past half hour had taken on her.

  Without so much as a nod of acknowledgment, Rachel walked in the opposite direction from him, toward the room where the family waited, undoubtedly to deliver the most difficult news to the family of the twenty-three-year-old woman who had, like Noelle, inexplicably, unfairly lost her brief battle.

  “Paperwork’s done,” Rafe said, coming from the nurse’s station around the corner. “Let’s get out of here. We’ve got an ambulance to restock.”

  Cale didn’t immediately move, feeling hollow and so damn tired.

  “Standing here isn’t going to do anybody any good,” Rafe said gently.

  Cale glanced back toward the room Rachel was now in, thinking she shouldn’t have to handle this alone. That she needed someone to be there for her. But...no. The likelihood of her breaking down while on duty was next to nothing. The queen of blocking out the hard stuff would soldier on at least until the end of her shift—he was sure of it.

  * * *

  FOR ONCE, RACHEL WAS out the door of the hospital less than ten minutes after her shift ended. She didn’t bother to change out of her scrubs, didn’t grab anything to eat, didn’t hang around to get any extra work done. She didn’t say a word to anyone, either.

  Her training had come through for her throughout the night after the asthma patient, allowing her to function on automatic for the most part, and in the times of extreme emergency, adrenaline had pulled her through.

  It was a rainy morning out, the sun lazing around somewhere beneath the thick cloud cover, but she had her sunglasses in place over her eyes before she left the building anyway. Her jaw was set with determination to get out of there unscathed.

  The silence when she got in her car was deafening. Punching the radio on, it struck her that she hadn’t bothered to check out the radio stations once during the month she’d been back on the island. Who knew if they were the same as they’d been when she’d been a teenager? Come to think of it, who cared?

  She hit the scan button and stopped it at the first pop station then cranked up the volume until the steering wheel vibrated. Taking care to look behind her, she backed out and left the staff lot. At the first stop sign, she finally noticed the blaring music. It was upbeat and happy. Nauseating. She smacked the power back off, preferring the silence to someone’s joyful declarations of love.

  The entire drive home, she held strictly to the speed limit in spite of a burning need deep down to floor the pedal, whip recklessly around corners and dodge vehicles. Or maybe not dodge them. Maybe hit them.

  She was hanging on to control by a microscopic thread. As if she was grasping for dear life, dangling over a bottomless canyon that would engulf her in its darkness and never spit her out. Never let her hit the canyon floor.

  She clung to that thread harder yet when she let herself into the empty house.

  Rachel stared at the kitchen, feeling disoriented, unsure what to do next. She was too keyed up to sleep, and besides, she was afraid of what might sneak up on her in her dreams. It was easier to stay vigilant when her eyes were open.

  Out of habit, she went to the refrigerator and opened it. Searched for a gourmet something her mom might have whipped up and then remembered her mother had left town for a weeklong conference before sunrise this morning. Rachel had been at work for a twelve-hour shift and she hadn’t had so much as a snack. She should be hungry, right? She should eat.

  But the thought of food hitting her stomach made her want to hurl. She closed the fridge, again at a loss for what to do. Because, God knew, she had to do something.

  A shower. She needed to be clean. Needed to wash the awful night off. That would help.

  With a nod of reassurance to herself, she climbed the stairs, went into her brother’s room and opened the dresser drawer for clothes. Comfort clothes. A pair of pink-and-yellow boxers and an ancient, faded, touristy San Amaro Island T-shirt.

  Once in the bathroom, she dropped the clothes on the floor, stripped out of her scrubs and waited for the water to heat. When she stepped in, she turned the water temperature up higher yet, needing it to scald her skin, cleanse her. She didn’t allow her mind to veer to what she needed to cleanse herself of. Couldn’t let herself reflect on...anything.

  It was too easy for thoughts to invade in the shower, though. It had always been her thinking place, her one sanctuary to process the other twenty-three and a half hours of her day. To slow down momentarily and catch up mentally.

  Today, she decided she wanted none of it.

  Without soaping or shampooing, she flipped the water off and hurried out of the glass-doored stall. In spite of the shortness of her time under the hot water, her skin was pink from it as she toweled herself off. Then she swiped her towel over a spot on the mirror to clear the steam and squinted at her reflection, only half-aware that she was looking for her sister.

  She knew that wasn’t Noelle staring back at her, and yet... She didn’t let herself think too much. Just allowed the relief to seep through her, clinging to the reminder that the sadness that’d been hovering just beneath the surface since the young woman’s death last night...that was not her grief. It was someone else’s. Hers was not fresh or new or different. She knew how to handle her sorrow. It wasn’t a friend, but it was familiar.

  “It wasn’t you, Noelle,” she said hoarsely to the reflection. “Not last night.”

  Breathing a little easier, she pulled on the shorts and shirt, ran a comb through her hair and escaped the steamy bathroom.

  She could handle this. Whatever this was.

  Outside of Sawyer’s room, she paused. She threw her dirty scrubs on the floor just inside. Inhaling deeply, slowly, she pivoted and faced the door of her and Noelle’s room.

  It was still open, but Rachel had managed to keep her gaze averted every single time she’d walked by it, out of sheer determination. And, okay, she’d admit it...fear.

  Apparently, she’d had enough of cowering for one day.

  Without giving herself time to think about it, propelled by the realization she’d had in the bathroom, she plowed into the room.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  RACHEL HAD THOUGHT barreling into the room quickly would be easier, like ripping off a bandage all at once instead of drawing out the pain skin cell by skin cell with a gradual removal. She stopped in the center of the bedroom and spun in a slow circle, her eyes not focusing on any one thing.

  It felt as if there were a vacuum in the room that sucked every last molecule of oxygen out of her lungs, leaving her unable to breathe or fun
ction.

  Everything hit her at once. Everything. The smell of the stale, dusty air and a hint of the baby-powder scent that had been Noelle’s body lotion. The almost painful silence. The sights—all the things she’d noticed the last time she’d come in here and so much more she hadn’t. She was fixated on Noelle’s side of the room, unable to look away. Like a gruesome traffic accident.

  She could do this. Though what this was, exactly, she wasn’t sure. Sort through her sister’s belongings? Decide what items had no more use and what she or others might cherish?

  Putting things into boxes would be measurable action. Progress.

  Realizing that if she left the room to find an empty box, she would likely never make it back across the threshold, she went to the closet, which was on Noelle’s half of the room, and slid the door open. Rachel’s share—the right side—was, of course, neat and half-empty. On the floor was a stack of shoeboxes. Rachel pulled the stack out and, one by one, opened each box and dumped out the old, seldom-worn dress shoes into a pile on the closet floor. The three boxes wouldn’t be enough for Noelle’s belongings, but they would get her started with the little stuff.

  Energized—relatively speaking—by having a concrete task, she went to the desk on her own side of the room and retrieved the empty wastebasket from beneath it. She carried it back and set it on the floor between Noelle’s twin-size bed and her vanity table.

  The vanity was the easiest place to start. The makeup that was still lying on top of it was no longer good for anything, so Rachel sat in the dainty chair and busied herself tossing it, piece by piece, into the wastebasket, not allowing any thoughts about whose it was or why it was only half-used to barge in.

  As she was systematically picking up each item, one in particular caught her attention and broke through her determination to not really see what she was handling—the bright green, sparkly eye shadow. It was so obnoxious and so uniquely Noelle. Rachel dipped her index finger into the powder and smoothed a streak onto the back of her hand. A bittersweet grin tugged at her lips as she remembered the first time she’d seen her sister wearing it, on a visit home from med school. Though Noelle had looked beautiful, as she always did either because of or in spite of her daring style choices, Rachel had joked about her aspirations of setting alien fashion trends. Noelle, of course, had come back with some insult about Rachel’s trademark “natural” look. Neither had thought more about the good-natured exchange. Rachel herself had never expected it to become a poignant memory that would threaten her composure.

  Swallowing back the surge of emotion, she clamped her jaw against feeling too much and threw the eye shadow in the trash.

  When the top of the vanity was bare, she opened the drawers to find Noelle’s extensive jewelry collection. Most of it was inexpensive costume jewelry and simple sterling-silver pieces, but none of it belonged in the trash. She stared at it for a couple minutes, overwhelmed. This was something she and her mom would need to sort through together and decide what to do with it.

  As she started to push the drawer closed, one of the necklaces caught her eye. She pulled it out and held up the silver N-shaped charm—a match to the R that Rachel wore around her neck. This one was easy. After unfastening her own necklace, she removed the N and added it to the chain that held her initial. She set the empty chain back in the drawer and put hers back on, fingering the two letters for several seconds before jumping up.

  Rachel eyed the door and reminded herself she could handle this. She was handling it. Though her throat felt as if a ball of clay had lodged in it and her pulse pounded in her temples, she was...okay...ish.

  She lost track of time as she tackled the two shelves of Noelle’s bookcase. The top shelf was full of stuffed animals from her sister’s childhood and her high school yearbooks—identical to the ones Rachel had stored in a box somewhere in the garage. These went in a pile on the floor since they were too big for a shoebox.

  The bottom shelf was the lump sum of reading material her sister had owned—yet another way they were so different. The stack of magazines, current over a year and a half ago, was such a display of her sister’s personality it made Rachel’s chest tighten. Celebrity mags, guides to hairstyles, women’s fashion magazines, one on exotic travel adventures. Not that Noelle had done a lot of exotic traveling, but she’d dreamed of it. Just one of many things she’d never gotten the chance to do.

  Rachel squeezed her eyes closed against the drops of moisture that threatened—not tears, dammit—and lifted her chin, fighting the pain that was so acute it was both physical and emotional. She stood and paced back and forth from the bookshelf to the center of the room several times, trying to get air, wiping at her eyes. She bent at the waist, grasping her middle, her lips pursed.

  Just half a shelf. She could get through the rest of it and call it a productive day. Walk out of here with the knowledge that she’d faced a pretty giant demon. She only needed to sort a few more books.

  She bit her lip and stared down at the remaining books, maybe two dozen of them. The temptation was there to just shove them in a box without a glance but she needed to make sure there was nothing there to hold on to. She owed her sister that, and so much more.

  Crouching in front of the shelf, she went through the books, checking for personal inscriptions that’d been scribbled in the front covers. Both Rachel and her mom were notorious for writing such things whenever they gave books as gifts. There were volumes of real-life paranormal tales, ghost stories, a couple on UFOs. She removed the last of a handful of celebrity biographies and noticed one more small book that’d been hidden behind the hardcovers.

  “No,” Rachel said sadly. “Damn.”

  Noelle’s diary.

  It, more than anything else in that bookshelf, was so personal, so brimming with Noelle. Even though Rachel had never read her sister’s diaries—mostly because she feared there were booby traps and she’d get caught—she recognized that Noelle’s innermost thoughts were contained in these pages. A private account of everything that had been important to her.

  Rachel flipped open the cover, not really intending to read the pages right now but wondering if there was a date or some other frame of reference to how old the journal was.

  What she found made her cover her mouth with her palm and then pinch her lips as hard as she could. And still, she barely noticed the physical pain.

  Private. Keep Out! That means you, Rachel Ann Culver. Don’t think I won’t find out if you’ve snooped!

  The words were scrawled in Noelle’s distinctive, looping handwriting, complete with outlandish curvy capital letters, in a glittery, blue gel pen so characteristic of her.

  It looked as if she could have written it last week. Seeing the style of handwriting that Rachel knew so, so well, had sometimes envied for its free-spirited fanciness, in fact, was like a physical blow to the chest. And once the initial impact was over, it felt as though a boa constrictor had got hold of her, was wrapping itself around her and squeezing, squeezing, suffocating, stealing the air from her.

  Stricken, unable to fight anymore, Rachel closed the diary and hugged it to her chest, falling back onto Noelle’s disheveled bed. And then she did what she could no longer prevent. What she hadn’t done for nineteen months and six days.

  She let the tears come.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CALE HAD HAD all night on duty to debate with himself, and he’d decided to hell with honoring Rachel’s wishes. To hell with leaving her alone.

  When his shift with the asthma patient had ended, he’d gone home, taken a shower and gotten some breakfast after a busy night that had left no time to grab a bite to eat. He was relieved to see Rachel’s Honda in the open garage at her house. Even though it’d been almost two hours since she’d gotten off work, it wasn’t unheard of for her to still be at the hospital this much later.

  He made his way through the light rain up the wet stairs toward the Culvers’ front door. It appeared that Rachel was alone, since hers was t
he only vehicle on the property. It didn’t surprise him, but it did concern him. Today might not be a good day for her to be alone.

  When he got to the door, he knocked and waited. He rang the doorbell, beginning to wonder if she’d gone to sleep, as most people would do after working an overnight. Somehow he didn’t think she’d be able to sleep after what had happened last night, though.

  After ringing the bell twice more, he tried the knob and found the door locked. The misty rain had picked up, and water dripped down his face from his hair. He went back down the stairs, into the garage and up those steps to the door that led to the kitchen. Without bothering to knock, he turned the handle and was relieved when it opened.

  “Rachel?”

  There was no sign that she’d been in the spotless kitchen.

  “Rachel, where are you?” he called again as he walked into the deserted living room. Hearing a faint sound from above, he took the stairs two at a time, keeping his step light and quiet so as not to scare her if she was sleeping.

  At the top of the stairs, he stepped into Sawyer’s bedroom, knowing she’d claimed it as hers for the time being. It was empty, as well, so he stopped and listened for a second, then turned and crossed the hall.

  What he saw when he cleared the doorway stopped him cold for a fraction of a second, and then he rushed forward.

  “Rachel, baby, what happened?” His heart raced as his mind sifted at lightning speed through possibilities of injuries or accidents that might be the cause of her condition.

  She was doubled over on the bed—Noelle’s bed—her back to him, sobbing uncontrollably. Fighting for air. Or maybe...hyperventilating? She gave no indication that she’d heard him come in.

  He sat on the bed next to her and touched her shoulder from behind, still not certain she knew he was there but beginning to sense this was no physical pain she was dealing with.