by Lisa Henry
The maître d’ held the doors open and ushered them into the cold night air. Elliott pulled Marianne down the sidewalk, away from the wide windows of the restaurant. Stopped in front of brickwork, and bracketed her against it with his arms.
Traffic, horn blasts, and sirens at his back.
Fingers of cold air tugged at his hair, slid down the collar of his shirt, but Elliott barely noticed them. He kept his gaze fixed on Marianne’s pale face.
A hundred emotions flitted over her features, none settling long enough for Elliott to name. At last she drew in a shaking, rasping breath, her bottom lip trembling.
“Elliott . . .” Her mouth fell open. “Elliott, what just happened?”
“I don’t know,” he said numbly. “I don’t know.”
Because love is bullshit, Mar.
Because love is a lie.
Because I don’t know.
I don’t know.
Elliott had seen, though, hadn’t he? He’d seen the way Jack looked at her. The way they’d laughed and kissed and brightened the world around them. Maybe something so big, so bright, was always fated to crash and burn. But that cold, blank stare Jack had leveled at Marianne . . . Love like that was supposed to end in heartbreak if it went wrong, wasn’t it? In fiery wreckage, not in ice.
Elliott looked back toward the restaurant. Odette and Lucien were hurrying toward them, coats bundled in their arms.
“I just . . .” Marianne pressed a hand to her mouth. “I just need to talk to him, to—”
“No. Marianne, no.”
“It’s a mistake,” Marianne said, determination creeping back into her tone. She pushed him away gently. “If I can just talk to him, he can tell me it’s a mistake.”
“Marianne!” Elliott reached out for her again, and she dodged away. “Mar!”
“It was a mistake,” she said firmly, backing away from him.
And then she was standing right on the edge of the sidewalk. And then her heel was slipping, catching against the gutter, and she was falling backward into the street.
Traffic. Horn blasts. Sirens.
A screech of brakes.
The dull thud of impact.
Odette screaming.
***
The waiting room smelled of antiseptic.
Elliott’s phone shook in his hand as he tried to unlock it.
Odette’s hand curled around his, and she plucked the phone from him. “Let me do it, sweetheart.”
Elliott nodded, numb.
He sank back into his chair and stared at his feet. Lucien was sitting beside him, a hand resting on the back of Elliott’s neck. He’d been sitting like that for what felt like hours now, but maybe it hadn’t been that long. Elliott didn’t know. His arm must have been getting tired though.
A dumb thing to think. Stupid. But his brain was seizing on the most random stuff, trying to get a fix on something. Caught in the dizzying whirl of a maelstrom, searching desperately for an anchor.
Elliott had been in too many hospitals lately.
Made too many horrible calls.
“Mom? Mom, it’s Elliott. You and the girls need to get here now. It’s Dad. He’s . . . he’s going.”
It was a strange way to say it, but Elliott hadn’t known how else to phrase it. He’s dying? He’d been dying for months. Stupid, useless, clumsy words.
What was he supposed to say?
There would be no asking for her to get here this time. No telling her to hurry; Abby was on the other side of the country. She might as well have been on the other side of the world. And he couldn’t . . . He couldn’t bring himself to crush her with another phone call, and so, like a coward, he let Odette do the talking.
Odette handed his phone back when she was done.
Elliott reached for the forms lying on the spare seat beside him and clutched them to his chest. He stood up and scrolled through his contacts. The number rang and rang, and just when Elliott thought nobody was going to answer, someone did.
“Elliott?”
“Hey, John.”
John’s voice sharpened. “What’s wrong?”
“Marianne got hit by a car.” Elliott walked away from the chairs. Stood by the potted palm in the corner. “I’m at the hospital. Can you come here? We don’t have insurance, John. I need you to tell them you’ll pay.”
“Jesus, Elliott.” For a moment there was silence, and then he spoke again: “Is Marianne okay?”
“I don’t know.” His voice cracked. “She’s still in surgery.”
“Okay,” John said. “Okay, I can’t get there, but put me on the phone to whoever needs my details, okay?”
Elliott felt a sudden jab of guilt. “We’re in New York.”
“What?”
“We’re at Mount Sinai Beth Israel.”
“Shit. Hang on a second.”
Elliott heard him talking to someone in the background. Francesca, probably. He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. “John?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m here. I’ll be there in about an hour, okay? Is anyone with you?”
“Yeah. Yeah, Odette is here.”
“The art lady?”
“Yeah.” Elliott put his hand on the wall. Tried to brace himself somehow. “You’re coming?”
“I’m on my way.”
“Thank you.” Elliott’s hand shook. “Please hurry.”
Odette appeared at his side as he ended the call, and steered him back to his seat.
***
Elliott watched as people came and went. Doctors and nurses. A janitor dragging a mop in a wheeled bucket. He watched the television on the wall. There was no volume, and he didn’t bother reading the subtitles. Just watched the people on the screen. Talking. Driving. Laughing. Eating. Smiling. It all seemed oddly mechanical, as if they were a cheap facsimile of reality, or Elliott had been somehow jolted out of step with the rest of the universe.
Odette spent a lot of time on the phone with Abby, reassuring her because Elliott was too numb to do it. Lucien brought him a coffee that slowly turned cold.
Waiting was the worst, people always said.
That wasn’t true.
What came after the waiting might be the worst.
Elliott looked up as the elevator doors at the end of the corridor rolled open.
It wasn’t John Dashwood.
It was someone so unexpected that for a moment Elliott just stared, unsure of how to make sense of it.
Colonel Deanna Brandon strode forward, her gait customarily stiff, her mouth pressed into a thin line. She stopped in front of Elliott. Her eyes were dark with worry.
“Paula called me,” she said. “What do you need?”
Elliott stared up at her wordlessly.
“I fucking hate hospitals,” Deanna said some time later, feeding coins into the coffee machine.
“Yeah.” Elliott glanced back to where Lucien and Odette were sitting. Odette had filled Deanna in on what had happened, including the confrontation in the restaurant with Jack. Deanna had looked horrified. “Me too.”
Hospitals. His dad. Sitting and waiting for him to die.
Coffee began to dribble into the paper cup.
“My adopted daughter,” Deanna said. “There’s a story there.”
Elliott met her gaze.
“When I was going through basic, I fell in love with my instructor,” Deanna said bluntly. “This was in the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell days. My instructor was a woman. Lizzie. She was my first love. She was older than me, straight, and married. Married to an abusive asshole.” Her expression tightened. “She left the service and we lost contact. Years later I discovered she’d dumped the asshole, but she’d been dealing with some other stuff too. She’d been in an accident. Back injury. She got addicted to opioids. Then, once she couldn’t get a doctor to prescribe them anymore, she moved on to meth.”
Elliott nodded, even though he was unsure of the point of the story.
Deanna wrestled her cup free from the machine. She sipped
her coffee, and her mouth turned down at the corners. “Tastes like shit.”
“Yeah.”
Deanna turned and dumped the cup of coffee in the trash. “Anyway, Lizzie had a daughter. Eliza. I adopted her when Lizzie passed. It wasn’t perfect. I was still on active duty then, and maybe I wasn’t home enough. And Eliza had her own issues, thanks to her mom. Five years ago I got home from deployment, and Eliza told me she got pregnant. She was sixteen, and the guy drove her to a clinic to get an abortion, and left her there. Didn’t even stick around to drive her home again.”
“Shit.”
“She begged me not to go to the police and have him charged with statutory.” Deanna’s expression darkened. “She still loved him. And I didn’t want to put her through that. Maybe I should have. I don’t know. But she was so fragile, and it would have been the biggest scandal to hit Barton Lake since your dad ran away with the nanny.”
“Shit,” Elliott said again, his stomach churning as the pieces fell into place.
“Yeah,” Deanna said. “Jack Willoughby.”
Elliott exhaled heavily.
“I thought he’d changed,” Deanna said. “I’m sorry.”
“Even if you’d said something, she wouldn’t have believed you. I wouldn’t have either.”
“Yeah.” Deanna grimaced. “I know.”
“Is Eliza okay?” Elliott asked quietly.
“She’s doing well.” Deanna’s smile appeared grudging yet genuine. “She has a good group of friends now. A good support system.”
Elliott nodded.
Deanna held his gaze. “Marianne’s going to be okay, Elliott. She’s going to be okay.”
Elliott nodded again, and they went back to wait with Odette and Lucien.
***
John Dashwood arrived at the hospital with Francesca in tow. Elliott was surprised, and grateful, to find himself enfolded into a hug.
“Thank you for coming,” Elliott said, his chest aching. “Thank you.”
“Hey.” John leaned back long enough to meet Elliott’s gaze before hugging him again. “She’s my sister too.”
Elliott’s eyes stung with sudden tears, and he held John tighter while he fought them. All this time, all these years, had John wanted to be their brother in more than name? Or had Henry’s death shaken something loose in him, made him reach out for some reason when the rest of the Family had pushed them away? Had it taken burying his father for John to want to know his siblings?
John was still holding him close when the surgeon appeared to talk to them.
“You’re all family?” she asked, looking around the room.
Elliott nodded. Close enough. He couldn’t help but look at the surgeon’s hands and wonder how steady they were, how competent.
“Okay,” the surgeon said. “Marianne’s out of surgery. She’s in an induced coma at the moment, just until the swelling on her brain goes down. We’ll bring her around in a few hours, and we’re hopeful she’ll respond well and there’s no injury to the brain itself. In pedestrian accidents, it’s common to see trauma to the head, pelvis, and legs. In Marianne’s case her right leg is fractured in several places, and our concern there was internal bleeding, but she’s come out of surgery really well.”
Really well. Elliott’s brain seized on that hopefully.
“Now, it was a low-speed collision, so there’s no fractures to the pelvic area.” The surgeon smiled. “The CT scans also didn’t show any spinal injuries, so barring a brain injury, I’m hopeful the worst of it is her leg. We’ve inserted pins to set the fractures, and we’ll reassess in a few days, but she’s doing very well.”
“Can I see her?” Elliott asked.
“I’ll have a nurse come and get you when you can go in.”
“Thank you. So I can call our mom and say she’s going to be okay?”
“Barring any potential brain injuries, yes.”
“What are the chances of that?” Elliott asked. “Of brain injuries?”
“That’s very much a wait-and-see scenario. I know that’s a frustrating answer for you, but we’ll know more in a few hours.”
“Okay,” Elliott said. “Thank you.”
The surgeon nodded and left the waiting area.
“That’s good, right?” Elliott asked.
John patted his back. “Yeah, that’s good. Do you want to call Abby and tell her, or do you want me to do it?”
“I don’t know.” Elliott felt like he was caught in limbo. While his initial sharp fear had flooded away, it had been replaced now by something different. By a more insidious sort of worry. It was like a precarious balancing act. Marianne wasn’t going to die, which was good. Obviously it was fucking good. But Abby would ask how bad it was, and what was Elliott supposed to say? Because they didn’t know yet. Maybe it would be good, probably it would be good, but probably wasn’t a guarantee. There had been a time when Henry’s prognosis had been optimistic too, until time and experience had worn all that away into the awful, stark reality of “I’m sorry, Henry. There’s nothing else we can do.” Elliott didn’t want that again. He wasn’t sure he could deal with that again. He needed something definite.
John was still waiting for his answer.
“I’ll do it,” Elliott said. “I’ll call Mom.”
Because in the end it didn’t matter how unsteady the ground was underneath Elliott’s feet. He had to step up anyway.
***
It was late by the time a nurse came to show Elliott and John to Marianne’s room. She looked so pale, lying in the hospital cot, hooked up to machines and monitors, with a breathing tube in her throat and a cannula in the back of her hand. Pale, but with a stark black bruise on her cheek, her skin scoured where she’d hit the street. Her right leg was elevated in traction. There was a complicated brace around it, almost like a cage, with metal pins digging in through the bandages. Elliott wondered how far those pins went, and then decided he didn’t want to think about it.
“Hey, Mar,” he said softly, and took a seat beside the bed. He put his hand gently over hers, careful not to jostle the cannula.
John sat on the other side of the bed.
They were silent for a long while, listening to Marianne’s heart monitor beep away.
“I didn’t even know you guys were in New York,” John said at last.
“Sorry.” Elliott looked at Marianne to avoid having to meet John’s gaze. “There’s an exhibit of Dad’s work. Odette asked us to come.”
“I knew she was putting something together. She wanted a bunch of his stuff.”
“It’s still on,” Elliott said. “If you want to see it.”
John snorted softly.
Of course Elliott hadn’t been the only one to notice how Henry’s work didn’t include John. How his photographs and diary entries didn’t. If Elliott had felt like an imposter at the gallery, then John would have felt like an interloper.
He rubbed his thumb gently over the back of Marianne’s hand. “I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter.” John shook his head. “Art’s not my thing.”
“Mine neither,” Elliott said.
John lifted his gaze from Marianne. “What is your thing, Elliott?”
There was no malice behind the question. No barb. Just an honest curiosity that Elliott had no idea how to answer. He felt tired. Wrung out. Stripped bare. He felt alone.
“I don’t know,” he said at last, curling his fingers around Marianne’s. “I don’t think I’ve found it yet.”
***
The hours passed slowly back in the waiting room.
Francesca’s heels clicked across the floor as she headed to the coffee machine. She punched at the buttons and glanced at Elliott. Her mouth was pursed into a thin, unhappy line, and Elliott figured that yeah, okay, the last time she’d seen him he’d had her brother’s dick in his hand, but still. He wondered why she was even here. To support John, or to make sure he didn’t do something stupid and write Elliott a blank check?
&
nbsp; Probably the second one.
Elliott sat for a while, and then paced for a while, and then sat again. Lucien stood up to leave at one point, whispering an apology as he hugged Elliott tightly, but someone had to open the gallery in the morning.
It was strange. Elliott felt that the entire world should have paused and held its breath at a time like this. Just like it should have when Henry died. But the world didn’t stop for tragedy. People still had jobs, and bills to pay, and the wheels kept on turning.
“I’ll come back later,” Lucien promised. “Text me if you need me to bring anything.”
Lucien had already done so much for them. His friendship, his lunch dates, his—
“Your friend’s dress,” Elliott said. “It’s ruined.”
“Don’t,” Lucien said, squeezing him tighter. “Don’t even worry about some dumb dress.”
Middle-of-the-night television was terrible. Elliott watched it anyway, tensing whenever he heard some incomprehensible announcement over the hospital PA system. Elliott wasn’t the only person here who wanted the world to stop turning long enough to find his feet again, was he? He wasn’t the only one standing numbly while a storm broke around him. The same story was being played out all over the hospital, all throughout the city, the country and the world.
It was morning when the surgeon came back and told them that Marianne was awake.
Elliott hurried to her room.
She looked awful and wonderful at the same time. Her bruises appeared even more stark this morning, and she had black shadows under her eyes. Her hair was messy and lank, but she was alive. She was alive, and she knew her name and the date, and the president, and the surgeon said there was no sign of any brain injury.
“Elliott,” she said, her voice tripping over the syllables of his name. “My head hurts.”
“Yeah.” Elliott brushed her hair gently off her forehead. “The doctor said if you press this button, you get morphine.”
“Ooooh.” Marianne pressed the button. “Huh. I’m not really feeling it.”
