by JB Lynn
“After our talk my life got so much better. It’s done a complete turnaround.” She smiled an ear-to-ear grin as though that would prove that she was deliriously happy.
Considering it had only been a few days, I thought she was probably exaggerating. “That’s nice.”
“No, you don’t understand.” She grabbed my hand. “Everything’s changed. I inherited a house, I met a great, new guy, and I got a new job.”
“Congratulations. I’m happy for you.” I wasn’t. I was wondering if somehow she’d managed to transfer her bad luck to me, like you’d see in a movie or something.
“And I owe it all to you, Maggie. That’s why I’m sorry to bring this up.”
She let go of my hand, sat back, and put on her reading glasses, her own personal Bat-signal that she meant business. “About your niece’s bill . . .” She waited, one of those long expectant pauses that probably usually compelled whoever she was dealing with to blurt out a reply.
Just to fuck with her life-is-so-freakin-great head, I held my tongue. Not because I disliked her, but because I was sick to death of having everyone, Harry, Delveccio, Gary the Gun, call the shots.
She was finally forced to ask, “Have you come up with the money?”
“I’m waiting to find out if an investment I made will pay off.”
“Will you know soon?”
“In the next couple of days.”
She nodded approvingly. “Good. Good. I gave notice and leave in five days.”
“Your new job isn’t here?”
She shook her head. “No. I hate this job. I never wanted this,” she waved her hands as though to encompass the whole hospital. “I want to help people. Like you helped me.”
“Oh.” Now I was feeling guilty for messing with her.
“I’m going to bury Katie’s paperwork as best I can, but at most, you’ll probably only have a week or so.”
“You’re going to do that for me?” I’ve got to admit I was surprised by her generosity. I’d only let the poor woman cry on my shoulder that one time, and here she was doing this incredibly generous thing for me. I felt guilty for my earlier thought about eating her.
“Oh course,” she said, flashing that huge smile again. “That’s what friends are for. It’s against company policy for us to socialize, but I hope that once I’ve left, we can get to know each other better.”
“I’d like that.”
“Okay, like I said, I’ll do what I can to keep her.” With that, Stacy hurried over to another patient’s family.
I made my way to Katie’s room. “Hey there, Baby Girl.”
No response.
I read Where the Wild Things Are to her for about the hundredth time, wondering if she heard me, wishing I knew whether or not she even knew I was there.
I fussed with her bedclothes, making sure she was tucked in just like she liked, with the covers pulled up to her chin, but not tucked too tight. I tried to tuck Dino under her arm, but I couldn’t find the stuffed toy. I looked under the bed, felt the sheets to make sure he hadn’t gotten lost under them, and even searched under the visitor’s chair. He was nowhere to be found, so instead I took her sagging hand and began singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.”
I remembered how she’d been giggling over the song when the car accident had occurred. It came back to me in flashes. Her crooked smile. Her twinkling eyes.
The skid. The roll. The screeching and squealing of metal. The impact. The pain.
I closed my eyes, trying to tamp down the remembered terror that was making my heart race.
“Quite the touching scene.”
Opening my eyes, I whirled to find Gary the Gun standing in the doorway.
“Fuck you!”
“If you want, but I’m not knocking any money off what you owe me.” He grinned, amused by his own joke.
“Get out!” I raised my voice, hoping it would attract the attention of a nurse or orderly.
“But I just got here.”
“You said I had seventy-two hours.”
“Indeed I did. I just wanted to see if you were sticking to your regular schedule.”
A chill skittered down my spine. This animal knew my schedule? “You’ll get your money.”
“As long as we understand one another.”
I didn’t reply; I just glared at him.
He didn’t look particularly intimidated.
“Oh hello,” Aunt Loretta called from the hallway. “Are you a friend of our Maggie?”
For once I was grateful for her interfering.
“Get out of my way,” Gary growled, pushing past her and stalking away.
I sagged weakly against Katie’s bed.
I couldn’t take much more of this.
“What a rude little man,” Aunt Loretta complained entering the room. “Is he a friend of yours?”
I shook my head.
Tilting her head, she examined me closely. “Are you feeling all right? You look . . . funny.”
That was probably because I was feeling sick to my stomach after my exchange with Gary. “I’m just tired.”
Aunt Loretta pressed her lips to my forehead and held them there for a long beat. This was her tried-and-true method of determining if one was running a temperature. “No fever,” she declared.
“I told you, I’m just tired.”
“That’s because you’re burning the candle at both ends, working, coming here, dating . . . how did your date go with that nice young man?”
So that was how she wanted to play it, like she hadn’t joined us uninvited, told him my father’s in the big house, and then fled the table in tears.
“It was nice.” I played along, and then because she was apprehensively eyeing me as though waiting for me to rip into about her meddling, I let her off the hook. “We’re going to have dinner again tonight.”
Before she could finish opening her mouth to speak, I told her, “And no, I’m not telling you where we’re going.”
She had the good grace to look away.
“Did Aunt Leslie make it home okay this morning?”
“About that . . .” Aunt Loretta didn’t often get cross with me . . . or with anyone for that matter. So when she did, it was something to behold. She crossed her arms over her barely covered chest, tapped her stilettoed foot impatiently, and gave me a look that would have made Aunt Susan proud. “She said you took her key away.”
“I asked her to leave it.”
“Why on earth would you do that?”
“I need my privacy.”
“That’s what you said when you moved out,” Aunt Susan complained from the doorway.
Loretta and I both spun in her direction. Neither of us had been aware of her arrival.
“Yes, that’s what adults do,” I countered. “They grow up. They move out. They value privacy.”
Strolling over to Katie’s bedside, Susan said, “You make it sound as though you were forced to share a room with twelve other orphans.”
Aunt Loretta chuckled at her sister’s joke. I did not.
Growing up, I’d shared a room with Theresa. Even though she had been older, I’d been the first to move out. My aunts had never forgiven me for “breaking up the family,” even though Marlene had actually been the first to jump ship, running away after her twin Darlene died.
The thought of Marlene squeezed my chest and caused my eyes to burn. Yet another loss I was never going to recover from. I’d spent so much time searching for her that first year after she ran away. Trying to find her, desperate to make things right. But every lead had resulted in a dead end. And when we didn’t hear from her after a couple of years, I gave up any hope she was still alive, let alone ever going to come home.
“Leslie is family,” Loretta reminded me, as though I hadn’t been aware of that little fact. “It’s not like she’s a stranger or something.”
“Aunt Leslie can’t be coming over to my place and passing out in front of my front door. If Paul hadn’t been there, I don’t kn
ow how I would have gotten her inside.”
“Who’s Paul?” Susan asked.
“Paul was there?” Loretta asked simultaneously.
“Paul is not the point!” I snarled.
“Just as I told you, she’s in an ill temper.” Loretta said to Susan who nodded in agreement.
If I’d had any doubts about whether or not they’d planned to gang up on me, now I was certain, when at that instant, Aunt Leslie stumbled in, “Sorry I’m late.”
“Only two visitors at a time,” I called, as though it could somehow ward off whatever spell the three witches were about to cast. I know you think that I’m exaggerating, or maybe just plain crazy, but when the three of them put their heads together about something, or in this case someone, which unfortunately meant me, they’re extraordinarily evil in their own “helpfully” meddlesome way. Okay, maybe not evil like Gary the Gun or Alfonso Cifelli, but they can make mere mortals, such as me, do things they normally wouldn’t.
As head of the coven, it fell to Aunt Susan to mutter the ancient incantation, “We want you to move home.”
“No.”
They looked a bit surprised that their spell hadn’t worked right off the bat, but, undaunted, the twins chanted the spell together. “We need you to move home.”
Crossing my arms over my chest, I shook my head. “No way. And who are you,” I asked, pointing at Aunt Loretta, “to ask me to move home, when you’re practically selling the place out from under Aunt Susan?”
“But I’m not, Darling.”
“You’re not?” I looked to Susan for confirmation. She was nodding serenely.
“You dumped the rat?” I asked hopefully.
Loretta blinked her mascara-heavy eyes. “Templeton? Of course not.”
“Of course not,” I muttered dejectedly. That would have been too much to ask for.
“And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t call him that.”
Bringing the conversation back on track with icy efficiency, Aunt Susan said, “We want you to move home. For a while. Nothing permanent. Just until things settle down.”
I shook my head. I was already going around killing people and talking to a lizard; moving in with these three would surely buy me an express ticket to Crazyville.
I looked at their hopeful faces. Loretta and Leslie were looking at me like kids hoping to receive permission to get a puppy, and Aunt Susan was regarding me with undisguised curiosity.
I wanted to shout, Hell no! Instead I said, “Thank you for the offer. I do appreciate it, but I just can’t accept.”
Loretta and Leslie looked crestfallen. You’d have thought I’d told them that The National Enquirer isn’t a real newspaper or something. Usually I felt annoyance when it came to my aunts, but at that moment all I felt was guilt for letting them down. After all, they had done a lot for me over the course of my life, and now all of them were showing up with regularity for Katie. “I will however make an effort to visit . . . and more . . . and more regularly.”
“Oh Maggie, that’s wonderful!” Aunts Loretta and Leslie cried out simultaneously, enveloping me in what they called an “L-and-L hug” when I was a kid.
“Family dinners!” Leslie cried.
“Sunday breakfasts,” Loretta declared.
While being smothered by the twins, it occurred to me that Aunt Susan hadn’t said a word. Craning my neck to peer around my other aunts’ arms, I looked for her.
When we made eye contact, she mouthed, “Thank you.” Then she hurriedly left the room, leaving me in the embrace of my two more emotional aunts.
And in that moment I felt pretty damn good.
And then Templeton the Rat sauntered in, his face still bruised from the attack by Aunt Loretta’s portrait.
He looked awfully damn smug.
“Look what I found,” he called, breaking up our family hug. He held up Dino and waved the stuffed toy like it was a winning lottery ticket. “It was in the waiting area.”
I eyed him suspiciously. I hadn’t seen it while I was with Stacy Kiernan. How had it gotten there?
“Oh that’s wonderful, Templeton.” Aunt Loretta rewarded him for his find with a hug. “It’s Katie’s favorite. I’m sure that when she wakes up she’ll be thrilled it’s here.”
“I wonder how it got out there,” Aunt Leslie mused, voicing my own thought.
“Strange things happen in hospitals,” Templeton said. “Why I once heard of a patient who just up and disappeared out of a hospital once. Paraplegic, poor fellow. One minute he was in his bed, the next he was gone. Some people said it was aliens who took him for experimentation.”
I walked out of the room as he spun his story.
I wasn’t buying his bullshit.
Not any of it.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“IT’S JUST A little too convenient that he’s the one who found it,” I complained to God as I got dressed for my date with Paul.
The lizard was barely listening to me. Most of his attention was focused on whatever idiotic true-crime show he was watching on television. He was convinced that he would find the solution to the Gary the Gun problem in an episode.
“I mean Templeton walks in with the “found” toy, and all of a sudden he’s the great rescuer or something? What’s that about? Manipulative, that’s what it is, if you ask me.”
“No one’s asked you,” God drawled. “No one cares.”
Just for that I turned off the TV.
“Hey, I was watching that.”
“No one cares.”
“I can’t believe you’re going on this date.”
“Patrick says I should maintain as normal a schedule as possible.”
“Normally you live like the proverbial old woman with too many cats,” the lizard reminded me. “Theresa was always worried you were going to end up alone, a bitter, old spinster.”
“Don’t tempt me with the cat idea,” I warned. “I bet you’d make a nice snack for one.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
Flopping on the bed, I looked him in the eye. “We have to talk.”
“I thought we were already doing that.”
“It’s about your future.”
“A cat-free future I hope.”
“I’m going to take you to the hospital tomorrow.”
I’ll be damned if the lizard didn’t jump up in the air and clap his hands.
Regaining his composure, he said haughtily, “Finally. I’ve been waiting forever to see Katie.”
“And as I told you, about a hundred times, they don’t allow pets there.”
“And as I told you, you could always just tell them I’m a service animal.”
“Dogs are service animals. Monkeys are service animals. Lizards are not service animals!”
“Have you ever tried talking to a dog?” God asked. “Their grammar is atrocious.”
Determined to get through this conversation without losing my cool, I told him calmly, “I’m going to leave you in Katie’s room.”
“Does she have a TV?”
“She’s in a coma! Why the hell would she need a TV?” Despite my best intentions I found myself shouting at the reptile. I took a breath and counted to ten.
“Have you ever considered anger-management classes?”
“Have you ever considered dropping dead?” Flinging myself off the bed, I stalked into the kitchen. I glared at the stinking lilies propped in my pitcher and considered sticking them in God’s enclosure since he hated the smell as much as me.
A cell phone rang, disrupting my evil plan. It was one of the throwaways Patrick had given me.
“Please tell me you have a plan,” I said as way of greeting.
“You really need to work on your phone skills, Mags,” he teased. “One usually says something like, hello. Followed by what’s new? or how are you? You should give it a try sometime.”
“Hello,” I said grudgingly.
“Hi, Mags. How are you?”
“Not good. Not good at all
. Gary was at the hospital again.”
On the other end of the line, Patrick crunched on his Lifesaver. “What did he say?”
“He was making sure I was keeping to my schedule. It freaked me out that he knew I even had a schedule. Please tell me that you’ve come up with a plan.”
“I have.”
Silence.
“And . . . ?” I coaxed.
“I’m working out the details. I’ll tell you about it tonight.”
“I’ve got a date tonight.”
Again with the silence.
“You’re the one who told me to act as normal as possible. Wouldn’t it look suspicious if I turned down a date with a cop?”
“So this is with Kowalski?”
“Uh huh.” I got the distinct impression he didn’t approve. I wonder what it meant that my aunts thought my going out with an officer of the law was the best thing ever, while Patrick and God seemed to think it was a terrible idea.
Not that Patrick said that. He didn’t say anything.
“You still there?” I knew he was since it sounded as though he was chomping on an entire roll of mints.
“I’m here.”
“So about the plan?”
“It’s gotta be tonight.”
“Okay, I’ll cancel my date.”
“Don’t do that!” His tone was uncharacteristically sharp.
“I thought you didn’t want me to go.”
“I don’t want you to cancel even more.”
“So what the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Go on your date, go home, and whatever you do, don’t let Kowalski inside.”
“Why not? He’s already been here.”
“More information than I needed,” Patrick muttered. “You can’t let him in, because I’m going to be there. Waiting for you.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure how I felt about this relative stranger being alone in my home. After all, I’d just been preaching about the value of privacy a little while earlier.
As though he could read my thoughts, Patrick said softly, “I promise not to snoop . . . except maybe in your fridge if I get hungry.”
“Fair enough. Don’t eat the leftover Chinese food, I’m pretty sure it’s covered in fungus.”
“Good to know. Bye, Mags.” He disconnected the call.
