by Nancy Rue
I remained trapped in the image of my sister, unable to close her eyes to sleep or listen or capture her own vision when she sang— out of a mouth that wanted to lose itself in her chest.
“It’s a lot to take in, I know.” Dr. Abernathy regarded me with soft eyes. “This kind of injury can be as difficult a loss as a death.”
“The loss of her face.”
I didn’t mean to sound hard and flat, but I had to remain a board that could only handle Post-it notes—basic facts in small pieces that I would organize later.
“I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with burn patients—”
“Almost none,” I said.
He dragged in a breath. “She’s lost a lot of facial function, and I’m not going to lie to you, her appearance is going to be drastically altered. Returning her to any semblance of normality is going to mean multiple procedures by a number of different specialists as time goes on.”
“What about right now?” I said.
“The nurses are debriding the wounds in hydrotherapy. I promise you that we will make this hurt as little as possible. Forget any draconian stories you’ve heard, anything you’ve seen on TV about people screaming while a team scrapes off their skin. That doesn’t happen here. We’ll use as much Ketamine as we need to keep the pain at a minimum.”
Good. Can I have some? I was scraping my thumbnail across my palm, over and over.
“That’s all I can tell you at this point,” he said. “We’ll sit down, the family and the team, when Sonia is able to, and come up with a master plan.” He stopped and cocked his head. “One of the nurses filled me in about her professional background. This will definitely be a chance for her to apply her own faith, won’t it?”
I couldn’t answer that.
“Still—you’ll have access to Sonia’s psychiatric liaison nurse, and I encourage you to talk to her. This affects the whole family, and your sister is going to need you to be strong for her.”
I was incapable of anything but a wooden thank-you and an acknowledging nod at the hand he pressed briefly over mine. If I’d done more, I would have splintered.
“If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate.”
Chip straightened from the wall. “Do you know anything about Marnie—Margaret Oakes? The other girl in the plane.”
“Was she burned?” Dr. Abernathy said.
Chip looked at me. My head turned to wood as well. I couldn’t even shake it.
“Our social worker can help with that. She’ll be checking in.” As he headed for the door, his last words were for me: “Get some rest.” The squeaking of his soles down the hall faded before Chip eased into the seat next to me, hands cool through my top as he ran them down my back.
“You okay?”
Was I okay? No. My sister’s beautiful face was being scraped off, but my husband showed more concern for the little vixen he’d—
I stuck out a mental hand and sent all of that falling over itself. Let that in, and the pieces I would break into would be impossible to reassemble. No. I had to do what I did so well.
“Are you okay?” I said.
Chip’s hand stopped on my back. “I don’t know what I am. How do you get your mind around this? Or your heart, yeah?” His voice went husky. “She’s our sister. We’re both pretty shook.” He kneaded the muscles at the tops of my shoulders. “I think I should take you home so you can get cleaned up.”
I twisted to face him. “Home?”
“You won’t be able to see her for a while.”
“Are you serious?” I said. “I’m not leaving.”
He peeled a hunk of hair from my cheek and tucked it behind my ear. His eyes looked washed out as they searched me.
“I could go home, then,” he said. “Get you some clean clothes and whatever else you need.”
“I look that bad?”
“Not to me. But you don’t want to show up looking like a trauma victim yourself when you see Sonia.” He rubbed gently at something on my chin. “You heard Abernathy. She’s going to need you to be strong.”
“Sonia hasn’t needed me for years,” I said. “I can’t see her starting, even now.”
Chip took my head in his hands and pressed it to his chest. “Well, I need you,” he said.
I shook away and struggled up from the chair. “Maybe some coffee would help.”
He gave me a long look before he said, “I’m on it.”
As he strode off, my thoughts crowded in. He looked like he should belong here and didn’t. He said he needed me. He was probably going to go check on that Marnie child.
I shut them all down and poked into the smoke-drenched pocket of my tunic. I withdrew two cracked M&Ms and looked at them. I wished they could erase everything, the way I always counted on them to do.
CHAPTER FOUR
Chip had only been gone a few minutes when a tiny Asian woman with a walk like a farmer stalked into the waiting room and dragged an upholstered chair over to face me.
“You’re Lucia Coffey,” she said as she propped herself on its arm. She pronounced it Loo-CHI-a. I shook my head.
“LOO-sha,” I told her.
She gave me a miniature hand to shake. “No one can ever say my name either.”
She pulled at her top so I could get a close look at the tag pinned to it. KIM AHN NGUYEN. PMHNP-BC.
“I see your point,” I said. I also saw from the letters that she was a psychiatric nurse practitioner.
“Do not even try to say it,” she said. “Just call me Kim. I am your liaison with the medical team. Think of me like a concierge. And punching bag, if necessary.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t feel like punching anybody at the moment.”
“You will.”
I shifted in the chair. The stench of my clothes was now beyond nauseating, and the aftertaste of smoke lined my mouth like bitter cotton. I didn’t want to be around anyone.
“I understand that you are one of us.”
I glanced at her, probably too sharply.
“Since you are an RN, we can let you stay closer to your sister than we usually do.” She moved her head side to side. “It is what you are comfortable with.”
I couldn’t imagine being comfortable with any of it.
“I’m sure her entire staff is going to show up here pretty soon,” I said. “She’s a Christian, uh, I guess you’d call her a celebrity. She has a whole entourage of people who probably know her better than I do.”
“But you are her family. She will want you, believe me.”
I didn’t, but I let it go.
“So.” She looked at me earnestly. “What do you need?”
“Me?”
“We are a holistic burn care center. You are my patient too. And whatever other family.”
“I’m it, basically.” I churned again in my seat.
“Tell me. You mind? I need to know about her.”
I did mind, but it seemed useless to argue. “We’re the only two.” My voice flattened. “Our mother died several years ago. Our father is—not in the picture.”
She didn’t chase that—fortunately, since there was nowhere to go with it.
“Does she have a husband?” she said.
“My sister’s a widow.”
A fine eyebrow went up. “A young widow.”
“Blake died six years ago. They’d only been married a short time.”
“Children?”
I nodded. “A daughter. She’s six.”
A sympathetic sound escaped from Nurse Kim. Sonia’s tragic life could drag compassion out of a stone.
“You are close to your niece?” she said.
“Bethany? I haven’t seen her in two years. She doesn’t really know me.”
I wanted her to go and take her questions and her charming little accent with her. I looked into my lap and noticed that my fingers were sooty. Something similar probably smeared my face as well.
“My husband went to get me some coffee,” I said. �
�And I don’t need anything else right now.”
“Except a shower.”
I blinked.
“We have facilities for family members. Many people come in covered in ash and do not even know it.”
“I don’t have clean clothes.”
She stood up. “We have scrubs. You are no stranger to those.”
What were the chances they’d have any in Size Tent? How humiliating would it be to have her scamper off promising a wardrobe, only to come back apologizing because they seemed to be running low?
Then I felt small hearted for even thinking about that while my sister— “You stay. I will fix you up.” Nurse Kim pointed a small finger at me from the door. “You have not heard the last of me, Missy. I am here for you, want me or not.”
With the room quiet again, I looked around for my pocketbook so I could at least drag a Kleenex across my face. Oh, wait. I’d run off and left my handbag in the terminal.
Heaven only knew what had happened to my car by this time. I had a strange vision of coconut truffles folding over the backseat like the watches in the Salvador Dali painting.
I was about to heave myself out of the chair when Chip sailed in, napkins plastered to his sleeve by the breeze he stirred up. His hands were full of cardboard drink trays and paper bags that oozed grease. Something normal. I could pretend to be normal.
“You’ll be happy to know I’ve been offered a shower and clean clothes,” I said as he unloaded the booty onto a veneered table.
“I’m happy to know you’re almost smiling.”
Chip pulled a plastic top from a cup and dumped the contents of a packet of sugar in. He took my hands and wrapped them around its Styrofoam warmth, leaving his own on top of mine.
“It’s going to be all right, babe,” he said, his voice bedside-manner kind. “I know it seems overwhelming, but it’s never as bad as it seems at first blush.”
He could do that for me, Chip could: come in with his big-bear chest and his soft, thick words and his blue-denim eyes and dissolve my demons into some silliness we could laugh away, even in the desperate moments that had tried to undo us. That was why I’d married him. Why I’d stayed with him when even my most antidivorce acquaintances told me I shouldn’t. Why I wanted right now to let go into his arms.
“Chip? Oh, my gosh, Chip—I am so glad to see you!”
Something brunette flew into the room and hurled itself at him. He barely had time to pull his hands from mine before she collapsed against him and wept.
“Otto’s dead,” she sobbed into him.
“Okay, Marnie—shhh.”
“What happened?”
She pulled away to look up at him, and something real crashed through my hope. I’d seen them have this kind of exchange already, and that obviously hadn’t been the first time. Her eyes knew him, and they were trusting as a puppy’s.
“We’re not sure yet,” Chip half-whispered to her. “Thank God you’re okay.” He gave her the crooked smile. “How many stitches, champ?”
“Six on my forehead. Seven here.”
She leaned over to display her leg, and her eyes caught mine for the first time. Her face crumpled again.
“Thank you so much,” she said, and flung herself at me.
The coffee overturned and dribbled off the table, onto my sandaled foot. I barely felt it. The girl in love with my husband curled into my lap, sobbing anew into my neck.
“I knew you two would connect,” Chip said.
Was he kidding? I gave Marnie a push and grabbed the stack of napkins.
“Oh, I am so sorry!” she said. “Let me do that.”
“I’ve got it, thanks.”
“No, seriously.”
“Marnie. Leave it.”
I heard the laughter hiding in Chip’s voice. Laughter that ripped through my stomach like a serrated blade.
“Come on,” he said to her. “Let me tell you about Sonia.”
Marnie abandoned me and the coffee and climbed into the chair Nurse Kim had just vacated, while Chip sat across from her, holding both her hands while he spoke to her like a doctor, giving her information layer by layer, waiting between for them to set. He’d once told me he broke bad news to families the way I built a torte.
I watched her shoulders settle and her face ease as he talked. I unwrapped a soggy hoagie and rewrapped it, creasing the paper and tucking in the ends until I, too, was safely packaged once more.
“I bet God’s going to do a major healing on her,” Marnie said when Chip finished soothing her. “Yeah, I can feel it, can’t you?”
It took a full fifteen seconds for me to realize she’d asked me. “She’s in a great hospital.”
“I mean fully recovered. This is going to be a God-thing. I’m sure ya’ll have been praying. I have ever since the minute we crashed.”
I got up and went for the door. Nurse Kim met me there with a pile of purple.
“I hope this is your color,” she said.
She deposited a set of scrubs and a Ziploc full of toiletries into my arms and didn’t acknowledge Chip or Marnie. I wished I could have dispensed with them so easily.
“Down the hall and to your right,” she said.
I escaped.
GH
In the shower, I scrubbed at the smoke smell on my skin until it was raw and the pain in my chest had resettled into an insensate lump somewhere behind my sternum. I had to keep it there, all of it, because somebody had to speak for Sonia until her people arrived. Then I could become invisible. Until then, I’d shove it all down until I only felt my stinging flesh, and relief that the purple scrubs went on my body and around my circumference.
I didn’t look in the mirror. I had no doubt that I looked like an oversized eggplant. Surely a runway somewhere waited for this look.
I went to the nurses’ station instead of back to the waiting room. “I will show you where your sister will be,” Kim said, and plodded just ahead of me.
She was petite, but I could envision her pushing a plow. Somehow that made me simply do what she said. She showed me their state-of-the-art everything, but I could feel my eyes glazing over. My legs were going heavy and losing all feeling, and I only wanted to lie down.
Uncannily, she looked at me and said, “Those chairs in the lounge—they recline so you can sleep.”
My legs got even heavier as she led me back there.
“I wish we did not call it a ‘lounge.’ You are not there to relax and have cocktails, you know?”
Right. But what was I there to do?
Lounge A was empty when we arrived, and I was too nearly catatonic to worry about where Chip and Marnie had gone. Nurse Kim produced a blanket and coaxed me into the chair, where I dug my nails into the arms, suddenly sure I was going to explode and leave the thing in shards.
I closed my eyes and faked a yawn. “I’m exhausted,” I said. “I’m going to try to catch a nap.”
She grunted, but I felt her obligingly move away, and heard the door close behind her.
“Egan—man, I’m glad you’re here.”
I opened my eyes to see Chip embracing a fortyish man whose white hair belied a young face and whose arms muscled from the rolled-up sleeves of an Oxford shirt with Sonia’s ALM logo on its pocket. My husband had never been a hugger of men.
When they finally let go of each other, Chip filled him in on Sonia’s condition while the man listened, staring at the floor and tugging at his upper lip.
“Egan, this is my wife, Sonia’s sister. I don’t think you’ve ever met Egan Ladd, Lucia—general manager of ALM.”
Egan gave me a startled look before he fumbled into, “I am so sorry.”
I wasn’t sure he was empathizing with my trauma or apologizing for mistaking me for one of the hospital staff.
“This is just—I can’t get my mind around it. All the way here from Pittsburgh, I just kept praying, ‘Lord, help me understand. What are You doing here?’”
I hadn’t thought to ask that, but Chip nodde
d.
“I told the rest of the staff to stay in Pittsburgh,” Egan said to him. “They can minister to people who’ve already shown up for the conference. They’ll be upset. Have you called Roxanne?”
“Marnie did. She said Georgia and Francesca are already on their way, and she’ll be right behind them as soon as she can.”
There was no need to try to disappear into the woodwork now. I was already invisible behind this force of people I’d never even heard of.
When Egan said, “What can we do now?” I didn’t answer. He and “the staff” would surely make it happen.
“We need to take this to the Lord, for starters.” Egan rubbed his hands together before stretching out his arms to Chip and me.
I didn’t know the meaning of that signal until Chip entwined his arm around Egan’s and nodded at me.
We were going to pray, standing, arms around each other, heads bent like three myopic people searching for a lost contact lens. Aside from the fact that I didn’t link arms with people I’d known for two minutes, my only prayer was one of thanksgiving that Kim chose that moment to stalk in with a steaming tray. By the time the introductions were made, the threat of the prayer circle had passed.
I have nothing against praying, bowing my head in some private place and pleading silently with God that if He would just let me have this one thing, I would give up anything else, do anything, be anything He wanted. I’d prayed such a prayer that morning when I’d hoped Chip and I could start over. I had been crying out Dear God! in my head ever since the plane hit the ground. I didn’t want to head into the vortex that suggested that what I had to give up was my sister. Or my husband.
They gathered around the heap of turkey sandwiches and bowls of clam chowder—Chip and Egan and a made-over Marnie, who had apparently found the family facilities. She made a pair of turquoise scrubs look like they belonged in the pages of Vogue.
I took two bites of a sandwich that went down like wet cement and wandered out into the hallway to the glass doors that separated me from the ICU.
It must have been close to ten o’clock by then. The place had that eerie hush that falls when the lights are dimmed to a yellow blush and the patients enter the tunnel to battle the dark demons of doubt and despair. During the day and early evening, a hospital is filled with purposeful bustle and cheerful talk and the handle-hold of hope. The pain is tempered by smiles, the fear by the sense of things being done, healing things. Being sick is bearable when the sun beckons through the window and visitors talk of things to come beyond this temporary tangle with illness.
