The dance. Travis dating Cindy. Erin forced a smile. “You have a good time.” They started toward the elevators. “I thought you were going to show me your dress.”
Shara glanced up and down the hall. “I’m wearing it under my coat.”
“Let me see.”
Shara opened the coat. She wore a cream-colored tuxedo, complete with ruffled white shirt, rhinestone buttons, and red satin cummerbund. “I told you it was different. Kenny’s wearing a black one just like it. What d’ya think?”
Erin nodded her approval. “Its terrific.”
“We’re both wearing high-top sneakers, and I’ve got a silk top hat too.”
Erin couldn’t help feeling envious. How she wished her life had not grown so complicated and so sad. “You have a ball, and call and tell me all about it,” she told Shara.
“I will.” Shara hugged her. “I’ll be home tomorrow if you need me to come up here.”
Minutes later Erin drove aimlessly through the streets crowded with Saturday afternoon shopping traffic. She passed a baseball field where a Little League game was being played, and a mall where a radio station was doing a remote broadcast. How was it that the world could be going on in such an ordinary way?
Erin kept fighting back tears and wishing there was somebody she could go to. An image of her father floated into her memory. She saw herself as a small girl sitting with Amy on her dad’s lap while he read them a book of fairy tales. How safe she’d felt then, intoxicated by the scent of his pipe tobacco and aftershave.
She glanced out the car window and got her bearings. She wasn’t too far from Briarwood, and more than anything she wanted to be with her daddy. She wanted him to tell her that everything was going to be all right. That like Sleeping Beauty, Amy would wake up if the right prince came along.
Chapter Sixteen
Erin walked the halls of Briarwood slowly, touching the rows of lockers as she passed. The smell of chalk dust and white paste and old books saturated the air, and her heels made a forlorn echoing sound as she went.
She passed the trophy cases and paused to read the plaques and ribbons and trophy inscriptions. All City Champs—Soccer, 1978, 1980, 1983. Best in State—Debate Team, 1973, 1981, 1985, 1986.
So what? Erin thought. Where were those girls now who’d brought back the trophies? Did the winners ever think about the awards sitting preserved and polished behind a glass wall? Why did wood and brass endure while life evaporated into the wind? It didn’t seem right.
She sighed and shook her head. The thoughts were too heavy and the questions too complex. An ache had begun between her temples. She hoped her dad had some aspirin in his desk.
Erin moved quickly until she spotted her dad’s classroom, the eerie quiet unnerving her. She might have barreled headlong inside, but something made her stop short in the doorway. Maybe it was that sound—a sound she knew but couldn’t quite place until she looked inside the room.
Her father was sitting at his desk, which was covered with papers, his arms resting on the wooden desktop and his face buried in the fabric of his jacket. He was weeping. Great, racking sobs were making his shoulders heave, and the sound he made was like that of a person whose soul was being torn away.
For a stunned moment Erin stood and watched. “Real men don’t cry. Is that it?” he’d asked her the day they’d looked through the photo albums together. And she’d answered, “Real men stick by the people they care about.” Her heart pounded. Oh Daddy. Poor Daddy, she thought.
For a brief, panic-stricken moment, she didn’t know what to do. She wanted to go to him and hold him, but she knew his tears were too private, too sacred for her to intrude upon. Erin flattened her back against the wall outside the door and shut her eyes, but the image of her father was burned into her mind forever.
Slowly she slid down the wall, biting her lip and resting her forehead on her knees. The tears came in quiet streams, and somehow she felt connected to her father by a cord of grief, as a spider’s web connects two tree branches by its shimmering threads.
Erin parked her car on a side street near Travis’s house and waited for him to return from the dance. She checked her watch. It was well past midnight. “Cinderella’s coach should have turned into a pumpkin by now,” she said to herself.
While she waited, she carefully plotted her strategy. Travis lived in a fine old house on Bayshore Drive. When he pulled into his driveway, she’d call to him and make him cross to the bay side of the street, where she’d confront him. They’d be alone, and she’d say everything that was on her mind. He was a louse and a creep, and she’d make him pay for abandoning Amy.
When his headlights turned into the driveway, her mouth went dry, but the hard, cold knot of anger gave her the courage to call to him. Travis hesitated, so she called again, then watched as he jogged hesitantly across the deserted avenue.
“Erin?” he asked, coming closer. “What are you doing here?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“Now? It’s one o’clock in the morning. How long you been waiting?”
“Never mind. Did you have a good time at the dance?” Her question was laced with acid.
“Yeah.” He drew the word out slowly. “Is that why you’re here?”
“Of course. I just had to know if you and Cindy had fun at the dance. If you had a few laughs about old times and old girlfriends.”
Erin knew that her barb had hit home. Travis glared at her. “Butt out, Erin. My life’s none of your business. Don’t you know? Life’s short. We have to grab all the gusto—go for the gold. Know what I mean?” He turned, but she grabbed his arm. “Let go.”
Years of dance training, coupled with anger, made her strong, and she tightened her grip. “Im making it my business for my sisters sake.”
“Has something happened to Amy?” His tone was wary.
“You mean you still remember her name? How interesting. I would have thought you’d forgotten it by now. You haven’t been to see her in ages, have you?”
“I saw all I wanted to see that day in the hospital.”
“And what did you see, Travis?”
“I saw Amy lying there like a vegetable.” He broke her hold and started up the sidewalk that encircled the bay. Erin went after him. His strides were longer, but she kept pace. “I owe you nothing, Erin. Get out of my face.”
“Well you owe Amy—you owe my sister plenty!”
He spun toward her, seizing her shoulders. His expression had become fierce. “I told you once that I’d never met anybody like Amy. She was wild and a little bit crazy, and we had a million laughs together. But when I walked into that hospital room, when I saw her lying on that bed with tubes and wires and hoses—” His voice quavered, and it surprised Erin. He dug his thumbs into her arms until it hurt. “That wasn’t Amy. That was some shell.”
“It is Amy,” Erin insisted through clenched teeth.
“It’s Amy’s body, but it’s not Amy’s—” He searched for a word. “Where is Amy, Erin? Where’s that special thing that made her Amy? That made her real. Tell me.”
If her arms hadn’t been pinned, Erin would have slugged him. She hated him. Hated him for asking a question she couldn’t answer. She searched desperately for a way to hurt him. “Well, I think Amy’s really up in that hospital trying to wake up. If they don’t take her into surgery and remove her organs for medical science first.”
Travis’s grip loosened, and she saw his confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“You don’t know, do you? If you’d been up to see her, you’d know that yesterday they declared her brain dead.”
For an instant he looked as if he might be sick, and Erin stepped back, rubbing her arms and feeling confused. It was the reaction she’d wanted, wasn’t it? Hadn’t she come to hurt him? He said, “I–I didn’t know.”
“Well, with your big date with Cindy and all, I can see how it might have slipped by you.” She reached inside her jacket and extracted the teddy bear. “Here’s a little someth
ing I thought you’d like to have back,” she said, holding the bear toward him. “Maybe Cindy would want it.”
Travis knocked the bear from her hand, then turned and braced his hands on the cement railing. “You’ve got a mean mouth, Erin.”
She wanted to leave him alone to think about how he’d wronged her sister, but her feet suddenly felt like lead weights. “I told them that they weren’t going to cut up my sister and give her away. I said that I didn’t care what their stupid tests showed, I wasn’t giving up on my sister.” She paused. “Like some people have.”
“You think just cause I don’t hang around Amy’s bedside that I don’t care? That I don’t hurt?”
“You have a strange way of showing it, Travis.”
“What am I? A robot?” His voice dropped, and Erin had to lean closer to catch all his words. “See, your problem is that everybody has to act exactly the same way for it to be legitimate with you.”
“That’s not true.”
When he glanced up, she could have sworn that there were tears in his eyes. But he blinked, and then there was so much shadow that she couldn’t be sure. “So you do penance by hovering over your sister and making sure everyone feels guilty for not caring the way you want them to.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Am I? If they tell you she’s dead, Erin, why can’t you believe them? Let her go. For everybody’s sake, let Amy go.”
She shook her head vehemently. “Doctors have been wrong before.”
“But what if they’re not wrong?”
“You’re not getting off that easily, Travis. I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to confuse me so you don’t have to admit you’re so disloyal to Amy that you’re dating before she’s—” She stopped the flood of words because she’d been cornered by them.
“Before what, Erin? Finish the sentence.”
She started to tremble. Below her, waves continued to hit the seawall, and her head began to pound. “Drop dead,” she told him.
“This is the way I deal with it, Erin. Cindy doesn’t mean anything to me but I’m going on with the rest of my life because it helps me get through, because life is too short to waste.”
Erin felt defeated. “I should have known telling you anything about Amy was a stupid thing to do.”
“I can’t change what’s happened to Amy. And neither can you.”
They stared at one another in the moonlight. The scent of jasmine mingled with the salty smell of the bay. Travis glanced up and down the sidewalk that wound along the water. “You know, I’ve suddenly got the urge to go for a run,” he said. “At this hour you don’t have to get out of the way for other joggers. Yeah, the world’s pretty empty right now. And I’d never have figured that out if you hadn’t come by tonight, Erin. So—uh—thanks for the tip.”
Erin, silent, watched him run away. She had nothing left to say to Travis. He was a total stranger, and Erin wondered why she’d ever liked him, why she’d ever been jealous of Amy over him.
Erin picked up the stuffed bear and started to heave it out into the bay, but she stopped. The bear’s glass eyes glittered in the streetlight. “You’re such a mess, teddy bear,” she said. “I’m sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Erin cuddled the bear and started to cry. As she stared at Travis’s figure, now just a speck in the moonlight, his plea kept coming back to her. “Let her go, Erin. For everybody’s sake, let Amy go.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Erin, what are you doing here this late? Your parents left hours ago,” Laurie, the night nurse, said when Erin stepped through the doors of Neuro-ICU.
“Yes, I know,” Erin said. “I stopped by the house to get some things and told them that I was spending the rest of the night up here. I just want to stay with Amy.” The clock on the wall read three A.M., and as Erin walked through the unit, she remembered how bizarre the machinery had seemed at first. Now her senses had become anesthetized to the blinking green lights and the rhythmic sounds she knew were sustaining life.
She stepped inside the glass-walled cubicle and set down her duffel bag at the foot of Amy’s bed. “Hello, Amy,” she said, squeezing her sisters hand and willing Amy to squeeze hers back.
“I’ll bet you’re wondering why I’m here,” Erin said. “Okay, so you’re not wondering, but I’ll tell you anyway.” The steady hiss of the ventilator was Amy’s only response.
“I miss you. You probably never thought I’d say something like that. But the house is sort of empty without you.” Erin felt her head begin to pound, and she pressed against her temples. “Oh by the way, I trashed your room. I know you would approve. I mean, if you could have seen how they cleaned it up—even the dust bunnies were gone.”
Erin smoothed the sheet over Amy’s chest. “And I need to tell you one other thing, Amy. I—uh—went to see Travis tonight. He had a date. It was with Cindy, but I don’t think he had a very good time. We sort of argued about him dating and all. It made me so mad, Amy—I don’t know how he could do that to you. But that’s not really what I want to tell you about Travis.” She took a deep breath. “You see, Amy, all these months—even before Christmas—I’ve sort of liked him. I mean, I really liked him. I thought I loved him.” Erin’s palms were sweating. Why was it so hard to get the words out? “Remember the night I went to the concert with him? I wanted to go so bad, and then when you sort of arranged it to happen … I couldn’t believe it! But you know what? He never stopped talking about you the whole night. I guess I knew way back then that he never could have been my boyfriend.”
Erin watched the ragged line of her sister’s heart monitor. “I’ve thought a lot about it, Ames, and I realize that I didn’t really love Travis. I just wanted to love someone and have somebody love me the way it is in books and movies. Maybe someday it will be that way for me, but it won’t be with Travis. I hope you understand about me liking him behind your back.” Amy’s chest rose up and down in cadence with the ventilator.
“So, how will I tell you when my Mr. Right comes along? How will I let you know if you’re never gonna wake up?” Erin placed her palm along her sister’s cheek. The skin felt dry and cool. Abruptly she stood and paced to the foot of the bed. “Look, Amy, I didn’t mean to get all mushy on you. Forget all that junk about Mr. Right. I brought some stuff for you.” She reached into the duffel bag and pulled out a book. “Remember this? Daddy used to read it to us when we were little.”
“Nursery Rhymes.” She read the title aloud. “Remember how we’d both sit on Daddy’s lap and he would read to us? It used to get me mad because you always had a zillion dumb questions like ‘Why did the man put his wife inside a pumpkin?’ or ‘How come she cut off the tails of the poor blind mice?’ ” Erin shut her eyes and tried to block out the images from her childhood. “Geez, Amy, we never had any of the answers. I’m sorry.”
She switched on the light over the hospital bed. “Speaking of Daddy, he’s taking all of this kind of hard. And I don’t think Mom’s doing so good either. They look older, Amy. I guess we all do.”
Erin pulled a chair next to the bed and opened the book. She read a few of the nonsensical rhymes, until her eyelids got heavy and the words began to blur and run together. She realized she hadn’t slept for two days.
“Let me borrow your pink sweater, Erin. Please? I’ll be your best friend.” Erin jerked awake. For a moment she was disoriented, then she spotted the book lying on the floor near her feet. She reached up and flipped off the fluorescent light and listened to the steady rhythm of the ventilator. In, out. In, out. Across the room a child crouched bedside the machine wearing a flannel nightgown and holding a teddy bear. Her dark hair looked ruffled as if she had just woken up.
Erin shot out of the chair. Her heart raced as she stared hard into the shadows, but now she saw only the wall and a towel on the floor. She was hallucinating. Agitated, Erin fumbled with the light switch. “You ruined my pink sweater, you know. Oh you were sorry and all that, but it didn’t take
away the pizza stain on the front.”
“Oh let me go! Please. I’ve had my license for a whole week, and I still haven’t had a chance to use the car.”
“How about if we go together?”
“I want to drive by myself this time. Pretty please? I’ll be your best friend.”
Erin felt herself growing angry as she spoke about the sweater. “You’re so careless, Amy. Why can’t you be more careful? Why can’t you be more responsible?” Suddenly she felt foolish. Hadn’t the doctors told her Amy was beyond hearing? Erin quelled her anger with a long sigh and took up her vigil in the bedside chair.
“I have something for us to listen to.” Erin unzipped her duffel bag and fumbled for the cassette player. “Ms. Thornton gave me a tape of the dance recital, and I thought you’d like to hear your reading. You were pretty good. Even if you were always late for rehearsals and—” Erin stopped, because her fingers had encountered a sheaf of papers. She withdrew the packet, saw Amy’s name, and remembered the day Miss Hutton had given them to her. At the time she’d shoved them into the bag and forgotten about them.
Erin put on the tape and leafed through Amy’s old tests and quizzes and book reviews. The music from the recital sounded. Shara’s voice sang and Amy’s voice read:
“O Lord, thou has searched me and known me. … I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.… Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in thy book they were all written, the days that were ordained for me…
Erin stopped listening to the tape and began reading one of the papers that Miss Hutton had given an A+.
Subject: English
Assignment: Essay
Date: February 9
Name: Amy Bennett
Sisters
My very first memory is one of my sisters face. Erin was wearing a cardboard crown shed gotten at a hamburger place, and she told me she was a princess and I was her maid. I had no reason to question her—princesses don’t lie—so I served her tea and sneaked cookies from Mom’s pantry, and when I was caught I took my licks. (Maids are always supposed to be loyal to their employer, especially when that persons a princess.)
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