Three Gray Dots

by K. L Randis

  She was sitting up in her bed, a book propped in her lap. The room was tidied up—no doubt something she had done while she was aware of where she was. Cleaning when she was anxious was something I had inherited from her. I wondered if she had cried when the nurses first told her that she was in a nursing home and that they would call her daughter. I wondered if she tried to leave.

  She smiled when her emerald eyes met mine. Dylan nudged me from behind and I sucked in a breath of air, unsure of what to expect. Putting her book down she outstretched one hand, using the other to cover her mouth as a tear slid down her cheek. “Oh, come here you,” she said, patting the bed beside her.

  My shoulders loosened as I realized she didn’t hate me. “I can’t believe I can talk to you again,” I said, approaching her bed and settling down next to her.

  She cupped my cheek in her hand, “I can’t believe it either. How long have I been out? The nurses wouldn’t say until you got here.”

  “Too long,” I responded, wiping my own tears away. “You can ask me anything.”

  “No need, I think it’s pretty obvious what happened.”

  “It is?” I asked, holding her hand in mine and eyeing Dylan.

  She laughed, “Well why else would I be wearing these?” Reaching across her stomach she grabbed the corner of the comforter and flipped it off of her, revealing a nightgown and her favorite pair of running sneakers secured to her feet. “They tried to make me take them off but I figured you would get a good laugh at it.”

  “A good laugh at what, Mom?” I asked, genuinely confused. Dylan shrugged when I looked at him, both of us wondering what we were missing.

  “Well clearly I was running and had a fall,” she said. “I don’t know where I was going but I’m sure glad they were able to get a hold of you to come get me. Can I get discharged now?”

  The number of marathons my mother ran throughout her lifetime surpassed anyone I ever knew. She had lived in her running sneakers, taking advantage of every opportunity to train whenever she could. When I was thirteen she bought us matching Nikes that I swore were the reason I won my first track meet in middle school. I wore them until the soles were flatter than pancakes. They were still in a shoebox at the top of my closet.

  Most people were proud of the first pair of baby shoes their kids wore. My mother cherished my first pair of running sneakers, since they introduced me to a world she had loved her whole life. We argued through my teenage years due to personality differences—she had an intangible talent of keeping the house spotless and I never wanted to learn to cook anything more than a grilled cheese—but we always came back to running, the one thing that tied our souls together.

  “Mom, where do you think you are?” I asked, swallowing hard.

  She rolled her eyes. “The hospital of course, why else would I have nurses running in here every few minutes asking who I was? I know who I am, I’m just not sure how long I’ve been out since clearly I hit my head. I don’t have the slightest idea what marathon I was training so hard for.”

  She rubbed her fingers along her hairline looking for a gash that would never exist, squinting to try and remember. Looking past my shoulder she eyed Dylan and smiled. “Roger, love, when did you come home? Did you dye your hair?”

  “Roger? Wait, who am I?” I demanded, before he could answer.

  “What do you mean? I could never forget who you are,” Mom replied.

  “Say my name.”

  “Pippa…” she said, patting my hand in assurance. “I will always know who you are.”

  “Your daughter or your sister?” I asked.

  The silence that followed answered my question. Confusion swirled around the green in her eyes and I could tell that in that moment she became scared.

  “I don’t have a daughter, Pippa. You know Roger and I didn’t work out and I left him when he took the job in Cambodia.”

  I closed my eyes, frustrated that she could remember her ex-lover but not her own daughter. “Mom, it’s me. It’s your daughter Pippa. You named me after your sister because she died in a car wreck just before I was born. You left Roger, that’s true, but you also found out you were two months pregnant soon after he left.”

  The smile faded from her face and she looked out the window. Dylan shifted his weight behind me and I could hear him clear his throat. When the words never found his lips, he cleared his throat again for good measure and jammed both hands into his pockets.

  “Mom, please remember me for just a minute,” I begged.

  I had seen baby pictures of my Aunt Pippa, and sifted through memory boxes of her from when she was in high school and college. We looked virtually identical, with the only difference being my auburn-colored hair against her dirty blonde. I realized that my new hair color probably complicated things for her more than usual, but the nurses had said she was lucid.

  I missed it.

  They should have called me sooner.

  If the nursing home was only a little closer to where I had been having lunch with Meg…

  “Pippa, I’m scared. Where’s Roger? Why am I here?”

  I nodded at her, fighting to find my voice and to keep the tears at bay so I didn’t capsize our visit. “It’s okay, I’m here,” I assured her. “Everyone’s just fine.”

  I looked around her room, looking for evidence that she had left me a note or letter, but the only things in sight were her photographs and knick-knacks from marathons she had run so many years ago.

  After sitting with my mom for a while, posing as her sister, I said goodbye and promised to visit soon. The nurses at the front desk apologized over and over as I signed the visitor log. “It’s okay, really,” I said. “It probably would have made it harder to say goodbye again.”

  “She told you about the sand though?” the nurse asked.

  “The sand?”

  “It’s all she will talk about sometimes. When she gets upset the sand in this vial seems to be the only thing that will calm her down lately. We thought maybe she’d tell you where it was from before she…” Her voice trailed off and she looked down the hallway toward her room. “In case when you got here she wasn’t…”

  I covered my mouth, emotions that I had bottled up while inside her room rising to the surface in vengeance. Dylan’s fingers interlocked between mine in response.

  “Here.” The nurse outstretched a closed fist and I lifted my free hand to meet hers. She deposited a glass cylinder filled with sand in the cusp of my palm.

  “Does it mean anything? It seems important,” she asked.

  I eyed the vial, remembering the one Meg and I had studied at lunch earlier that day. “Yes, it must be but…how is this possible?”

  “What is it? Who gave it to her?” Dylan asked, pushing it around in my hand.

  “I have no idea,” I admitted, wondering who had given me a similar one at The Inlet hours earlier.

  Chapter Four

  “I don’t know why I ever agree to this,” Meg huffed, barely able to hoist the weights onto the squat rack. She secured the one side, then collapsed to the floor, stretching her arms above her head and moaning.

  “You’re so dramatic,” I teased.

  “I’m not the one trying to kill me.”

  “You wouldn’t be dying if you showed up more than once a month,” I replied, joining her on the floor to grab a swig from my water bottle.

  The gym was eerily quiet on Wednesday afternoons. People who had a predisposition to binge over the weekend would hit the gym hard at the beginning of the week. Those who had plans for the upcoming weekend would show up at the tail end and turn into weekend warriors until Sunday. Wednesday was like the cousin no one wanted to talk to at the family reunion and avoided by everyone. There was rarely more than a handful of people perusing around in the middle of the day, but it was just the way I liked it. Meg joined me sometimes, but only if I promised to grab an early dinner with her afterward. She wanted to devour her loaded French fries and beer guilt-free. She was naturally agil
e though, and didn’t need nearly as much maintenance as I did since graduating college.

  “I can eat more than you,” Meg stated.

  “And I can bench more than you,” I shot back.

  “You can,” Meg said, nodding. “If I didn’t know any better I’d say you were working out more than usual to maintain a certain physique for a certain someone.”

  “Nope.”

  “No one, huh?” Meg raised an eyebrow to impressive new heights.

  “No.”

  “Not even one little swipe right on the Tinder app?” She flicked her pointer finger in my direction.

  “Nothing.”

  “No sneaking into room two-thirty-three late at night in your scrubs?”

  “Room two-thirty—? Hey! How’d you know about him?”

  “Ah HA, so there IS someone!”

  “There is not, I just have no idea how you knew about that guy,” I said.

  “Morgan told me.”

  “Morgan?”

  “Yep,” Meg said, looking at her fingernails.

  “Who the hell is Morgan?”

  She put down her hand, a devilish grin spreading across her face. “First name Captain…”

  “Ohhhh of course, you took advantage of my brain when I was drinking.” I sat up on the cool mat beneath me, pinching the space between my nose and trying not to snort from laughing so hard. “You jerk.”

  “Morgan knows all things,” Meg said, opening her arms wide and staring up at the oversized fan wobbling in circles above us. “So two-thirty-three wasn’t your patient…?”

  “No…”

  “But you treated him anyway?”

  “I’m not getting into this.”

  “Is that legal? Don’t you have designated patients for a reason? I think I need to speak to your supervisor.”

  “There’s no rule about being friendly to someone or checking in on a patient to go above and beyond when you know your boss happens to be wandering the halls.”

  “So this was a one time thing?”

  “It wasn’t a thing!” I said

  “Seems like a thing,” Meg said, shrugging. “According to Morgan, he seemed like the only thing.”

  “Well Morgan and I are no longer friends then,” I said.

  “Fair enough,” Meg said, putting her right leg out in front of her to stretch. “You really don’t see him anymore?”

  “I really don’t.”

  “Because you don’t want to or…?”

  “He was discharged,” I said, catching the hint of sadness in my own voice. “And it happened when I wasn’t on shift so—”

  “Ohhh! You didn’t even get to say goodbye!” Meg said, cutting me off and tilting her head with empathy. “Do you know his last name? Maybe we could—”

  “Meg, no…”

  “I’m so good at finding people though. This one time, I tracked this guy on Instagram who—”

  “Meg!”

  We sat there in silence for a moment, listening to the hum of the cooler behind the reception area and the distant grunting of a man trying to deadlift more than he should somewhere in the back of the gym.

  “I don’t know how you do it,” Meg said softly. “How you can treat people who have been in the military.”

  “They’re just like anyone else,” I said.

  Meg’s eyes were watering before I finished my sentence. “But we both know they’re not,” she said.

  “Oh, Meg, no. I didn’t mean…Cheryl was different, she was…”

  “Lost,” Meg finished. “She was my lost, baby sister and no one could help her find her way back. Not that she didn’t try. The Army certainly didn’t come running when she told them she was depressed and having anxiety attacks on a daily basis.”

  “I know,” I said. I reached for Meg’s hand, but she slowly backed it away.

  “Now that I think about it they weren’t very fast to show up to the funeral when she overdosed either.”

  “I know, I know. I’m not sure anyone really knew how bad she was hurting.”

  “They knew,” Meg said, narrowing her eyes. She picked at the laces of her Brooks and sighed, shaking her head. She was literally shaking the thought of her sister out of her head. “Well I’m going to go cycle for a bit and get this adrenaline out. Want to come?”

  I knew from the hardened look on her face that she was going to need some time to decompress before she bounced back. “No, you go, I want to run instead so I think I’ll go sprint on the beach. I’ll meet you back here and we’ll go stuff our faces, okay?”

  “Deal,” Meg said. “Speaking of Cheryl, do you think we can pick up Phoenix on the way? I’m sure she’d love to throw French fries on the floor and put some frozen yogurt up her nose while we eat.”

  “She’s three already,” I nodding in disbelief. “Of course we can pick her up, I thoroughly enjoy watching you be the coolest aunt in the world to that little ray of sunshine. It makes my ovaries ache and stuff.”

  “Are they capable of aching? I’m pretty sure your ovaries are old and dried up.” Meg pulled herself into a standing position as she continued. “Plus I’m pretty sure a penis has to be involved to like, make a kid. I remember that from anatomy class I think.”

  “Don’t fall off your bike!” I called after her as she walked away, giving me the finger.

  A wall of dense, crisp air enveloped my body as I stepped outside the gym. I wrinkled my nose, wondering if maybe I should just run on the treadmill instead. North Carolina had fairly mild winters, which was ideal for training purposes, but it was cooler than I preferred for the middle of February. I decided against it, since the beach was a close three blocks distance. Jogging over with ease, I laced up my sneakers a bit tighter near the water’s edge once I made my way down to the surf.

  There was a line of condos in various colors parallel to the ocean, so I chose a yellow one off in the distance as my bull’s-eye while I stretched. I started a light jog until I reached a blue condo with a wrap around porch, and then sprinted the rest of the way to the yellow condo. Then I’d walk back to my starting point and do it all over.

  The beach was deserted. The lone surfers who sometimes braved the waters in wetsuits during the winter months were nowhere to be seen, but sweat trickled down my cheekbones anyway. I adjusted my ear buds, cranking up my music as I made my way back to my starting point for the third time. I was surprised to see a man wearing a gray hoodie stretching his calf muscles a few hundred feet away. He glanced at his watch and appeared to be setting something, then stared out into the ocean again as he grabbed onto his other ankle.

  I turned my back to him, grabbing my left ankle for a quick stretch while mentally locking eyes with my goal in the distance. The first few steps I took were interrupted by a spritz of sand shooting across my ankles.

  Startled, I glanced to my side and saw the man sprinting beside me. Cautiously, I increased my speed to put some distance between us. The footsteps faded, and I smirked at the ease of pulling ahead so easily. Refocusing my attention to what was in front of me, a gray blur whirled past, kicking sand against my thighs in protest of my previous victory.

  “What the—?” I gasped, flailing my arms thinking I was being attacked. The guy in gray barreled ahead, putting several feet between us. “Oh no you don’t!”

  I re-positioned my body—preparing for full sprint-mode—closing the gap between us each time my feet hit the sand. I maneuvered to his right to get better traction against the hard-packed sand closer to the ocean, hoping to gain an upper hand. He guessed my play, shifting toward the right as I continued to approach. Like a switch, I felt runner’s high kick in. “Woooooooo!” I yelled out.

  Gray-guy looked over his shoulder just in time to watch me match his pace. We hovered there, our bodies humming in rhythm against the sand and the surf. Passing the yellow condo that was my original target we remained steadfast. Our rhythm hiccupped momentarily, and I started to pull out ahead of him.

  “Wait!” the guy shouted,
a muffled cry against the music beating through my ear buds.

  I ignored him, even more convinced to push forward at his cries of defeat.

  “Wait!”

  The basketball-sized dimple of sand came out of no where. The sudden hump caught the front part of my toe, sending me flying forward. Just before I hit the ground my body was shielded, a firm hand encased around my head as we tuck-and-rolled to a stop.

  “I told you to wait!” the guy said. His head was lowered, the hood from his sweatshirt drooping to my chest. He was panting like a cheetah that lost his kill.

  “I just thought you were being a sore loser,” I admitted, pulling one ear bud out.

  “I didn’t know we were racing.”

  “You started it, I was just doing intervals when you went all Boston Marathon on me.”

  He raised his head, an amused twist on the only part of his mouth I could see. He pushed the hood from his face, huffing. “What can I say, I run better when I have a challenge.”

  I opened my mouth in shock, my heart crashing against my chest like the waves surrounding us. “Two-thirty-three? Is that you?” I could barely get the words out, looking over his shoulder to see if I was on some kind of candid camera.

  “Two-thirty-three?” He looked confused. “Is that an agent thing? Are you F.B.I?” he asked, only half-serious.

  “No, I’m— I’m sorry it’s just that I think we know each… I think we’ve met. Right?” I treaded water lightly. Sometimes the patients we treated were so distraught or pumped full of meds that they weren’t able to remember the majority of their hospital stay. Since I technically wasn’t assigned to his room when he was admitted, I wanted to see if he had recognized me first. I had been drawn to him while he was under our care, needing to check in on him even when I didn’t know why myself.

  Then, after the time limit for his psychiatric hold expired, he was gone.

  A haze of curiosity reflected from his hazel eyes as he stared at me. His gaze skimmed down my nose, resting on my lips. He parted his, sucking in a breath and I braced myself for him to out me about sneaking into his room during non-visiting hours for nonsense reasons. I brought him a cup of water twelve times, replaced his tissue box like he had brain matter dripping from his nose, and swapped out glove boxes just to have one more chance to speak with him.