The quiet on the other end told her that Gregory didn’t quite believe her, but he knew that she preferred to process things onher own and then talk about them when she was ready. “Okay,” he acquiesced, “but you’ll let me know if you need anything?”
She promised that she would, even though she didn’t know if that was true.
Once she was alone with her thoughts again, she stared up at the ceiling, wondering what she’d done to push Hallie away.
Brynn’s dream was murky and distressing. Something she should have understood wasn’t real. Only, as with most nightmares, her brain wasn’t getting the message.
It felt plausible that she’d somehow found herself in a fluorescent-lit hallway, trying to find the right room, but the numbers on the doors kept changing.
She knew, on some instinctive level, that it was a pediatric wing in a hospital.
During her childhood, she’d spent time in almost every medical center along the Eastern Seaboard. Some on the West Coast, too. Her sister, Bridget, had been sick from the time that Brynn was three until she was six.
Bridget probably would have continued being sick longer, but she’d lost her fight with leukemia shortly after her eighth birthday. They’d celebrated that last birthday in a hospital room Bridget had been living in for months. That day, it had been filled with balloons and medical equipment and presents and IV drips. With so many toys that Bridget had never had the chance to enjoy.
A good day mingled with an awful day. But, by that point, most awful days had just become normal days. Brynn hadn’t understood much of it at the time except that Bridget hadn’twanted to be there, which meant that Brynn hadn’t wanted her sister to be there either.
Most of Brynn’s earliest memories, which she still carried today, centered on the very specific smell that all hospitals seemed to have. Lighting that was simultaneously too bright and too dim, depending on the time of day. The incessant beeping of monitors, which were always needed but which never let them forget where they were.
To this day, Brynn still hated grocery store checkout lines and the beeps that happened when items were scanned.
And then suddenly, when Brynn was six—because it felt sudden, even though Bridget’s cancer had been progressing for years—she became an only child.
The memories of her sister that she carried forward into adulthood mostly took place in those hospitals. In her dreams, she was always trying to get back there to see her again, but she could never find her. Could never locate the right room and get inside. She desperately wanted to, even if what awaited her was her sister’s frail body, hooked up to machines, smaller than Brynn, even though Bridget was two years older.
She pushed against a door, but it didn’t budge. She wanted to get inside. Sheneededto get inside. And she was so, so frustrated, angry, even, that she was in this stupid hospital. That she couldn’t get to Bridget. That there was nothing she could do, no matter how hard she rammed her body against the solid weight of the door.
“Brynn,” a soft voice called, and she felt something brush across her cheek.
She lifted her hand to her face, but there was nothing there. She was still in that hallway, trying to find her sister.
“Brynn.” She heard her name again, even though she couldn’t tell where it was coming from. There was no one else in the hallway with her. There never was.
She jerked sideways with one last burst of effort to break through, and she collided with hands that held her—on what she was realizing was the sofa.
“Are you okay?” It was Hallie’s voice. Soft but insistent. And it was Hallie’s hands, too, pressed into Brynn’s biceps, keeping her steady.
She blinked. Slowly, the room came into view. She’d fallen asleep at some point, with only a light on the end table illuminating the living room.
“Brynn,” Hallie pressed again, though she still spoke in a low, hushed tone. There was more urgency in her voice now than the first time she’d spoken, and Brynn tried her best to push the bad dream away.
“I’m sorry.” She tried to sit up, but Hallie's focused touch held her right where she was.
“Don’t be sorry. You seemed like you were having a nightmare. I just got home and couldn’t leave you like this.” She moved one of her hands so that she could ghost her fingertips across Brynn’s cheek, and Brynn let out a soft sigh as she leaned into the touch. “Do you want to talk about it?”
And then Brynn remembered that Hallie had been pulling away from her this past week. She didn’t seem to want the closeness that Brynn was starting to crave like a drug.
But most of all, it wasn’t fair to pull the dead sister card, even if she wanted Hallie to keep touching her so gently, which she was graciously still doing. Her fingertips trailed from Brynn’s cheek over to her temple, where she’d scratch lightly before she’d start the pattern all over again.
Brynn shook her head, trying not to move too much and disrupt the path of Hallie’s fingers. “It’s no big deal. Just a bad dream that I have sometimes. Sorry you had to bear witness,” she joked, trying to impress upon Hallie that it wasn’t a big deal.
Really, it wasn’t. Brynn had been having some variation of this dream since she’d been six. She’d been living with it for far longer than without.
Hallie eyed her warily and stilled her thumb along Brynn’s cheek, starting to rub light, focused circles there. “You were crying.”
Embarrassment warred with sadness, and she wasn’t sure which one would win until she said, “Does being a crybaby count if you don’t even know that you’re doing it?”
But Hallie wasn’t relenting. If anything, she was digging her heels. She had taken off her shoes and was curling up next to her on the sofa before Brynn realized what was happening.
