She types and deletes a text to her aunt several times.
Aunt Gigi, I went to check again on my patient V. She’s not there…Do u know where she is? Wanted to make sure she’s ok.
She waits until it’s five in the morning to send off the text.
When she pops back up to the ICU at the end of her shift, the same unhelpful nurse is there. “Sorry, honey, I still don’t know,” the nurse answers. Then she gives a puzzling enough glance to make Taylor worry she’s coming off too interested.
Taylor leaves, face flushed. She’s not in trouble, she has to remind herself. She clearly has a guilty conscience because she broke into Vivian’s apartment, but nobody else knows that. So who cares if this ICU nurse thinks she’s acting weird?
On her walk home from the hospital, Taylor detours to Vivian’s shop, Storied Antiques. It’s a charming storefront, tucked into a side lane that branches off Charles Street, Beacon Hill’s main drag. Vivian’s apartment is a few blocks over. Her patient’s whole world appears to have existed within the span of four streets. She likely stood in this very spot most days. It makes Taylor feel surreal, like she’s suddenly inside the TV set of a show she watches.
She peers through the darkened window, noting the carefully arranged end table with a crystal vase and a tumbler set on a hammered coaster. An Emily Dickinson book of poetry. The coral armchair with a cable-knit wool throw and a matching footstool. She can imagine Vivian in the display, gracefully placing each accessory, stepping back to consider the furniture’s best angle for onlookers.
Taylor swallows. What she would give to open this door and step into Vivian’s life. To have a conversation with her from the vantage point of a customer. To see her living and breathing, full of life.
To get a sense of what Taylor’s own mother might have been like, had she lived.
Vivian’s injury suddenly seems so unfair. One never knows how TBIs will resolve. Orif.And when patients do recover, there’s such a wide spectrum of brain function they may or may not regain. Some make a full recovery, some might turn simply forgetful at times, and others continue to live in between, in the desert of their mind. Only time will tell.
Taylor can’t bear the thought that Vivian might never return to this shop, that she won’t sleep in her luxurious bedroom, or don her Loro Piana cashmere sweater and Dior ballet flats. ThatVivian won’t continue to exist in the world the way she once did, before falling down those stairs.
That she might succumb to a tragic and untimely death, not unlike Taylor’s mom.
Taylor checks her phone, but her aunt has not responded. She trudges the rest of the way home, feeling a little more depleted with each step.
Sam’s street-facing window is as dark as Vivian’s storefront. When Taylor was leaving for work last night, she heard loud laughter coming from his apartment; he definitely had company. She was puzzled he hadn’t invited her. He always invites her when he has a group of friends over, even though she doesn’t always go. Maybe he’s still salty about her missing the haircut. She wouldn’t have been able to hang out anyway; she had to work. Buthedidn’t know that.
Back home in North Carolina, Taylor used to have a set social routine. On Saturday nights, she and Grayson would go to the local bar a friend owned. They would play darts and drink beer and eat spicy chicken wings smothered in ranch dressing. Taylor liked these evenings just fine, but she never loved them. It seems like she never loved anything in the Outer Banks. But here, in Boston, she was hoping things would be different.
Sam’s exclusion stings.
In her kitchen, she fixes herself a bowl of Lucky Charms and sorts through her mail from the prior day. She sighs. All bills. Credit card bills, an electricity bill, a school loan statement. Even the one piece of mail that isn’t a bill is still asking for money: a donation request from the Museum of Fine Arts. Clearly, they don’t know their target audience.
She rubs her eyes, glances down at her phone. She’s not one to spend much time on social media, but Grayson is on her mind. So she opens up Instagram.
Grayson was a surfer, like most of the boys she grew up with. Moppy caramel hair, light brown eyes, always clad in board shorts and Birkenstocks, even in the winter. She met him when she was twenty, at a house party hosted by one of the bartenders from her dad’s restaurant. Some girl handed her a plastic cup of champagne, and when Taylor looked up, confused, the girl pointed to the corner of the room, where Grayson sat in a fold-out chair with his own respective cup.Cheers, he mouthed, and smiled with a deep dimple.
It had been very easy for Taylor to slip into a life with Grayson—too easy. He was familiar to her in the way that home was: sandy grains in between her toes, Old Bay–seasoned shrimp and cold, cold beer. The Outer Banks had its own rhythm, the ocean and its offerings the local currency. Coffee shops had hours that operated like a mood, closing for inclement weather and good surfing conditions. Their friends who were waitresses and bartenders sweat through poorly air-conditioned restaurants in the summer and then claimed unemployment in the wintertime, when many of the restaurants closed. The pool and spa cleaning company Grayson’s family owned also deadened in the off-season.
Then one night, while smoking a joint on the worn, dated sofa Grayson had inherited with the condo he was renting—and which he kept pressuring Taylor to move into—she realized her future: It was a straight existence, as linear as the horizon. No variation. The dense, humid days, once comforting like a blanket, had become smothering. While their friends chatted weddings and babies, she cranked up her fashion podcasts, trying to drown out the internal angst those thoughts caused.
When she first reached out to Aunt Gigi, she didn’t tell anyone. She simply followed her aunt’s advice:If you really want to move to Boston and come work at Mass General, then youshould get some nursing experience first. Work for a few years at home, save up some money. Then reach back out and we’ll chat.
When Taylor applied for her Massachusetts nursing license and had her remote interview for the hospital, she still didn’t tell anyone. Aunt Gigi honored her wishes not to speak with Taylor’s dad—Aunt Gigi’s brother—until Taylor told him first. Only after she was offered the ER position did she sit down her father and Grayson.
“Boston,” her dad had sighed. “Of all the places, T.J., why did you have to pick there?”
Grayson has moved on. An Instagram story shows him with a female friend sitting side by side on a familiar set of green webbed folding chairs in his backyard. They’re wearing flannel shirts and holding Miller Lites. Taylor knows the woman: Hatcher, they called her, by her last name. She was a grade below Taylor in school. People used to say Hatcher looked like Taylor. Or that Taylor looked like Hatcher. She can sort of see it: They both have apples for cheeks, brown eyes, shoulder-length chestnut hair. Hatcher fills out her T-shirts much more generously than Taylor does, though, and her teeth are better behaved, aligned in a neat little row.
Taylor’s not jealous. But she’s not not-jealous, either.
She closes the app. Grayson is where he should be. And she’s where she always wanted to be: Boston. So why does she feel so bad?
Vivian
Early February
“I’m sorry you had to see that skirmish,” Michael says. He’s whisked her away from the masquerade ball to an upstairs restaurant, which Vivian is surprised to see even exists. How many nooks and crannies does this place have? Multiple levels of dining mean there are multiple levels of kitchens at the Knox, unless they have installed some sort of high-speed dumbwaiter.
