Maybe it’s Taylor’s fault that Boston is not turning out how it was supposed to. She’s had unrealistic expectations. She thought by now she’d be well immersed in some fairy-tale story—like her mother clearly had been, before her untimely death on Greenwich Lane—but instead Taylor’s trapped in a boring nonfiction read.
It’s not like she thought she’d get asked to model when she moved to Boston; she wouldn’t want to, and besides, she doesn’t have the kind of looks her mother did. But—if Taylor allows herself to admit it—she believed that Boston would somehow fix her.
Instead, when she wakes up in the middle of the night, she creeps closer and closer to the conclusion that she’s unfixable.
Perhaps she should resign herself to her current situation and be grateful she’s a nurse at Man’s Greatest Hospital. And try to meet someone. In the first month Taylor moved here, she slept with two residents who she later spotted sitting together in the hospital cafeteria. Since then, she’s avoided dipping into the incestuous hospital pool. Should she agree to be set up with Aunt Gigi’s book club friend’s son who works in finance?
Or maybe she should sign up for a dating app, like Sam. She once tried a website version, thinking it would be more seriousthan an app—paid the fee and all—but the questions they asked were so thorough it felt invasive, judgmental even.When was the last time you cried? What is your favorite sexual position? What is your approach to polyamory?
Her answers had been too boring, bordering on pathetic:I cried yesterday. My favorite sexual position is missionary. I prefer monogamy.When she paused to look at the profile she was creating,shedidn’t even like it. So then she’d created a new profile, which required she pay another fee and use a new email address for which she had to register. Halfway through that sign-up process, where she lied about everything, her name being the least of it, she touched herself until she came.
Taylor now pours herself a 3:00 a.m. bowl of Lucky Charms and sits at her Formica countertop, hoping the night demons will soon settle. Her garden-level apartment is a mirror image of Sam’s, the second half of an apple. Though his is of a decidedly fancier variety. She inherited the furniture in her small living space from the previous tenant: an uncomfortable purple love seat and worn coffee table. Her apartment is small, so she has no kitchen table, but it came down to either that or the stand for her sewing machine. There was really no choice, given all the repairs she does on her thrift-store finds. In Sam’s place, he’s made small but significant improvements over the years: extending the kitchen countertop a couple of feet, built-in shelves, a hanging copper pot rack.
Like her, Sam rents from Anna, their landlord. But he also owns a cottage on the Cape that he escapes to on summer weekends and to which he’s promised he’ll bring Taylor.
Taylor hopes she makes it in Boston that long.
She finishes the cereal and puts the bowl inside the sink, alongside the cereal bowl from the previous day. She likes to leave dishes in the sink so her apartment appears lived-in, less lonely.
She looks at the sweatshirt draped over the couch, hesitating before picking it up. It’s the sweatshirt she wore earlier to work. She has to dig through the pockets to find what she’s looking for.
A key.
Opening her laptop, she logs into Epic, the hospital’s electronic health record system.
What kind of life must Vivian live?she wonders.What kind of apartment—or house? What does she do for work?Doesshe work?
The alcohol has done the opposite of drowning out thoughts of Vivian. Instead, it’s brought them closer, the way an ocean churns objects to its surface, bobbing them together.
Taylor loops her finger through the hole of the key ring, twirling it around.
She hadn’t meant to take the key home with her; she’d tucked it in her pocket when she found it, moving Vivian from the bed to the CT scan machine. Perhaps it had fallen out of Vivian’s purse.
But then, in the flurry of activity that ensued, Taylor forgot all about the key until she was walking home. She could have—should have—turned around and given it to security, to be placed among Vivian’s other personal belongings that they were holding on her behalf.
But she hadn’t.
She’d let it sit heavily in her pocket during her cold walk home, through her whiskey-fueled conversation with Sam, a little bronze secret bumping against her every other thought and word.
Her finger hovers over Vivian’s name. She’s never looked up a patient while she’s not at the hospital. She knows they track this kind of stuff. But she has a right to look, doesn’t she? If she were returning to work, that would be the first thing she’d do: look up her patient to see how she is doing.
So many of Taylor’s patients are never admitted to the floor: They are triaged, treated, and released, ushered out the door from whence they came. In the ER, she often doesn’t have time to get to know her patients; it’s something she misses from working at the outpatient orthopedic center. For the handful of ER patients who do get admitted, Taylor has historically followed their progress, even visited them at the bedside. She’s felt a certain amount of care for them, like a mother hen. She’s not totally heartless, after all. There wassomethingabout nursing that drew her to it, even if she initially just viewed it as a means to an end, a one-way ticket to get the hell out of her small, suffocating North Carolina town and into Boston.
So, checking up on her patient via the online portal isn’t totally out of the ordinary. It’s just 3:00 a.m. out of the ordinary.
But Taylor has an itch to scratch. She wants to know more about this patient who arrived looking like a Van Gogh among a bunch of kindergarten-level finger paintings. Vivian deteriorated so quickly—her brain swelling from the subdural hematoma—and then she was promptly put into a medical coma. So now any chance Taylor has of communicating with the woman is gone, which makes her feel only more compelled to understand:How does one become a Vivian in life? Who is she?
Taylor swallows as a burgeoning insight builds within her: Vivian is whoTaylor’s motherwas. Who Taylor’s mother would have been, had she not died in a basement house fire. Yes, Vivian’s a few years younger than her mother would be, and yes, she has green eyes instead of her mother’s brown, but Vivian’s elegant essence is the same one Taylor’s mother possessed. They even wear the same scent.
Taylor presses on Vivian’s name with a decisive click. The screen opens to a new window, making her feel like she always does: Whether she’s at her dad’s crab house restaurant watchingwealthy summer tourists, flipping through old photos of her stylish mom, or gazing through the windows of fancy Boston townhomes at the city’s elite, it’s the same sensation.
Her whole life she’s been peering at everything she’s ever wanted from the outside.
Vivian
Present Day
I am what I am.Two puffed cheeks, a round nose. Yellow pipe. Sailor hat.Popeyeis the first thing she thinks of when she comes to.
