Her question had me absolutely perplexed.
I wasn’t sure how long I was silent, but I heard the blankets rustling.
“Sorry, Doc. Just trying to make a friend. Forget I said?—”
“She reminds me of my sister.”
I blurted out the words before I could swallow them whole. I didn’t want to talk about my sister. I didn’t want to conjure her memory. I didn’t want to remember how much it hurt not to have my best friend around.
My poor baby sister.
“Doc,” she asked curtly.
It ripped me out of my trance, and I cleared my throat. “My apologies, Miss Elizabeth. What was that?”
She turned back toward me while lying in bed. She studied me with a pinched brow and wrinkled nose. “Did you say your sister? I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“She died,” I said before I could catch the words.
Her face fell. “Oh.”
The silence was too much. “Pneumonia. She was fourteen.”
“I’m really sorry, Doc.”
I nodded before the corner of my eye caught the pain medication bottle perched on the bedside table. I busied myself with going over and checking how much was still in it. The calculations in my brain were quick, and it only took me seconds to determine that she wasn’t overdoing it on her pain medicine.
If anything, she wasn’t taking enough.
“Let’s get another dose in you, Miss Elizabeth,” I said.
I expected her to fight back. To protest. To tell me that she didn’t need it. But instead, all she did was push herself upright in bed. That was good. It was good to see her pushing ranges of motion strengthening.
It took her best friend, Marla, a while to build back those types of strengthening motions.
“Here,” I said as I walked over to her side of the bed. “I’ll bring it to you.”
“Thanks,” she said softly.
I crouched down before I reached up and peeled the comforter away from her face. My eyes studied some of the bruising that was now finally fading into that sickly looking yellow that always denoted time and length of healing.
“Slowly,” I said as I brought the little cup to her lips. “Small sips.”
And for once, she did as I asked.
Her eyes held mine, and I held hers. Gray to gray. Strength to strength. She was beautiful, Miss Elizabeth. Even in the sunlight that poured through the exam room downstairs, she had this hair that twinkled like twilight. Such the opposite of my hair. She had these random freckles all over her body, too. Not like the scattered freckles I had everywhere, but she had patches of them. She had one on the small of her back to the left. She had one just up under her right arm. She had another small patch of it behind her left ear, of all places.
“I’m done,” she said.
Her voice snapped me out of my trance and I moved the cup away from her lips. “Need some water?”
She just shook her head and placed it back down against the pillow.
I stood to my feet. I tried to ignore the way my knees popped like rice krispies. I went into the attached bathroom that this particular bedroom in my estate afforded and I washed out the medicine cup. I took it back out to where I had found it and tipped it over against the edge of the bedside table so that it could dry out for when she needed it next.
But it wasn’t until I got back to standing in the doorframe that I heard her voice again.
“I’m really sorry for your loss, Doc.”
