My robe smelled of the estate—cedar chests, alfalfa blossoms—but the slippers were hospital issue. Too small, they left my heels brushing the cold floor. Gravity had evened out, at least.
I shuffled, toes clutching the precarious slippers, into the hall.
I recalled my first moments awake, afraid of something terrible waiting outside my room. But there was nothing scary about this hallway. A shiny tile floor, too much light, an unattended desk at the far end.
With one hand on the wall, I started walking—away from the desk. I didn’t want anyone ushering me back to bed. It was a relief to move my muscles.
The doors to the patient rooms were open, allowing glimpses of sleeping, unguarded figures, machines in various states—alight, pulsing, gently hissing.
It felt good to be the only one awake, the way it felt to walk among ordinaries. I’d missed this sense of my own power.
The hallway ended at a large window that looked out over a parking lot. I leaned against the cool glass to catch my breath. A smattering of cars clustered near the bright halo of the intake doors, but the rest of the lot was vacant.
The emptiness out there made me feel abandoned. I wished my family would take me back to the estate, to the world I understood.
My reflection stared back from the glass—hair raggedly shorn, shaved in places, centipedes of staples rippling my scalp. The fading scratches on my face unearthed memories of being pushed from an SUV. Between tired eyes, my nose was bulbous and bruised.
Push it under your feet.
You’re. Just. Meat.
I wondered if Uncle Cyrus had any bruises.
No, wait. He was just Cyrus now.
And I was Aunt Jessica…
I turned from the window, the floor aslant, the air too thin. Halfway back to my room, I veered to one side, reaching out to steady myself against a doorframe.
A soft noise came from inside the room. Sprawled on the bed was Bellamy, the little girl who’d visited me.
She lay tangled in her blanket, one pale leg thrust over the edge of her bed. I saw pink scars where pins and rods had gone into her knee.
It pained me to see her asleep—so thin, so delicate, a child made of eggshells. I still felt the strings connecting us, her fragility plucking at my bones.
Cancer, she’d said. The spreading rot that had hollowed out my Aunt Eunice when I was twelve, leaving her ashen, gaunt, weak. And then gone.
Mortons don’t always heal.
I could shuffle closer, here in the dark, and break this defenseless child so easily. Switch off her machines, snuff her out with a pillow. Snip those hundred humming strings that connected us. Kill this weakness, like a rabbit.
Like my Rabbit.
“Miss?” came a gentle voice.
I turned to face the nurse in the hall, happy to look anywhere that was not the breakable child.
“You’re up!” she enthused in a whisper. “Good work, but let’s get you back to bed.”
“Good idea,” I said, and offered her my arm.
43
Over the next few days, time organized itself again, days and nights following one another with hardly any missing hours.
My family began visiting in force. We’d given a lot of money to the hospital over the decades, and visiting hours did not apply. Passels of cousins, aunts and uncles, Grandpa Dwight with fresh flowers. Veronica, bringing me yarn and needles, homemade food, a new phone. Cyrus, unmarked by the crash except for his right arm in a sling. Still no Sebastian.
These visitors unnerved me.
