Between Here and Forever - Elizabeth Scott [3]
Even more importantly, who wants to live near it?
Well, my parents, for one. They think it’s nice we live near a river, that on the weekend we can walk down to the water and trip along the sand-studded rocks (that’s “the beach”) and look at people grilling or riding around in tiny boats, their motors roaring as they pass each other going back and forth, back and forth.
But of course my parents like it. They didn’t grow up here. They grew up in a nice suburban neighborhood, with shopping malls and neighbors who aren’t all related to each other in some way. Or so they say. My mother’s parents are both dead, and my dad doesn’t talk to his parents at all, and they only ever mention where they’re from once in a while.
Tess used to love to look at pictures of them from back when they first started dating, and even before, from when they were in high school together. She asked all sorts of questions that neither of my parents ever really answered. It’s like they didn’t exist until they met each other and moved here.
Tess used to say our parents had secrets, and lots of them, but that was back when she was stressing out over going to college, and had also stopped talking to her best friend just because she got pregnant. And that made her into someone I had no desire to listen to.
I figure there won’t be any follow-up questions to the nonquestion I got about the ferry, but just when I’m feeling almost relaxed for the first time all day, Mom comes up and knocks on my door.
“Abby, what are you doing?”
“Homework.”
I’m not. I don’t need to, because Ferrisville High is a joke, but I need to be alone right now. Try to figure out what to do about Tess.
“I wanted to tell you that your uncles sent Tess flowers again,” she says. “Did you see them?”
“I must have missed them. Sorry.” I’d seen them, and read the cards. Get Well Soon on each of them, and nothing more. My mom’s brothers, Harold and Gerald, seem nice enough, but they don’t come to visit often.
Mom’s not that much older than they are, but it’s like—well, the couple of times they’ve been here, they treat Mom like she’s way older than they are. They treat her like she’s their mother, with a weird sort of respect and anger. I don’t know what they have to be mad about. They don’t live here.
“I’m going to go and make something to eat for your father and me,” Mom says. “Maybe heat up the leftover pancakes from this morning. Do you want to join us?”
I want to, but I don’t. If I do, I will see Tess’s chair. I will think about it.
I will know we are all thinking about it.
“I’d better finish my homework,” I say.
“All right then, good night,” she says, with a little sigh, and I listen to her footsteps fade away.
four
After school the next day, I grab my bike from the ferry dock (amazing how no one took it, right?) and head to the hospital. I weave through the ground floor, past the waiting room full of people doing just what the room wants them to, down the hall past the gift shop (run by cheery old Milford ladies who chat about their prize-winning dogs or flowers while they sell gum for the outrageous price of two bucks a pack), and around to the elevators.
Everything about Milford Hospital is depressing.
Well, not everything. I like the cafeteria. It looks out over the river, and Ferrisville is far enough away that you can’t really see it. You just get an impression of houses on carefully laid out streets, a factory nestled at one end, and a rocky strip of beach dotted with the weathered ferry station.
Plus the cafeteria is the one place in the hospital that doesn’t smell bad. Everywhere else smells like chemicals, like the kind of clean that can strip away your skin