Between Here and Forever - Elizabeth Scott [35]
“I’m sorry,” she says, after I’ve asked her for what feels like the thousandth time. “I wasn’t looking at Tess. I was talking to you.”
“But—”
“Abby, I really do have to get back to work,” she says, and moves past me, not even looking back as she leaves the unit.
“Are you sure you paged the doctor?” I ask the nurse who supposedly made the call, and she says, “I’m sure,” her voice filled with something that sounds an awful lot like pity.
I swallow.
As I stand near the nursing station, waiting, Eli is a silent and weirdly reassuring presence. I like that he’s not trying to tell me how the doctor will be here soon or anything like that. I glance at him a couple of times and he smiles at me, then goes back to drawing on a piece of paper he must have gotten from one of the nurses.
I walk over to him—not to stand near him, but to see what he’s drawing. I know it for the lie it is—I do want to see what he’s doing, but I also just want to be near him—and still walk over there anyway.
Eli is not an artist. He’s just doodling, like I do sometimes, like lots of people do, squiggly lines and boxes, and it really hits me that he’s a guy, past all his beauty, he’s a person, and then—
And then, for the first time in almost two years, I want to do something with a guy other than wait for him to go away. I want to touch him. Not in a just-thinking-about-it way, but for real. Not like—not like I did with Jack, I’m not that stupid, I’m not going to pretend I could ever be someone Eli would really want to see—but I want him to hold my hand, tell me without words that everything will be okay. That someone is here with me.
I haven’t wanted someone to comfort me in a long time, but I want it now.
“You don’t have to wait,” I tell Eli, because wanting something and acting on it are two very different things and I trust my heart and body about as much as I believe that the nurse who said she paged the doctor actually paged him.
Which is to say, not much.
“I don’t mind,” he says, making another box on the right hand side of the paper, then the left.
“The doctor’s not going to come.”
“He’ll come,” Eli says.
“No,” I say. “No one … no one believes me.”
Eli stops drawing and looks at me. “I believe you.”
I fold my hands into themselves so I won’t reach for him. I force myself to think about Tess. About what she needs. “Can you—if you asked Clement, would he be able to get a doctor here?”
Eli shakes his head. “He’s not—he doesn’t have any real power.”
“But he gave all that money—”
“He can’t—it doesn’t work like that,” Eli says, and when I laugh because, hello, of course money does things everywhere, he touches my arm. “People in Milford think he’s strange and I don’t think—I don’t think anyone would even talk to him if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s, you know.”
“Rich.”
Eli looks down at his notebook. “Yeah.”
I go back to Tess’s room. She’s lying there, perfectly still like her eyes didn’t move, like there wasn’t something she was watching behind her closed lids, like there wasn’t something she saw with her eyes wide shut.
“Wake up,” I say, my voice angry, a whispered hiss, and when she doesn’t move I grab her chart—yes, I know I’m not supposed to touch it, and no, I don’t care—and write a note about what I saw on the blank back of a card that was once tied to a bunch of flowers blooming brightly in the corner. And then I stick that card on her chart’s clipboard.
Those flowers … they wilted into nothing ages ago, but my parents have kept the cards, have them waiting for Tess to look at. I figure she won’t miss the back of the one that’s been signed by Beth, stupid Beth with her boxing up all of Tess’s things and her stupid signature, all swooping capital letters like she’s some sort of star.
The nurse who paged the doctor comes in then, sees me sticking the card onto Tess’s chart, and says, “You need to leave now.”
“I’m waiting for the doctor,” I say, and she puts her hand on my shoulder.
“Abby,” she says, and I’m startled that she knows my name. Almost no one uses it here; I’m just a visitor, I am