Between Here and Forever - Elizabeth Scott [36]
“I know what I saw.”
“You miss her,” the nurse says, and I start to laugh because I do miss Tess, but not like she thinks. I’m not the devoted sister, I’m not the noble, plain girl who sacrifices all for her sister to come back. I want Tess to wake up so she’ll go away.
I want her back in her life and out of mine.
“Maybe you want to take her somewhere—a walk, maybe?” the nurse says to Eli, like I’m a toddler or dog or just a teenager not worth listening to because Tess isn’t moving now.
“Tess,” I say, looking at her. “Please.”
Nothing.
“Can you—?” the nurse says, gesturing at me to Eli, giving him a help-me-out-here look.
“I saw it too,” Eli says. “So why can’t we wait for the doctor?”
It works. I can’t believe it, but it does, and so we wait. Me and him, sitting in Tess’s room, on either side of her bed.
It takes me a long time to say it, not because I don’t know how, but because I’m afraid to say it.
“Thanks,” I get out, after we’ve sat there for a while, and I was right to be afraid to say it because when he says, “Sure,” easily, like it was nothing, I want him to have said something else, and I don’t even look at Tess to see if his voice has moved her again. I just—
I’m too busy thinking about how he’s moved me.
twenty-six
The doctor doesn’t come, and visiting hours end.
I ask if I can wait anyway, knowing I’ll be told no.
I am, but the nurse who said she paged the doctor, the one who put her hand on my arm and said “You miss her,” like what I feel for Tess is that simple, says, “If the doctor has anything to report, we’ll be sure to let you know,” as I’m headed out of the unit.
“Thanks again for, you know, before,” I tell Eli as we leave the hospital. “See you tomorrow?”
He shakes his head. “Clement and I go to church, and then I have—there’s some family stuff.”
“Oh, right.” Stupid. He just gave up his Saturday night to be here, so why would he want to give up his Sunday too?
“I can meet you on Monday, though,” he says. “Regular time?”
I shrug, like I don’t care if he shows up or not.
But I am supposed to care. For Tess, at least. So I let myself say, “I know Tess will like that,” before I start to walk away.
“Hey, can I—can I take you home?”
I freeze. I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. No one has ever asked me that before. Jack would sometimes walk me back to the house after we talked, but he never asked, and we both knew he only did it for a chance to see Tess.
I take a deep breath.
“You want to talk about Tess some more or something?” I ask, mostly to remind myself why I’m here, why he’s here, but when he says, “Yeah, sure,” I feel the bits of me I broke with Jack, those stupid hopeful bits, bleed open.
I feel grubby in his car, my crappy clothes a reminder that I don’t belong here. Tess belonged—belongs—in this car. Not me.
“Tess belongs here,” I say, and Eli, pulling out of the hospital lot, looks at me like he doesn’t understand.
“This is her kind of car,” I say. “I can see her in here, you know? She’d like it.”
“I don’t like it,” Eli says. “It’s like driving a bus. I used to … I used to have my own car. My parents told me I could get a car when I turned sixteen because that’s what everyone did, and they wanted—they wanted me to be like everyone else. I was going to get a, you know—”
“Super-fast sports car?” I say. “Let me guess, you wanted a red one too, right?”
“Silver,” he says with a quick grin at me. “But we got to the lot and there was this car over in the corner, some car an old lady owned and that her kids had gotten rid of when she died, and it looked so sad. All alone out there, you know? And her kids hadn’t even bothered to clean out the glove box. When I looked in it, there was a shopping list. Eggs, bread, tea, all in this tiny, old-lady handwriting. And I kept thinking, What if that’s the last thing she ever wrote? What if she’d made the list and put it in the car so she’d remember it when she went out and she never