Clearer in the Night (5 page)

I woke up in the wee hours of the morning. My roommate was curled into a tight little ball, crying. Not sobbing, not even weeping. Just tears, sliding out of her eyes, soaking the pillow, flooding the room. I heard her, for just a moment, heard and saw what had been done to her that no one knew about. My gorge rose, and I choked it back down. My hands were shaking. Wes was gone. Suicide watch guy was gone. Didn’t that defeat the purpose of him? It was just her and me, and she was clawing at her bandaged wrists. I read somewhere—probably in an article that Mom wrote—that girls are more likely to attempt suicide, but guys are more likely to succeed, because guys eat a gun barrel or hang themselves, while girls choose more passive methods of escape. Like slitting their wrists or downing bottles of pain meds or engaging in dangerous behavior with members of the opposite sex. Or so the article said.

Before I had time to really doubt myself, I slid out of my bed and went to crouch at her bedside. I put my hands gently over hers, where she was struggling with the bandages. She yanked her hands away from me, her eyes feral, avoiding mine. That twisting and turning set up in my belly again, and it was hard to breathe for a moment. But we were alone and—God help me—I’d heard her.

“Is this really what you want?” I asked her.

She huffed out a huge breath and rolled away from me. “You have no idea,” she said. “Just go away.”

“You feel dirty,” I said, keeping my voice low and soft, like you’d talk to a frightened dog. “Everywhere he touched you. Right? Like you’ll never be clean. But he’s the one who’s dirty. He is, not you. If you tell them what happened, they might be able to help you.”

She huddled as small as she could against the pillows, pale under her tan and wash of black hair. “What, did you read that in a book or something?”

“No,” I said. It had been in that same journal article that Mom had written. Totally different.

She was dissolving into tears again. “I wasn’t raped,” she said, but she flinched when I tried for her hand again.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry for misunderstanding.” The flashes in her mind—they were not open to interpretation, at least not from where I was sitting. But what else could I do? Pushing her to admit something she wasn’t ready to talk about would do more harm than good, and besides, I could hit the call button on the sly, and the nurse could get someone who actually had a degree in this crap to help her.

“I didn’t say no,” she told the wall, as I sat down on my own sheets. “It’s not rape if you don’t tell him to stop.”

“Maybe not in a way the police can prosecute,” I said. “But maybe you still weren’t the one in the wrong.” I hit the button with my thumb, my hand behind my back, where she couldn’t see. “You know?”

She offered me a tired, weak smile. Her thoughts were completely clear, though her lips didn’t move at all.
If only
. The words echoed through my mind and left a bitter, lime-rind sort of flavor on my tongue.

“My name is Caitie,” I said. I almost corrected myself, and then I let it stand. It was how I thought of myself, anyway. Most of the time. When I wasn’t disparaging myself. Which wasn’t all that often. The pause stretched into awkward silence before she sighed and said, “Liz. Elizabeth Grace.”

“Nice to meet you, Elizabeth Grace,” I said, trying to be funny.

She shuddered. “Liz, I think. Just Liz.”

“Okay.” And then the nurse bustled in, took in the scene—Liz with her tear-stained cheeks and red eyes and the torn up bandages on her wrists, and the empty chair by the bedside—and her lips pursed. She bustled right back out again.

“How did you know, anyway?” Liz asked, her eyes anywhere but on my face.

“What?”

“How did you know? About—him. No one else could tell. Everyone else thinks we’re perfect together. So what gave it away?” She glanced at me with hollow eyes. “You can’t tell just by looking at me, can you?”

My pulse picked up, and I hugged my knees. “You were talking in your sleep,” I said, shooting in the dark.

She snorted. “I know that’s a lie. I haven’t slept in a week.”
Since it happened
.

“That’s a long time to not sleep.”

She shrugged.
Better than the dreams
, I heard.

“True,” I said, without thinking.

Her eyes got huge and wide and terrified again. I pressed my hand into my belly, trying to calm the circling and twisting. “How are you doing that?” she asked. “I think you’re reading my mind.”

I scoffed, but I wasn’t convincing either one of us. “That’s impossible,” I said.

“Are you an angel?”

“Definitely not.”

She smiled for the first time. “I don’t think I believe you,” she said. The nurse was back then, with fresh bandages, and a middle-aged woman in a turtleneck and slacks in tow. The woman should have had shrink tattooed on her forehead. I did my best to fade into the background while the nurse re-bandaged Liz’s wrists, and the shrink spoke quietly with her.

Then an orderly came with a wheelchair. Apparently there was an opening on the psych floor now, and she was off. As she got settled, she looked at me, and her eyes narrowed. Her voice exploded in my head, so loud that I understood why Sam Tate had gotten a nosebleed.
I won’t tell them about you
, she thought, probably as hard as she could. Ow. “Get better,” I said out loud. I didn’t rub my head until they wheeled her out. It didn’t seem right for an angel to get a headache.

I woke up as the doctors were doing rounds. Mom hadn’t come back, and Wes hadn’t reappeared. Wherever Liz was, I hoped that she was better off than she was last night. I hoped she was healing.

TV doctors never tell people that there’s no reason for patients to feel the way they do. There’s always some rare disease that just somehow happened to penetrate suburbia, and the young hotshot—or the old curmudgeon—always figures it out just in time. If a doctor says, “You seem to be doing much better now,” in the first act, it’s only so the patient can have a dramatic relapse right before the commercial break.

In real life—in my sample size of one, anyway—real doctors seem a lot more willing to say, “Your CT was clean, your lumbar puncture came back fine, your fever’s gone, your white cells are elevated but not abnormal. It seems like some kind of virus hit your system very hard, but in the end, you seem to be recovering. We see no reason to keep you here. Go home, take it easy, rest up. Do you have someone you can stay with, just in case you start feeling worse again?”

The doctor—Dr. Jacob Turner, Internal Med Resident, according to his name tag—looked like he’d passed exhausted years ago. His hair was a nice shade of brown, but gray was creeping in at the temples. His eyes looked young and friendly, but there were creases around them. At least the lines around his mouth looked like they were from laughing. “I have a roommate,” I said. Who was going to read me the riot act, as soon as she got the chance, I was sure of that.

“Good,” he said. “What about someone who can give you a ride home?”

“My mom. She’ll be here soon, I’m sure.” I wasn’t really sure of that at all. My mind kept wandering back to the smell of whiskey on her breath. How had she been drinking at the hospital? Was she carrying a flask again? She hadn’t been that bad in years, not since right after they died, when she was still insisting that it had all been faked somehow. That was when she’d gone away for a little vacation, as she called it, and I’d stayed with Shan and her mom for a couple of months. When my life had been something that pretended at normal. She’d never stopped drinking entirely, but she’d been doing much better. For years. At least, while I’d been home. I hadn’t made any extreme attempts to stay in touch. I’d called when I thought of it, but every conversation we had was painful, so I avoided them when I could. She sent me checks, now and then, to supplement the meager income I was pulling off, splitting shifts between being a backup teacher in a preschool and a barista in a local coffee shop. What was there to talk about, anyway? Her daytime life was protected by HIPAA, and I doubted she wanted to hear about the butts I cleaned or the various ways people managed to be insulting while ordering their double-tall-mocha. We were apples and oranges, she and I, and the less time we spent trying to understand each other, the less time wasted.

But still. If she was drinking again, maybe I needed to keep a closer eye on her. Sometimes, things got weird, when she’d been drinking heavily. Stuff happened. I’d call her when the docs cleared out, and see if she answered. See if she offered to come and pick me up, or if I needed to figure out something else. Like the bus to my apartment. Or something.

As the doctors finished patting me on the head and leaving, the nurse—Jamie, again, back for the day shift—came into the room. “I hear they’re setting you free,” she said as she set down a breakfast tray.

“You hear right.” I scooted myself more upright as she pushed the tray over my lap.

“Well, before you abandon us, you have a visitor, if you want to see him. Your handsome rescuer.” She smiled and leaned in close as she fluffed the pillows behind me.
He’s worth ten of that creep that’s been hanging around
, she thought.

“Sure,” I said. “I’d love to say thank you.”

“I’ll send him in after you eat.” She smiled approvingly at me. She looked like my mother for a minute. Or the older sister I’d never really had.

I recognized him as soon as he walked into the room. He had flowers and a gift bag with him, and he was wearing jeans and a flannel button-down shirt. His red hair was messy and wavy around his face, but what I really recognized was the soft, kind look in his eyes. They were such a deep blue that they seemed surreal, and on another face they would have been cold. On his, they were exquisite.

“You look better than you did the last time I saw you,” he said.

“I feel better, too.”

He handed me the flowers—wildflowers, I thought, but nothing I could name off the top of my head, although I hadn’t really been swimming in occasions to identify cut flowers—and then held out his hand to shake. “Eli,” he said. “Elijah Wright, actually.”

“Nice to meet you, Eli. Caitlyn Murphy. But you probably know that already.” Was it my imagination, or did his hand linger over mine for a moment longer than it had to? Did his thumb pass over my wrist on purpose as he drew his hand away? Did the left corner of his mouth quirk up just a bit at the way my breathing deepened?

Jeez, girl, settle down. Guys who rescue damsels in distress and then turn up with flowers and presents are worlds—universes—out of your league. Save the memory to conjure up some time with my fingers in my panties, and wipe up the drool. “Thank you. For the rescue the other day.” I excelled at awkward. Way to go, Cait. Excellent job.

He nodded seriously, though. “I was in the right place at the right time. I’m just glad I got the chance to be of use.”

Was he for real? And I thought I was an epic doofus.

We were awkwardly silent for a long moment, and then we both did the wow-is-this-awkward laugh, which did nothing to relieve the tension. I pulled my legs up under the blanket and crossed them, and gestured at the foot of the bed. He sat down. Hovered was really a more accurate description. I laid the flowers down on the tray next to my bed. With my hands empty, he held the gift bag out to me.

“You really didn’t have to,” I said. “You saved my life. I should be bringing you presents.”

“It’s nothing fancy,” he said. “But I figured you’d have a lot of time to rest ahead of you and—well, open it.”

I pulled a layer of tissue paper out of the bag and found a book. A really thick book, paperback.
Cryptonomicon
was the title. It sounded familiar, but I hadn’t read it before. “Well, this will definitely fill a few days,” I said, and then winced at how utterly ungrateful that sounded.