Fearless (13 page)

ZOLOV WAS IN ROOM 502. HEATHER was now in room 724, and Gaia was in room 728. Sam had been released from the emergency room last night after being examined and bandaged He had slept—or at least lain—in his own bed most of last night Today he made his rotations like a physician. Like a disoriented, exhausted, overwrought, inept physician who hadn’t actually gone to medical school.

He had no idea what happened last night. It was a complete mystery why he wasn’t dead and who’d

fought off the gang. One of the policemen thought it was Renny, the kid who’d called 911, but that didn’t make much sense. One of the paramedics jokingly suggested it was Superman.

Sam had this strange, hazy memory of Gaia … but no. That was obviously a fitful hallucination—a product of his own deranged fantasy life.

Zolov’s slashing wound was minor, but he was so old, the doctor on call wanted to observe him for another twenty-four hours. Zolov seemed to Sam in happy spirits and was very fond of the hospital food. He’d already discovered an orderly who loved to play chess.

Heather lay in the bed only a foot away from him, almost good as new and being released the following afternoon.

Gaia, he hadn’t actually spoken to. He’d only prowled around the door to her room like a cat burglar, wanting to catch a glimpse of her but feeling too weird to actually enter.

“So Carrie told me that Miles and them are all coming over tomorrow night. It was supposed to be a surprise, but … you know.”

Sam didn’t know, but he nodded, anyway. Heather had been chatting gaily at him for almost an hour. She was propped up in her bed, surrounded by at least a billion flowers, wearing her own pink linen robe. The bouquet he’d carefully chosen was

hidden behind two veritable towers of greenery and a gargantuan basket of fruit. Nurses and doctors and scores and scores of visitors slipped in and out, attending to her as if she were a reigning queen. Her face was flushed and lovely.

“And you’ll be there, right?”

Sam glanced up. He’d forgotten to listen to the first part of the question. He nodded again.

“Great. I mean, my mom is going to, like, shit if I’m not in bed by ten. But it will be fun, anyway.”

Heather didn’t know Gaia was just down the hall. She’d accepted his explanation for his swollen purple eye with a minimum of questions. She’d cooed about how brave he was and how he’d avenged her, which wasn’t true, of course, but whatever.

“… Don’t you think?” She was looking at him expectantly after a long soliloquy on something or other.

Sam nodded, grateful Heather only asked yes or no questions and rhetorical ones at that.

“I figure we can just order more if we run out,” Heather continued.

How had Heather managed to turn a hospital stay into such a social whirlwind? he wondered as two more random friends waved at her from the doorway. “We’ll come back,” one of them whispered loudly in a we’re-cool-to-the-fact-that-your-boyfriend-is-here kind of way.

“Right,” he said absently.

He was thinking about whether or not the door to room 728 would be fully open and what he might say if he did venture into room 728. And then he felt ashamed. What kind of asshole obsessed about a troubling near stranger when his girlfriend was in the hospital?

He was considering this when Heather’s face changed distinctly. He turned to see why. He clamped his jaw down so hard, he nearly crushed his back teeth.

“Um, hello?” It was Gaia hovering at the door. Her face was tentative. He’d never seen her hair down before. It was a pale, beautiful yellow, and there was lots of it—it fell below her shoulders. Her few freckles stood out in the fluorescent light.

Heather’s expression turned from surprised to pinched and angry. “What are you doing here?”

“I—I—um, actually spent the night down the hall because—”

Heather shook her head in disbelief. “I swear to God, it’s like you’re stalking me.”

Gaia looked desperately uncomfortable as her gaze shifted from Heather to Sam and then back again. Her skin looked so pale, it was almost translucent. She tugged and fidgeted with her grayish purple hospital gown. “I don’t know if you heard, but I … there was … this fight last night and …”

“Do I care?” Heather’s voice was so harsh, Sam winced inwardly.

“No, it’s just …” Gaia sighed and started over. “It doesn’t matter. I just wanted to tell you that I’m very sorry for not warning you about the guy with the knife in the park. It was a bad and dishonorable thing to do, and I don’t need you to say it’s okay or anything. I’m not looking to be friends. But what I did was wrong, and I’m very sorry for it”

Sam’s heart moved up through his chest and into his throat as he watched Gaia. He saw something in her eyes (when he let himself) that was so profoundly vulnerable and scarred that her defiance only made it more moving and distressing to him. Was he the only one who saw it? Was he imagining it? He found himself hoping with unfamiliar passion that Heather would be kind to her. Gaia’s speech was met with at least a minute of silence.

“Are you done?” Heather finally asked.

Sam’s heart dislocated his tonsils. He couldn’t swallow. He was supposed to be on Heather’s side. She was his girlfriend, and furthermore, she was the one who’d been wronged. But he struggled against the impulse to put his arms around Gaia and tell Heather to go to hell.

Gaia nodded.

“Then please go away,” Heather said. She was capable of causing hypothermia when she felt like it.

Gaia left just as Heather’s mom arrived in the

doorway. Sam practically leaped to his feet. “Heather, your mom probably wants some time with you,” he mumbled, needing to get out of that room if he was ever going to breathe again. “Hey, Mrs. Gannis,” he said politely, bolting past her.

He paused for a moment or two before following Gaia into her room. Although it was only a matter of thirty feet from Heather’s, it belonged to a different universe. Aside from a pitiful clump of bright orange flowers in a sticky-looking glass bottle, it was colorless, empty, quiet. Gaia was sitting with her arms around her knees on the radiator under the window, staring out at the rain.

“Gaia?” he said.

She turned around. She had those eyes again. “Hi.”

She looked like a waif in her hospital gown. Her feet were bare, her ankles surprisingly delicate. Her toenails were mostly covered in chipped brown polish. She had such a big presence, he’d never realized how slight she could appear.

It was too quiet. He needed to say something to her, but the feelings stirring in his core weren’t getting anywhere near his mouth. He found his legs taking steps that brought him close to her.

“How are you doing?” she asked softly, filling a tiny part of the silence.

“Oh, fine,” he said, as if that were a surprising question. “What about you?”

“Fine. I’m going home tomorrow.”

“I’m glad.”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “So, where are your folks?”

Her pupils seemed to dilate, but she didn’t look away. “I don’t have any.”

Sam wanted to slit his throat. And yet somehow the information didn’t completely surprise him. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“That’s okay,” she said quickly. “How could you have known?”

“I—I didn’t … I—I just …” His voice petered out. So much for the speech therapist.

“Sam,” she said.

His name sounded different than it ever had before. “Yes?”

“I am very, very sorry for attacking you last night. I wish I had it to do over.”

For some odd reason, he found himself smiling a little. That was the one thing in his life he would have left just the same. “No, no. It wasn’t your fault. I’m the one who’s sorry … for … for everything.”

“I seem to have a lot to apologize for,” she said quietly, studying her fingernails. Her hands were exceptionally graceful, although her nails were bitten down to the quick.

“Some people do, and they say nothing,” he murmured. He hoped she would know what he meant.

She nodded.

“Gaia, do you have any idea what happened last night?”

She tilted her head “What do you mean?”

“I mean, somebody beat up those guys and … saved my skin. Maybe yours, too. Do you have any idea who it was or how it happened?”

Her eyes didn’t move from his. She was looking for something from him as intently as he was from her. “Probably no more than you,” she said equivocally.

He took a deep breath. “I have these strange fragments of memories, but … well …” He found his cheeks warming at the images in his mind “But they don’t make sense.”

Gaia shrugged. “Oh.”

“I mean, you didn’t …” His voice was obviously beseeching, but he couldn’t supply the rest of the question.

She wasn’t going to help him.

“Maybe it will come back to one of us,” he said lamely.

“Maybe.”

He stuck his hands in his pants pockets. “Did you see Zolov today?”

Gaia smiled. “Yeah. He’s happy. He keeps asking for more pudding.”

Sam smiled, too. Suddenly he wanted to stay here and smile at her for the rest of his life.

“Yeah,” he repeated stupidly.

She lifted up her arm to brush a strand of hair from her face and as she did revealed a deep, prune-colored bruise on the tender underside of her arm. “Oh,” he said out loud, his breath catching. Suddenly he wasn’t just close to her but nearly touching her. Two of his fingers hovered around her elbow.

She lifted her arm again and glanced at the bruise, wondering at his reaction. “This?” She turned out her arm and offered it to him.

For some reason the dark, angry bruise on her soft, sweet skin pained him beyond words. It was a helpless spot, even on Gaia’s body. She has no parents, he found himself thinking disconnectedly. She has a terrible bruise on that hidden, sad part of her arm and she has no parents.

Without thinking properly, he let his fingertips land on her skin just above the inside of her elbow. Gaia looked down at them, but she didn’t flinch. Together they watched his fingers slowly graze the damaged spot so gently, he wasn’t sure whether he felt her skin or simply her warmth.

The warmth radiated up into his face, now bent over her. He was hypnotized by that passage of skin. He inhaled her subtle fragrance—a faint but tantalizing mixture of chamomile and Chap Stick and caramel and faded laundry detergent.

Was he breathing? Was his heart still beating?

“It’s nothing much,” she said in something just above a whisper. “You should see the ones on my stomach.”

Oh, God. The mere thought of her stomach was a mistake.

“And this,” she said. She lifted a curtain of gold hair to show a nasty bruise on her hairline just above her ear.

Now his hand was on her hair. He’d first realized it last night, that her hair was magical stuff. It was weightless and sparkled with strangely mutable color—as if it were shot through with sunlight

His eyes were on her wound, then suddenly his lips. It had nothing to do with thinking. If it had anything to do with thinking, he never would have done it Because he was a cautious, rational person. Everyone said so.

His lips touched her hairline so tenderly. She breathed into him, letting her head, her body relax against him. She let out a tiny sound A hum, not a word.

He’d found his purpose with her, in that touch of his lips, in those few seconds. Without caution or anything related to reason, he knew (he didn’t know how he knew) that he had a unique power. He alone had it Did she know? Did she care? Would she hate him for it? Or would she, could she, love him?

As his lips moved with exquisite gentleness from

the bruise in her hairline to the bandaged cut over her left eyebrow, he knew that he somehow possessed the power to kiss her and make her better. It was a puzzling, inexplicable kind of certainty that came only in dreams. It was an idea so complex and fragile that if he even blinked, he feared he would lose it.

Let me show you, he thought as his lips moved toward hers. Let me show you what I can do.

She was staring up at him in wonder. Her fingers had wrapped around his. Her breath was slow and just barely audible. Her lips were parted in a question. Her blue-violet eyes opened into a billion possible worlds.

“There you are!” The booming words cut through the spell with the force of an ax.

The pretty, plump nurse who’d spoken them was carrying only a paper cup and some pills. “There you are!” she said again, this time clearly to him. Her voice was so loud, it was disorienting. Sam wished he had a remote control to pause her or at the very least turn down the volume.

“You’re
Heather’s boyfriend, right?
“

Could they hear her all the way uptown? he wondered absently.

“She’s
looking for you
—asking
everybody
where
you went
.”

Could they hear her in Harlem? In Connecticut? At the North Pole?

Sam had traveled deep into a netherworld, and it

was hard coming back. He looked at Gaia, but her face was turned to the window.

“Gaia?”

When she turned back to him, her face was different.

“Yeah?”

“I’ll see you later?”

“Sure, maybe,” she said.

Her eyes were no longer the color of the dear night sky soaring up into a universe of stars and moons and planets and galaxies. They were iced over. Shut.

“Hey, Sam,” she called as he walked toward the door.

He felt something dangerous as he turned to her.

“You and Heather make a great couple,” she said. Her voice was as frigid as her expression.

All hope and warmth drained away. He blinked.

“I’m not sure how to take that,” he said.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

Sam’s sore muscles tightened. He pulled his eyes from her face and forced the fuzzy clouds in his mind apart, letting in the cold light of reason.

He was awake. He was fully awake, and the dream was gone. Now he could remember that he disliked Gaia. Even hated her. She was trouble. Within a week of meeting her he’d been beaten to a pulp and two people he really cared about were in the hospital. Gaia