Skin and Bones (20 page)

Bones wanted his future self to say something equally brilliant. But everything he wrote lacked originality. He tore up page after page, frustrated, then settled on:

Bones and Alice were in dire need of a tube feeding, although they found exploring each other’s curves and hollows more interesting than discussing wasting flesh.

Late one night Alice wept over something she couldn’t explain. Bones thought her tears were opalescent from the absorption of his fluids. It must have nutrients, he thought, because her breasts were overflowing with the same milky substance.

Bones and Alice hid during the daylight hours when only those with Oxygen Permits were allowed above ground. Time passed, days turning into weeks that fell one on top of another.

He played his guitar, expressing ideas about a community of artists, arranging his words in an elaborate language. “Your music showers me with images,” Alice said, working pigment into wet plaster. “Keep singing and I’ll paint it.”

He sang about his passion for his soul mate, Alice, while she languished over her latest fresco,
A Ballet for Bones
.

Another endlessly long day.

Bones was tired. So tired.

Bones knew he’d gained another five flippin’ pounds without the flippin’ scale telling him he was a flippin’ one-hundred-fifteen flippin’ pounds—because the waistband of his sweats was leaving an indelible ring on his flabby skin and choking off his belly button.

He stood on the overturned trashcan peering into the treacherous mirror with its unexpected dangers. Sometimes the glass sucked you in, and you were swimming alone in glass and more than a little bit afraid. Sometimes life itself sucked you in like that. Today his reflection told him what he already knew. If he didn’t buy bigger pants, he’d be chewed in half by insatiable elastic.

Bones turned on the hot water in the sink until steam obliterated his augmenting self. He knew he didn’t have a choice, standing in front of his closet a minute later studying the jeans his mom had brought for him. Relaxed, yet classic. Slightly faded. Ragged cuffs.

Bones shed his trusty sweats and stepped into one leg, then the other, yanking on the waist, worried it wouldn’t make it over his hips. He refused to look at the size as the jeans fought back. Unfortunately Bones won. At least the jean material was soft; his mom must’ve washed them in fabric softener.

Lard set Rachael Ray aside. “Not too bad, more like you’ve got an ass. Girls like an ass, man. It gives them something to hang onto.”

“Yeah?”

“Trust me.”

“Never.”

Later in the dayroom, Elsie said, “Hey there. You look good with a little meat on your bone.”

Bones couldn’t believe she was checking out his package.

Overall, the Eating Disorders Unit was in a shitty mood. Except for Elsie, who didn’t count, no one had slept all that much since Alice disappeared. Dr. Chu had somehow managed to be both distracted and verbose during therapy sessions. He’d never carried his cell phone with him before. Now he answered anxiously on the first ring.

Only Unibrow seemed immune to the low spirits on the fourth floor, indifferent as a head of lettuce.

As the days wore on, Bones felt like he was becoming lost in the memory of Alice’s eyes, her touch, her scent. Sometimes he got up in the middle of the night, hit the stairs, and wandered aimlessly around different floors, invariably ending up on the sixth floor, where Alice asked him to tell her a story. He wondered if she had the bear with her. Other times he’d run into nurses taking care of nighttime business. They were either too tired or busy to question him.

It was one of those days when Bones only thought about Alice and why she’d left and where she might have gone and what she might be doing every other second. He and Lard had talked about it ad nauseam and they came to the conclusion that she had to be okay, wherever she was. Otherwise—they’d worked frantically to convince each other—one of them would have heard something to the contrary.

Then on Friday night, while Bones was finishing a letter to his sister, Lard appeared in the doorway. “Do you know the difference between an alcoholic and someone with food issues?”

“How many guesses do I get?” Bones asked.

“A drunk can give up his drug, like cold turkey.”

“I suppose.”

“It might be about as easy as unscrambling an egg—but at least he won’t die.”

Bones didn’t get where this was going. “Sorry, you lost me.”

“What’s a person with an eating disorder supposed to give up?” Lard asked.

“I give up.”

“
Food
.”

“I get the analogy,” Bones said. “Sort of.”

“Guess it wouldn’t be much of a problem for anorexics.”

“More like nirvana.”

Lard grabbed his lunchbox. “Maybe I’m the one who’s been a contemptuous jerk.”

It wasn’t like Lard wanted a response; it was more like he was saying it out loud because he needed to hear what it sounded like.

Lard waved his lunchbox. “Wanna know what’s in here?”

Bones smiled at the ridiculous sight. “Only if you want to tell me.”

Lard flipped the latch, letting the lid fall open. Packages of Twinkies tumbled out. “I’ve been carrying around Twinkies the whole time I’ve been lecturing you,” he said. “I’m like a recovering alcoholic who keeps a bottle of Jack Daniels on the kitchen counter as a sick way of testing my willpower.”

Bones stared at the Twinkies. “Maybe it’s more like a reminder of who you used to be,” he said. “So you won’t go back to being that person.”

Lard flattened a Twinkie with the sole of his boot.

Smash!

“That’s why I didn’t take the magazine away from Alice.”

Smash!

“Because I had goddamned Twinkies in my lunchbox.”

Smash!

“Get rid of them for me, okay?”

Bones winced at the oozing cream filling. “I’ve been wondering about something else.”

“Lay it on me, man. I’m already in a shitty mood.”

“How did you get my medical files when I first got here?” Bones asked. “What’d you do, hack into Chu’s computer?”

Lard stood in doorway, effectively sealing his voice inside the room. “I found a set of keys in the kitchen. It was just a hunch, and sure enough, one of them was to his office.”

“No way.”

“Wanna guess his password?”

“
God
?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been thinking, if we could read Alice’s files…” Bones was still working it out in his mind. “Maybe we’d find something about her we don’t know, something to tell us where she might have gone. Her address…maybe if we could talk to her parents—”

“You think they’d talk to us?” Lard ran a hand through his unruly hair. “Knowing it was my car we used that day?”

Bones knew he was right.

“Besides Chu Man changed the lock right after I found his keys,” Lard said. “He would’ve changed his password too.”

“Probably.”

Bones was left with a dozen squashed sponge cakes, wondering if he should flush them down the toilet. First he’d have to unwrap them. He was sitting on the floor, scissors suspended like a dagger when Nancy came in.

“I have your new menus,” she said, stopping mid-stride.

Bones glanced up, their eyes locking.

“If I don’t see what you’re doing I won’t have to report it,” she said.

No one would believe he’d sneaked Twinkies onto the

EDU. And that’s what he told Nancy.

“You don’t have to explain,” she said.

Nancy stood there silently, swaying awkwardly from one sensible shoe to the other. Bones watched her, thinking about her lack of presence in the days since Alice disappeared.
She’s been avoiding me.

That’s when he finally knew. He read it in the dullness of her eyes and felt scared all over again. His voice pierced the silence, “Nancy, you know where Alice is, don’t you?”

Nancy sighed then swished by the beds and desks to the open window. “Yes, but…” She was staring out across the parking lot and talking away from him so he had to strain to hear. “I’m sorry, Bones. It isn’t just doctor-patient confidentiality…Alice is a minor and she was under our care when she left.”

She turned to him, closed her eyes a moment, and opened them again. “You saw her parents…what they’re like.”

The look on her face gave him a sinking feeling. He remembered that night on the roof with Alice when she talked about the bus stop in front of the hospital.
Wouldn’t it be fun to get on a bus and not know where you’d end up?
She could have gone anywhere.

“Did she take a bus?” he asked.

Nancy sort of nodded. “She bought a bus ticket to New York.” She chose her words carefully. “Police found her at a Greyhound bus station in LA. She was passed out in the bathroom…I’m sorry I can’t tell you more, Bones. We’re just so grateful she’s alive.”

Alive?

What did that mean? He’d thought she might have gone to San Francisco to dance on Fisherman’s Wharf for spare change or had been kidnapped by Romanian gypsies. “I never thought she wasn’t okay.”

Nancy looked at him now, really looked at him. “It’s this damned disorder, it’s so emotional, and at the same time biological. The two are so entangled. Sometimes people just never resolve—” She sighed, stopping herself. “How’re you doing with all this?”

Bones couldn’t answer. His grief was like the latest strain of bubonic plague. Zero mercy to it. Whoever said time heals all wounds should be drawn and quartered. His body ached from eleven days of heartbreaking worry.

“Sorry,” Nancy said again.

And this time she left.

Bones stabbed a Twinkie with the scissors and flung it out the window. Alice must be in a hospital somewhere. That had to be it. If she were somewhere in this hospital, news would have leaked out.

Bones scooped up the rest of the petroleum byproduct and let it sail out the window. He had to get his hands on a phone. He’d call every hospital in Los Angeles County if he had to. Or he’d take Lard’s car. Yeah, that was a better idea. He had to
see
her.

He dug through Lard’s desk searching for his keys.

“What’d you think, man?” Lard said as he emptied the dishwasher. “That I’d leave my keys lying around? After you parked in a handicapped spot? You’re lucky the Doodle didn’t get towed.”

“I was desperate,” Bones said.

“And another thing, the steering wheel was orange. You should definitely use a napkin when stealing a person’s car and eating his snacks.”

Bones sat down across from Teresa, vaguely aware of the fish on the table between them. It lay in a tray of ice chips, cold and dead. Teresa was tearing sheets of aluminum foil from a long roll, carefully measuring each square.

“Alice is in a hospital somewhere,” Bones said.

Teresa muttered, “
Coma
.”

Bones felt his heart slide into the ice chips. Nancy hadn’t said anything about a coma.

“How do you know?” Lard asked her.

“I overheard Dr. Chu on the phone when I went to his office to ask about—you know,” she said, not looking at them. “I’m pretty sure he was talking to one of her parents.”

Lard butt-bumped the dishwasher door closed. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Because there isn’t anything we can do,” she said quietly.

Bones hated her for saying what he should have known. He was on his feet, ready to hit the road. “What else did you hear?”

“I don’t know.” Teresa started to cry. “She’s in ICU. No one can see her but family.” She sounded frightened, like she did that night on the roof after the family therapy fiasco. “I think it’s worse than the other times.”

Bones was in front of Lard. “I need your keys!”

Lard stared back. “Chu Man confiscated them.”

“You’re lying!” Bones shouted at him.

“They’re locked in his drawer.”

Bones didn’t believe him. “Don’t you want to know what hospital she’s in? That this is all an elaborate joke and she’s sitting up in bed watching soap operas and eating bonbons.
Don’t you care about her anymore
?”

“What’re you gonna do? Break down the doors to ICU?”

“You have a better idea?”

Lard backed away, slowly shaking his head. “There’s gotta be two-hundred hospitals in LA county—that would take days. Maybe weeks. You…Me…” His voice had a sharp edge to it. “We can’t help her, man. We never could.”

Frantically, Bones started rummaging through drawers. Peelers, graters, whisks, bottle-stoppers. He felt Lard’s beefy hands on his shoulders before he was spun around. “I’m telling you, man, I don’t have the keys.”

Bones ripped away from him. “Fuck you, Mr. Already-Has-a-Girlfriend-and-Doesn’t-Care-about-His-Friends-Anymore!”

Lard ripped right back. “Or maybe I care just as much about you as I do about her!”

Bones didn’t want to hear it.

He hit the stairs at full speed, powering to the top, hyperventilating, as he raced through the storage area, vaulting over carpet remnants and paint cans.

Just before he reached the door to the roof, he tripped over a bucket and collided face-first with the doorknob. Since he didn’t die immediately he swore and clutched at his eye. His whole face throbbed. He swore again and pushed through the door, stumbling headlong onto the roof, trying to focus and wondering what life would be like blind.

Bones squinted at the intensely blue sky through a blur of stars. He felt his face. No blood. But the throbbing in his eye was intense. He put his hand over one eye and blinked, then the other. He’d have a serious shiner, but at lease he wasn’t blind.

He picked his way over a jumble of conduits. The zucchini had grown like crazy in their neglect. Everything else drooped, begging for water. Lard hadn’t been up here either for the same reason. Memories were like vinegar spurting from an open vein.

While searching for the watering can he noticed the folding chairs, purposefully arranged, like someone had planned it. Alice. Her yoga mat was unrolled. Four candles sat on top holding the edges down. She’d even left a book of matches.
Ocean View Suites
.

Bones felt like he was walking backward and forward at the same time, drowning in an empty space that should have been Alice. He struck a match and lit a candle. Vanilla. Then he sat back on his heels, blinking at the unsteady flicker. He pictured Alice asleep and wondered if a person in a coma had dreams. He hoped she had her ballet slippers with her.