Chapter 20
BELL
It takes them twenty minutes to come get me after she’s taken back, which in hospital time is nothing, but in away from Birdie time is just enough for me to start spinning dark fantasies of bribery and threats.
An ER tech with gauged ears, pink hair, and a name tag that says Tobie finds me pacing in front of the faded play area with its chipping paint and empty plastic house and leads me to a room where Birdie is waiting on the bed in a hospital gown, looking unbearably small.
Her face is pale with fear, and when I walk over to take her hand, it’s trembling.
“I’ve got your boyfriend for you,” Tobie says cheerfully.
The tech goes to the other side of the bed and checks the pulse oximeter on Birdie’s finger and then the saline bag hanging from the IV pole next to her.
Everything seems to be in order because Tobie leaves with a promise that the doctor will be in soon.
There’s something warm moving in my chest as the tech swishes the curtain closed but leaves the glass door open, and it takes me dragging a chair over to the bed and finding Birdie’s hand again to realize what it is.
Boyfriend. They called me her boyfriend.
I like that.
“Were they making sure I wasn’t abusing you?” I ask. I still remember the do you feel safe at home checklist every time Mom had to come to the emergency room during her final months.
“Yes,” Birdie says. Her voice is thin and her eyes are bouncing between the monitors and the curtain separating us from the shared desk. “They also asked if I had thoughts of hurting myself. As if I don’t know any better,” she adds sourly.
I lift my eyebrows at that. “Any better than what?”
“Than to answer that question for real,” she says, exhaustion in her voice. Her hand is still trembling.
I pause. “Do you have thoughts of hurting yourself?”
She doesn’t look at me when she answers too easily, “Of course not.”
“Little bird.”
“I’m a good Catholic girl. I believe suicide is a sin. I’m not going to kill myself, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I wish she would look at me. I wish she’d tell me the truth, or some of it anyway.
But I decide that I believe her about the Catholic thing.
It wasn’t enough to keep my sister safe from her own pain, but it very well could be enough for Birdie.
Her intense connection with her faith might as well come with a gold leaf halo around her head.
And I think she romanticizes suffering—or at least still believes that it’s useful currency in some grand cosmological exchange.
Like divine mercy is a 501(c)(3) that can only operate on donations, never generating any mercy on its own.
“Did the questions upset you?” I ask. “The ones about you? Or the ones about me?”
I’m not bothered by her wondering if she should have given different answers to the latter. I’d be worried about her sense of self-preservation if she didn’t consider asking for help, actually.
“No,” she mumbles. “I’m upset because I hate hospitals.”
I wasn’t expecting that. “Really?”
She finally looks over at me. “You don’t?” Her lips are alarmingly pale, but her oxygen saturation is okay, and the chux pad they put under her leg has only a little blood on it, so I manage to keep myself from finding the doctor and dragging them in here myself.
“No. I feel safe in hospitals. Someone’s always awake. I’m afraid of the dark, you know,” I inform her with a flash of my dimple.
Her mouth twitches—almost amusement—and I feel like I’ve won a prize. “I don’t believe you. You are not afraid of the dark,” she says.
“Well, I used to be.” I run my palm up her forearm.
God, she’s shaking all the way up to her shoulders.
I’m surprised her teeth aren’t chattering.
“I got sick in high school—a mat burn from wrestling that turned into a staph infection and then septicemia—and I was intubated and put in an induced coma for a week. At some point after they woke me up, I must have told my secret to the nurses. They protected my adolescent pride by pretending to leave the bathroom light on or turning on the TV before they left. Sometimes they’d keep the door open.
There was always a light on, always someone to hear if you needed them. It was nice.”
Her eyes drop to her lap, where her free hand curls limply upward, the finger with the oximeter curled more than the others.
She swallows. “I don’t like that there’s someone to hear.
They’d hear my mom or Busy, and then—” She’s shivering even more now.
“I used to wait for hours and hours. Or sometimes I’d be back there with them, not even in a room but a space with curtains for walls, and I’d always be waiting for bad news, that they were taking Mom or Busy for an involuntary hold or that there weren’t any beds at this shelter or that rehab, and I’d be trying to keep my mom or sister calm, and sometimes they would be calm, and sometimes they wouldn’t, and the worst part was that sometimes I’d feel…
relieved…when the nurses had enough and got out the Haldol.
” She’s crying now, trembling and trembling.
The blood pressure reading above her head is flashing red.
“That’s what a hospital turns you into. Someone so tired that you’ll do anything for a little bit of quiet.
Someone who’d give their own mother the shot just so it wouldn’t be… so…awful—”
“Birdie, Birdie, shh.” I’m crawling up on the bed with her now, careful of the IV line and the oximeter and blood pressure cuff.
She resists at first, quaking, sobbing, stiff, but I don’t stop.
I arrange us so I’m sitting behind her, her back resting against my chest, my legs on either side of hers.
I make sure the pad is under her leg and tuck the blankets back over her.
She tenses, holding herself away from my chest, but I feel the moment she gives up, slumping back against me, still crying.
I don’t tell her to stop. Her sadness scratches at something vital in my chest, and I vibrate with the need to fix it…
but this is also the most she’s ever spoken at once to me, the most of herself she’s ever shown, and I refuse to tarnish that vulnerability by telling her what to feel or how to act.
She can feel anything she needs to, do anything she needs to; she can cry or scream or howl, and I will eat the liver of anyone who tries to stop her.
I reach around her and take her hand in mine—the one without the oximeter but with the IV. Her whole hand is cool from the saline drip, and I turn it so it’s resting in my palm and her palm is facing up. It’s impossible to miss how much bigger my hands are than hers like this.
I nuzzle into her hair as I use my free hand to stroke a circle on her upturned palm. A circle about the size of a knot of wood. “Why did you turn the angel into the devil?”
She sniffles. “What?”
“The statue. You told me at Evelyn that it was going to be an angel. What changed your mind?”
She doesn’t answer right away, but I keep stroking her palm, letting my hand underneath warm hers, and finally she says, “The knot.”
“One defect in the wood, and it’s automatically satanic?” I ask a little wryly.
She doesn’t laugh, not really, but she does breathe a little through her nose, a small whisper of a ghost of a memory of a laugh. “No, almost anything will have a defect in it if you cut deep enough, and some defects are hints, really. About what the wood wants to be.”
“Was the spot on its hand a hint?”
She sighs. Her hair, curlier than I’ve seen it after her shower yesterday, moves silkily against my jaw. I smell apples and I want to take a bite out of her.
“Yes. The way I felt like it was supposed to be carved—like the angel was summoning someone…it looked like it was trying to hide something inside its fingers, like it wasn’t being honest with whomever it was summoning.”
“So you thought he needed to look like me?” I murmur into her ear, amused.
“Your honesty is also a kind of deceit.” Her voice is no longer tearful but it’s quiet. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else who’s like that. Who makes the truth feel like a lie and a lie feel better than the truth.”
I start caressing her fingers, pausing on each fingertip to swirl around the roughened pad and then back down to the palm again.
I love the calluses on her hands, the phantom furrows of splinters that have been dealt with, the short fingernails, the strength hidden inside those slender fingers.
When I cast a glance up at the monitors without moving my head, I see that her blood pressure reading has slid down.
Not by much but enough to stop flashing.
“That was probably unkind of me,” she says, probably feeling self-conscious because I haven’t replied yet. “I’m sorry.”
“Now, now, sweet bird,” I murmur between kisses against the shell of her ear. “Don’t go polluting your own honesty with deceit. You meant it, you believe it. And you don’t have to be afraid that I’m angry about it because I’m not. I think you’re quite right. I feel complimented by it, actually.”
“I can’t believe I told you about the Haldol…about the statue.” She shakes her head slowly. “I’ve never told anyone those things. I’ve barely even told God. Why you? When you’re—”
She pauses, and I nip at her earlobe. “When I’m your devil, pretty bird?”
A noise in her chest.
“Maybe it’s precisely because I’m your devil,” I say to her. “I won’t make you be righteous for me because I don’t want your righteousness, and you don’t care what I think anyway because I’m the villain who’s using your good heart to acquire the wicked desires of my own.”
“My good heart,” she breathes out. “Yes, so good when I was willing to let a nurse scribble down words like agitation and failed de-escalation so everyone felt better about giving my mom or my sister a shot in the ass just to get them to…stop.”