Chapter 22 #2
They both remained silent for half a mile, the only sound the tires humming as they cruised into Pine Ridge.
AJ didn’t ever have strong reactions, or really any reactions to things, but she noticed his look of surprise at her response.
If she were being honest, her reaction had caught her off guard as well.
She could see from the outside looking in how ridiculous her behavior was.
Not just the snapping but how hot and cold she’d been with AJ.
In therapy, which she’d started eighteen months ago, Dr. Basil had called it “preemptive abandonment.” She’d laughed at the time, but now she couldn’t stop seeing it.
“She’ll make a big deal about it, and it’s nothing.” Even as Poppy heard herself tell AJ her reasoning for not telling her mom where she was headed, she knew it was a lie.
Her therapy may have started because she was stressed about fertility, but it had resulted in her discovering a lot about herself. One of those self-discoveries was that she punished her mom by withholding parts of her life from her as an adult.
As a child she’d wanted and needed her mom so badly, and she’d felt abandoned.
After Michael Davies died, her mom changed.
She started being the mom Poppy always wanted.
Kerri apologized for not being there the way she should have, and Poppy said she forgave her.
But those were just words, the truth came out in petty ways, like not telling her mom she’d had an accident and was heading to the ER, which was something she was sure she’d want to know.
Before her weekly sessions with Dr. Basil, she had not been aware she did it. Now that she knew, she couldn’t un-know it. Maybe this was what self-awareness felt like, nauseating, inconvenient, and impossible to ignore.
They pulled into the ER parking lot, and AJ did a wide, slow circle before finding a spot close to the entrance.
For all the times she’d been to this hospital, she’d never entered through the emergency room before.
The glass doors slid open with a hydraulic hiss, and the bright, institutional lighting brought her headache back full force.
The Saturday night crowd was out in force, she saw a dad cradling a toddler with a bloody nose, a teenager with his foot propped up on a backpack, and a couple of older folks whispering in hushed tones over a clipboard.
Zeta, the charge nurse, was in the middle of a call, but spotting Poppy, she put the receiver to her chest immediately. “Give me just—oh, Poppy?” Her sentence died in mid-air. She set the phone down, took off her headset, and leaned over the counter to get a better look. “What’d you do, girl?”
AJ took the initiative. “She passed out. Hit her head. There’s bleeding. She was unconscious for a few seconds.”
Poppy tilted her head towards AJ. “What he said.”
“She passed out.” Zeta’s eyes flickered over to AJ, then back to Poppy, then did a double take back to AJ. “Aren’t you—”
“AJ Costas.”
“Right. And the wedding was today, right?” Zeta glanced down at AJ, who was still in his dress shirt and slacks.
“Yeah, I changed before we came,” Poppy explained.
“She hit her head on the corner of a cement planter.” AJ shifted the conversation back to the injury.
Zeta clucked her tongue. “Let me see.” She motioned for Poppy to turn her head, then gently lifted the edge of the handkerchief. “Oof, you’re gonna need a couple staples at least. Any nausea? Ringing in your ears?”
Poppy shook her head, then remembered she was supposed to say something, so she added, “Just a headache.”
“Anyone at home with you tonight?” Zeta glanced at AJ, then back at Poppy, then at AJ again. A quick triangulation as she typed into the computer.
“She’ll be with me,” AJ stated, his voice strong and steady.
“Good.” Zeta was the epitome of professionalism as she nodded to AJ, that mask slipped as she gave Poppy a quick—Daaaamn, girl!
—expression, then it was right back to professional.
“We’ll get you checked in. It’s a madhouse tonight, but I’ll see if Dr. West can squeeze you in.
You’re still in the system, right? Under the employee plan? ”
Poppy nodded. “Till January, how long is the wait?” she asked as she glanced over her shoulder, feeling tired. The motion caused the world to swim a little, and she had to brace her hands on the counter to steady herself.
Zeta looked down at the computer and then buzzed the door. “Go back to bay six. It’s open. West will be in to see you shortly.”
Poppy hadn’t asked for special treatment, she didn’t work at Pine Ridge anymore, technically she did, but not really, and she didn’t want to put any undue stress on the staff.
“Are you sure?”
Zeta winked. “Bay six.”
Poppy hadn’t had a lot of advantages, or any, growing up. But if working at a hospital for a decade gave her a fast pass to the ER, then she’d take it.
“Thank you.”
She walked to the double doors, and when she noticed AJ wasn’t with her, she glanced over her shoulder and saw him turning back towards the waiting room.
She wasn’t happy she was there, but since she was, she didn’t want to spend the next couple of hours alone.
Also, she wasn’t going to advertise it, but she was terrified of needles.
Which was another reason the past eighteen months of tests had been so tough on her. Most of them had involved needles.
“Coming?” she asked.
He turned back. His eyes silently asking the same question she’d posed to Zeta. The corners of her lips curled. That was all the confirmation he needed. He was by her side in the blink of an eye, holding the door for her and walking a step behind.
She had to admit, being there, in the hospital, as a patient, with AJ was not the worst way to spend a Saturday night. Actually, it was better than probably ninety percent of the dates she’d been on in the past few years.
The monitors in bay six were a symphony of beeps, whirs, and hums, their green flashes pulsing through the sterile air.
AJ sat next to Poppy’s hospital bed, perfectly still except for the subtle clench and release of his right hand, which cradled hers as gently as if it were a rare and delicate artifact.
The room’s fluorescent lights seemed determined to expose every scratch and bruise on her face, which only accentuated her fragile, astonishing beauty.
She looked so tiny, a halo of tangled chestnut hair with a bandage covering one side of her forehead, as she lay in her hospital bed tucked beneath a pale blue blanket.
AJ was doing everything he could to stay present and sane.
He counted the ceiling tiles twice, mapped the machines by manufacturer, and tracked every tiny change in expression that flickered over Poppy’s delicate features, committing each to memory before storing them.
The world outside the curtain may as well have ceased to exist.
The last few hours had been a blur of intake paperwork, triage, and the low-grade chaos native to emergency medicine.
AJ had not let go of Poppy’s hand, not even when the nurse, a man with a tattoo of a mitochondrion on his forearm, gently suggested he might want to wait outside while plastics sewed up her scalp.
One look in her panicked eyes, and AJ knew he wasn’t going anywhere.
“I’m good,” he’d said, to which the nurse shrugged.
AJ sat at her side as she squeezed his hand tightly, so tight that the tips of all his fingers went white, when the needle punctured her skin and the resident’s voice slipped from clinical to apologetic, when the numbing agent failed to fully numb.
Despite being a twin, AJ had never before experienced the sensation of having someone else’s pain transmit directly into his own body, but that’s what occurred: every wince, every shallow intake of breath, was mirrored in the deepest recesses of his chest cavity.
Poppy was still pale, but she had gotten a little of her color back.
She looked…fucking beautiful, but also so vulnerable, so frail.
Seeing her like that awakened every primitive cell in his DNA he hadn’t even known he had.
In that moment, he knew he would kill anyone who tried to harm her.
He’d never felt like that before. There was no rational thought involved, it was a base, animalistic instinct he was fully prepared to act on.
He’d endured three hours of relentless noise, the flicker of fluorescent lighting, and the constant chemical assault on his senses and felt nothing except singular, laser-like focus on Poppy’s well-being.
His entire sensorium was occupied with her.
Now his job was to distract her. She was currently coming up with questions to try to stump him.
“Why do we pronounce the g in longevity twice?” Poppy asked as she lay in the hospital bed with a row of stitches on her forehead and an I.V. tube coming out of her arm.
“It’s due to a linguistic process called palatalization. You are pronouncing it first with the hard g sound and then with the soft g sound.”
“Okay, so there’s ‘disheveled,’ but why is there no ‘sheveled’?”
“Disheveled was incorporated into an English word from Old French, where the root referred to hair, not shelves. Words of those origins are often referred to as
“cranberry morphemes” or “unpaired words.”
“Okay, fine. Um…what travels around the world yet stays in the corner?” she asked.
And they were back to brain teasers. She’d been alternating between those for the past hour to pass the time.
“What travels around the world yet stays in the corner?” he repeated, then repeated again silently to himself. What travels around the world yet stays in the— “A stamp.”
Her lips split in a smile so wide it covered her face from ear to ear. “Wow. Your brain must be so fun to live in.”