Chapter 2 – Lily #2
The doctor bustles out of the room, but I stay with her for a little while, checking her chart and vitals until she’s more stable.
I can’t help myself when I see someone that young riddled with the misery of addiction.
My heart aches for them. All that wasted life and opportunity.
It’s as if a malignant force comes along and sucks the light out of them until all that’s left is a desolate husk.
I hated watching it happen to my mom, and I still hate it now.
The memory of my mother sends a sudden wave of grief pulsing through me, and I hold the clipboard to my chest to steady myself.
I close my eyes and try to get grounded, focusing on the steady beep of Amber’s heart monitor.
It’s been almost two decades without her, and even though the grief is constant, the sharp agony of the loss still has the ability to floor me.
It’s always been like this. In between stretches of numbness, some days I’m filled with sadness, other days it’s pure unbridled rage. But it’s always bubbling just below the surface. The curiosity that wars with resentment. The question that never leaves me.
Why did she take her own life and leave me behind?
I don’t believe in fate or any of that woo-woo bullshit, but it feels like the universe is sending me a sign.
A piercing heat flares at the base of my skull and I squeeze my eyes even tighter, breathing in slowly through my nose. Count for four, hold for eight, out for four until it subsides.
Not now, please, not now.
I rub my neck to release the muscles and breathe as steadily as I can. The scans must be wrong. Kate must be wrong. There’s got to be something broken inside me, because when the pain hits like this, it’s like I’m dying.
A low, gurgling noise on the bed cuts through the rhythmic beeping of the machines, and my eyes snap open to find the source. It’s deep and guttural. Like a plughole echoing as water drains through it. All the hairs on my arms stand up as my entire body crackles with animalistic fear.
When I spin around, Amber rises off the bed, her limbs twisted into a sickening tangle beneath her. I run to the bed, but before I can touch her, I stop.
“A-Amber? Honey, can you hear me?” I stammer as I reach for the call button, but my words die in my throat.
Her back arches off the bed with a violence that defies human anatomy, her spine bent at an impossible angle. Her head nearly touching her feet. Her fingers stretch and curl into barbs that grasp and tear through the thin hospital sheets with a sound like ripping silk.
The low gurgling escalates into something inhuman—the screech of metal on metal, of an ancient and hungry thing clawing its way out of her throat.
I slam my hand on the emergency button so hard pain shoots through my wrist. The alarm screams through the room, but it’s nothing compared to the sound pouring from the depths of Amber’s gut.
Her limbs twist and jerk like she’s being operated by some sadistic puppeteer, joints bending in directions that should snap bone.
Then, as suddenly as it started, it stops.
Amber sinks back onto the bed with a gentle fluidity, her spine realigning with soft pops that make my skin crawl. Her breath evens out, and when she turns her head to look at me, her eyes are still completely black. Like someone has poured ink into her skull.
“They’re coming for me,” she whispers, her voice carrying a sinister laugh. “I hope you’re here when they get here.”
A slow, terrible smile spreads across her gray lips.
“You’re their favorite kind…”
Ok, I need some time off.
After Amber’s unexpected, and frankly terrifying, seizure, I’ve decided that’s clearly a sign from the universe to take a break.
My hands are still shaking, and nausea hits me in wave after terrible wave.
In all my years working ERs, patching up horrific gunshot wounds and seeing the worst that humanity offers, I’ve seen nothing like that.
Kate’s right. The stress isn’t helping these headaches. When I became a travel nurse, I thought I’d have more flexibility, maybe work less, but lately the back-to-back night shifts have taken their toll on my brain and my body.
After ensuring my other patients are stable and properly handed off to the night charge nurse, I pack up my stuff to go.
My headache is steadily escalating into a screeching migraine, and the fluorescent lights hit like ice picks behind my eyes.
I undo the messy bun at the nape of my neck and shake my tangled chin-length waves free.
It relieves some tension on my scalp but barely makes a dent in the pain.
When I swing by the nurses’ station to say goodbye, Rami’s hunched over the desk, scrolling on the computer, a huge vat of coffee cooling beside him. His weary eyelids look heavy behind his thick black frames. When he speaks, he barely glances up from the screen.
I tell him I’m cutting my latest contract short and apologize for leaving him with the mess of arranging a backfill for the next few weeks.
I already called the agency, and luckily my track record for reliability has been so flawless that they let me off.
He gets it—he’s seen me get gradually more haggard over the last few weeks as the pain and hallucinations began ramping up.
The parking garage is nearly empty, just my well-loved Toyota and a few other cars scattered across the concrete expanse. I sit in the driver’s seat for a moment, letting the stillness wash over me, and then pull out my phone to text my stepdad Pat.
Lily: “Changed my mind. I’m going to come for Mom’s anniversary. I need a break from work. Hope that’s still cool?”
Pat: “Of course it is, Lilypad. Looking forward to it. It’s been ages x.”
I breathe a heavy sigh of relief. Seeing Pat will be good for me. We’re not blood-related, but he’s truly family. He was there for me when my grandparents died, and he’s been more of a father to me than the mysterious sperm donor who took off before I was even born.
We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, and we’ll dance around the memory of Mom. Carefully tiptoeing around the truth of how she was at the end when the drugs and the drinking had eaten through everything good in her.
“It’s important we remember her,” Pat likes to say. Sometimes I think forgetting might be easier.
But now…now I have questions. Real questions. About that tattoo, about why she had the same mark as a dying girl in my ER.
I start the engine and pull out of the garage, but instead of heading home, I start driving downtown. Drawn by some invisible force to an unfamiliar place, a mantra ringing in my head. Twenty years. That can’t be a coincidence.
My pulse quickens as I navigate the streets toward Sixth Street. The same tattoo. In the exact same spot. There has to be a connection.
Mom always said life was too short to play it safe. She got a tattoo of a lily on her shoulder when I was five, telling me she wanted to carry me with her, always. “You’re my whole world, Liliput,” she told me as she tucked me in one night. “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”
I always promised myself I’d return the favor someday, but I never found the courage until now.
I’ve never done anything remotely reckless, but as the neon lights of Sixth Street blur past my windshield, my mindset shifts.
A fidgety energy that’s been building like a fire for weeks, maybe months.
The same feeling I used to get right before Mom would announce we were moving to a new city, starting over.
I drive slowly down the street, scanning the various tattoo parlors. There has to be someone who recognizes that design, someone who can tell me what it means.
Then I see it.
A red neon goat skull glowing in a shop window, and above it, the sign: “Six6Sixth Ink” in gothic letters. But it’s the stylized “6” in the logo that makes my heart stop. The same ornate curves, the same twisted flourishes I just saw on Amber’s shoulder. The same mark my mother bore.
I pull into a parking spot across the street, my hands trembling on the steering wheel. This is it. This is where they came from.
Twenty years of questions, and I’m finally looking at an answer.
The pounding in my chest intensifies. I could drive away right now, pretend I never saw it. Go to San Antonio, visit Pat, mourn my mother the way I always have. Shut the box of secrets. Put up a wall, and live in blissful ignorance.
Or I could walk through that door and finally learn the truth.
Time to light a match and burn it all down.