Chapter 6
“A former patient moved in with me,” I tell my supervisor, Jen, at the end of my shift the next day.
Better to get ahead of it. I’m not really sure what I was thinking when I offered for Stevie to move in with me.
Honestly, I wasn’t really thinking. Or at least, not how I should have been.
I was thinking about her alone in a camper with a hole in the roof in the middle of the woods with a head injury.
I was thinking about how I didn’t want her to be alone.
I wasn’t thinking about my job at all. And that’s the second time that’s happened around her.
The first being when I lost track of time that night in the hospital talking with her and forgot to check on my other patients.
I’m not sure what it is about her, but I need to get my head on straight before I make any more unwise decisions.
Jen lifts one brow. “Oh?”
I settle into one of the chairs in her office, across the desk from her.
“I only cared for her once, for a very short amount of time. But she suffered a head injury and her place wasn’t safe to live in, and so I told her she could stay with me—not while she was here, I should clarify—and she ended up taking me up on it. ”
Her head tilts to the side. “Are you talking about Stevie?”
Small towns. Small town hospitals.
“Yes,” I answer, unsure if it being Stevie makes this better or worse for me.
Jen is quiet for a moment, scratches above her blonde brow with a short, bare nail. “She has other people she can stay with.”
I can’t tell if it’s a question or a statement. “Yes.”
“But she chose to move in with you.”
Again, I’m unsure of her meaning. “Yes.”
Her eyes are assessing, and I can see the gears working behind them. I liked her immediately when I met her. She reminded me a lot of my mom. Her way of putting people instantly at ease, of how she seems to think before she speaks but laughs without a care.
Finally, she goes back to typing something on her computer. “Okay, I don’t see why it should be a problem. If she comes back for any reason though, you can’t be her nurse.”
A tension I hadn’t realized I was holding onto unspools inside me, letting my heart resume its normal pace. “Of course.”
The smile she gives me is warm, motherly, and it twists something tight in my stomach. “Now get out of here. See you back here in the morning.”
I’m on swing shift during this contract, meaning I work nights for three or four days and then have a few days off before switching to days.
It’s a shitty schedule, but I don’t mind.
The night shift team is more fun, but the day shift allows me to see the sun and have a normal circadian rhythm. You win some, you lose some.
My watch vibrates with an incoming text as I open my locker and grab my things from inside.
It’s from Evan, my twin brother, and I snort out a laugh as I read it.
Evan: Call me shitstain
The locker clamors shut, the sound echoing through the room. I click his contact as I head out the door and down the hallway.
He answers after the first ring.
“Hey, shitstain.”
A soft, high pitched voice responds, “You shouldn’t say that.”
Clara. My six-year-old niece.
“Shit,” I swear under my breath.
She giggles. “Daddy is going to be very mad you said a bad word twice.”
“Hi, Clara. Is your daddy there?”
Before she can answer, I hear my brother’s voice in the background and a shuffle as I assume the phone is passed around.
“You shouldn’t curse in front of my daughter.”
“And you should use commas.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He does. He’s the worst texter in the world and refuses to use any punctuation, which I regularly annoy him about.
“How’s South Carolina?” he asks, changing the subject as I walk out the automatic doors of the emergency room, waving goodbye to Kwame, the elderly security guard, who absolutely could not do anything if there was an actual emergency.
“North Carolina,” I correct him. “And it’s good. I’ve got a new roommate.”
“Roommate?” he asks, incredulous. “I thought after the bad roommate situation in college, you refused to do roommates anymore.”
I had…which made my offer to Stevie even more of a surprise.
“He had a booger wall,” I say.
“Who didn’t?”
Evan decidedly did not have a booger wall, but he was a complete slob, and we shared a room growing up, which is how I turned into a clean freak minimalist. How his wife, Kate, stays with him, I’ll never know.
“So, who’s the roommate?” Evan asks. In the background, I hear the sliding door to his deck opening and closing. It’s dinner time here, which means Clara must have just gotten home from school in Montana and is probably bouncing off the walls in their house.
I can perfectly picture the view. The aspens and cottonwoods just starting to change color.
The dusting of white on the peaks of the mountains in the distance.
The sky so big you can’t ever imagine it stopping.
The way everything out there feels so endless.
I remember that view. It’s seared in my brain, carved on the marrow of my bones, even though I hadn’t seen it all that often.
At least, not from that particular house.
The one Mom finally bought herself when I went off to college.
The one she only lived in for a few months before she got sick, and only for a few more months before she had to be hospitalized.
The one she left to Evan when she died, like she knew I would never be able to live there in the place she was dying.
And she was right. In fact, I’ve managed to hardly return there at all.
“Jack?” My brother’s voice pulls me from my memories, the ones that feel like a tender bruise still, all these years later.
“Sorry, got distracted,” I say, unlocking my Jeep and climbing in. It’s old, the first car I ever bought myself, but I haven’t been able to get rid of it, despite the thousands of miles I’ve put on it. “Stevie.”
“Sounds like a porn star name.”
“She’s not, as far as I know.”
“Oh, I was thinking it was a man.”
“A female Stevie isn’t a porn star name?”
“Nah, only a male porn star from the seventies,” he responds. “So, how’d you end up with a roommate?”
The unseasonable chill has burned off with the last of the storms, leaving the evening pleasantly warm for mid-September.
The chill brought with it the first of the change in the leaves, so the drive from the hospital is filled with shades of burnt orange and fiery red interspersed with the green trees on the mountains.
It’s pretty here, prettier than I would have guessed, having only spent time in the eastern part of the state before. This place feels grounded, steady.
“A tree fell through her roof,” I say, flipping on my blinker to turn right.
“Ah, the classic.”
“She lived in an Airstream and a tree fell through the roof. She was my patient one of my first nights at the hospital.”
“Scandal,” Evan says.
“It’s fine. I talked to my supervisor about it,” I tell him. “Anyway, I ran into her a few days later, and she didn’t have anywhere to go, so I offered her the second bedroom.”
Evan is quiet for a moment, and I can almost hear the gears in his head turning.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says.
I stop at a red light and stare at the speaker where my aux cord is connected, like I can see him through it. “No, tell me.”
“I’m just surprised, that's all.”
“Why?”
“You’re a loner.”
“That makes me sound like I wore a cape in high school.”
“You did.”
“It was a hoodie.” We’ve had this conversation before.
“Tomato, potato.”
“That’s not the saying.” We’ve had this conversation before, too.
“You just like being alone,” he clarifies, and the way he says it makes his disapproval clear.
He’s always had a problem with the way I’ve avoided Larkspur, Montana since Mom’s death.
Every chance he gets, he’s invited me home.
There’s always been an underlying tension each time I’ve had to work a holiday or I’ve told him I don’t have enough downtime between contracts.
He knows my excuses are bullshit, and I know he knows they are, but he’s never fully called me out for it.
He just makes remarks like this one.
“Well, I was trying to be nice.”
“Mmm.” The noise he makes is enough to set my teeth on edge, raise my hackles.
But I can’t really argue with him. He’s right, I should come home more.
But every time I have—the very few times in the last fourteen years—I’ve felt like the mountains were moving in closer and closer, threatening to bury me beneath them.
Like the weight of Mom’s absence, the memories of her everywhere, might suffocate me.
“Will you be home for Thanksgiving this year?”
That word—home—haunts me. Larkspur hasn’t felt like home in a long time. Nowhere has, really.
“Um,” I say, turning up the winding road to the cabin.
There are others around each turn, but the one I’m renting is at the very top, the last driveway that dead ends before the trees stretch out behind it.
“I don’t think I can. My contract ends right before then and I’ll be headed to my next assignment. ”
“Right.” The single word is as pointed as a knife.
“Hey, listen. I’m pulling up to the house, so I’ve got to go. Give Clara a hug from me and tell Kate she’s a saint for putting up with you.”
“I will,” he says, and I don’t miss how resigned he sounds. I know my avoidance disappoints him. I know it would have wrecked my mom. But I can’t help it.
“Bye, Jack. Love you.”
“Bye, Ev.”
Love. Even that word feels too heavy to say, too risky to give when it can so easily be taken away.