Chapter 5
I sipped through the straw and I was careful, but it did still hurt my jaw. “Thank you,” I mumbled.
“This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” Cadence answered. She grabbed another tissue from the hospital-supplied box and wiped her eyes. “It’s horrific. You look like you were in a car crash.”
“You’ll get through this and be fine,” she told me firmly, but then she started crying again.
“Your face is usually so pretty! I always thought you looked like the star of Sabrina except your hair is red and you have big blue eyes instead of brown, but you’re small like she is and you move gracefully in the same way, and—”
A nurse came in and interrupted her. “How are we doing?” he asked us.
Clearly, Cadence was very upset. But she knew him a little because she’d gone to high school with his younger brother, and he got her to calm down.
I was in pain but they had given me stuff for it, and those drugs might also have kept me calmer, too.
They discussed what I would do next. I knew that I should have been concerned about my future plans because Cadence was, but I just was glad to be safe for now and I was having trouble thinking too far ahead. The world seemed hazy and I was so tired that it was hard to pay good attention.
She was upset enough for both of us. She had straightened almost all the curls on her head by tugging on them so hard. “I don’t know where she’s going to go,” I heard her tell the nurse. “I think her boyfriend did this to her so she can’t live with him again.”
“What are the police saying?”
“I called and tried to talk to someone and I’m waiting to hear back, but if they act anything like the cops in the series that my mom watches, they won’t reveal much. It’s her favorite show and its fictional but it seems very accurate,” she told him. “She hasn’t missed an episode.”
“It wasn’t Kolter,” I said, but I couldn’t raise my voice very much, due to how tired I was and how I couldn’t draw in any huge breaths. I had some fractured ribs.
“But I don’t think that I can take her, either!
My room is on the second floor and it’s an old house so the stairs are very steep.
My mother is on the ground floor. I asked her if she would mind sharing the space for a little while.
We could have put another bed in the living room but…
Mom doesn’t adapt well to changes,” she continued.
“I don’t know what to do. As far as I can tell, Vivi doesn’t have any family herself, at least, not in Michigan.
She’s from the West Coast. I think Oregon. ”
“Nevada. It’s not a coast and I’m not going to come stay with you,” I tried to assure her.
She’d already explained why she was here, that someone in the ER had called her because they’d found the card for her portrait painting business in my bag.
That was the only thing I’d had with a name on it.
Cadence was such a nice person that she’d driven right over to the hospital even though it had been very late at night, and she’d also shown up today after working at the library.
She’d cried when she’d first seen me and she had kept crying ever since.
It was so nice that she’d come but that didn’t make her responsible for my life, and I tried to tell her that as she and the nurse discussed me and where I would go. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Cadence, please listen.”
“I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” she said, sniffing.
“Is there anyone else we can call for you?” the nurse asked me. “A relative? Another friend?”
“No, but I don’t need anyone.” I wished that they hadn’t called Cadence, either, but only because she didn’t need to be involved in all this.
I had been avoiding the library for the past few weeks, at least a month, because I hadn’t wanted her to know what was happening.
The frost date had passed already and it felt like summer, and I bet that she had moved her delicate plants outside.
“I don’t know other people here. But I’ll be ok on my own. ”
“Oh!” We both looked over at Cadence, who then dropped her hair and put her hand over her mouth.
“Nothing,” she told us. She walked toward the door and I saw her taking out her phone.
Before, in the library, I had noticed her texting with her mom a lot but today as she’d been sitting in the chair next to my bed, I had really gotten to see how much they were in contact with each other.
She was writing or calling several times an hour.
Maybe it was because her mother was worried that Cadence was going to invite me home and they’d have to take me in like an unwanted stray cat.
The nurse talked to me a little more, but I was still floating on my meds and didn’t have much to say for myself.
I did glean that I was going to be discharged shortly, and he did seem to want to know where I was going next because he was worried that my living situation wasn’t safe.
“You have older injuries,” he said, and that was true.
He told me that he would get the information for shelters and I agreed it was a good idea, mostly because he seemed to really want to do that and also, I wanted him to leave so that I could close my eyes again.
It was so nice that Cadence had come but it was hard to stay awake and comfort her.
When I heard a noise, though, I forced my lids back open and thought that I might have been in the middle of a very realistic dream—hospital-grade drugs were powerful so I was unsure about what I was seeing. “Nolan?” I questioned.
He seemed very, very real, and he also wasn’t a shapeshifter, doppelg?nger, or anything else paranormal. His eyes were still blue instead of red and he answered me in his own voice instead of a demonic rasp. “Hi, Vivi. How are you?”
At the moment, I was very confused. “Hi. I’m ok,” I told him, just like I’d been repeating to Cadence. “How are you?”
“I’m doing all right. Your friend called me,” he said. “I guess we went to high school together and she got my number somehow.”
“Cadence? She’s really good at research,” I said. “She called and you came?”
“I did.” He took a step closer to the bed. “The last time I saw you, you told me that you were going to leave Michigan.”
“I couldn’t but I didn’t waste the money you gave me and it wasn’t a scam,” I said. “I don’t do that stuff.”
I had been trying to sit up as I explained myself and he quickly walked closer and put his hand on my arm. “Don’t move too much. Cadence said that you were badly beaten and I can see that she was right.”
“She’s really worried and upset,” I said.
“I understand her feelings.”
She joined us at that point and stumbled over her words as she tried to explain the situation to Nolan.
“Some tourists found her in a hotel parking lot,” she said.
“The police are searching for the person who did it.” She glanced at me and pressed her lips together before telling him, “I called you because I remembered what you did for the volleyball team.”
“Yes, you mentioned volleyball,” he answered. To me, he sounded perplexed by that.
I understood why. I was a stranger to him, and Cadence (another stranger, since he didn’t remember her) had summoned him to this hospital. He had given me money to leave and I had taken it, put it in my bag, and yet? A few weeks later, I was still here. No wonder he was confused.
I tried to clear up some of that. “I didn’t steal from you,” I told him again.
“I did try to go.” But the two of them had started talking together and they didn’t pay much attention to what I had to say.
And I was trying to follow along, but I wasn’t doing a great job.
My ankle was itchy and for some reason that was absorbing so much space in my mind… get the itch, scratch it…
“Vivi?” Nolan was leaning over the bed. “What do you think?”
“I think that you’re going to believe that I blew your money on something stupid but that wasn’t what happened.
The day you gave it to me, Kolter’s friend saw us as we were leaving the hamburger restaurant.
It was just like the bread again. Kolter left work and came home, and he was so steamed up.
He wouldn’t let me go and he made me admit that I was hiding things.
I wouldn’t have told him, but I had to. He took everything. ”
“Did he do this to you last night at the hotel, too?”
“No.” But I closed my mouth after that one word, because I felt like I had talked too much already.
I was tired from saying all that and my jaw ached.
It had just tumbled out, which happened to people at times of stress or while they were under the influence.
I had learned a lot of information from my mom that way— in her case, it was due to narcotics.
I looked over at Cadence, who had also listened to me vomit up that story, and she appeared to be sick to her stomach herself.
“Sorry,” I apologized to her. She was a nice person who lived in her family home and it was probably great, even if the stairs were steep and her mom didn’t want to share the first floor.
She wouldn’t have heard anything like this before, although she did read a lot of the books they had at the library.
Maybe there was a story about someone like me? I considered that and felt doubtful.
“I’m just a normal girl,” I announced. “My life isn’t exciting.”
Nolan looked over at Cadence. “Does she have a head injury?”
“They observed her and said she’s ok. I think they drugged her up a lot,” she answered.
“Or it could be the pain that’s making her giddy.
” She took another tissue and wiped her eyes.
“Vivi? Nolan Whittaker is going to help you,” she told me, speaking only a little faster than when he’d first introduced himself to me last fall, Nnnn-ooo-lll-aaa-nnn.
“What?” Despite the slow speed of her words, I hadn’t understood. “Why? I don’t need help.”