Chapter 10
BY THE TIME I PULL INTO THE HOSPITAL PARKING LOT, Uncle Bill’s burner phone has enough of a charge to turn on. It only has one number saved: a northern Nevada area code under the contact name Brian. I try calling, but he doesn’t answer. I tuck it into my pocket, just in case.
I don’t even think about Veer until she finds me in the break room.
She and Rodriguez roll in along with another pair—the loud, bossy one is Temple, I think, and the stone-faced one is Ying—as I’m finishing my lunch break. Coffee and crackers. Eleven at night isn’t really lunchtime anyway.
“We picked up Oscar again,” Temple drawls, slamming her way through the cabinets in search of K-Cups. “Come on, how hard is it not to smoke when you’re already on oxygen?”
Ying grunts.
“He’s lonely,” Rodriguez says in his soft, measured tone. “People do messed-up things, sometimes, when they get old and don’t have anyone left to care.”
“We’re not babysitters,” Temple grumbles, but quieter.
I smell Veer’s distinctive mix of sweat and skin and hair gel, but she doesn’t say anything. Not to them, or to me. The back of my neck itches.
Temple scrapes one of the chairs toward herself. “Is this seat taken?”
She sits before I answer, legs splayed wide.
She smells like drive-through hash browns and whitening strips.
EMTs and medics see a lot, not just the body stuff but having to come to people wherever they are, in whatever state they’re in.
Sometimes it shrinks them down, makes them melancholy and reflective like Rodriguez or expressionless and guarded like Ying.
Sometimes it makes them like Temple, confident that she’s seen the worst of life already.
Sometimes it makes them like Veer, quick to anger and quicker to remorse.
Is that what she meant by having been through some shit?
“It’s yours,” I say. I don’t have it in me to be around people right now. “I was just finishing up.”
I toss my coffee and head for the door, but a hand on my arm stops me.
“Hey,” Veer says. “I’ll walk with you.”
Temple tips back in her chair. “Hands to yourself, Zawadski.”
“Fuck off,” Veer calls, half joking, as the door slams behind us. She grimaces. “Sorry.”
Her hand falls away from my arm. I want to catch it and bring it back, but we’re at work and it’s not like that. She’s stuck a round Band-Aid over the scrape on her eyebrow. I like how her lips turn up at the corners. I want her to kiss me again.
Instead, she asks, “Back to triage?”
I’d wanted to swing by the fifth-floor break room, where the phlebotomists swap blood-draw horror stories, to find out what I could about the hospital’s management of blood samples.
Maybe get closer to a solution that doesn’t rely on faith that Uncle Bill will turn up overnight, or that the mysterious Brian will call me back.
But I can’t tell Veer any of that, so instead I tell her, “Yeah.”
“Cool.”
A nurse in Sleeping Beauty scrubs passes us, clacking hot-pink nails on her clipboard.
Veer’s sneakers squeak on the tile. I wish I knew what to say to bring back whatever intimacy we had last night.
But it’s gone now, maybe proof that it was never real to begin with.
She’s sobered up, and this is the part where she’s nice enough to apologize for everything.
Abruptly, she stops.
“Last night was all right, yeah?” She asks it like a challenge.
“Yeah.”
“So, like. Want to do it again?”
I can’t help a laugh. “Almost start a fight and then go to a party and then I run out on you because my family’s a mess?”
Her eyebrows punch up as if to say, Oh right, that. “Okay, so not exactly the same thing. But would you, like, want to go for a drink or something? Not tomorrow, I’m going up to Reno, but maybe next week if we both have a night off?”
It’s been a while since someone’s asked me out, even longer since I’ve wanted to say yes. I want to get to know her. I want to ask her what she meant about her darkness. I want to see her in that cutoff tank top again.
“That sounds nice,” I say, and the eager flash in her eyes is like a knife in my back, “but I can’t. You know, the family stuff.”
She wouldn’t get it. She didn’t even ask if my mom’s okay.
I brace for an accusation, the kind my mom deploys when I’m too wrapped up in myself to play along. Veer only backs away, shrugs, doesn’t quite meet my eyes.
“No problem,” she says. “It’s cool. Uh, you have my number.”
My pocket vibrates. I whip out my phone, ready for my mom’s face to blare accusingly from the screen, but it’s blank. The call’s coming from my other pocket. The one with Uncle Bill’s burner phone in it.
The break room door whines shut. Veer’s gone. I pull the silver Nokia free and it buzzes across my palm, green-and-black screen blinking furiously.
Incoming Call: Brian.
I hit the green button and for a second, it’s just dead air and I’m cold with panic. Then—
“Hello?” His voice is gruff and wary, fuzzy around the edges from the ancient phone and bad reception.
“Hi,” I answer, breathless. “Is this Brian?”
“Who’s this?”
Of course. He was expecting Uncle Bill. “My name’s Ellis. I’m Bill Karsten’s niece. I—”
“How’d you get this phone?”
My feet are taking me somewhere quiet. Not the break room, a bathroom maybe, or an empty patient room. I can’t have this conversation out in the open, but I also can’t ask him to call back later and risk never hearing from him again.
“I found it.” I push past more nurses with more clipboards, past patients pacing the halls. “Have you seen him lately? He hasn’t been home and I haven’t heard from him in a couple days, and I found this old phone with your number for emergencies and I just need—”
I bite it off at the last second. I don’t know if he’s one of us.
“Bill’s niece.” He chews on each word. “His sister’s kid?”
“Yeah.” I swing into a patient room and shut the door behind me. Wind shrieks in the background of the call, filling in the space where Brian’s quiet.
“So you’re family.”
It’s the same roundabout language Uncle Bill uses: Hunger makes family of all of us, biological or otherwise. I hate this dance, the euphemisms. If I have to beg, I’d rather do it honestly, knees ground into the dirt, the ticking clock of my body exposed for the vultures.
But I don’t get to choose how I do it. I’ve lost control. Of this, of my mom, of my thoughts that keep swirling back to the disappointment in Veer’s eyes as she walked away.
“Yeah,” I say. “Family.”
“Well.” He pops the last syllable, adding a “p” where there isn’t one. “I haven’t heard from him. And you shouldn’t go through his stuff. Never know what you might find.” There’s a note of warning to that last bit.
“I didn’t—” I stop myself, try to refocus. “I don’t know when he’ll be back, and his freezer’s empty.”
I thought Brian might know what that means. But his “Okay” tells me he doesn’t.
“Blood,” I say, voice hushed, tasting salt and resentment because now that I’m saying it out loud to this stranger, I understand why Uncle Bill keeps the word in the crook of his elbow but not on his tongue.
Saying it out loud feels shameful, no matter how many times you smell it, no matter how many times you thrust it into your veins.
“We’re running low, and if he doesn’t come back soon… ”
“How low?”
I think of the vials smashed across our floor, of my mom’s blackened tongue, of the nearly full sharps container. “A couple days.”
He swears. The wind howls in the background, staticky and muffled. I find myself staring out of the hospital room window into the concrete wall outside. No Parking, it demands in blocky white letters. They’ll be wondering where I am at the triage desk.
Brian coughs. “You got a car?”
“Yeah.”
“Come up this week. I’ll text you the coordinates.”
Relief floods my lungs. He’s willing to help. Ten, twenty, a hundred small failures brought me here, but I’ve staved off adding one more.
“Where—” I start, but he’s already hung up.
I stand there, looking out the window into a concrete void, and without warning all my limbs turn to lead weights. I slide into the room’s single pea-colored vinyl chair and wrap my arms around myself.
“This is good,” I whisper. “It’s going to be okay.”
It’s the kind of thing I say to my mom when she’s upset. Phrases that don’t really mean anything, but I’ve been saying them so long that I’m not sure I know how to do anything else.
I breathe in, parse the smells of floor polish and Windex, of papery hospital gowns and strangers’ fingerprints left on the TV remote.
The hospital air’s familiar funk of body fluids and exhaustion, of people stretched thin and wrung out.
It really is going to be okay. I’ve bought us time, and a few more days of hoping that Uncle Bill comes back.
If he doesn’t, it proves all my mom’s fears right, the ones whispering that everyone leaves her, that I’m the only one who won’t, and not even because I don’t want to, but because I owe her. Will I have to be the one to break it to her that he’s gone for good?
The Nokia buzzes, reminding me it’s still in my hand. Brian’s texted coordinates. I plug them into my phone, find he’s way out in the northern Nevada desert. For a second, I taste exhaust and shadow and tumbleweed.
I’ll text when I’m on the way, I reply.
Then, belatedly, Thank you.
The phone buzzes. You’re welcome. Bill is a good guy. I’m sure he’ll be back soon.
That, too, feels like a lie.