“Class two hemorrhage,” Dr. Jacob Loomis told Valerie. “Maybe twenty percent blood loss. No biggie. She’s young and healthy. She’ll be fine.” He was a tall guy with designer glasses and a haircut intended to look as if he’d just tumbled out of a hot girl’s bed. Carried himself very much in the manner of a man who had his mind brightly elsewhere. On the lifestyle his profession afforded him rather than on the profession itself, Valerie decided. She didn’t like him.
“Fine?” she said, not quite without judgment.
Loomis smiled. “Physically, yes,” he said. “You’ll have to talk to the shrink as far as the rest of her well-being goes. She a smart kid?”
“As far as I know, yes. Why?”
Loomis shrugged. He was about to toss out a tidbit from his casually acquired omniscience. “Probably not a serious attempt,” he said—then left it at that.
Valerie counted to five, mentally. “Because?”
Loomis smiled again, delighted to have the door to his condescension opened. “Smart suicides don’t cut their wrists,” he said. “Two minutes on the internet will tell you it’s a lousy method. Slow and painful. Serious contenders go femoral or carotid.”
Valerie had seen this sort of chipper arrogance in surgeons before. To the right kind of assholes, saving lives on a daily basis simply made them bigger, happier assholes.
“Good to know,” she said, turning away. “I’ll bear it in mind when someone’s smugness finally pushes me over the edge.”
There was no answer to her knock, so she opened the door, gently. Elspeth was in bed in a hospital gown, sleeping, hooked up to an IV. Both arms outside the covers, wrists bandaged. Rachel Grant was in the chair next to her, also apparently asleep. She stirred, opened her eyes, saw Valerie.
“Hey,” Valerie whispered. “How’s she doing?”
Rachel Grant just stared at her. Then put her head in her hands. When she raised it again she drew her palms down her face, as if to wipe away something clinging there.
“What happened?” Valerie said.
It took Rachel a moment. Her voice, when it came, sounded as if it hadn’t been used in years.
“I found her,” she said. “Why would she do this? Why would she…” Rachel shook her head. Struggled. Recovered. “She’s been sleeping downstairs with me,” she said. “We’ve been watching movies. It’s all she wants to do. There’s all this time … She can’t stand it.”
To Valerie neither mother nor daughter looked like they’d slept much. Their new shared exhaustion had stripped their features, returned them to the essential animality formerly soft-lensed by an untroubled middle-class life.
“Last night I did sleep,” Rachel said. “But I woke up and she wasn’t there. She … I found her in her room.”
She paused and looked down. Swallowed. “When I think of her, when I think of her lying there, bleeding … All that time. If I hadn’t got up, if I hadn’t woken up and gone upstairs…”
“But you did,” Valerie said. “And the doctor says she’s going to be—”
“That’s all it is,” Rachel interrupted. “It’s just whether you happen to do something. If I hadn’t … She’s just a child. Is that all it is? Whether you happen to wake up?”
“I know,” Valerie said. “But you did wake up. She’s okay. And she’s going to get whatever help she needs. Both of you.”
“It’s my fault. I’ve been useless. If I didn’t have her … If I didn’t have her there’d be nothing. Just … There would be absolutely nothing.”
Valerie tried to imagine Rachel Grant recovering from a second loss, this loss. She couldn’t. There would be absolutely nothing.
“She never…” Valerie hesitated. “She never did anything like this before?”
“Of course not. Why in God’s name would she?”
“No, of course. I understand.”
“I keep seeing her…” Rachel locked her jaws for a moment. Rode out the horror. “It was a box cutter. She went to the utility room. I keep seeing her, going there by herself … How could she do that? How could I not know?”
Valerie kept silent.
“It’s my fault,” Rachel repeated. “I sat there and told you how strong she was. I’m a fucking monster.”
“Don’t blame your—”
“She was strong because she could see how weak I was. God, I’m disgusting. It should be me lying in that bed, not her.”
“Mrs. Grant, I’m not a shrink, but I’ve seen enough to know that a lot of survivors end up feeling guilty about the simple fact that they have survived.”
“She’s not going to go that way. I’m not going to let her go that way.”
Rachel’s voice had risen. Elspeth stirred. Opened her eyes.
“Mom?”
“I’m here, honey.” Rachel took Elspeth’s hand, carefully. The girl focused. Saw Valerie. Looked sick at the sight.
“I’ll leave you two in peace,” Valerie said.
She glanced back from the open doorway. Rachel had moved to the edge of the bed and was embracing her daughter. Elspeth looked at Valerie over her mother’s shoulder. The big puppet eyes were unblinking—but there was plenty going on behind them. A pitch of tension so extreme it manifested itself as perfect calm. For the first time it occurred to Valerie that maybe Elspeth knew about her father’s affair.
Leave my daughter out of it, Rachel Grant had said.
So far that hadn’t been a problem.
Maybe it was time for it to become one.