NINETEEN

2003

Nicki wakes up, head throbbing, and runs to the bathroom to vomit. Good fucking god, what have I done? she thinks, hands shaking, head pressed against the toilet seat, feeling as though a thousand-pound weight has dropped from the sky and onto her back, keeping her pinned there. She can still taste the tequila coating the insides of her mouth, can still smell the tinny, stale-beer smell of the bar, and can definitely still hear Dallas snoring in the next room. It isn’t even a dawning of sick recognition that hits her then, just a slow resigned sigh, like of course that’s Dallas snoring in the next room, who else would it be? And here she is, kneeling on the bathroom floor of some seedy motel and throwing up like she’s in fucking high school, for Christ’s sake.

It was Jenna’s birthday, or at least it had been Jenna’s birthday on the previous Tuesday, but now that they were adults with jobs and kids and shit, they couldn’t just go out and party any old night of the week. So they saved up their hairspray and the money from their tip jars and went out Friday night, seven of them wobbling on too-tall heels in too-tight skirts, outfits they never would have worn back in the day, pre-kids, pre-divorces, pre–credit card debt, when all they needed to be sexy was a baby tee and some strawberry-scented lip gloss. Nicki might have only been twenty-six, but stuffed into her Spanx, with her eyeliner stretched out to her temples, she felt more like forty-six. She hoped she didn’t look as desperate as she felt, standing at the bar at Scuttlebutts, waving a twenty discreetly for the benefit of the bored bartender, who ignored her as if she was just some middle-aged mom with a bad haircut whose idea of a good time was two wine coolers and being in bed before ten. The whole thing made Nicki’s head hurt.

As she made her way back to the table balancing a tray of tequila shots, she bumped into Dallas. Really, Dallas bumped into her, while walking backwards through the bar with his arms thrown up in the air, yelling something to one of his bros across the room who was making rude gestures with a test-tube shooter. She didn’t even know it was him until they were both on the floor, dripping with tequila, lemon wedges scattered between them, the salt shaker uncapped and overturned on Dallas’s chest.

“Watch where you’re fucking going!” Nicki yelled, driving her heel into Dallas’s side.

“Fuck, Nicki,” Dallas groaned.

Nicki sat up, waving off a couple of outstretched hands from the crowd of amused onlookers. She found one shot glass that was still three-quarters full of tequila, hoisted herself up onto all fours, and crawled across the floor to Dallas, then leaned over and licked at the pile of salt on his T-shirt with a catlike flick of her tongue. Then she sat back on her heels, downed the shot, and dropped the glass onto Dallas’s chest with a thud that made him curl back in on himself, salt spilling onto the floor. “You owe me thirty-seven-fifty,” she said. “Plus tip.”

She left him there on the floor and went to the bathroom. One side of her face was streaked black with what was left of her dramatic cat’s-eye liner, and her lip was bleeding. All she could smell was tequila – it was in her hair, soaked into her shirt, dripping down her skirt, which was twisted sideways at an awkward angle. She hadn’t been in a fight since before the twins were born, but she was pretty sure this was what her fight face looked like, the type of face that made other women see you as a wounded animal, something to either protect or destroy. For a moment she thought about going home, about taking a long shower, scrubbing herself down, climbing into bed with one of her girls, burying her face in their hair, trying to feel thankful for what she had. Instead she fixed her eye makeup as best she could, wiped the blood from her lips and smeared them with red lipstick from her purse, jacked up her tits in her push-up bra, and headed back into the bar.

Dallas was waiting for her outside the bathroom. As soon as she came out, he pulled up his T-shirt, glaring at her. “Look what you did,” he said. “It’s already fucking bruising.”

“Poor baby,” said Nicki. She reached out and touched the growing bruise gently, then bent her index finger and drove her knuckle into it.

Dallas slapped her hand away. “You’re such a bitch,” he said through gritted teeth.

“You liked it,” she said. “Now buy me more tequila and I won’t tell Finn that you tried to take your shirt off in front of me.”

She made Dallas buy her eight more shots just to make it even, and together they slammed them back at the bar, one after another – salt, shot, lemon – like an assembly line. Then they ordered more. Later, Nicki remembered arguing about what they were going to play on the jukebox: Dallas wanting to put on Dave Matthews Band, Nicki saying he might as well just tell everyone in the bar he wanted them to kill themselves. Then something about walking to Nippers for french fries, how long it would take, and whether they would still be open when the bar closed. Something else about whether or not dogs could see in the dark. At some point she noticed that Jenna and the girls had left; she couldn’t remember if they had said goodbye. At some even later point there was a decision made. A motel room. A late-night talk show on the TV. Blankets and sheets on the floor. A bad taste in her mouth, skin sticky, hair matted in the back. She doesn’t even know if they had sex. She can only remember his hands on her, too rough between her legs, her surprise at the size of his dick, thinking, Ahh, okay, Finn, now I get it.

And now she’s kneeling on the bathroom floor, head on the toilet, sifting through the broken pieces of her memory of the night before. There is too much blank space for her liking – Nicki always prefers to act drunker than she feels, not the other way around. That’s not to say she wouldn’t have wound up in the exact same place at the end of the night – she just might have shown a little more dignity getting here.

As she’s lying there, she hears her cell phone ring in the next room. She moans and tries to lift her head. It’s not even noon, too early for any of her friends to be calling. Her mom is home with the girls, she must be calling to see when Nicki is coming back. For a moment, Nicki contemplates never going home, at least not for the day, staying at the motel instead, ordering pizza and drinking beer – ugh, no not beer, she thinks as her stomach heaves, chocolate milk, maybe – smoking a couple of joints, watching bad reality TV. Dallas can even stay if he wants, she wouldn’t mind the company. He isn’t a bad guy, really, didn’t deserve the shit she’d been giving him all these years about being a deadbeat with no ambition, about not shaving his beard or having no muscle tone or not committing to her sister. That last part is a no-brainer, the guy has cheater written right on his forehead, but it’s in that invisible ink that you need a black light to see. Nicki is the black light, that’s all. She is basically doing Finn a favour, even if Finn wouldn’t see it that way. Not that she would ever tell Finn about this. She’s not an idiot.

“Hello?” she hears Dallas say in the other room. She raises her head from the toilet.

“Hey,” she says, crawling to the door. “That’s my –”

“Finn? Hey, baby,” Dallas says. “I had a rough night out with the guys.”

Silence. Nicki sinks back against the doorframe. She can feel her heartbeat in every cell of her body, rocking her back and forth. Dallas is lying on his side in the bed, facing her, her phone pressed up against his ear. “You dumbass,” she says, dropping her head into her hand.

“What are you talking about?” Dallas says into the phone. “You called me.” He is sitting up now, his eyes darting around the room. He raises his eyebrows at Nicki. She just shakes her head. What? he mouths. “Finn, Finn, wait, what are you talking about?” He pauses, then pulls the phone away from his ear. “She hung up.”

“That’s my fucking phone, genius,” Nicki says.

Dallas picks up the phone again and stares at it, uncomprehending. Then he looks back at Nicki. “She said to tell you to come home,” he says, his voice strangely high. “Your mother’s in the hospital.”

2012

“Maybe I should go visit your mom in the hospital,” Dallas says, propping himself up, his elbow digging into the dingy motel room pillow. “Pay my respects.”

“She’s not dead,” Nicki says. “She’s in a coma.”

“Wrong choice of words, I guess.”

“No shit,” says Nicki. She pulls the blankets up around her chin. They have cranked the air conditioner to full blast, so even though it is probably thirty degrees outside, the room is freezing. The cold air was welcome thirty minutes ago when they crashed into the room, delirious and sweaty from heat and adrenaline – Nicki won’t call it desire, that sounds too romance-novely, and there is nothing romantic about her relationship with Dallas – but now the sweat is cooling on her skin and everything seems like a really fucking bad idea, including the air conditioner.

Dallas picks up the remote and flicks half-heartedly through the channels. “Sunday-afternoon television sucks,” he says. “Why can’t motels have Netflix?”

“We’re lucky this motel has a working toilet.”

Dallas shakes his head. “Hey, I take you nice places.” He flicks around some more and then settles on a nature documentary, something about sharks featuring an attractive host in a wetsuit. That guy London likes. Adam something. “Let’s learn something, shall we?” says Dallas.

But Nicki is not in the mood for learning. “Do you have any weed?” she asks. Nicki hasn’t smoked since she married Hamish, who, although he looks the part of a stoner, is resolutely straight edge. He doesn’t even really drink, just a beer sometimes when he’s fishing, or a taste of the whisky he’s made to make sure nothing’s gone wrong with the batch. But she suddenly wants to, can almost feel it burning in her lungs. And god knows she deserves it, this one little fucking thing.

“At my place,” Dallas says. “But we probably don’t want to go there.”

Because of Tanya, Nicki thinks. The little bitch. “Never mind,” she says. “I didn’t really want it anyway.” After this, she will have to go to the hospital, and Shawn will probably be there, and Shawn is basically a narc – he can smell weed on you ten miles away. But she feels the occasion calls for it, somehow. Dirty motel rooms and weed just seem to go together.

Normally, Nicki would have made Dallas take her somewhere a bit classier – a Super 8, at least, or a Best Western, something brand-name. Not one of these fucking no-tell Current River shitholes with names like Bay Vue and Lakeshore, even though the only bay or lake you can see is in the cheap reproduction artwork hanging in the bathroom – but everything in town is booked up for some kind of baseball tournament. They’ve gone to a few different places in the six months they’ve been doing whatever the fuck it is they’re doing: hotels, friends’ apartments, the back room at Desi’s when it was closed, his parents’ place when they went to Poland to visit their cousins. One time they went up to his friend’s camp on Arrow Lake, a leisurely late-spring afternoon spent fucking and fishing and drinking beer, and Nicki came home with two medium-sized pickerel and splinters on her kneecaps from the wooden deck.

What the fuck are they doing? Sneaking around, lying to people, feeling disgusting ninety percent of the time. And for what? Nicki doesn’t even like Dallas. If she had ever thought there was any feeling there, anything at all, it had been wiped away the instant she walked into Desi’s and saw him standing behind the counter in that stupid long black apron taking people’s orders as if nothing had ever happened, as if he hadn’t knocked her up and then taken off for eight years. She had thrown a mug at him that day, still half-full with some mousy-haired Lakehead student’s lukewarm peppermint tea. Just picked it up off the nearest table and hurled it at Dallas’s head, although the mug was heavier than she thought and it ended up skidding across the counter and smashing on the floor at his feet.

“You fucking deadbeat!” she screamed, and Dallas just stood there like a drooling idiot, his mouth hanging open, until Nicki picked up a plate with the same girl’s half-eaten blueberry muffin on it and heaved it at him like a Frisbee. He reached one hand up and caught the plate seconds before it came in contact with his face.

“Nicki,” he said. “Holy shit.” He put the plate down and climbed under the counter, grabbed her by the wrists. She struggled, but he was surprisingly strong. He put his mouth near her ear. “You can hit me if you want,” he said, “but let’s just do it outside, okay?”

He led her through the back and out into the alleyway behind the café. As soon as they stepped outside, he let her go. “Jesus Christ,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a pack of smokes. “Do you know how many times I’ve wanted to do that?”

“What, throw a mug at your head?” Nicki asked. She leaned against the wall, her whole body shaking.

“Throw a mug at someone at Desi’s. We’re all such fucking douches.”

It might have just been the adrenaline, but Nicki laughed. “Give me one of those,” she said, reaching for the cigarettes.

“So are you going to hit me or what?” Dallas asked. He took a drag of his smoke and opened his arms wide, a half smile on his face. The smug motherfucker. Like he knew she wasn’t going to do it. “I deserve it. I know I do.” Well, duh, Nicki thought and hauled off and punched him in the stomach. His face registered a brief look of surprise before collapsing into a cartoony “oof” as he stumbled backwards, reaching for the wall. Nicki sat down on a milk crate and smoked her cigarette.

After a minute, Dallas righted himself again.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said shakily, bringing the cigarette to his lips.

Nicki stood up, crushed out her butt, and punched him again.

They ended up back at his place – the only time Nicki has been there. Dallas still lived like a frat boy, his one-room apartment furnished with a yard-sale futon and tables made out of empty beer cases, takeout containers strewn across the floor. There were two walls not taken up by windows. A giant flat-screen TV was mounted on one; on the other was what looked like a promotional poster for a movie about bullfighting, but all the words were in Spanish. Without talking about it – without talking about anything – Dallas fucked her up against the wall with the bullfighting poster, so that when she turned her head she could see the unfamiliar words, the red of the cape, the horns of the bull.

“What’s with the poster?” she asked him afterward, sitting on the futon, slightly stunned. All the fight had been screwed right out of her, and she felt almost quiet on the inside – even in that disgusting room, with its cracking ceiling and dirty windows, a place where she now felt she could sit, unmoving, for hours.

“Oh,” Dallas said, following her gaze. “A friend brought that back from Spain. I thought for a while I might want to be a bullfighter. But then I realized that meant I would actually have to fight bulls.”

“You mean a girlfriend,” said Nicki, leaning back on the futon. She had managed to pull up her jeans but her top was still somewhere in the mess on the floor. She ran her hand over her belly, feeling the stretch marks there, the little pouch of flesh that never seemed to go away no matter how many diet pills she took.

“Yeah,” he said. “Her name was Sage. I lived with her on Salt Spring for a couple of years.”

“That’s such a stupid name,” Nicki said, pounding her fist lightly against her stomach. She didn’t try to hide the jealousy in her voice. She didn’t care enough to hide anything from Dallas, maybe that was the appealing part about being with him. “I can’t believe you dated someone with such a stupid name.”

“Actually, we were married. For six months. We just got divorced last year.”

Nicki let her hand drop against her stomach. “Awesome,” she said. She sat up abruptly and started searching for her shirt.

“What?” said Dallas, watching curiously as she stumbled around the room, kicking takeout boxes away, throwing aside old crusty boxer shorts.

“You prick. What the fuck is wrong with you?” Her pulse sped up, and her vision blurred with a flood of rage. The worst part was, she knew she had no reason to be angry, which made her even angrier, to the point where she could barely see.

Her shirt was nowhere to be found. She grabbed her coat and zipped it up over her bra, smoothed down her hair, and gave Dallas the double-middle-finger salute before slamming the door behind her.

Fucking married. Who did he think he was?

But she was the one who texted him the next weekend, and the time after that, and the time after that. She still doesn’t like Dallas, but for some Christ-forsaken reason she really, really loves fucking him. She loves the sneaking around, lying to people, feeling disgusting ninety percent of the time. She loves that he’s the last person on the planet that she should want to fuck. She loves that they can do it and then be dicks to each other, that they can bite and kick and scratch and then share a beer and go back to their lives. She loves that if Hamish ever found out, he would be devastated – loves that she can dangle his fragile heart over the gaping chasm of her betrayal and swing it there. She needs this, this knife’s edge. She needs it to feel alive. And she won’t apologize for it.

So they end up in dirty motels like this one, with her clients thinking she’s sick and Hamish thinking she’s working and the girls off doing their own thing and Ross with her mother – or in this case, Finn, something that Nicki is trying to push to the back of her mind. Her mother is too lost in her own world to question Nicki, but Finn is another story. Finn will read her mind like the morning paper.

“I should probably get going anyway,” Nicki says. She doesn’t say that Hamish will be home soon from Terrace Bay, or that Finn will be wondering where she is, or that Ross needs her to make him supper. She doesn’t say any of that because these are not things that exist in their world, this afternoon, this motel room.

“No, stay,” says Dallas, reaching over and cupping her breast.

Just then the television switches over to a local news promo, and that Cassandra Coelho bitch starts talking about Kate. The two of them watch in silence as Kate flies over the waterfall. Dallas shakes his head again. “Un-fucking-believable,” he says. “How is she not dead?”

“I don’t know.” Nicki remembers the story of Princess Green Mantle plummeting over the falls to her death in order to save her tribe. At least she was doing something useful – if anyone should have survived the fall, it was her, not Kate, who went over for no good reason. “Finn thinks there’s something really wrong with her. Like she would know anything about anything.”

Dallas is quiet for a minute. “I saw her, you know,” he says finally. “Finn, I mean.”

Nicki pokes at the inner corner of her eye, chasing a nonexistent eyelash. “I know,” she says. “Do you think I didn’t know?”

Suddenly the room feels oppressively hot, even with the air conditioner. Nicki can’t breathe. She glances at Dallas, lying against the pillow, his too-long blond hair sticking up from his head at unlikely angles. He seems to be breathing just fine, but it’s hard to tell. She checks her watch: it’s nearly six. Four hours of her life wasted in this shithole. “I’m gonna go,” she says.

“Wait,” says Dallas, sitting up. “Are you okay?”

“Fuck you,” she says, although she doesn’t know why. It is their usual routine: fight, fuck, flee. She tells herself it’s what she wants as she walks out the door.

2003

Nicki only has last night’s clothes to wear. It couldn’t be any worse: the Spanx digging into her bloated belly, everything else chafing against her hypersensitive hungover skin, all of it too tight and bright and perfectly wrong for pretty much anything that could happen before midnight. Dallas offers her his plaid shirt and she takes it, buttoning it up over her tube top, which is still sticky with tequila. She’s still not talking to him. At least he has the sense to act sheepish about the whole thing, otherwise Nicki might have to drill him in the other side, give him a matching bruise.

“I’ll tell her I found your phone at the bar,” Dallas says, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching as Nicki puts on her shoes. “I took it and was going to give it back to you, but then it rang, so I answered it, thinking it might be you…”

Nicki stares at him, unblinking. “You really are dumb as a fucking post,” she says. She wriggles her foot down into her shoe and limps towards the dresser, searching for her purse. “I don’t know how Finn has put up with you for this long.”

“I don’t get it,” Dallas says, his voice edging on a whine. He curls his feet up underneath him, arranging the blankets over his lap, pouting. He looks like a little kid who’s just pissed the bed at a sleepover party. Pathetic. Nicki picks up an empty water bottle from the floor and throws it at his head.

“Just help me find my purse.”

The room feels like chaos. Nicki doesn’t know how they could have done so much damage in such a short period of time. Dallas eventually finds her purse shoved behind the bedside table, and she digs out her lipstick, her wallet, and her sunglasses, but can’t find her keys. “Did you leave them at the bar?” Dallas keeps asking her, until she’s ready to punch him. Like, why the hell would she pull out her keys at the bar? They must have fallen out of her purse somewhere in the room. Her car is still outside the bar and she’ll need it for work the next day. No, she doesn’t know where her spare is, who knows where their fucking spare is? They scour the room from top to bottom but her keys are not under the bed and they’re not in the bathroom and they’re not behind the television and they’re not in the drawer with the Holy Bible. They’re not even in Dallas’s beat-up old Accord, which Nicki is shocked to discover they had driven to the motel, disgust rising up in her throat like bile, until finally the adrenaline or whatever the fuck it is that Nicki has been running on wears off and she runs to the bathroom to throw up again. When she comes back out, Dallas is sitting on the bed again, holding up his own keys and jingling them in his hand.

“I guess you need a lift,” he says.

Nicki sighs and nods. “Fine,” she says. “But you’re not coming in.”

It’s not until they’re in the car that it all sinks in: Her mom is in the hospital. She slept with Finn’s boyfriend. Finn knows she slept with her boyfriend. She breathes in, searches her purse for lip gloss, and then runs it over her mouth, smacking her lips together. Moments like this are what Nicki lives and dies for. Life smashed into a pulp on the ground in front of you, split open, bleeding and convulsing. Those seconds where you can see, in stark relief, the essence of everything that is important, its bright gory beating heart, without the glaze of everyday, mundane, boring details.

She knows that if anyone were to examine her life, they would see a long string of mistakes: Getting knocked up at eighteen, then at twenty-one. Sleeping with her sister’s boyfriend. And Finn would have so much more to add to that list. Skipping classes, failing exams, mouthing off to teachers. Getting her tongue stuck to frozen metal, climbing too high in a tree, swimming too far out in the lake. Shoplifting lip gloss from the pharmacy, stealing liquor from their parents, driving drunk. Staying in Thunder Bay. Wanting to stay in Thunder Bay. All the things Finn had spent years warning her about.

But Finn warning her about something only made her want to do it more. For Nicki there is no such thing as a mistake. She runs headlong into the fire, basking in the burn.

She should get Dallas to drop her off a few streets before the hospital, but she’s got her heels on and it’s raining, of course, great big spitwads of water pummelling the roof of the car. “Over here,” she says to Dallas, pointing to the entrance of the emergency department. “Just pull up to the door. You don’t have to park or anything.” With three kids and two aging parents she knows these hallways as well as the hallways in her own home, knows which doors lead to which tragedies, knows what to say, who to say it to.

The entrance is covered with an awning – thank god for small mercies – and Nicki pulls Dallas’s shirt tighter around her as she mentally prepares herself to get out of the car. “Well,” she says. “It’s been…fucked up.”

“Yeah,” says Dallas. “I hope your mom’s okay.”

“Yeah,” says Nicki.

They both sit there staring straight ahead, listening to the rain hammering against the awning, the low buzz of the radio. Finally, when she realizes Dallas isn’t going to say anything else, she gets out of the car. At the entrance, she sees Finn standing just inside the sliding glass doors, watching her. Nicki straightens her skirt, lifts her head, and saunters towards the door. But as she gets closer, she realizes it’s not her that Finn is watching, it’s Dallas, her eyes trained on him all puppy-dog and sad even as her sister walks towards her wearing her boyfriend’s shirt over last night’s dress, even as she comes through the door with a lazy half smile on her face, close enough for Finn to see the mats in her hair, the bite marks on her neck, a perfect image of freshly fucked bliss. Still Finn stares at Dallas, and when Nicki turns around she sees Dallas is staring at Finn, that they are having a conversation with just their eyes – a conversation that Nicki is locked out of.

She walks right up to Finn and cracks her gum. Finn blinks twice and finally looks at her.

“Hey,” Nicki says. “What’s up?”

Finn blinks a third time and then walks away.

2012

They don’t talk about Ross. Ross is not a part of this, and the second he becomes a part of this, Nicki tells herself it will be over. “What’s he like?” Dallas asked her once, in the alley behind Desi’s where she had punched him that first time, while they were sharing a post-fuck smoke. Nicki liked watching Dallas smoke; he did this thing where he didn’t even blow the smoke out, he just opened his mouth and let it waft away. She secretly thought it was sexy, even though she would never tell him that.

“Who?” she asked, taking the cigarette from him and trying to copy his exhale. It never seemed to work for her, she always ran out of patience and ended up blowing it out before it was all gone.

“My…Ross,” Dallas answered.

Nicki narrowed her eyes at him. “He is not your Ross,” she said flatly. “You do not have a Ross. As far as you are concerned, there is no Ross.”

Now, driving away from the motel, Nicki wonders if this was a mistake. If this is the kind of thing that could screw up a kid for life. The realization hits her all at once, as she’s waiting at a light on Red River Road, watching three teenaged boys in cargo shorts and hoodies sauntering across the street in front of her: Someday, Ross is going to find out about this. And he is going to be very, very pissed.

She remembers the first time she was with Dallas and how her mom ended up in the hospital. The two events will always seem linked to her, as if one somehow led to the other. That time, Kate had fallen off the roof of their house, where she had climbed up to watch the sunrise. Even now, thinking about the whole thing makes Nicki sick to her stomach. They had all been up on the roof before – it was something they just did as kids, climbed out the dormer window in the master bedroom and then inched up on their butts as far as they could go. But picturing her fifty-five-year-old mother doing it – it just seemed wrong. Since then, everything about Kate has seemed wrong, even to Nicki, who loves wrong, who embraces wrong, who fucking lives for wrong. But this wrong – it was different. Darker. Scarier. And beyond Kate’s control.

When she gets to the hospital this time, Nicki immediately knows something isn’t right. In the parking lot she sees her dad’s truck, parked at a weird angle across two spaces, as though he had just abandoned it there. Oh no. She tries to remember how her mother had looked when she visited earlier that morning, whether or not Kate had seemed different. Nicki should have been able to tell; if anyone could, it would have been her, she was the only one who was here every day, the only one who was beside Kate the whole time, the only one of them who really gave a damn. Just because she doesn’t want to sit around and cry about what is happening to Kate doesn’t mean she’s in denial. How can she be in denial about something that’s in her face every single fucking day? The blank look in her mother’s eyes when Nicki says a word she doesn’t understand. Her head hung in humiliation when Nicki has to pick her up after she’s gotten lost, or when she’s pissed herself in the mall because she can’t find the bathroom and doesn’t know how to ask where it is. Nicki has spent the past eight years watching her smart, funny, badass mother slowly deteriorating into a scared, confused shell of a woman. So no, Nicki does not want to talk about how bad things are with Mom. She doesn’t want to talk about it because she has to fucking live it every day.

Ignoring the microphones shoved in her face, Nicki rushes into the hospital, paces in the elevator until it reaches the eighth floor, races down the hall to Kate’s room.

Shawn is standing outside the door. “Nicki,” he says, grabbing for her arm as she tries to push past him. “Wait.”

“Don’t fucking touch me!” she says a little too loud. A nurse at the station looks up from her computer and starts down the hall towards them.

“Nick, she’s gone,” Shawn says.

“Oh god.” Nicki feels her knees start to buckle. “No, no, she can’t be.” The world is spinning. “Oh god, oh god.”

Shawn reaches out to steady her, holding her by her arms. “Nicki, look at me. She’s not dead. She’s gone. Like disappeared gone.”

It takes Nicki a couple of moments to process the words. “What the hell, Shawn,” she says under her breath, eyeing the nurse, who has stopped ten feet away, watching them. “What is wrong with you?” She wrenches her arms away from him and goes into Kate’s room. The bed is empty, rumpled, as though Kate had just gotten up to go to the bathroom. Walter stands by the window with his back to the door, and in the chair next to the bed is Finn, with Ross on her lap. “Vroom vroom,” Ross says, playing with a wooden tongue depressor, flying it through the air like an airplane before crashing it into the side of Finn’s head. “Boom. Crash.”

“Ross, baby,” Nicki says. She goes over to him, pets his head like he’s a kitten. His too-long blond hair sticking up at unlikely angles. “What are you doing? Did Aunt Finn bring you here?”

“Hi, Mom,” Ross says, enthralled with his airplane, which has miraculously recovered from the crash and is now circling Nicki’s arm.

“Hi, Nicki,” says Finn.

Finn is staring her down, but she refuses to acknowledge her. She is still recovering from thinking her mother was dead, she doesn’t need to deal with her judgmental twin making her feel even worse. She turns to Shawn instead. “What happened?” she asks. “Where is she?”

“She must have woken up and then left,” says Shawn. He rubs his hand over his face, then shakes his head. “There was only about twenty minutes between the last time someone checked on her and when Finn and Ross got here and found her missing. The hospital is looking into it now.”

“They’re looking into it? They lost a patient, Shawn. They should be doing a little more than just looking into it.”

Shawn sighs. “They’re doing everything they can, Nicki. Seriously.”

“Nana’s gone,” Ross says. He throws his airplane onto the bed, as if to make a point.

“We’ll find her,” Finn says, giving his arm a squeeze. She smiles. Nicki could choke her, she really could. The world starts to spin again, and she sits down on the bed, gripping the edges as if she were about to fall off.

“Are you okay?” Shawn asks. “I can get Katriina to go look after the twins tonight, if you want to stay here for a bit. And I called Hamish, he just left Terrace Bay, he should be here in a couple of hours.” Nicki feels Finn flinch, but she doesn’t say anything. Shawn puts his hand on her shoulder. “Do you want some water or something? You look like shit.”

“You said shit, Uncle Shawn,” Ross says.

“I’m fine,” says Nicki. But she’s not fine at all. She is tired. She lies back on the bed and stares at the ceiling, trying to imagine a place that is as far away from here as possible. Then in her mind she takes Finn and puts her there instead.