Roger wasn’t the only unexpected ghost from Daniel’s past to visit the ICU floor in the days following the shooting. Lisa came and went, staying as long as her frayed nerves would allow, but she always left when the sight of her son lying comatose in a hospital bed proved to be too much to bear. During one of her extended cigarette breaks, a woman in a pair of black suede pants and a black turtleneck sweater stepped off the elevator, bypassing the nurses’ station altogether and choosing not to sign in as a visitor.
She took the loop around the floor in her high-heeled boots, clicking purposefully down the hallways like she knew exactly where she was going. Her hair was still dark and straight, but longer than it had been when she was eighteen. Avoiding the sun her whole life had kept her face remarkably unwrinkled, and even at forty-eight, she looked sharp and youthful.
Without hesitation, she opened the door to room 314 and entered as if she belonged there. Again, Daniel was alone on the snowy mountain of sheets and pillows, the shell of him propped up by machinery and pharmaceuticals. The rest of him--the best, most essential part--was somewhere else. She knew that, but still, the sight of him nearly took her breath away.
At his bedside, she set her black purse on the chair and carefully laid her overcoat across the back of it, spending more time than was necessary on the arranging of her personal belongings. Having something else to focus on gave her the chance to compose herself, to prepare for the way he looked there in the hospital bed.
Like Roger, she hadn’t known how to approach him after all these years. In fact, she’d known that even finding him would be fruitless. He’d know nothing about her, wouldn’t remember their past, wouldn’t understand why a woman claiming to be a music journalist from New York City would show up in Westchester wanting to talk to him about a time and place he wouldn’t remember having lived through. At best, he’d think she was some over-the-hill Gen Xer looking to write a story about teenagers and how their tastes in music had changed over the decades. At worst, he’d peg her as a cougar and tell his friends he had a MILF on his trail. She couldn’t have lived with herself either way, so she’d stayed away.
But now she’d had to come; there’d been no choice. When Roger had tracked her down and told her about the school shooting, every fiber of her being had burned hotly and then frozen inside as she’d held the phone to her ear, leaving her numb and in shock. Sure, she’d imagined him growing up in Westchester in the house next door to Roger’s. Sure, she’d thought about him over the years, wondering whether time had played the same tricks on other people that it had played on them. But her life had kept her far too busy to even consider throwing a wrench into the universe and creating another wrinkle in time. Until now. Now she had no choice.
“Daniel,” she whispered, leaning over the bed as she slipped her hand into his still one. She squeezed, hoping that he might open his eyes just as much as she prayed that he wouldn’t. “Hi. I’ve missed you. Oh my God.” Her eyes filled with tears and her throat closed in on itself as she tried to swallow thirty years of grief and confusion. “It’s Jenny,” she said, trying her voice to see if it would hold the weight of her words. It did.
“Roger told me you were here, and I had to see you.” Jenny squeezed his hand again. “It’s been a long time, and I wanted to see you. You look the same,” she said, marveling at the fact that the eighteen-year-old Daniel she’d known in 1986 was here in the flesh and that she was holding his hand.
“Daniel, I wanted to see you and tell you something. I wanted to tell you about your daughter.”