Chip had only been gone a few minutes when a tiny Asian woman with a walk like a farmer stalked into the waiting room and dragged an upholstered chair over to face me.
“You’re Lucia Coffey,” she said as she propped herself on its arm. She pronounced it Loo-CHI-a. I shook my head.
“LOO-sha,” I told her.
She gave me a miniature hand to shake. “No one can ever say my name either.”
She pulled at her top so I could get a close look at the tag pinned to it. KIM AHN NGUYEN. PMHNP-BC.
“I see your point,” I said. I also saw from the letters that she was a psychiatric nurse practitioner.
“Do not even try to say it,” she said. “Just call me Kim. I am your liaison with the medical team. Think of me like a concierge. And punching bag, if necessary.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t feel like punching anybody at the moment.”
“You will.”
I shifted in the chair. The stench of my clothes was now beyond nauseating, and the aftertaste of smoke lined my mouth like bitter cotton. I didn’t want to be around anyone.
“I understand that you are one of us.”
I glanced at her, probably too sharply.
“Since you are an RN, we can let you stay closer to your sister than we usually do.” She moved her head side to side. “It is what you are comfortable with.”
I couldn’t imagine being comfortable with any of it.
“I’m sure her entire staff is going to show up here pretty soon,” I said. “She’s a Christian, uh, I guess you’d call her a celebrity. She has a whole entourage of people who probably know her better than I do.”
“But you are her family. She will want you, believe me.”
I didn’t, but I let it go.
“So.” She looked at me earnestly. “What do you need?”
“Me?”
“We are a holistic burn care center. You are my patient too. And whatever other family.”
“I’m it, basically.” I churned again in my seat.
“Tell me. You mind? I need to know about her.”
I did mind, but it seemed useless to argue. “We’re the only two.” My voice flattened. “Our mother died several years ago. Our father is—not in the picture.”
She didn’t chase that—fortunately, since there was nowhere to go with it.
“Does she have a husband?” she said.
“My sister’s a widow.”
A fine eyebrow went up. “A young widow.”
“Blake died six years ago. They’d only been married a short time.”
“Children?”
I nodded. “A daughter. She’s six.”
A sympathetic sound escaped from Nurse Kim. Sonia’s tragic life could drag compassion out of a stone.
“You are close to your niece?” she said.
“Bethany? I haven’t seen her in two years. She doesn’t really know me.”
I wanted her to go and take her questions and her charming little accent with her. I looked into my lap and noticed that my fingers were sooty. Something similar probably smeared my face as well.
“My husband went to get me some coffee,” I said. “And I don’t need anything else right now.”
“Except a shower.”
I blinked.
“We have facilities for family members. Many people come in covered in ash and do not even know it.”
“I don’t have clean clothes.”
She stood up. “We have scrubs. You are no stranger to those.”
What were the chances they’d have any in Size Tent? How humiliating would it be to have her scamper off promising a wardrobe, only to come back apologizing because they seemed to be running low?
Then I felt small hearted for even thinking about that while my sister— “You stay. I will fix you up.” Nurse Kim pointed a small finger at me from the door. “You have not heard the last of me, Missy. I am here for you, want me or not.”
With the room quiet again, I looked around for my pocketbook so I could at least drag a Kleenex across my face. Oh, wait. I’d run off and left my handbag in the terminal.
Heaven only knew what had happened to my car by this time. I had a strange vision of coconut truffles folding over the backseat like the watches in the Salvador Dali painting.
I was about to heave myself out of the chair when Chip sailed in, napkins plastered to his sleeve by the breeze he stirred up. His hands were full of cardboard drink trays and paper bags that oozed grease. Something normal. I could pretend to be normal.
“You’ll be happy to know I’ve been offered a shower and clean clothes,” I said as he unloaded the booty onto a veneered table.
“I’m happy to know you’re almost smiling.”
Chip pulled a plastic top from a cup and dumped the contents of a packet of sugar in. He took my hands and wrapped them around its Styrofoam warmth, leaving his own on top of mine.
“It’s going to be all right, babe,” he said, his voice bedside-manner kind. “I know it seems overwhelming, but it’s never as bad as it seems at first blush.”
He could do that for me, Chip could: come in with his big-bear chest and his soft, thick words and his blue-denim eyes and dissolve my demons into some silliness we could laugh away, even in the desperate moments that had tried to undo us. That was why I’d married him. Why I’d stayed with him when even my most antidivorce acquaintances told me I shouldn’t. Why I wanted right now to let go into his arms.
“Chip? Oh, my gosh, Chip—I am so glad to see you!”
Something brunette flew into the room and hurled itself at him. He barely had time to pull his hands from mine before she collapsed against him and wept.
“Otto’s dead,” she sobbed into him.
“Okay, Marnie—shhh.”
“What happened?”
She pulled away to look up at him, and something real crashed through my hope. I’d seen them have this kind of exchange already, and that obviously hadn’t been the first time. Her eyes knew him, and they were trusting as a puppy’s.
“We’re not sure yet,” Chip half-whispered to her. “Thank God you’re okay.” He gave her the crooked smile. “How many stitches, champ?”
“Six on my forehead. Seven here.”
She leaned over to display her leg, and her eyes caught mine for the first time. Her face crumpled again.
“Thank you so much,” she said, and flung herself at me.
The coffee overturned and dribbled off the table, onto my sandaled foot. I barely felt it. The girl in love with my husband curled into my lap, sobbing anew into my neck.
“I knew you two would connect,” Chip said.
Was he kidding? I gave Marnie a push and grabbed the stack of napkins.
“Oh, I am so sorry!” she said. “Let me do that.”
“I’ve got it, thanks.”
“No, seriously.”
“Marnie. Leave it.”
I heard the laughter hiding in Chip’s voice. Laughter that ripped through my stomach like a serrated blade.
“Come on,” he said to her. “Let me tell you about Sonia.”
Marnie abandoned me and the coffee and climbed into the chair Nurse Kim had just vacated, while Chip sat across from her, holding both her hands while he spoke to her like a doctor, giving her information layer by layer, waiting between for them to set. He’d once told me he broke bad news to families the way I built a torte.
I watched her shoulders settle and her face ease as he talked. I unwrapped a soggy hoagie and rewrapped it, creasing the paper and tucking in the ends until I, too, was safely packaged once more.
“I bet God’s going to do a major healing on her,” Marnie said when Chip finished soothing her. “Yeah, I can feel it, can’t you?”
It took a full fifteen seconds for me to realize she’d asked me. “She’s in a great hospital.”
“I mean fully recovered. This is going to be a God-thing. I’m sure ya’ll have been praying. I have ever since the minute we crashed.”
I got up and went for the door. Nurse Kim met me there with a pile of purple.
“I hope this is your color,” she said.
She deposited a set of scrubs and a Ziploc full of toiletries into my arms and didn’t acknowledge Chip or Marnie. I wished I could have dispensed with them so easily.
“Down the hall and to your right,” she said.
I escaped.
GH
In the shower, I scrubbed at the smoke smell on my skin until it was raw and the pain in my chest had resettled into an insensate lump somewhere behind my sternum. I had to keep it there, all of it, because somebody had to speak for Sonia until her people arrived. Then I could become invisible. Until then, I’d shove it all down until I only felt my stinging flesh, and relief that the purple scrubs went on my body and around my circumference.
I didn’t look in the mirror. I had no doubt that I looked like an oversized eggplant. Surely a runway somewhere waited for this look.
I went to the nurses’ station instead of back to the waiting room. “I will show you where your sister will be,” Kim said, and plodded just ahead of me.
She was petite, but I could envision her pushing a plow. Somehow that made me simply do what she said. She showed me their state-of-the-art everything, but I could feel my eyes glazing over. My legs were going heavy and losing all feeling, and I only wanted to lie down.
Uncannily, she looked at me and said, “Those chairs in the lounge—they recline so you can sleep.”
My legs got even heavier as she led me back there.
“I wish we did not call it a ‘lounge.’ You are not there to relax and have cocktails, you know?”
Right. But what was I there to do?
Lounge A was empty when we arrived, and I was too nearly catatonic to worry about where Chip and Marnie had gone. Nurse Kim produced a blanket and coaxed me into the chair, where I dug my nails into the arms, suddenly sure I was going to explode and leave the thing in shards.
I closed my eyes and faked a yawn. “I’m exhausted,” I said. “I’m going to try to catch a nap.”
She grunted, but I felt her obligingly move away, and heard the door close behind her.
“Egan—man, I’m glad you’re here.”
I opened my eyes to see Chip embracing a fortyish man whose white hair belied a young face and whose arms muscled from the rolled-up sleeves of an Oxford shirt with Sonia’s ALM logo on its pocket. My husband had never been a hugger of men.
When they finally let go of each other, Chip filled him in on Sonia’s condition while the man listened, staring at the floor and tugging at his upper lip.
“Egan, this is my wife, Sonia’s sister. I don’t think you’ve ever met Egan Ladd, Lucia—general manager of ALM.”
Egan gave me a startled look before he fumbled into, “I am so sorry.”
I wasn’t sure he was empathizing with my trauma or apologizing for mistaking me for one of the hospital staff.
“This is just—I can’t get my mind around it. All the way here from Pittsburgh, I just kept praying, ‘Lord, help me understand. What are You doing here?’”
I hadn’t thought to ask that, but Chip nodded.
“I told the rest of the staff to stay in Pittsburgh,” Egan said to him. “They can minister to people who’ve already shown up for the conference. They’ll be upset. Have you called Roxanne?”
“Marnie did. She said Georgia and Francesca are already on their way, and she’ll be right behind them as soon as she can.”
There was no need to try to disappear into the woodwork now. I was already invisible behind this force of people I’d never even heard of.
When Egan said, “What can we do now?” I didn’t answer. He and “the staff” would surely make it happen.
“We need to take this to the Lord, for starters.” Egan rubbed his hands together before stretching out his arms to Chip and me.
I didn’t know the meaning of that signal until Chip entwined his arm around Egan’s and nodded at me.
We were going to pray, standing, arms around each other, heads bent like three myopic people searching for a lost contact lens. Aside from the fact that I didn’t link arms with people I’d known for two minutes, my only prayer was one of thanksgiving that Kim chose that moment to stalk in with a steaming tray. By the time the introductions were made, the threat of the prayer circle had passed.
I have nothing against praying, bowing my head in some private place and pleading silently with God that if He would just let me have this one thing, I would give up anything else, do anything, be anything He wanted. I’d prayed such a prayer that morning when I’d hoped Chip and I could start over. I had been crying out Dear God! in my head ever since the plane hit the ground. I didn’t want to head into the vortex that suggested that what I had to give up was my sister. Or my husband.
They gathered around the heap of turkey sandwiches and bowls of clam chowder—Chip and Egan and a made-over Marnie, who had apparently found the family facilities. She made a pair of turquoise scrubs look like they belonged in the pages of Vogue.
I took two bites of a sandwich that went down like wet cement and wandered out into the hallway to the glass doors that separated me from the ICU.
It must have been close to ten o’clock by then. The place had that eerie hush that falls when the lights are dimmed to a yellow blush and the patients enter the tunnel to battle the dark demons of doubt and despair. During the day and early evening, a hospital is filled with purposeful bustle and cheerful talk and the handle-hold of hope. The pain is tempered by smiles, the fear by the sense of things being done, healing things. Being sick is bearable when the sun beckons through the window and visitors talk of things to come beyond this temporary tangle with illness.
But at night, the life-giving machines taunt and the swish of shoes in the halls whisper what-ifs. The sleep we welcome at the end of a health-filled day eludes us when we’re in pain. In its place comes the dark threat that there will never be health-filled days again. It is replaced by the specter of death.
I shivered, and Kim materialized with a blanket, folded lengthwise like a shawl, which she wrapped around my shoulders. I pretended to appreciate its warmth, but I didn’t know if I was hot or cold, exhausted or merely so wired I’d blown all my circuits.
“Coffee?” she said.
“I’d kill for a Diet Coke,” I said. “In a sixteen-ounce cup with crushed ice.”
“No need to kill.” Her voice smiled. “I can fix you up. The doctor is almost ready to give you an update.”
It was all I could do to go back to the lounge, particularly when I saw that its population had nearly doubled.
Two women had joined the group, both in the constant motion of females who pride themselves on their stress levels. Sandals clacked, swing haircuts swung, hands raked through tresses. The atmosphere in the room had changed, the way it does with the arrival of the people who know how to take control of a situation.
The tall blonde dropped her phone into her bag when she saw me and said, “Can you tell us anythang?”
The “thang” overlapped the shorter woman’s, “We’re looking for her sister—they’ll only tell us anything if we’re family.”
Kim looked at me sideways.
“Georgia,” Egan said, “this is—”
“Evening, folks.”
Dr. Abernathy appeared in the doorway, and Georgia and the other woman swarmed him like a cloud of honeybees. Marnie and Egan joined the hive, leaving Chip to return to his wall.
Dr. Abernathy looked over their heads at me. “This is all family?”
“Friends,” one of the women said. “As good as family.”
“This okay with you?”
I nodded.
He picked up the story where he’d left off, and I felt the facts calming me, brutal as they were. I could understand debriding and irrigating and applying topical agents. I could get through corneal desiccation and oral commissures and neck contracture in my brain. Just as long as I didn’t have to feel them in my heart.
“Doctor.”
We looked up at Georgia who, with everyone else except Chip, hovered behind me.
“Can you debrief your nurse later and use plain English with us?” she said, hands on narrow hips. “I have no idea what corneal decimation is, and I’m sure the rest of us don’t either.”
“Lucia’s a nurse,” Marnie piped up. “She can explain.”
“Lucia, her sister?” Georgia said. “Well, where is she?”
“I’m so sorry!” Marnie thrust out her hands. “I thought you knew—”
“You’re Lucia?” one of the women said.
“All right, look, just—what happens now?” the other one said. They sounded exactly alike: imperious and entitled.
Dr. Abernathy waited for my nod before he addressed them. “We’ll regulate her fluid intake, which is a delicate process. Keep an eye on her lungs—not much we can do but wait there.”
“For how long?” Egan said.
“I’ll be talking with Lucia about that, and I’m sure she’ll keep you apprised. Meanwhile, Sonia’s whole support group has access to her psychiatric nurse, Kim.”
No one said anything until Marnie chimed in with, “And God.” “Most assuredly God,” the doctor said. “That will be a huge factor in her recovery. She’s lucky to have all of you.”
“I don’t think luck has anything to do with it.” Egan gave his evangelical smile and opened his arms.
This time Chip didn’t take him up on the offer.
“When can I see her?” I said to Dr. Abernathy.
“Right now, if you want. Then we want her to rest.”
“We’ll be able to see her tomorrow, then.” Georgia nodded, willing Dr. Abernathy to nod with her.
“We’ll see how her night goes. The staff will work through Lucia.”
I could feel their eyes on me, disappointed, doubtful that I was the appropriate person for the job when better groomed, more technologically adept, thinner people were available. I watched the doctor slip out the door.
Kim replaced him, crooking her finger at me.
“I’ll take you,” she whispered to me.
I followed her through the doors without looking back at the stiffness we left behind. What possible difference could it make what they thought or said or assumed? I had to steel myself for what I was about to see—because once I saw it, there would be no erasing it. No matter how hard those people prayed.