8

Ellie’s house was cozier than Mary Alice’s. Warmer. Her curtains were heavier and more intolerant of light, the cabinets were bigger and darker, her couch was more inviting and easier to nap on. Ellie hated overhead lighting and enjoyed the act of turning on the lamps when she entered a room. It was second only to the act of turning them off as she left, which made her feel as though she was taking a tactile approach to her life. That was the thing you’d be struck by if you scanned Ellie’s living room. It was filled with things that didn’t only look nice, but invited you to find out why. It was a home meant for enjoying, which is to say it was a home meant for living. As much as she enjoyed and often truly loved spending time at Mary Alice’s home, crossing her own threshold, where everything seemed a little warmer and more inviting, always gave her a sense of relief. Every house is tainted by a dusting of the owner’s memories, and sometimes they’re too sad to bear if not your own. Ellie’s memories may not have been any happier than Mary Alice’s, but at least they were hers. And on this Wednesday morning she was alone with them.

Though she’d only been spending mornings with Mary Alice for the past three months, the ritual had become such a reliable part of her daily routine that drinking coffee by herself filled Ellie with anxiety. Coffee from the same pot she would have poured from anyway tasted bitter in her own kitchen, alone with her own thoughts, without Mary Alice there to make everything seem sweeter by comparison. After one mug, she dumped the rest of the pot down her sink. What a waste, she thought, watching it swirl around the drain and then rinsing it with water from the tap, removing any proof it had ever been brewed at all.

She was dressed and adequately caffeinated forty-five minutes before she normally left, but she couldn’t decide how to fill this strange new morning void. Before Mary Alice invited her over, she watched the local news and did the New York Times crossword on her iPad. But returning to that former version of herself wasn’t as easy as turning on a TV or unlocking her iPad. There had been a murder, the reporter said. A photo of a smiling old man appeared above his left shoulder, and the reporter read the introductory details with an affected sympathy that made Ellie turn off the set before she could find out whether or not the police had any leads on the previously happy man’s killer. She took her iPad, covered in a bright pink faux leather case, from its basket on the credenza and tapped on the crossword puzzle app. It loaded quickly and reminded her that she’d lost her previous streak, but solving the first clue, “Koppel or Williams,” provided no pleasure. T-E-D, she tapped, filling the boxes as the editor intended, but the grid no longer felt like a challenge. So she locked the iPad and set it aside, feeling a little free. The words were someone else’s responsibility now.

So, she thought, she would leave for work early. She held the arm button on her alarm, walked through the kitchen door into the garage, locked the dead bolt behind her, and got inside her car, a green compact SUV, tight and comfortable and just high enough off the ground for her to feel like she was a little safer on the road. When the front half of the car was through the garage, she tapped the brakes and looked to her left to see any signs of Mary Alice, but the morning sun’s reflection obscured all the windows. Then, after pulling out fully, she saw a white SUV in the driveway. A model so new she imagined how it smelled. This must be why Mary Alice canceled, Ellie thought, instantly putting the explanation away and trying not to speculate about who it could be. She turned on the radio to 101.9 and let the second verse of what sounded like an old Jewel song carry her through town and onto the highway.

If Trevino were a body, the hospital would be the liver—sort of in the middle though not quite in the center, and ugly as hell. She could have gotten there in twelve minutes that morning, but she stopped at the Coffee Wagon instead. Even as she pulled in, she wondered what she was thinking. Paying for coffee at a café when she could make it at home or have a cup from the hospital’s bottomless supply always felt like the most unforgivable waste of money, and all her coworkers knew it. “Ellie’s happy with the sludge,” Xavier, the oldest nurse, would say if one of their coworkers left for a coffee run during a break. Once he had poured a drink from the Coffee Wagon in her hospital mug to see if she’d notice.

“What happened here?” she’d said after the first sip. “Since when did we start getting good coffee?”

“So you can taste the difference,” Xavier said. “I’m not sure if I’m relieved or just more annoyed that you keep drinking the office stuff.” Ellie thought that trick was just awful, though she pretended to be amused by the whole thing. She wasn’t a stubborn coworker. She was easy to talk to. Everyone liked working with her. So why did they pick on her for this one little thing? Why was it so embarrassing to think saving money on coffee was some kind of small virtue?

When Ellie told this to Mary Alice over the summer, long after it happened, Mary Alice scoffed and told her young people don’t appreciate the value of a dollar. When she told Mary Alice that Xavier was her age, Mary Alice told her that you didn’t go to work to make friends.

It wasn’t until Ellie had waited for the orders of two customers ahead of her that she realized she should probably scan the tables for her coworkers. How would she explain this ethical swerve to them all? she wondered in a flash of panic before seeing the coast was clear. “Ma’am,” said a voice in a tone that forced the panic right back. “Can I take your order?” Ellie turned to see a young woman with no hair on the left side of her head and many different colors of hair on the right waving her forward.

“Oh, yes, sorry,” Ellie said, embarrassed by how frazzled she must have appeared. “Good morning. I’ll have, hmmm . . .” She scanned the menu with her eyes squinted, grimaced, and heard someone clearing their throat to her left. Without looking but quickly getting the point, she pulled her head back and returned to the cashier. “One medium cappuccino,” she said, playfully over-enunciating every syllable as if this were the most fun she’d had in days.

“What kind of milk?” the cashier said.

Ellie almost said, “Cow.” Then she looked carefully at the cashier and realized it wasn’t the kind of thing someone with that kind of hair would ever laugh at. “Just regular old whole milk,” she said. “I haven’t had breakfast.”

“That’ll be $4.25,” the cashier said, as if that was simply how much coffee should always cost. As though no one had ever taught her how to make it at home.

Ellie gave her a painted-on smile, unzipped her wallet, and pulled out a five-dollar bill. When the change was returned in a quick dance of their hands, she let the coins drop into the tip jar, which surprised the barista enough that she said, “Wow, thanks,” instead of saying nothing, which Ellie expected. “Can I have your name?” she added, pulling a cup from the middle stack and readying the Sharpie in her hand.

“Ellie,” she said.

“Next in line?”

Ellie felt so hurried and out of place. Beyond the sheer financial loss, which she didn’t even try to understand, she wondered how people could do this every morning, and why they would add to their workdays—which were already cacophonous jumbles of people and lines and bad moods and decisions—the possibility for even more distress. She pretended to read on her phone while waiting for her coffee to be ready, thoughtlessly thumbing through the headlines while listening to what everyone in line ordered. A young man got an iced coffee, black. The man behind him, a cold brew with half-and-half. Then came a woman with an iced latte with an extra shot, which made Ellie raise an eyebrow and let out the smallest of gasps. Not until her order was called a few seconds later did she realize, of course, the woman wanted espresso, not whiskey.

To everyone else in line, this was a normal Wednesday. To her, it was the smoking embers of a house Mary Alice had built and then destroyed. For a moment Ellie was angry at her, creating a routine only to thoughtlessly abandon it with hours’ notice. But no, that’s unfair, she thought. Mary Alice didn’t owe her anything but respect, and the text, though late, was a sign of that. Once back in the driver’s seat, five-dollar coffee in hand, she remembered the car in the driveway and Ellie’s anger morphed into sheer curiosity. Mary Alice hadn’t been behaving weirdly during the planning meeting. Apart from that ridiculous behavior toward Josie, she seemed more contented than she’d seen her all summer.

Ellie understood all too well why Mary Alice behaved so strangely around other people in town. She had suffered through not only the loss of her husband and son, but the endless whispers that accompanied them. She commanded respect as the town’s most accomplished teacher, the person whom all their children feared and, in most cases, learned from. And though she was never exactly beloved, her classroom became icier after Michael. Being feared was preferable to being pitied, so she leaned into it.

Ellie noticed the change firsthand. It began with a slow, steady reduction in phone calls. When they did happen, they were quick check-ins that reeked of obligation. Four months after Michael was gone, what were once twice-weekly conversations—long, meandering dialogues during which they would chat while cooking or drinking a glass of wine or staring up at the sunset—had stopped entirely. Around the same time, she began hearing more open complaining about Mary Alice’s harsh grades and piles of homework while browsing the four small aisles at Carlye’s. Once she even heard Betty Flores tell Lucy Lutz to hush when she was spotted through the stack of cans. Don’t let Ellie hear, they meant. She and Mary Alice are thick as thieves.

She could have corrected them. She could have said, “Don’t worry, Linda. Your complaints are safe with me. Mary Alice and I don’t speak anymore since our children died.” She could have distanced herself from Mary Alice and tried to find a replacement of sorts, a new best friend, but that doesn’t just happen. It’s always unnerving to discuss friendship in transactional terms, as a product that didn’t simply manifest organically between two people without much work, but rather a relationship one went into willingly and maintained with countless more choices over time. Every new moment between yourself and a friend is fundamentally the result of an effort to keep the friendship active. An active decision that, no, you will not let this falter. You will put in the work. You will see this through to the end, by which you mean death, though you’d never be so blunt as to admit it.

That’s what “friends forever” means, isn’t it? Friends until one of us dies. But the acronym for that doesn’t look good on a sticker or a necklace or a mug or a card or a hashtag. And though forging new ones requires a combination of dedication and luck, it’s so much easier to focus on the former. To think of friendship as a kind of magic, when it’s really closer to alchemy. Still, Ellie felt she didn’t need a new friend after Mary Alice. Though maybe it was because she knew, deep down, she just needed to wait for Mary Alice to come back to her. If only she’d known back then that she’d be waiting twelve years.

Ellie pulled into the staff parking lot of the hospital at 8:35, twenty-five minutes earlier than usual, and sighed after putting the car in park. The radio was playing “Underneath It All,” and she tried to remember the singer instead of heading in early. Avril Lavigne? Britney Spears? Nelly Furtado? She waited for the song to finish so she could have her answer, but in place of a song ID came yet another one. Five songs and two recognizable artists later, it was 8:55, time to walk inside. She grabbed her cup of coffee, which she had all but forgotten to drink from, and headed for the door.

In movies and TV shows, you’re bound to hear someone say, “I hate hospitals.” Ellie always hated that. In her experience, no one ever says it, because it is far too obvious. Grieving parents and spouses and friends and family members don’t look down a bright teal corridor and say, “I hate hospitals,” with a shiver. Being in a hospital as a healthy person, when it’s not your job, is never going to be fun, but it’s not the place to talk about things you hate. It’s not the place to complain. It’s a place to worry and to hope, and Ellie noticed, if anything, a place with an unreasonable amount of positivity, not disdain.

People often asked Ellie what it’s like to be surrounded by death all day, and over time she constructed an answer that combined shades of the truth with enough comforting whimsy to keep them from asking more. “I’m not surrounded by death all day,” she’d say, as though searching for the words and coming up with her answer on the fly. “I’m surrounded by life.” This put people at ease, which was a major part of her job. Yes, she administered drugs. Yes, she communicated patient problems to the doctors. Yes, she bathed and clothed and took care of some of the patients’ most obvious and fundamental needs. Yes, she wore cute scrubs to soften the edges of the attending staff’s harsh, overly crisp white coats. But people never wanted to talk about that. Instead, they just wanted to praise her for making them feel safe and secure and comfortable around all the more callous people doing the life-saving.

She was good at all of those things, too, which everyone at Trevino General knew. Even the patients who had never met her would sometimes say things like, “Oh, I’ve heard you’re the best.” She never asked who they heard this from, and pretended not to care, but it made her feel important. Today’s rounds: a broken arm, an esophageal spasm, a busted lip that needed stitches, and a recommendation for a dentist who took walk-ins. Trevino General was rarely full, rarely empty, and rarely filled with tears. On their first date, which they didn’t realize was a date until it had become a weeks-old memory, Gerald had asked her how she could spend day after day in a place as sad as a hospital. How do you keep going when a core aspect of your job is being reminded of death? And she told him what she must have told a dozen people before. Whose job isn’t?

Gerald texted Ellie at 12:32, right as she was heating up lunch in the break room. The ding came from her locker, where she kept her phone all day to avoid, yes, distractions, but also in an attempt to prevent herself from becoming as addicted to the device as her friends and peers. If she never got a taste for social media, she would never need to worry about breaking the habit. But still, the sound of her text tone gave her a jolt of serotonin. The only people who texted her these days were Mary Alice and Gerald, and Mary Alice knew better than to interrupt her during work.

DINNER TOMORROW? it read. His use of all caps was cute, even if something about it seemed, she thought, strangely elderly.

Yes.

BUCKHORN?

She pulled her head back from the phone, worried by the question. They’d never been to the Buckhorn together, as a couple. Dinners had been at his house or her house or one of the three Mexican places in Trevino. It was too early, she thought, knowing better than to relay that message to him. Instead, she simply countered.

My place? I can stop for steak on the way home. The only problem is the wine.

IF YOU INSIST. SMILEY FACE.

She didn’t know what embarrassed her more: how much she enjoyed their rapport, or how quickly it had developed. The all caps, the text-based descriptions of emojis, and her coy acknowledgment of his burgeoning wine snobbery. They were a couple, she thought, even if neither of them had used the words.

I insist. How’s 7:00?

HOW’S 6:30?

What’s the rush?

WHAT ISN’T?

Her girlish giggle caught Fran, a pediatric nurse, by surprise. “Who’re you texting over there, your boyfriend?”

Ellie gasped. “No! Just a friend.”

“Sure.”

She didn’t like revealing too much about her personal life, though she was certain all her coworkers knew the bullet points by now. Got married to a rotten man. Had a son with him. Divorced him because she didn’t want the rot to spread. And then the son, the opposite of rotten, died before he had the chance to grow up. She never got over it. It wasn’t quite right, more of a soapified abstraction of her history than a proper biography, but it filled in the blanks in a way that left her pride intact without inspiring much additional questioning.

She slipped the phone back in her purse and slammed the locker shut. Her lunch was getting cold. As she slurped down a spoonful of the lentil soup she’d made in bulk on Sunday night, she stared up at the mounted TV and pretended to watch a celebrity tell a more famous celebrity about her marriage, hoping no one in the break room would notice she was thinking about something else entirely. Even if they did, they would never guess she was thinking about the best side to serve with steak that didn’t involve potatoes. She ought to surprise him with something less obvious, she thought, embarrassed to be excited about a side dish.