The Space Between

Truman watched her open a package of plastic barrettes, drop them, pick most of them up off the floor, and shove them into her coat pockets. He felt a surge of sympathy for this new version of Daphne, a twitchy and agitated version. Her eyes were wide and unfocused. It was a stare he recognized—that glassy, panicked look, like the room was shrinking.

She stopped pacing and looked at him. Her eyes were wide and she was breathing fast and shallow. She glanced away and whispered, “Things aren’t fine.”

He’d spent all afternoon while Daphne was out trying not to think about her and mostly failing. It was impossible not to think about her, and thinking about her led to other things. Thinking about her meant thinking about home and Charlie and Dio’s bathroom floor and before that, the bathtub and the hospital and her brother.

Finally, he’d bitten the inside of his cheek, and that helped a little. Then he sat down on the floor across from the baby, who was still wet-haired and dripping, wrapped in a ratty bath towel. Truman propped his elbows on his knees and they sat looking at each other.

She was nothing like the babies whose mothers lived in the Avalon. Those ones were sticky and neglected-looking. They screeched or cried and their noses were always red and dripping. Raymie was grave. That was the only word for it—grave, and a little severe, and now, without the layer of dirt from the storage, very clean.

They sat across from each other on the dusty carpet like they were waiting for something. Truman desperately wanted a cigarette, but if one thing had been drilled into him, it was that you were never supposed to smoke around babies. Probably even crazy-looking nightmare babies with metal teeth.

Raymie stared up, blinking at him. “He helped people sometimes, in the hospital. They were wounded. Did he help you?”

At the hospital, they’d sewn Truman back up, pumped him full of someone else’s blood. They gave him pain medication that made his wrists numb and his dreams terrible. Surgery had saved him, but before the operating room, there’d been Charlie, dragging him out of the water, slowing the blood. Alexa, with the phone to her ear, speaking rapidly. Truman himself only had vague recollections of hands, voices, sirens, an oxygen mask. Nothing.

He’d been afraid of a lot of things—afraid that he would go to Hell and that he would ruin Charlie’s life. He’d been afraid that his mother, watching from some undetermined location, would be disappointed and ashamed of him. He’d been afraid it would be messy and disgusting and weak and cowardly, but never at any point had he been afraid that he would survive. That first night, he lay in the adjustable hospital bed and watched the beat of his heart blip up and down across a black screen.

Obie had come into the room very late, in his chalk-green scrubs, bringing water in a plastic cup. It was Obie who made the whole thing seem much more real than Truman’s stitches or his blood in the tub or the sick way the room seemed to spin around him.

“So,” he said that first night, when Truman was still dizzy from blood loss and painkillers. “Worst day of your life, huh?”

And Truman had laughed at that, because something was building in his chest and laughing was, of course, easier than crying. Then he began to cough.

Obie offered him the water, shaking his head when Truman tried to raise a hand to take the cup himself. “Don’t,” he said. “You’ll disturb your sutures.”

He held the cup while Truman drank from a straw with an accordion joint. He rested his hand on Truman’s shoulder and the weight of it felt warm through the fabric of the hospital gown. That was the part he remembered best. How, when Obie touched him, it hadn’t hurt.

“I see you went for the bleed-out.” The look on his face had been knowing and wise and very sad. He’d smiled and then turned away, busy with the monitors and the IV drip.

Hearing bleed-out said aloud felt like being hit hard in the stomach. Truman had begun to cough again and Obie came across to him and pushed the button that raised the bed.

Truman closed his eyes and when he opened them again, Obie was still there, standing over the bed, looking down at him. Obie’s hair was shaggy, longer than the way most of the other men on staff wore theirs. He clasped his hands behind his back as though he were waiting for something.

“You’ve got a bunch of superficials and a couple not-screwing-arounds. You would have died if your stepdad had stopped to pick up a newspaper or something.”

“I don’t know. Home, maybe.” Obie was still looking down at him—intense gray gaze and sad, indeterminate mouth. “What do you remember?”

Truman stared up groggily and shook his head. “Like . . . before the tub? I remember waking up. There was ice on the windows because the furnace is broken. Charlie was still at work. I didn’t go to school.” Other memories surfaced slowly, and he winced. “I remember getting drunk—really drunk.”

He looked away, waiting for Obie to point out that drinking before five was bad news and drinking before noon was just sad but drinking before eight in the morning was completely unstable.

Obie didn’t mention it though. He only sat down on the foot of the bed, looking expectant. “But that’s all? Nothing unusual or strange? What about after?”

Truman glanced away. He didn’t point out that pretty much everything about the day you decided to kill yourself could be considered unusual. “Nothing. I don’t know.”

That wasn’t quite true. He remembered the flooded bathroom and the oxygen mask. He remembered a dream of a girl. She had wide, dark eyes and black hair. He imagined reaching for her hand, grasping it in his, and smiled dazedly at the ceiling.

Obie leaned close, snapping his fingers in Truman’s face. “No, no, no, you’re getting dopy. Focus. I know it’s hard, but stay with me. I need you tell me what you remember.”

Truman shook his head, trying to forget the chaotic dreams of blood loss. The girl was still there, pale and perfect, surrounded by a huge smear of metallic gray. “Nothing.”

Later on was when the night got bad. The shadow of the dresser seemed to stretch out, oozing over the floor, filling up the room, and then he heard a voice. A real one, and not the kind that echoed up out of drug states or dreams.

And as drugged-up and exhausted and afraid as he was, he’d gone. Despite the monitor wires and the IV, he felt himself stand up and cross to the corner of the room, only mildly surprised that when he looked back, he was still lying in the hospital bed. Then he’d stepped through the black door and into a derelict church, where the shadow man and his own smiling cadaver were waiting for him.

In the days that followed, his room was full of nurses and orderlies. They wandered in and out constantly, but Obie was the only one who looked at Truman like he was actually seeing him—all of him—and not just what he’d done. Obie told jokes and stories and laughed easily, smiling his wide, rueful smile. Holding Truman’s hands still while he shook, careful not to tear the sutures. Truman slumped sideways over the bedrail with his head resting against Obie’s shoulder. It had been more than a year since he’d let anyone touch him like that, not like a stranger, but like family.

Truman closed his eyes, mentally recited the first two lines of the Hail Mary, and stopped remembering. Daphne was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap, staring at the wall. Her back was straight and tense.

She took a deep breath and nodded. Then she got up and crossed quickly to the other side of the room. “Here, move the dresser.”

She reached underneath, fumbling around. After a few seconds, something began to smoke blackly. Then she stood up and pushed the dresser away from the wall, revealing mangled scraps of blackened metal where the bolts had been, just like she’d done to the door of Obie’s apartment.

With the dresser out of the way, she took out a felt-tipped marker and drew a high rectangle on the wallpaper where the dresser had been. Then she stepped back and stared at it.

Truman looked around the little room, and realized it was empty. Everything was packed. The drawing of the door seemed very final, suddenly.

He thought about Charlie coming home from work, finding Truman gone for the second morning in a row. He’d get worried after a few days, maybe call the police. But maybe it was better this way. Charlie was a good guy. He could have had a day job if they hadn’t needed the money so bad. Maybe even a girlfriend. He could have had a life if he wasn’t stuck raising someone else’s kid. The thought made Truman feel guilty, and at the same time, he was filled with a wave of love for Charlie. He missed him already.

He picked up the backpack and slid his shoulders into the straps. Then he scooped Raymie off the bed and moved to stand behind Daphne.

She knocked once on her fake door. “Passiflore,” she said clearly, and then reached for the handle, which turned into a brass doorknob as her hand closed over it.