Fourteen

I stood at the front door sweating and panting. I shoved my hands into my pockets, but I realized as soon as I did so that I didn’t have my key. My key was in my jacket, and I hadn’t brought that with me. It was still in the house somewhere. I rapped on the door. I waited. Nothing. I pounded on the door. Gracie couldn’t have gone anywhere—Annie had the car. Unless Cameron had come and picked Gracie up. I became convinced of this when I squinted inside and saw only the empty living room. I slid down to sit on the top step.

My cell phone, like my key, was inside the house somewhere. What now? At least it wasn’t that cold out. My head hurt. I shut my eyes, but saw only confusing images. Annie at various ages in her life … the ages I had always presumed her to be versus the age that she probably was. It was dizzying.

Then I heard something. The car—only it wasn’t coming back from the doctor’s office like I first assumed, but down the driveway. I saw Gracie behind the wheel, and Annie in the passenger seat. My reeling mind didn’t even know how to begin to process this additional confusion. I did have enough sense to stand up and flag down Gracie.

“Hey,” I yelled. “Where are you going?”

Gracie rolled down Annie’s window and shouted to me, “There you are. We’ve been trying to find you. Get in the back.”

“Where are you going?” I repeated.

“I didn’t know where you were,” Gracie said. “I tried your cell phone.” Annie was being remarkably quiet during this whole exchange.

“I left it in my room.”

“Yeah, I realized that. Also, you have like a billion text messages on there. You might want to read them sometime.”

“You were reading them?” My voice came out sounding angrier than I had intended.

“Relax, I just saw the little box blinking. Get in the car please.”

I pulled open the back door. I recalled too late about my chopped and dyed hair, but Annie seemed to barely even notice when I got in. Had they put her on some sort of drugs at the doctor’s office?

“How are you feeling?” Annie asked.

“I’m fine,” I said, remembering I was supposed to be home sick from school, “Better,” I added. “How are you feeling?”

“I keep telling Gracie I’m fine, but she won’t listen.”

“You collapsed in the middle of the living room floor,” Gracie said, her voice cracking as she zipped through the stop sign at the end of our street.

“What? You collapsed?” I asked.

“It’s my own fault,” Annie said. “That’s what you get for not eating breakfast.”

“This has nothing to do with skipping breakfast, and you know it,” Gracie said. She continued to drive too fast as she raced through town toward the highway. I watched Shallow Pond fly by outside the window as I tried to make sense of what was going on.

“I thought you went to the doctor this morning,” I said.

“Yes, and he said I was perfectly healthy,” Annie told me. She sounded normal, but she really didn’t look well. Could it be something as stupid as not eating breakfast? I’d felt pretty lousy when I woke up that morning and it was probably because I hadn’t eaten anything the night before.

“You need to go to a real doctor,” Gracie said. “They have machines and tests they can do and stuff at the hospital.”

“I feel better,” Annie said. “Just turn the car around.”

Gracie didn’t listen to her, and I was glad. Annie had been sick for a while and if she’d collapsed, then maybe there really was something seriously wrong. It could be something stupid—maybe she just needed to take some pills or something. I hoped it was something like that, something simple, treatable. The fact that Gracie had managed to get her into the car meant that Annie realized she needed help.

As we neared the highway entrance, Gracie turned on the right blinker and headed toward the southbound entrance ramp.

“No, we’re going north,” Annie said.

“What? Are you delusional on top of everything else? The hospital is south of us.”

“We’re not going there,” Annie said in that clipped, firm tone that made it sound like she was so angry she could barely open her clenched teeth.

“Jenelle volunteers there,” I said. “Maybe she could make a phone call for us. Make sure we get a nice doctor.”

Gracie pulled onto the ramp, but Annie grabbed hold of the steering wheel, jerking it hard to the right. I cried out as I was tossed around in the back seat. Gracie got control of the car and steered us carefully onto the shoulder of the road, bringing the car to a stop. Both of my sisters were breathing heavily in the front seat. It looked like Gracie’s heavy breathing was due to shock. Annie, on the other hand, looked completely exhausted.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Gracie demanded. “You could have killed us all.”

“Listen to me. We’ll go to the hospital, but we’re going up to University Hospital.”

“What? That’s more than an hour away! What do we need to drive all the way up there for?”

“Dad had a friend who worked there,” Annie said.

“And Babie’s got a friend who works at Shipley, which is only twenty minutes away.”

“Volunteers,” I corrected, somehow hoping to smooth over the tension in the front seat. Jenelle had only just started volunteering; she might not even know anyone at the hospital yet.

“We go to University Hospital and meet with Dr. Feld, or you turn the car around and we go home. Those are your two options.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Gracie said. Annie didn’t re-spond. She just glared at Gracie until Gracie finally sighed, popped the car into reverse, and slowly drove backward down the shoulder of the entrance ramp so that we could get onto the northbound ramp.

“Do you even know this Dr. Feld?” she complained when we were finally on the highway headed toward University Hospital.

“He was a good friend of Dad’s. They were close.”

“Couldn’t have been that close,” Gracie said. “I don’t remember ever meeting him.”

“They used to work together,” Annie said.

The whole time I’d known my father, he was a misanthropic hermit, but Annie always told me that he’d been a smart man. A genius, she’d told me, but this was probably hyperbole. He’d been some sort of medical researcher. That was before I was born, and maybe before Gracie was born if my new theory was correct.

“You don’t even know this guy,” Gracie complained. “I don’t understand what the big deal is.” I felt like telling her to just shut up and drive, but she did have a point. It was an awfully long way to drive just so that we could see some doctor who had once worked with my father twenty years ago or more.

“Do you know if Dr. Feld even works there anymore?” I asked.

“Yeah, good point,” Gracie said. “He probably won’t even be there.”

“He still works there,” Annie said.

She turned around to look at me, reaching our her arm to pat me on the hand like I was a little kid. She had dark circles beneath her eyes and her face looked so thin and pale. I hoped this Dr. Feld, whoever he was, was a genius like my father had supposedly been.

“You cut your hair,” Annie said. She smiled as if it took her all her energy to do so. “It looks cute.”

“Cute?” Gracie said. “I’m going to ask them to examine your head as well when we’re there. She looks like hell.”

Annie didn’t respond. She rested her head on the back of her seat. Within a few seconds I could hear her snoring softly. I caught Gracie’s eye in the rearview mirror and we exchanged concerned looks with each other. For a brief moment I found myself wishing it was Gracie who was the sick one. I quickly chased those thoughts from my mind. Annie would be fine, I told myself. It was probably nothing.