Elizabeth Scott - Between Here and Forever

Claire takes the package and sniffs it. “Smel s like fake fruit. Go for it. And Cole’s fine. I have the only two-year-old who’s afraid of toilets, but he’s fine.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t like your bathroom,” I tel her, popping a piece of gum in my mouth. The flavor bursts sweet and fruity across my tongue, but only lasts about two chews. “I know I’m afraid to go in there. It’s like being inside a cross-stitch classroom, with al the reminders to put the seat down and wash my hands.”

“So funny. Like your mother’s col ection of towels no one but ‘guests’ can use is better.”

I shrug and shove another stick of gum in my mouth. “I heard one of the nurses talking about her kid today. He’s four and sometimes takes off his pants and poops on the rug. So I figure you’re doing okay with Cole.”

“No! Who is it?”

“Kathleen.”

We grin at each other. Kathleen is Claire’s supervisor, and is always making Claire run and fetch things for her, like Claire’s her slave and not a nurse’s aide.

“That almost makes up for how she acted today,” Claire says. “She spent five minutes yel ing at me for having a stain on my pants when she knew the reason I had the stain was because she made me wash Mrs. Green, who always pees the second you start to bathe her.”

We pul onto Claire’s street, which is also my street. Cole is out in the front yard, running around after Claire’s dad’s hunting dogs in that weird way little kids have, where for a second it seems like they’re going so fast they’re going to fal right over their own feet.

“Momma!” Cole yel s at Claire when we get out of the car. He can say about ten words now, although Claire swears he’s talking when I think he’s babbling.

“Hi, baby,” Claire says. “Wanna say hi to Abby?”

“No!” Cole says, which I don’t take personal y because of the ten words I know for sure that Cole knows, his favorite is “no.”

“Hey,” I say, and pat the top of his grubby little head. “Claire, thanks for the ride.”

“Sure,” she says. “Tel your parents I said hi, okay?”

I nod, but I won’t. Tel ing my parents anyone said anything would mean actual y talking to them, and that’s something that doesn’t happen much these days.

After al , what is there to say? We al know what’s going on. We’ve al waited and waited for Tess to wake up.

We are al stil waiting.

as I come in. I stop, shrug at her, and then walk upstairs to my bedroom.

My parents have to take the ferry home from the hospital too, so they know what it’s like. There’s no other way to get from Milford to Ferrisvil e, and the ferry is what it is, a slow boat on a river.

There was talk, once, of building a bridge, but nothing ever came of it. My guess is that if Milford wanted a bridge across the river, it’d be built in a heartbeat. But why would they want to connect to Ferrisvil e? We’re a smal , poor town near nothing but acres of government-owned land that’s supposedly a national park or reserve. Not that we get any visitors. Who wants to see something cal ed “The Great Dismal Forest”?

Even more importantly, who wants to live near it?

Wel , my parents, for one. They think it’s nice we live near a river, that on the weekend we can walk down to the water and trip along the sand-studded rocks (that’s “the beach”) and look at people gril ing or riding around in tiny boats, their motors roaring as they pass each other going back and forth, back and forth.

But of course my parents like it. They didn’t grow up here. They grew up in a nice suburban neighborhood, with shopping mal s and neighbors who aren’t al related to each other in some way. Or so they say. My mother’s parents are both dead, and my dad doesn’t talk to his parents at al , and they only ever mention where they’re from once in a while.

Tess used to love to look at pictures of them from back when they first started dating, and even before, from when they were in high school together. She asked al sorts of questions that neither of my parents ever real y answered. It’s like they didn’t exist until they met each other and moved here.

Tess used to say our parents had secrets, and lots of them, but that was back when she was stressing out over going to col ege, and had also stopped talking to her best friend just because she got pregnant. And that made her into someone I had no desire to listen to.

I figure there won’t be any fol ow-up questions to the nonquestion I got about the ferry, but just when I’m feeling almost relaxed for the first time al day, Mom comes up and knocks on my door.

“Abby, what are you doing?”

“Homework.”

I’m not. I don’t need to, because Ferrisvil e High is a joke, but I need to be alone right now. Try to figure out what to do about Tess.

“I wanted to tel you that your uncles sent Tess flowers again,” she says. “Did you see them?”

“I must have missed them. Sorry.” I’d seen them, and read the cards. Get Well Soon on each of them, and nothing more. My mom’s brothers, Harold and Gerald, seem nice enough, but they don’t come to visit often.

Mom’s not that much older than they are, but it’s like—wel , the couple of times they’ve been here, they treat Mom like she’s way older than they are. They treat her like she’s their mother, with a weird sort of respect and anger. I don’t know what they have to be mad about. They don’t live here.

“I’m going to go and make something to eat for your father and me,” Mom says. “Maybe heat up the leftover pancakes from this morning. Do you want to join us?”

I want to, but I don’t. If I do, I wil see Tess’s chair. I wil think about it.

I wil know we are al thinking about it.

“I’d better finish my homework,” I say.

“Al right then, good night,” she says, with a little sigh, and I listen to her footsteps fade away.

ferry dock (amazing how no one took it, right?) and head to the hospital. I weave through the ground floor, past the waiting room ful of people doing just what the room wants them to, down the hal past the gift shop (run by cheery old Milford ladies who chat about their prize-winning dogs or flowers while they sel gum for the outrageous price of two bucks a pack), and around to the elevators.

Everything about Milford Hospital is depressing.

Wel , not everything. I like the cafeteria. It looks out over the river, and Ferrisvil e is far enough away that you can’t real y see it. You just get an impression of houses on careful y laid out streets, a factory nestled at one end, and a rocky strip of beach dotted with the weathered ferry station.

Plus the cafeteria is the one place in the hospital that doesn’t smel bad. Everywhere else smel s like chemicals, like the kind of clean that can strip away your skin if you get too close. And underneath that chemical smel there’s always another one, fainter but never ever gone.

Underneath, you can smel unwashed flesh and fear and how off everything is. How everyone who’s in here, al the patients lying in al their beds, aren’t here because they want to be. They’re here because they have to be. Or because this is the last place they’l ever see.

The elevator comes and I step inside, prepare to see Tess.

After I’m buzzed in to her unit, I walk to her room. She looks the same; thin, pale, somehow gone but yet stil here. Her hair’s been washed, though, and it shines, golden against the white of her pil ow. A nurse is fixing one of her IVs, and sighs when she sees me.

Tess was—is—always good at getting people to like her.

I suck at it.

“I’m going to change her sheets,” the nurse says, and I nod, sit down to wait even though the nurse sighs again, and then Claire walks by like I’ve somehow summoned her. I start to wave, but she isn’t looking at me. She’s looking at the unit entrance, and I realize everyone else is too, that al the nurses are turned toward it like something’s going to happen. Weird.