Elizabeth Scott - Between Here and Forever

“No,” I say. “No one … no one believes me.”

Eli stops drawing and looks at me. “I believe you.”

I fold my hands into themselves so I won’t reach for him. I force myself to think about Tess. About what she needs. “Can you—if you asked Clement, would he be able to get a doctor here?”

Eli shakes his head. “He’s not—he doesn’t have any real power.”

“But he gave al that money—”

“He can’t—it doesn’t work like that,” Eli says, and when I laugh because, hel o, of course money does things everywhere, he touches my arm.

“People in Milford think he’s strange and I don’t think—I don’t think anyone would even talk to him if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s, you know.”

“Rich.”

Eli looks down at his notebook. “Yeah.”

I go back to Tess’s room. She’s lying there, perfectly stil like her eyes didn’t move, like there wasn’t something she was watching behind her closed lids, like there wasn’t something she saw with her eyes wide shut.

“Wake up,” I say, my voice angry, a whispered hiss, and when she doesn’t move I grab her chart—yes, I know I’m not supposed to touch it, and no, I don’t care—and write a note about what I saw on the blank back of a card that was once tied to a bunch of flowers blooming brightly in the corner. And then I stick that card on her chart’s clipboard.

Those flowers … they wilted into nothing ages ago, but my parents have kept the cards, have them waiting for Tess to look at. I figure she won’t miss the back of the one that’s been signed by Beth, stupid Beth with her boxing up al of Tess’s things and her stupid signature, al swooping capital letters like she’s some sort of star.

The nurse who paged the doctor comes in then, sees me sticking the card onto Tess’s chart, and says, “You need to leave now.”

“I’m waiting for the doctor,” I say, and she puts her hand on my shoulder.

“Abby,” she says, and I’m startled that she knows my name. Almost no one uses it here; I’m just a visitor, I am just Tess’s sister. “Sometimes patients move a little. It’s not—it’s a good sign, of course, but it doesn’t mean she’s going to wake up tonight.”

“I know what I saw.”

“You miss her,” the nurse says, and I start to laugh because I do miss Tess, but not like she thinks. I’m not the devoted sister, I’m not the noble, plain girl who sacrifices al for her sister to come back. I want Tess to wake up so she’l go away.

I want her back in her life and out of mine.

“Maybe you want to take her somewhere—a walk, maybe?” the nurse says to Eli, like I’m a toddler or dog or just a teenager not worth listening to because Tess isn’t moving now.

“Tess,” I say, looking at her. “Please.”

Nothing.

“Can you—?” the nurse says, gesturing at me to Eli, giving him a help-me-out-here look.

“I saw it too,” Eli says. “So why can’t we wait for the doctor?”

It works. I can’t believe it, but it does, and so we wait. Me and him, sitting in Tess’s room, on either side of her bed.

It takes me a long time to say it, not because I don’t know how, but because I’m afraid to say it.

“Thanks,” I get out, after we’ve sat there for a while, and I was right to be afraid to say it because when he says, “Sure,” easily, like it was nothing, I want him to have said something else, and I don’t even look at Tess to see if his voice has moved her again. I just—

I’m too busy thinking about how he’s moved me.

I ask if I can wait anyway, knowing I’l be told no.

I am, but the nurse who said she paged the doctor, the one who put her hand on my arm and said “You miss her,” like what I feel for Tess is that simple, says, “If the doctor has anything to report, we’l be sure to let you know,” as I’m headed out of the unit.

“Thanks again for, you know, before,” I tel Eli as we leave the hospital. “See you tomorrow?”

He shakes his head. “Clement and I go to church, and then I have—there’s some family stuff.”

“Oh, right.” Stupid. He just gave up his Saturday night to be here, so why would he want to give up his Sunday too?

“I can meet you on Monday, though,” he says. “Regular time?”

I shrug, like I don’t care if he shows up or not.

But I am supposed to care. For Tess, at least. So I let myself say, “I know Tess wil like that,” before I start to walk away.

“Hey, can I—can I take you home?”

I freeze. I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. No one has ever asked me that before. Jack would sometimes walk me back to the house after we talked, but he never asked, and we both knew he only did it for a chance to see Tess.

I take a deep breath.

“You want to talk about Tess some more or something?” I ask, mostly to remind myself why I’m here, why he’s here, but when he says, “Yeah, sure,” I feel the bits of me I broke with Jack, those stupid hopeful bits, bleed open.

I feel grubby in his car, my crappy clothes a reminder that I don’t belong here. Tess belonged—belongs—in this car. Not me.

“Tess belongs here,” I say, and Eli, pul ing out of the hospital lot, looks at me like he doesn’t understand.

“This is her kind of car,” I say. “I can see her in here, you know? She’d like it.”

“I don’t like it,” Eli says. “It’s like driving a bus. I used to … I used to have my own car. My parents told me I could get a car when I turned sixteen because that’s what everyone did, and they wanted—they wanted me to be like everyone else. I was going to get a, you know—”

“Super-fast sports car?” I say. “Let me guess, you wanted a red one too, right?”

“Silver,” he says with a quick grin at me. “But we got to the lot and there was this car over in the corner, some car an old lady owned and that her kids had gotten rid of when she died, and it looked so sad. Al alone out there, you know? And her kids hadn’t even bothered to clean out the glove box. When I looked in it, there was a shopping list. Eggs, bread, tea, al in this tiny, old-lady handwriting. And I kept thinking, What if that’s the last thing she ever wrote? What if she’d made the list and put it in the car so she’d remember it when she went out and she never got to go out and just

—I don’t know.”

I stare at him, entranced in spite of myself. “So you didn’t get a sports car?”

“Nope,” he says. “I got a baby blue sedan with low mileage. It had this huge, soft plastic thing on the gearshift, I guess because the old lady had bad hands or something. When I was upset, I’d pick at it. My parents—” He taps his fingers against the steering wheel. “My parents thought I was crazy.”

“So what happened to it?”

“My parents sold it,” he says. “Before I came here, they weren’t … they weren’t real happy with me.”

“No, I mean, what happened to the shopping list?”

“What?” he says.

“The shopping list. What happened to it?”

“I left it in the glove box,” he says. “I didn’t want to throw it away. It was her car first, you know? Plus—I don’t know. My parents have never done anything like make a shopping list.”

“They don’t like shopping?”

“They like shopping,” Eli says. “But not for food. They have people who do that. Pick out menus, buy the food, and make it. Al that stuff.”

“Real y?”

“Yeah. They don’t—they like the house to be run for them. Someone to cook, someone to clean, someone to take care of the laundry.”

“Right,” I say, like it’s no big deal, but inwardly I’m feeling even grubbier. Jack’s parents had money but not like this, not money to have someone do al the little things that make a house run for them. “You must miss having al of that.”