Lily kept talking.
“How long?” she said. She had raised herself up and was half sitting, half standing, with one knee bent under her and her body twisted around to face Jack over the high plush back of the couch. It was a childish, gleeful pose, as if she were too excited to sit all the way down. “I bet you were kids when you started. It’s like one of those British novels. Kids in those books are always fucking each other. Was it like that?”
I saw my brother reach over the back of the couch and put his hands on Lily’s shoulders. He told me later that he only meant to push her down, to make her shut up, but then she said, “To tell you the truth, those books always kind of turned me on,” and Jack’s hands moved so quickly that I saw only a blur. One hand went over her eyes and the other over her mouth, and with a mighty jerk he pulled her by her head over the back of the couch. Her dark red lips opened to cry out once, and then I couldn’t see her anymore.
Jack had one of the heavy glass vases from the side table in his hand and I saw his arm move downward fast, once, twice, three times. By the time I made it to the other side of the couch Lily was lying crumpled on the floor. Her blood was mixing with the water on the floor and there were pale blue lilies and deep red liquid everywhere. It was too late.
We put her in the coat closet. Neither of us could think with her lying there like that. Then we cleaned up the blood and the glass, changed our clothes, and threw the ones we had been wearing into the incinerator. The clothes that we put on were our old clothes from Janesville, which I had been keeping in plastic bags on my closet floor. Just in case.
We did all of this silently, speaking only when it was absolutely necessary. It was like cleaning the house in the old days, after a week of tearing it apart: see what has to be done, do it.
Her foot
—
I see it
—
got her?
—
no, wait
—
Jack and I worked as if we were one person.
When it was done, we collapsed onto Lily’s big bed and slept in the same clothes we’d worn when we’d fled our father together. We slept holding hands.
When I woke up the next morning, my hand felt like it was on fire. Jack asked me if I thought I’d better see a doctor.
I was too tired to dissemble. “I don’t know,” I said.
He held my hot hand and felt gently around the wound. “It looks bad. Should I take you to a doctor?” he asked again. I was having trouble standing, so we went to the emergency room. The waiting room had the same hard plastic chairs as the bus station we’d waited in during the long trip to New York. It all began to seem unreal, the chairs and the waiting and the dead girl at home in the closet. My mind drifted and I let myself imagine that we were still on that trip. We still had all the long months in the city ahead of us. There was still time.
10
T
HE DOCTOR TOOK ONE LOOK
at my arm and said, “That doesn’t look good. We’ll have to admit you for that.” I told the admitting nurse that my name was Lily Carter and that no, I didn’t have any health insurance. I gave them her address. The nurse checked a box on a form. “Sign here,” she said tersely.
They put me in a bed and plugged an IV into my arm. A female nurse with immense hips and a flat, pasty face was making adjustments to the IV drip. Jack sat beside the bed.
There was another bed in the room. The girl in the bed was a few years older than I was and looked far sicker. The only sounds she made were her raspy breathing and her thick cough.
“I can only stay for a while,” Jack said. “I have to think.”
The hospital was anonymous and reassuring. The clean white sheets, the impersonal nightgown, and the scentless pillow were soft and thin with use. Even the pain and stiffness in my arm were welcome: a tangible problem that was being countered by a tangible solution, the saline spiked with antibiotics that was slowly dripping into my arm. It was comforting, somehow. Everybody seemed to know exactly where they should be and what they should be doing. The doctors came in on schedule, asked the same questions, made—presumably—the same notes. The thin doctor with the gleaming scalp was the one I liked best. He was the one who talked to me about rabies, and how they were going to have to treat me as if I was infected unless I could remember where I’d gotten my ferret bite.
I found this amusing. “Are there ferret control police?” I said. “A ferret elimination task force, perhaps?” It was my second day in the hospital. Tepid Josie Raeburn no longer, I had become Lily Carter, and I was the life of the party.
The doctor smiled a perfunctory professional smile. “If we can talk to the owner of the ferret—if it’s been vaccinated or if we can have it tested for rabies—then we can assume that you’re safe. Otherwise, we have to treat you as if you’re infected.”
He had explained to me that the rabies treatment would involve six extraordinarily expensive shots in four weeks. I saw no reason to be concerned about the cost; after all, since when had Lily Carter ever worried about money? “How do you test it for rabies?”
“We don’t,” he answered. “Animal Control does. This isn’t really my area of expertise.” He sneaked a look at his watch. “But I think they just observe it for a while. Make sure it doesn’t act strange.”
“Really? I thought they cut off its head.”
He ran his hand over the shiny skin where his hair used to be, a tired, for-God’s-sake gesture that made me a little sorry I was teasing him. “Maybe they do, if they seem sick. I don’t really know.”
An unfamiliar nurse came in to check on the girl next to me, putting a thermometer in her mouth. I said, “If I act strange, will you cut off my head?” The nurse glanced at us as she left, her eyes curious. The doctor grinned wryly.
“No, Alice, we’re not going to chop off your head,” he said.
“My name’s not Alice.”
“Off with her head,” he said. “Get it?
Alice in Wonderland,”
and when I still didn’t react, “The children’s book. Down the rabbit hole? ”
“I never read it. I didn’t know it was about decapitation.”
“You’ve never read
Alice in Wonderland.”
It was somewhere between a statement and a question, and I shook my head. He rolled his eyes, looking a little more human, and said, “What is the world coming to?” as he left.
They gave me the first rabies shots anyway: one in the arm and another in my right hand, where the bite was. The girl in the next bed lay there, her breathing still labored. She never looked at any of the doctors and nurses coming and going from the room, but stared straight ahead, feverish and unseeing. Her eyes were burning hollows in her face.
Later, the nurse returned to change the bag on my IV. She checked the tape holding the needle in the back of my hand. Reaching across and picking up my hand, she said, “Didn’t they wash your hands when they admitted you? Your fingernails are filthy.”
The dark crust underneath my fingernails was mostly Lily’s blood. I shrugged.
The nurse leaned down to get a closer look at my nails. “That looks like blood,” she said. “Is it blood?”
“I bled a lot when the ferret bit me,” I said and held up my bad hand. “I can’t clean it with my hand like this.”
She grinned, friendly now. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I haven’t lost a patient yet to dirty fingernails.”
She left and the wheezing girl and I lay there like two dolls forgotten under a bed. I pretended it was a game: the first one to move lost.
When the balding doctor showed up again, there was no hint of his wry grin. “Boyfriend been by today?”
He meant Jack. “Later,” I said. “He just called.”
“Good,” the doctor said and pulled up a chair next to my bed.
“You’ve come to chop off my head, after all,” I said.
“Not exactly. I’ve got some news for you.”
“You’re letting me go.” My hand felt much better. The swelling had gone down and it no longer hurt to move it.
“Soon.” He was studying my chart. “Lily, when was your last period?”
I stared at him. “You’re joking.”
“I’m afraid not,” the doctor said. “How old are you, Lily?”
“Eighteen.” I would be eighteen in January. Jack had warned me to tell them I already was so that there wouldn’t be any questions about the hospital forms.
He was watching me carefully. “You seem surprised. Have you been using birth control?”
I didn’t answer.
He smiled. It was a gentle smile, and kind, but there was anger there, too. “Then why are you surprised?”
I pinched a piece of the industrial bedsheet with the fingers of my good hand, leaving a crease, and then rubbed the crease smooth again. The giddy pseudo-Lily vanished; Josie was back, limp and exhausted and only able to function because of the plastic tube snaking into her arm. The last person who slept in these sheets, I thought, was probably a good person. Sick, but healthy. In my head, a voice said: We’re different than the rest of them.
“You must think I’m pretty stupid,” I said. The words tasted bitter on my lips.
The doctor sighed. “That’s not at all the sense I get. Although I don’t quite know what to make of a kid that’s never read
Alice in Wonderland.”
He cleared his throat. “Which reminds me, I picked this up for you at the gift shop. Thought it might cheer you up.” He handed me a brightly colored paperback with a little girl in an apron on the cover. There was a formal, absent look on her face that I liked. I turned the book over in my hands, smelled the spicy, wholesome scent of its pages, and thought, I don’t deserve this.
“Is that what I am?” I said. “A kid?”
“Not a kid,” he said awkwardly. “Young, maybe. Although,” he looked at me carefully, “I don’t imagine you feel very young at the moment.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“I imagine not.” Then there were a few moments of silence as we both waited for something else to happen: the gawky doctor with his hands stuffed in his pockets, me lying shellshocked on the bed, the book in my lap and the girl on its cover staring impassively up at me.
“Thank you for the book,” I said. “I’ll tell you where the ferrets are, if you want.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “But you need to think about what you want to do. Maybe your parents can help you.” The expression on my face must have discouraged him, because he sighed again and said, “Well, talk to your boyfriend when he gets here. I’ll be back later. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
A few minutes later, the wide-hipped nurse came in with a lunch tray. “Poor dear,” she said. “Well, it’s a life lesson. It’ll all turn out all right, though, don’t you worry. Nature usually has her way in the end.”
I stared at the unappetizing food on the tray. A plain chicken breast, mushy peas, dry rice. Suddenly I wanted to stuff it down the nurse’s throat. I could practically hear the noises she’d make, see her face turning purple as she choked to death.
No. That wasn’t me. I shut my eyes to make the image go away and said, “Yeah, well, nature has a pretty sick sense of humor.”
Time passed. I spent most of it reading
Alice in Wonderland,
and reflecting with cynical amusement on all of the bottles I’d sipped from in my time, none of which had been labeled
DRINK ME
and none of which had succeeded in turning me into anyone other than the person that I was. Eventually I heard the lively jumble of voices in the hallway outside that meant that the day nurses were leaving and the night shift was coming on. The night nurse that I knew best was skinny, with wispy gray hair and surprisingly strong arms. I was waiting for her to come in when the nurse who had changed my IV bag appeared in the door. She was wearing a black leather jacket over her purple uniform and carrying a worn denim bag.
“Hey.” She sat down on the edge of my bed without asking.
“Hi,” I said, confused.
“You want me to do your nails?” she asked, taking a small zippered case out of her bag.
“What?”
“I’m on my way home, but it won’t take long.” She opened the zippered case and out came a sharp-looking silver instrument. She didn’t wait for my consent. “One thing my mother always told us was keep your nails nice,” she said, picking up my hand. “You keep your nails nice, you can get away with almost anything.”
I smiled. It felt almost natural. “Is that the secret? If only I’d known.”
“You stay away from those ferrets,” she said. “You’ll be okay.”
That was all she said. We sat in silence, both staring at my hands, as she cleaned my fingernails, trimmed and filed them, and then buffed them down with a flat rubber stick. She was sure and fast. When she was done, my hands looked like they belonged to someone else.
“That’s amazing,” I said.
“That’s seven months of beauty school.” She grinned at me as she zipped her tools back into their case.
I grinned back. “Whatever it is, it’s impressive.”
“Doing my nails always makes me feel better,” she said.
And it helped. I didn’t think it would, but it did.
When I woke up the next morning, my pale roommate was gone and Jack was stretched out on her newly made bed. I woke him up, told him what the doctor had said, and asked him what I should do. He rolled his eyes and said, “Can’t they take care of it?”
I said, “I suppose.”
He seemed restless and didn’t stay long. When he was gone, and the wide-hipped nurse came in, I asked her what had happened to my roommate. She clucked her tongue. “Poor thing. We brought her up to the isolation ward this morning.”
“What was it?” I said.
“TB,” she said. “The doctors never even thought about it. She wasn’t the type.”
“How’d she get it?”
The nurse shook her head.
“Some outlandish college trip she took last year—Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or somewhere. If her mother hadn’t mentioned it on the phone, we would never have known. We’ll probably be able to control it, but what an awful disease. Such a pretty thing, too.” She gazed at me for a moment, and then said, “You, too.” She patted my arm. “Well, you’re young yet.”
I stretched the fingers on my right hand experimentally and watched the way the light shone on my fingernails. The only thing that hurt was the needle in my hand. Even the ferret bite was beginning to heal.