I brought everyone up to speed on Laria as we headed toward the elevator that would take us to the visitors’ lounge on the second floor.
I separated Meghan from the pack while we waited. “What the hell are you two doing here?”
Probably not the most brotherly response, but I was low on patience at that point.
“Car trouble,” she said with a shrug. “I tried calling you and got Ma instead. Great luck, huh?”
“What kind of car trouble?”
She shrugged. “I drive a beater, big brother. I’ve had all kinds of car trouble.”
She said they’d spent the night at the old-school Stardust Motor Court near the county hospital.
“I thought we were going to head up to Canada tomorrow, but he got all antsy and we set out at the crack of dawn.”
“Crack of dawn?” My sister only saw the crack of dawn from the flip side.
“Okay, so it was almost nine, but it felt like the crack of dawn.” They made it a few miles north of Sugar Maple when the car died and our parents swung by to rescue them and continued on to the hospital.
“You had to bring him with you?” I muttered as the elevator light went on.
“We couldn’t leave him on the side of the road.”
“Doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.”
“Shh,” she warned me. “Be nice.”
I wasn’t making any promises. If the jackass got out of line, I was kicking him out. No questions asked.
Maybe he was smarter than he looked because he nodded at me in the elevator but gave me a wide berth, which was fine by me. My sister might have a thing for bad boys, but I was a cop. I knew that bad boys usually ended up doing twenty-to-life.
Chloe was talking to someone in a white lab coat when we entered the visitors’ lounge. She looked tightly strung, pale, and exhausted but slightly less worried than she had before.
“So far, so good,” she said as she embraced my parents and shot a quizzical look toward Meghan and her jackass. “They’re taking her for a CT scan now, but they don’t expect to find anything.”
Bunny peppered her with questions that she tried hard to answer but fell short of the detail my mother was looking for. I was happy enough with the news that the seizures had stopped and there was no fever.
“Who’s the neonatal?” my mother asked.
“I don’t know,” Chloe said, “but a Dr. Albright is overseeing everything.”
Bunny marched off in search of answers and Meghan took the opportunity to step forward and introduce her friend.
“This is James,” she said. “We had car trouble. We tried calling you—”
“Nobody’s interested,” I snapped and instantly felt like shit when Meghan blushed bright red.
James flashed a toothpaste smile and extended his right hand in Chloe’s direction. To my surprise, Chloe nodded but didn’t take his hand. Instead she turned to my dad.
“You look like a man in need of coffee,” she said, linking her arm through his. “Why don’t you sit down and I’ll get you a cup?”
“I should be taking care of you,” my dad said.
Chloe gave him a tired smile. “You’d be doing me a favor, Jack. Otherwise I’ll just sit here and think.”
He nodded and lowered himself onto one of the sofas lining the wall.
“Anybody else?” she asked, deliberately avoiding James’s eyes.
“Tea for me, thanks,” Meghan said.
I shot my sister a look.
“She
asked
,” Meghan protested. “Chill, big brother. You’re getting a little intense.”
“You want intense? In case you forgot, we’re waiting to find out why our eight-day-old daughter is having seizures.”
“Luke.” Chloe placed a hand on my arm. “It’ll be a while until we hear anything more. Help me with the coffees, okay?”
CHLOE
“I wasn’t going to lose it,” Luke said as we walked down the hallway toward the small cafeteria.
“I know,” I said. “I was.”
“I saw you didn’t shake his hand.”
“I couldn’t. I was about to turn into a flamethrower.” The tips of my fingers were uncomfortably hot and I waved them in the air to cool them down. Was it possible my magick was making a comeback so soon after Laria’s birth?
We got on line for coffee behind a frazzled mother of three wired kids who were running laps around the room. My admiration for human mothers took another leap.
“I thought everyone said Meghan liked pretty boys.”
Luke shot me a look. “You don’t think he’s good-looking?”
“Average to plain.”
“My mother thinks he should be a male model.”
I shrugged. “He’d have to hit the gym a whole lot harder.”
“Are we talking about the same guy?” Luke asked. “Chiseled features, blue eyes, guns the size of howitzers?”
I started to laugh as we placed our order. “Maybe your sister should be worried that you’re competition.”
He turned red, which made me laugh even more. It felt good to release some of the tension that had been building inside us for hours now.
“Not my type,” he said as we paid for the drinks. “I like tall, skinny blondes.”
We started back to the lounge. “Nothing against Meghan, but I really wish they weren’t here.”
“Does that mean I can kick his ass out?”
“No,” I said. “It means I wish they weren’t here.”
Bunny and Jack were watching the overhead television when we returned. Bunny was knitting on my sock-in-progress. Meghan was working a newspaper crossword puzzle while James leaned against the window and looked down at the parking lot. Direct sunlight wasn’t his friend. He looked older, more jaded, not somebody I’d like to get to know better. Or at all, for that matter.
I have magick, but I’m not psychic. I can’t walk into a room and suss out the good, the bad, and the downright evil like many of my Sugar Maple friends can. But this James guy set off a gut-level reaction I couldn’t ignore. Even through the dark cloud of worry over Laria the warning bells rang loud and clear.
Okay, so maybe I already knew enough about him to hate him. Cruelty had never been one of my turn-ons and there was no denying he had been incredibly cruel and thoughtless with Meghan. But there was something else at work, something I couldn’t identify but sensed just the same, and I wished he were anywhere but here with us.
Luke sat down near Meghan and struck up a conversation. I sat on the arm of the sofa next to Bunny and Jack and tried to muster up some interest in
The Price Is Right
but all I could think of was Laria.
“Hope you don’t mind,” Bunny said as she handed back the sock. “It looked lonely.”
I managed a smile. “Toe-up or cuff-down?”
“Cuff-down,” she said, “but I did try two on one circular once. I won’t make that mistake again.”
I picked up where she left off, willing myself to ease into the comforting rhythm of knit three, purl one ribbing.
Bunny patted me on the hand. “I have a good feeling about this, honey. It’s all going to work out fine.”
To my embarrassment I totally choked up and could only nod my head in response. I was aware of James’s eyes on me, cool and calculating, and I ducked my head against what felt like an invasion of privacy.
Maybe I should have let Luke kick his ass after all.
Time dragged on. I knitted. Bunny bought us sandwiches around one o’clock but I couldn’t choke down a bite. Jack dozed intermittently on the plastic sofa while Luke paced a hole in the dark gray industrial carpet. Meghan must have picked up on the unfriendly vibe because she asked James to go for a walk with her so she could “get some air.”
Bunny shook her head as soon as they left. “I don’t know why she dates men who are prettier than she is. You’d think she’d have learned by now.”
Jack snored. Luke grunted something unpleasant. I looked at Bunny in surprise.
“I don’t think he’s that great looking,” I said honestly, then ticked off the ways in which I found him lacking.
“Well, look at you,” Bunny said with a laugh. “You look like a movie star yourself. Your idea of average is very different from mine.”
“Do you like him?” I asked.
She gave me an
are you kidding
type of look. “He’s arrogant, conceited, and stupid. Exactly the type my daughter is drawn to time after time.” She sighed and inspected her short, no-nonsense fingernails. “The only good thing is it won’t last.”
“Will it last the afternoon?”
Bunny looked at me and laughed out loud. “I knew I liked you.”
I liked her, too. She was smart, aggressive, and definitely nosy, but she loved her family. By extension I was part of the tribe and it felt good. And to my surprise I saw a difference in Luke, too. His parents might get on his nerves, but their presence at the hospital helped make both of us feel less alone as we waited for news of Laria. Conversation ground to a halt as the hours wore on, but the feeling of being connected to each other by our love and concern for Laria was more powerful than words. I sneaked off to the empty chapel on the sixth floor and quickly blueflamed Janice to let her know what was happening.
“If you need us, we’re there for you,” she said. “We’ll drop everything and transport over. Just say the word.”
I tried to tell her how much I appreciated the offer, but Janice wasn’t one for big displays of sentiment. She tried to make a joke out of it, but I wouldn’t let her.
“Knock it off,” she said with a laugh. “Next thing I know you’ll be designing a magick line for Hallmark.”
Meghan and James popped back in around shift change at three to see if there was any news and then went off again, to the relief of everyone in the room.
Luke and I got to see Laria once between tests and she was her sweet and hungry self. I’d expressed my milk earlier and was ready to feed her, but the doctors were withholding nourishment until the next test was completed.
“She looks fine,” Luke said as she grabbed hold of his pinky.
I smiled and kissed the top of her head. “You’d never know anything happened.”
“Sorry, folks,” Paula, one of the evening nurses on duty, said, “but Laria has things to do.”
We lingered as long as we could, but the nurse was insistent. Reluctantly we turned to leave and found ourselves face-to-face with James Whatever His Last Name Was.
“How long have you been standing there?” Luke demanded, not even taking a stab at being friendly. “I thought you were out walking with Meghan.”
“We came back so I could use the john.” If the guy was the least bit uncomfortable it didn’t show. “I heard your voices on my way back.” He smiled and I liked him less than before if that was possible. “I thought maybe I’d get a look at the star of this show.”
“No.” I didn’t mean for it to pop out quite that harshly, but my emotions were pretty ragged by then. “No visitors. It’s family only.”
Another man might have been ticked off by my confrontational reaction, but he didn’t blink. The guy had sociopath written all over him.
“I saw you holding her. She’s a beauty.”
“Thanks.” I was lucky I could manage that much with Luke glowering at me. “We’d better go. They have one more test to run and we’re holding them up.”
Luke and I started down the hall, but James stayed put.
“Let’s go,” Luke said as the moment grew increasingly uncomfortable. “Like we said, family only.”
I wasn’t sure if the guy was socially awkward or just plain manipulative, but I leaned toward the latter. Luke had been keeping an eye on him before this incident, but now he was watching him like a hawk.
A middle-aged couple came in around four thirty to wait for news of their son, who had been rushed into surgery after a snowmobile accident. They huddled together in the far corner and I could hear whispered words of prayer rise and fall above the drone of local news on the television.
I found another circular knitting needle deep in the bowels of my tote bag and Bunny cast on for the second sock. She gave me a grateful look that all knitters would understand. At that moment we were definitely process knitters. It didn’t matter what came off our needles. It only mattered that we were knitting to stave off the demons.
“I can’t take this,” Luke erupted around five o’clock. “We’ve been here all day. Somebody’s gotta know something.”
“Maybe they forgot you were waiting here,” Jack offered from the depths of the couch.
“Did you give them your cell number?” I asked Luke.
“They didn’t ask.”
“They didn’t ask me, either.”
“Both of you sit down and take a deep breath.” Bunny was exerting her full range of maternal power. “They know you’re here. When there’s something new they’ll tell you. Now try to relax.”