Damaged Goods

by Nicole Williams

  A place for him. A piece of him. For most girls, those concepts might have worked for a while, but they wouldn’t have sufficed long term. Good thing for Will and me both that I wasn’t most girls.

  KEEPING A FANTASY out of reality was harder to do than a person would think. At least, it was for me. In terms of steering physically clear of Will, that wasn’t an issue. He still came down every night to bang away under the hood of the Suburban, and he had dropped off a couple more culinary masterpieces from Mrs. Goods. I had money to purchase food now, but that didn’t mean I knew how to prepare it. Not very tastefully anyway. But I’d managed to stay out of his way, and he’d done just as apt a job of staying out of mine. No awkwardness. No explanations. No apologies. Keeping my body far away from Will Goods was simple.

  My mind though? That was another thing. Keeping my mind far away from him seemed impossible. It strayed to Will often, and once he was at the forefront of it, pushing him back was an all-out cardio workout. I’d broken more sweats from forcing Will Goods out of my head than I had from peddling back and forth to work.

  As much as I preferred to keep my fantasy and reality in separate compartments, I had to accept that some parts would leak into the other. So instead of fighting a losing battle, I assured myself that by giving the fantasy the victory in the small fight, at the end of it, I would be the one who won the war.

  So reality and fantasy became a bit skewed. A tad murky. It was a price I was willing to pay because for the past few days, for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t just barely treading enough water to keep my head above the surface. I was swimming. I was actually gliding through the water with purpose. If the cost for finally thriving was a lake of murky water, I’d take it.

  My sisters seemed to be swimming through life too. Paige and Reese looked as if a hundred pounds of troubles had been lifted from their backs, and though I still had a long ways to go with Paige, I was fine with measuring my success with her in millimeters. I tried to focus on the handful of those I’d gained instead of gazing down miles and miles into the distance.

  On one of my days off, I was doing a little catch-up grocery shopping. I rode an extra few miles just so I wouldn’t have to shop at the Gas n’ Grocery, where Reese was still volunteering a couple of hours a week after school. I wasn’t avoiding it because I was ashamed of what had happened there with Reese, but because I knew Hal would want to know where I’d finally found a job.

  Most times, I managed to keep shame out of my life when it came to my present job, but it found ways to slip in—like when Reese had asked with big, curious eyes the other night when I’d be able to switch to the day shift at my new job. The kid didn’t have a clue what I did, thankfully. I wouldn’t be able to hang on to that for much longer, because something like what I did for a living didn’t stay a secret forever. Or for long. So my kid sister, asking all innocently about the day shift while having no clue I stripped for money, turned on the shame valve. Paige studying my duffel bag every night before turning her narrowed eyes on me as I slipped out the door brought on a potent dose of it too.

  Having to lie to Hal wouldn’t come shame-free either, so I took the easy route and pedaled the long one to the chain grocery store a town over. It was getting close to dinner time, so I rushed down the aisles with my hand basket. The girls would have gotten home from school a couple hours ago, and I’d promised them a home-cooked meal . . . and they’d tried to keep their grimaces to themselves. Well, Reese had. Paige had let her grimace flag fly when she found out I was the one creating this home-cooked meal.

  I tossed a packet of rice in the basket and gauged how heavy it was with my current selections. The biggest downside to not having a running vehicle wasn’t the twenty-mile roundtrip I made to work five nights a week; it was carrying a heap of groceries home in my duffel. I could fit a maximum of three plastic bags of groceries in there, and if I had to pick up something big like paper towels or a case of pop, I was lucky to squeeze one other bag inside. That meant I was at the grocery store almost as frequently as I was at The Body Shop. At least I didn’t have to take my clothes off for the customers at the grocery store, although it felt like a good handful was always imagining them off. This was a favorite spot for an after-work beer run for the mill workers.

  I’d convinced myself I could fit a few more items into my bag and was off to grab a box of microwave popcorn so we could have a movie night after dinner when my phone chimed. Given I had my duffel over my back and my purse, containing my phone, was zipped inside, I had to set the basket down and fumble with two bags before I could free the phone. I was worried it would go to voicemail before I could get to it.

  “Hello?” From the sound of it, I could have just sprinted a hundred-meter dash, not just freed myself of a few impediments inside the grocery store.

  “Miss Bennett?”

  Nothing good ever came from that kind of address. Not when it was said in that tone. She had an unfamiliar voice, but her tone was just routine and bored enough to give away that she made these kinds of calls regularly. That meant she wasn’t another flustered assistant manager calling to inform me one of my sisters had been caught shop-lifting. That meant she wasn’t the principal at the girls’ high school—I’d already gotten a call from him after Paige came close to “accidentally” setting the chemistry lab on fire, and his tone was pissed-the-hell-off all day, every day.

  Which meant . . .

  “This is Mercy Hospital. I’m calling to let you know your sister’s been admitted for emergency treatment, and you’ve been listed as her guardian.”

  I interrupted Ms. Monotone. “Which sister?” It didn’t matter. I was already running for the door, my basket abandoned in the popcorn and chip aisle, but I wanted to be prepared for whose face I’d find when I got there.

  I heard her shuffle through some papers. “Paige. Paige Bennett,” she answered. “Are you able to come to the hospital sometime today? There’s additional paperwork we’ll need you to fill out.”

  Not to mention a little sister in the E.R. for God knows what who might need a little comforting. “What happened? What’s she being treated for?” I shifted my duffel around my back and squeezed the phone between my ear and shoulder as I slid onto my bike and pedaled double-time.

  Some more shuffling paperwork.

  Come on. This is Mercy Hospital we’re talking about, not some megaplex in downtown Chicago that probably admits hundreds of patients every night.

  “A rattlesnake bite.”

  My feet flopped off the pedals, and I swerved just in time to keep from smashing into the side of an old Buick at the back of the parking lot. Living where we did, I’d seen plenty of rattlesnakes. Once when Kitty had been dating Loser First Degree, he’d left the back screen door open, and a rattlesnake had slithered inside and hidden underneath Paige’s bed. She’d cried and cried, trying to convince Kitty there was a real monster under her bed, but Kitty had slapped her hands away and told her to grow up. Of course, when the real mother failed to actually mother, I was next on Paige’s list. I didn’t believe her, of course—I’d stopped believing in the fake kind of monsters years ago, when I’d learned there were plenty in real life—but I followed her to her room. She stayed outside the door, pointing with all of her five-year-old might under her bed, trembling in fear. I remember rolling my eyes, lowering myself to the floor, peeking beneath her bed . . . and screaming. Loser First Degree came running with a shotgun loaded and racked, because I guess that was the only way to respond to a young girl screaming.

  Paige keeps a board over it, but you can still find the holes the shotgun drilled into her bedroom floor from that afternoon. The monster under her bed’s head had been blown off. But here we were, ten years later, and another monster had bitten her. The venomous, highly poisonous monster had gotten her.

  I swallowed and blinked to clear my eyes. I would do Paige no good if I wound up in the E.R. too because I’d run into a car thanks to tears obscuring my vision. “I’ll be the
re as soon as I can,” I said into the phone, although from the sound of it, the line was dead. Apparently the bored-bearer-of-bad-news had more of it to spread.

  Thank god Mercy was only a couple of miles away. Having to keep my mind controlled and the tears from slipping out after being told my little sister had been bitten by a rattlesnake was no easy task, and it was certainly one I wouldn’t have been up to for a long period. I held on just long enough to power up to the emergency entrance, drop my bike right there on the sidewalk, and dash inside.

  I did a quick scan of the room, found no sign of Reese, then rushed to the admission desk. “Paige Bennett. Where is she?”

  My breathing was still labored from my all-out ride to get there and my face had to have been a legendary mess, but the elderly lady manning the desk didn’t bat an eye. I supposed she’d seen plenty of stark-raving lunatics in her line of duty. No one showed up to the E.R. with a smile and a ray of sunshine following their every step.

  “What’s your relationship to the patient?” the lady asked, not unkindly.

  “I’m her sister. Her guardian,” I answered.

  “That poor, sweet thing. She had on such a brave face when they brought her in. I don’t think she cried a single tear the whole time.” The nurse watched my hand nervously thump on the desktop. She covered it with her own and gave mine a soft squeeze. “She’s been moved to the main part of the hospital. Room 252.”

  “Thank you,” I said as I hurried for the elevator.

  “She’s lucky, you know. Most rattlesnake-bite victims come in here much worse off. She was fortunate to have someone come to her aid so quickly.” The woman gave me a small smile as I waited for the elevator doors to open. “People die of snake bites, but come tomorrow, she should be back home and walking around just fine. Don’t let go of that guardian angel who swooped in to save the day, hon.”

  The elevator doors whooshed open, and I was inside and pushing the two button in a heartbeat. I waved at the lady. Then the doors closed. I didn’t have much time to process what she’d just said, but in the few moments it took the elevator to get from the first to the second floor, I knew that the first thing I would do when I saw Reese was give her the biggest, hardest hug I could conjure. She’d saved Paige. She’d looked after her sister when their big sister and caretaker was away. Maybe the lady at the desk hadn’t realized that we were all sisters as our last name was about the only similarity that tied the three of us together, but Reese was one guardian angel I was never letting get away.

  As soon as the doors started to open on the second floor, I lunged through them and hustled down the hall, not really knowing what direction 252 was. I just needed to hustle my way there.

  “Liv!” a familiar voice hollered from behind me.

  I broke to a stop and spun around. “Oh my god, Reese.” I went from rushing down the hall to rushing toward my sister. I threw my arms around her and pulled her close, letting the first tear I’d been holding at bay fall. “How is she? Where is she?”

  Reese squirmed a bit under my restrictive embrace, but she didn’t fight me. As a rule of thumb, my sisters and I didn’t do big shows of affection. A squeeze here, a high-five there, a hip-check most times . . . but something about discovering one of them had just looked death in the face and lived to tell about it made me suspend the “no sobbing, squishy hugs” policy.

  “She’s just fine. Or she’s going to be just fine,” Reese answered, patting my back tentatively. “The nurse and doctor are in her room now, so I just came down to hang in the waiting room.”

  Okay. Paige was here, in the hospital, receiving medical treatment, and a doctor was in her room right now. She was in the best, safest place she could be. I let myself exhale and felt the surplus of adrenaline coursing through my bloodstream siphon out. The result was an overwhelming wave of exhaustion.

  “Whoa. You don’t look so good, Liv.” Reese examined my face with a furrowed brow before guiding me to the waiting room. “Let’s get you sitting down and some sugar or something in you before you keel over. I can manage one, but I’m pretty positive I can’t handle both of my sisters checking into the hospital.”

  Oh, maybe that’s what that wave of wooziness was. It wasn’t exhaustion at all. It was my body going into shutdown mode. “Just . . . for a minute. I’ve got to see Paige.”

  Reese helped me into a chair. Then she grabbed her purse and headed for the vending machines. “Paige is in good hands. You, not so much. I don’t know what you need more—sleep or a can of Mountain Dew. Some doctor I am, right?”

  “After what you did to save Paige today, I’d say you deserve one of those fancy M.D. diplomas on your bedroom wall.” I drilled my fingers into my temples and sucked in a few deep breaths. I was already feeling better. The wooziness was passing.

  Reese huffed as she deposited coins into the soda machine. “I don’t think having to try dialing 911 three different times because my hands were shaking so badly and screaming my head off qualifies me for any kind of diplomas. Other than How Not To Handle an Emergency.”

  I glanced at her curiously. “What do you mean? From the sounds of it, you probably saved Paige’s life.”

  Reese grabbed the can of soda from the vending machine slot and returned my curious look. “I think you’re mistaking me for Will.” She held out the can of Mountain Dew. “I didn’t save Paige. Will did.”

  Okay, information overload again. I took the can, cracked it open, and took a big drink, hoping the sugar and caffeine would keep the next woozy spell from setting in. “Did you just say that Will saved Paige?” I managed to keep my voice calm, despite everything inside me being the opposite.

  Reese took the chair beside me and nodded. “Yeah, he got to her before I even knew she’d been bitten. I was in the shower . . .”

  I held my hand up to stop her. “Start from the beginning, since I obviously don’t have a clue what really happened.” The only things I’d gathered from the phone call, the nice woman at the front desk, and Reese’s piecemeal information were three terms: rattlesnake bite, Paige, and Will. I wasn’t sure how to fill in the rest of the story.

  Reese took a deep breath. “After we got home from school, I went to take a shower. Paige said she was going to go hang out back and do some ‘homework,’ which meant she was going to find a quiet place to have a smoke and take a nap before you got home.”

  My eyes widened. “What do you mean, have a smoke?”

  Reese realized her error too late. From her expression, I would have thought she’d just sold out her best friend in the whole world. “Um . . . Can we just pretend I never said that and you never heard it?”

  “No, we can’t,” was my clipped response as I fumed. “Really? Paige smokes? With her asthma?” The thought of it made me furious. I hadn’t smelled smoke on her, and I sure hadn’t found any cigarettes lying around, or I would have done something about it on the spot. Like threatening her life . . . which had actually taken place today. My anger dimmed but didn’t diminish. “So Paige was off to her secret smoking spot on the back forty,” I grumbled, saving the smoking issue for another day—one where Paige hadn’t been bitten by a rattlesnake and rushed to the emergency room. “What happened then?”

  Reese still looked flustered, but she kept going. “She likes climbing those rocks out back and sitting at the top. She says that when she’s up there, she can forget about this place and pretend she’s someone else, somewhere else . . .” Reese eyed the can of soda in my hand.

  I held it out for her. We both needed the benefits of sugar bursting into our veins.

  “All I know is that when I got out of the shower, Will was screaming to call 911 as he rushed toward the trailer with Paige in his arms. He said she’d been bitten by a rattlesnake. She was . . . unconscious. I thought she was dead.” Reese sniffed and shook her head. “That’s part of the reason it took me three tries to dial the correct three numbers. Anyway, the ambulance was there within five minutes, and after that, the rest is kind of a
blur.”

  I draped my arm around Reese’s shoulders and pulled her against me, kissing the top of her head. “You did great, kiddo.”

  She choked on a sob. “Yeah, right. Will did great. I just took a shower, totally oblivious, and punched three numbers into a phone. Not exactly the stuff of heroes.”

  I shook my head. Reese could always find a way to make her actions seem insignificant or inferior. I hoped that one day she figured out how great she really was. “I take it you rode in the ambulance here with Paige?”

  Reese nodded against my shoulder.

  “What about Will? Did he stay behind when you girls left?” I had to work to keep my voice level. I didn’t want the emotions I had for him to seep out in front of Reese or Paige—or anyone for that matter. The way I felt about Will, in my personal and professional life, deserved to be sealed in a lock box and stamped “Top Secret.”

  “Not . . . exactly.”

  I couldn’t see her face, but her tone put me on high alert. “Did he ride in the ambulance with you then?”

  Reese didn’t answer right away. I was about to ask again when she leaned back and met my eyes. “He rode here in an ambulance. Just not our ambulance.”

  My forehead wrinkled. I’d never known an ambulance company to send a back-up as an escort vehicle. I was missing something. “Reese?”

  She knew that tone. She looked like she was bracing herself before she opened her mouth. “Will saved Paige.”

  “Yeah, you mentioned that.” I was tired of taking the long cut to get to the end of the story. Why wouldn’t someone give me the damn short cut?