by Fiona Zedde
Six years ago, she thought she had been handed a renewed universe. With Rille, she had night after night of explosive, getting-to-know-you-again sex. The feeling of opening herself emotionally for the first time in years. Of falling free of disguises and pretense. Yes, those first months were paradise. Rille had given her everything she’d ever dreamed of in a lover and a potential partner.
“You’re at your best when you want something,” Sara said quietly. “But once you have it, your life is meaningless again and you start to treat people as if they’re meaningless too.”
Rille flinched under her touch. The dark eyes snapped open.
“I’ve never treated you like that. You mean everything to me.”
Sara smiled at the lie. So dramatic. “That’s such an ordinary and sweet thing to say. I’m tempted to believe you.”
“You should just believe me. Don’t doubt.”
“I can’t. You’re a liar.” Sara tapped Rille’s mouth. Gently. “A pretty and sincere liar.” She whispered the last like an endearment. A love word.
“And because of this you’re still going to leave me?” Rille sat up, brows lowering.
“Yes. Yes, I am.” Sara lay on her back below Rille’s looming height, slim torso, the stalk of a neck, jaw firm with the beginnings of anger.
Rille’s stare sharpened. “Until I saw you again after college, I never saw myself as ordinary. Never. But over the years, you made me that way. Feeling love, wanting validation, even a fucking house in the suburbs. I found myself protecting your feelings,” Rille spat this last as if it was the worst. “Now that you’ve made me into this ordinary thing, you want to leave?” She pushed herself off the bed and yanked her clothes into some semblance of order. The curls loosened from their earlier tussle crackled with electricity around her face. “Fuck you, Sara Chambers.”
Her footsteps hurried across the floor. The door slammed.
Cotton sheets shifted under Sara as she turned to the window. The Japanese maple waved its banner red leaves, bowed its head to the strengthening wind. Could she really do it? Was this really the end of them? Her throat felt dry and torn. Breath rasped through her open mouth.
A loud curse and a series of laddering bumps jerked Sara’s attention from herself. She sat up. “Rille?”
Without waiting for an answer, she dashed to the bedroom door, flung it open, and ran down the short hallway. “Everything okay?”
A groan and another thump drew her to the stairs.
“My God…”
Rille lay on her back, a twisted doll, at the bottom of the stairs. Her head moved slowly from side to side as if searching for something she’d lost. Naked, Sara rushed down the stairs, careful to hold on to the railing.
“Don’t move!”
But Rille didn’t listen. Before Sara could reach her, she fumbled up for the banister, trying to drag herself up, but slipped and toppled backward, smashing her head into the bottom step. Blood exploded through the blond curls, spread across the cherry hardwood stair. Her eyes fell closed. She didn’t move again.
“Rille!”
The pulse in Rille’s neck beat sluggishly, but it was there. Sara grabbed the cordless phone from its stand near the banister and called 911. “There’s been an accident,” she gasped to the woman who answered the phone. “Please tell me what to do.”
All Good Things…
Stephen/Atlanta
“There’s someone on the phone for you.” Manny poked his newly shaved head into the office.
“Thanks.” Stephen absently picked up the phone, his mind still on the compact bike pumps he was thinking of carrying in the store. They weren’t as good quality as the ones they now sold, but students and bikers on a budget would appreciate them. “Stephen here. What can I do for you?”
“There’s been an accident.” Sara’s vibrato voice seized him in the throat.
He was halfway out of his chair even as the questions tumbled out of him. “What happened? Where are you?”
“It’s not me. Rille fell.” A rough breath distorted her voice. “We’re at Emory University Hospital.”
He drew a breath of his own. “Okay.”
It took him twenty minutes to get to the hospital, find a parking space, and run down the hall through sharp medicinal smells to grab a pacing Sara by the arms.
“Tell me.”
He felt the eyes of the other people in the waiting room on him. Through their coughs and specific sounds of pain, through the noise of the television, he focused on Sara.
“She fell down the stairs.” The skin around Sara’s mouth was pinched and tight as she spoke. “We had an argument.”
Did you push her? He wanted to ask, but as soon as the thought burst into his brain, he knew it couldn’t have happened that way. Sara was not impulsive. No matter how much Rille pushed and pushed, Sara would never push back. Not like this. Between his hands, she shivered as if cold and Stephen impulsively pulled her against his chest. She didn’t pull away.
“I prayed for her,” Sara whispered. “She needs to be all right.”
“She will be. Don’t worry.” Stephen said the words into her hair, wanting to believe them himself. “Have the doctors said anything yet?”
“No. They just took her away.” Sara plucked at the front of his shirt. “She was so still.”
Stephen walked with her to the nearly empty row of padded chairs, tugging her down beside him to wait. But after a moment, she shrugged him off to pace the carpeted floor again. In her oversized T-shirt, yoga pants, and tennis shoes, she looked very young, like one of Rille’s students. Her curling locks spilled around her face and down her back. She pushed them away and behind her ears as she paced, looking at the wall clock after each complete circuit of the room.
More than an hour passed before someone finally came in with news for them.
“Sara Chambers?”
Stephen dropped the magazine he’d picked up in desperation for something to take his mind off their unknown. Sara whirled to face him, her eyes wide. She held out her hand to him and he took it. The slim brown doctor in green scrubs introduced himself as Dr. Benipal, shifting the clipboard he carried to shake Sara’s hand.
“This is Stephen,” she said to the doctor. “He’s also listed on the paperwork I gave the nurse as family.”
Dr. Benipal shook his hand too, wrinkled forehead giving him a look of gravity and concern. “It’s not good news,” he said. “I’m afraid that Ms. Thompson is in a coma.”
The horror of the doctor’s words abruptly washed over Stephen. A coma? How hard had she fallen? He felt Sara sag against him. “What does that mean?” he asked.
“Her condition is serious but stable. She could wake up at any time or…” Dr. Benipal paused, looking at them with regret in his large round eyes. “…no time soon. We’ve made her comfortable, but that’s all we can do.”
Sara swallowed audibly. “What about her HIV? Will the coma make it worse, or could she stay asleep longer because of the virus?”
“We’re managing the HIV with medication while she is in the comatose state. One condition shouldn’t adversely affect the other.”
Sara’s hand tightened on Stephen’s arm. She sighed. “Okay.”
“Can we see her?” The question jerked out of Stephen’s mouth.
The doctor nodded. He led them through the automatic double doors and down a long, brightly lit hallway, past the blip of machines, curtained off rooms, faceless men and women in scrubs glancing down at charts as they rushed in attendance to the sick and dying. A voice rang over the intercom: “Paging Dr. Madden. Pick up extension seven seven one. Dr. Madden. Extension seven seven one.”
Dr. Benipal paused before a closed door. “We’ve already moved her to a private room so this is where she’ll be from now until she recovers enough to go home.” He pushed the door open.
Rille looked diminished. Lying in the small bed under a steadily beeping machine and with an I.V. feeding fluid into her arm, she was the smallest
Stephen had ever seen her. Her face was turned away from them to the wall, showing clearly where they had shaved nearly half of the back of her head to clean and bandage a wound. Up close, her features were still and ashen.
“Her hair!” Sara lurched away from him toward the bed. But she didn’t touch Rille. Her hands only hovered above Rille’s face, above the eyelashes that seemed as if they would lift at any moment to reveal that familiar teasing gaze.
“All we can do at this point is hope for the best,” the doctor said from Stephen’s side. “Like I said, she could wake up very soon.”
Or never. Stephen bowed his head at the unsaid words. “Thank you, doctor.”
Dr. Benipal squeezed Stephen’s shoulder. “Stay with her as long as you like. When you’re ready to leave, see someone at the nurse’s station and they’ll let you know about regular visiting hours and answer any questions you might have.”
He looked at Sara who stood on the other side of Rille’s bed, her arms crossed over her belly as if in pain. After a moment’s hesitation, the doctor pulled a card from his breast pocket. “Here’s my contact information in case you need to speak with me directly.”
Stephen thanked him again. After another glance at Sara, the doctor left them alone with Rille. Stephen sank into the chair at Rille’s bedside, unable to stay on his feet any longer.
“How did this happen?”
This morning when he had left them for the bike shop, everything was the same as usual. They made love as the sun rose above the horizon and crept into their bedroom. Rille was particularly attentive to Sara, whispering into her throat, taking her with a rough tenderness that Stephen hadn’t seen in a long time. Afterward, he made breakfast, fruit topped waffles dusted with powdered sugar, that they ate in the kitchen while reading their various newspapers. When he kissed Sara’s indifferent cheek then Rille’s mouth before getting in his car for work, Stephen sensed nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing.
Sara straightened over Rille’s bed. “There was a fight. A misunderstanding. While we were talking in the bedroom, I told her something she didn’t want to hear. She ran out the door and fell. I guess she was in too much of a hurry to get away from me.” Her hands clenched around the bed rails.
“Was it about that girl at the school?”
Sara flinched but did not look away from Rille’s still face. “She told you about that?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t care?”
He weighed his words carefully. “I wouldn’t say that I don’t care, but if she’s determined to have this girl, what can I do about it?”
Sara made a noise of disgust and turned away from the bed. “Do you really feel that way?”
“Don’t you?”
Her look speared him. “I felt that way four years ago. But not now.”
He wanted to ask her what changed, but the look on her face stopped him cold. “Are you going to spend the rest of the day here?” he asked instead.
Before she could answer, the door opened.
“Merille, oh my God!” Rille’s mother burst through the door, followed closely by her father.
Beverly Thompson pinned him and Sara with a single poisonous stare before nearly falling into Rille’s narrow bed. Sara scuttled out of her way.
“What the devil happened here?” Beverly stared down at Rille, but her cold voice broadcast to the entire room. The cascade of malachite crystals against her throat and chest clattered as she leaned down to caress Rille’s face. Her green dress, Stephen noticed idly, matched her eyes.
Her husband quietly closed the door behind him. “The doctor already told us it was an accidental fall, Bev.”
Short and thin, with a crest of silver hair surrounding his dignified bald crown, Fletcher Thompson seemed the very opposite of his wife. He walked slowly into the room. As if taking in the feel of the air, making sure he was in the right place. Making sure that it was Merille Thompson in the bed, his daughter, and not some stranger. Making sure this wasn’t some terrible mistake. He nodded at Stephen, offered a stiff smile to Sara as he moved past them to hover at the foot of Rille’s bed. His already narrow face crumbled in on itself.
Stephen had only met the Thompsons a few times since he’d been with Rille, and he was surprised at how much they loved their daughter, yet did not know her. Theirs was a love fostered by willful ignorance of their child’s personality and needs. As long as Rille performed well in school, her profession, and in public, they were pleased to acknowledge her as their own.
“Merille? Baby?” Beverly’s voice dropped to a whisper. She pressed her palms against Rille’s cheeks as silent tears rushed down her face.
The misery in Sara’s eyes jerked Stephen out of his stupor. He stood and moved toward the door. He felt Sara follow behind him.
“Thank you for calling us, Sara.” Mr. Thompson’s voice reached out. He stood at his wife’s side with a hand on her back.
Sara made a low noise, cleared her throat. “I couldn’t have done anything else, sir,” she said.
Beverly’s necklace rattled again. “I’m sure you did this.” She straightened over the bed. “The doctor told us about her sickness. It’s because of how you live. That’s why she’s HIV positive. That’s why.”
“Darling, please,” Mr. Thompson said. As a doctor, he knew what Beverly said wasn’t true. Even she should know better. She who was a pediatrician and no stranger to illness.
But his wife wouldn’t be stopped. “I know one of you did this to my baby.
Sara shook her head and crossed her arms. “It was an accident.” The steel behind her words surprised Stephen. “I’m sorry that this happened,” she said steadily, reaching for Stephen’s hand. “Stephen and I both are.”
They walked out of the room.
“What’s wrong with that woman?” Sara hissed under her breath. “Can’t she see we’re all suffering here?”
In the parking lot, she and Stephen looked at each other, lost, not quite knowing what to do. Like her, Stephen didn’t want to leave the hospital, but with Rille’s parents in the room, it didn’t make sense for them to stay.
“Go home, clean up. Come back later.” He squeezed her hand. “If they’re not gone by then, hopefully Beverly will have calmed down at least.”
“Yeah, right.”
Still, Sara got into her car and pulled out of the hospital parking lot toward home. As she disappeared out of sight, Stephen sagged against his car, the thin façade of control abruptly falling away. His body throbbed dimly on the inside, a thudding pulse of worry, fear, and foreboding that he didn’t know what to do with. He didn’t want that feeling again. The drowning under a tide of uncertainty, being pulled away from the safe haven he’d gestated in for the past four years.
Looking back at that time, he’d never prepared himself for loss. Even with Rille being HIV positive, he never thought his time with her would end. He’d prepared himself to stay in her orbit forever. With or without Sara.
It wasn’t fair. The thought drummed in his head like a migraine. It wasn’t fucking fair.
Approaching voices and footsteps roused him from his thoughts. He shoved away from the car, fumbled for his keys in his pockets, and got in. At the store, he ignored Manny’s look of curiosity and worry and buried himself in work for the rest of the day. By the time he got home after ten that night, Sara was back at the hospital. The note she left in the kitchen near the plastic containers of take-out Italian told him she’d be home in time for bed then work the next day. Stephen turned over the note in his hand, her clear, looping handwriting blurring before his eyes. The hospital.
At work, he hoped it had all been some unthinkable dream, that when he pulled his car into the driveway, Sara and Rille would be home, talking quietly on the couch while their favorite jazz station played in the background, or sitting at the dinner table waiting in front of empty plates for him to join them. But this bagged food from a strange restaurant. This note. All unthinkable, but not a dream.
He put the food in the fridge and went upstairs to bed. The hospital could wait. Tonight, he would slip between their sheets, find Rille’s scent in them, and perhaps dream of her. Awake.
“She’s still the same.”
Sara’s voice, the light settling of her weight in the bed, pulled Stephen from his tentative slumber.
“I know.” His words were thick with the tears he’d only been able to release in sleep. “You would have called otherwise.”
“Yes.”
In the gray shrouded room, he watched her pull the covers over her bare shoulders and snuggle into her favorite pillow, the Temperpedic memory foam that Rille had bought for herself but surrendered to Sara when Sara started having neck pains.
“I’m going to work for a couple of hours tomorrow, but I’m heading straight to the hospital afterward.” She turned to face him, maintaining a perfect Rille-sized distance between them. Her hand drifted into the empty space. She closed her eyes. “Good night.”
“Good night,” he echoed, but knew sleep wouldn’t come for him again.
By the end of the week, they’d drifted into a routine of sorts with Sara and Stephen leaving for work at roughly the same time in the mornings on his days to open the bike shop. After Manny came in, he grabbed lunch near the hospital then went to sit at Rille’s bedside, always hoping for a change. By seven o’clock, Sara arrived with dinner she picked up on the way. They ate together in the small park nearby, with Stephen forcing himself to pick through the meal while Sara only rearranged hers in the Styrofoam container, face blank as she talked about a case or something or other, anything but the reason they were sitting there. After eating, they hovered near Rille in the room, both watching until deep into the night for a flicker of an eyelash, a twitch of a finger. Something. He and Sara held vigil until eleven o’clock or until one of them grew tired or the Thompsons swept into the room to drive them off.
Sara, he knew, was slowly coming apart. He walked into the kitchen to find her at the counter, staring down at a thick pile of mail. Scattered envelopes. Bills. Sales circulars. A flyer about the next neighborhood watch meeting.