Ghost Hand

by Ripley Patton

  “I’ll ask the night shift to go easy on you,” Nurse Jane offered. “You aren’t on any meds, and your breathing is good, so there’s no reason to check you too often. I’ll see you in the morning,” she finished with a sad smile and left as well, revealing the bustle of the evening shift-change as she slipped out the door.

  “Olivia,” my mother sighed, sitting heavily in the chair by the bed.

  “I’m really tired.” I said, turning my face away, “I think I need some rest.”

  “I tried to tell you,” she said weakly.

  “Really?” I looked at her, glaring. “When? When exactly did you try to tell me?”

  “Last night,” she glared back.

  “Last night?”

  “Yes, last night. That was why I wanted you home early. I was going to tell you, and then Ray was going to come over so you two could meet.”

  “Ray?” I gagged on the name.

  “Don’t make this more difficult than it already is,” she said, taking my left hand in hers again. “He was there for me when I needed him.”

  I yanked my hand away. “You want to hold my hand?” I asked, my voice breaking on the last word. I slipped my ghost hand from under the sheet and thrust it at her, “Then hold this one.”

  She recoiled in surprise, fear flashing in her eyes.

  “No?” I taunted, reaching out to touch her face, watching her flinch away from it.

  “Olivia, don’t!” She knocked my arm down with her forearm and pinned it to the bed rail.

  We both looked down at my ghost hand, panting, stunned by our own actions.

  I tried to yank my arm away because I could feel it happening—my hand beginning to un-form, to bleed, to reach toward my mother. It didn’t like being pushed away and pinned down.

  She must have felt it too, because she let go of my arm and jumped up from her chair. For a second, I thought she might bolt from the room, but she didn’t. She kept her distance though.

  “What is wrong with it?” she asked, trying to sound clinical and detached, like a doctor, but it didn’t work. Her voice quivered.

  “It wants to pull something out of you,” I said flatly, knowing it would scare the shit out of her. Tendrils were beginning to form. How far could they reach? Across the room? Down the hall? Out of this godforsaken hospital?

  “How long has this been happening?” she demanded.

  How long had it been happening? Was it only yesterday I’d been in Calculus taking my test. It seemed like years ago. It seemed like a different world ago.

  “I don’t know,” I said, because it felt true. Vines of PSS energy were stretching over the bedrail, writhing in her direction.

  “I’m getting the doctor,” she said and shot out the hospital room door.

  Now I’d done it. She would never let this drop. Her artist husband hadn’t been able to “fix” her daughter, but maybe her precious doctor Ray could. When my mother told him what had just happened, there would be tests. They’d keep me in the hospital. Like a guinea pig. Like an experiment. Like a pin cushion. Like my dad. I couldn’t let that happen.

  I looked down at my hand, willing it to settle down. If I could just get it under control before my mom and her doctor boyfriend came back. But how? Marcus had grabbed my wrist, and it had gone cold. I glanced around the room frantically, looking for something cold.

  My eyes fell to the plastic pitcher of water Nurse Jane had brought in. It wasn’t ice cold, but it would have to do.

  I grabbed the pitcher, set it in my lap, pulled off the lid, and dunked my wrist in, wild PSS energy and all. Water sloshed over the edges of the pitcher, and soaked my lap, but I didn’t care because right before my eyes the PSS shrank back like a sea anemone when it’s touched. It happened so quickly, my hand forming back to normal fingers and a normal hand, I could barely believe it.

  I pulled my ghost hand out and shoved the lid back on, just as my mother came charging through the door with Dr. Fineman.

  I looked up innocently, set the pitcher back on the table, and placed my hands in my lap over the wet spot.

  My mother’s eyes flew to my ghost hand. “It was—something was wrong with it,” she said. “Olivia, tell Dr. Fineman what your hand was doing.”

  “My hand’s fine,” I said, holding up my flesh hand and giving them a wave.

  “Not that hand,” she said, almost growling. “Your PSS hand.”

  “It’s fine too,” I said, showing them.

  “It wasn’t fine a minute ago,” she insisted, turning to her Dr. Fineman for support. “It was losing form and stretching across the room toward me. She said it wanted to pull something out of me. And this wasn’t the first time. It happened at home, earlier last night. When I asked her how long this has been going on, she said she didn’t even know.”

  “Olivia,” the doctor said, approaching my bedside, “if your PSS is experiencing some kind of anomaly, we need to know. Your mother and I just want to help you. Can I see your hand?” he asked, holding out his big man hand, palm up.

  Your mother and I. There was that phrase again, burning into my brain. He wanted me to put my hand in his. My own mother wouldn’t even touch my ghost hand, was revolted by it, but this guy wanted to take it and he didn’t even know me. But he didn’t want to help me. He wanted to appease his lover, and maybe get an article on PSS for some medical journal out of it. Still, I had to play this smart. I reached out my ghost hand and put it in his.

  He grasped my wrist firmly with his fingers, almost like Marcus had, and it made me jump.

  “Did that hurt?” he asked, concerned.

  I shook my head.

  “Can you tell me when the symptoms started?” he asked, turning my wrist this way and that, looking at my PSS closely.

  “What symptoms?” I asked.

  “The malformation. The stretching. The things your mother described.”

  “I don’t know what she’s talking about,” I said, giving Ray my best concerned-for-my-mother look. “She’s just afraid of my PSS. She always has been. Ask her to come take my hand and you’ll see what I mean.”

  My mother’s face went from red to white as she stared at me over her boyfriend’s head.

  Dr. Fineman set my wrist gently on the bed. “We can run some tests,” he said, looking between me and my mother, “and compare them to the PSS readings taken at her birth.”

  “No,” I said at exactly the same time she said, “Yes.”

  “Don’t you need my consent to run tests on me?” I asked.

  My mother looked at me like I’d just grown a third arm. “Who is this creature that defies me?” her eyes asked.

  “Actually, no,” Dr. Fineman said. “PSS screening of a minor is at the parent’s discretion. But,” he turned to my mother, “I’ll need you to sign a waiver, and I have to put the order in for the tests now, if you want them done in the morning.”

  “Do that then,” she said.

  “What are you going to have them do, strap me down?” I asked.

  “If I have to,” she answered, eyes blazing.

  “Sophie, can I talk to you in the hall?” Dr. Fineman said, his arm again going to that place on her back as he guided her toward the door. I could hear their low voices talking even after it had closed behind them.

  After about five minutes, my mother came back in.

  “We’ll talk about this tomorrow when we’re both less distraught,” she said, obviously trying to regain some of her cold professionalism.

  “I’m not letting them test me.”

  “I need to go work on some housing arrangements for us,” she said, ignoring the challenge. “I’ll be back first thing in the morning.”

  “I want to stay at Emma’s.”

  “And I want you to have these tests done,” she said, turning her back to me and leaving the room.

  The implications of that exchange were clear. You want to stay at Emma’s, then agree to the testing. But if you block what I want, I’ll block what you want. That was
pretty harsh, even for my mother. Our house had burned to the ground, and she was going to use the only familiar place I had left as a tool to force me to do what she wanted. What did they call that in psychological terms? Oh, yes—emotional blackmail.

  I sat alone in my hospital room, fuming. Everyone else must have known. Nurse Jane. All the doctors and staff. The whole town must have known and been laughing at me behind my back. How long had my mother and Dr. Ray been lovers? A month? A year? She hadn’t even mourned my dad. It wasn’t right, how she’d left me to wallow in loss alone while she’d gone off and found comfort in the arms of some doctor. He was nothing like my dad. He was cold, and sterile and white like the halls he roamed every day pretending he could fix people.

  That’s what doctors did. They pretended to have power over death. They gave little girls false hope that their fathers wouldn’t die of cancer. They tortured and poisoned sick people with things like chemotherapy and radiation in the name of science. That’s what they’d done to my father, even though he hadn’t wanted it. He had wanted to go home and spend his last few good months with his family, to watch sunsets, and picnic in the yard, and tuck his little girl in at night. That is what he had wanted, what he had told the doctors and me and my mother. But she had wanted him to fight. She had wanted him to take every last excruciating measure to eke out more of his painfully tortured existence. And he’d done it for her. With love in his eyes and heart, he had died longer and harder. Even after he’d gone into a coma, he’d fought, refusing to die, unable to live. That had been the longest month of my life.

  I looked toward the room’s tall floor-to-ceiling windows. The garden-like UMH courtyard was almost dark, the final dregs of sunset casting the trees in shades of orange. I had seen that same effect a hundred times sitting at my father’s bedside. We had dubbed it “the backside of the sun.”—not the sunset itself, but the way its reflected light changed the hue of everything it touched.

  Once, during one of his stronger spells, I’d mentioned how I missed us seeing the real sunset together, the way we’d used to in the cemetery at the top of Sunset Hill.

  “I can’t climb that hill anymore, Peanut,” he’d said. “But I think we should go see the front side of the sunset together, right now.”

  Then he had detached all his hospital paraphernalia and he’d gotten out of bed. He’d thrown on a robe from home and some slippers, and put his arm around my shoulders. But, instead of walking out the door, past the nurses and doctors who would have stopped us for sure, he’d guided me over to one of the room’s big windows and opened it.

  Like a pair of kids skipping school, we’d snuck along the inside of the hospital courtyard, hiding behind bushes, giggling, and swearing fellow-patients to secrecy when they saw us. Then, we’d made our way up the hill behind UMH, and sat in the grass to watch the sunset, side by side. Eventually, before it got too dark, a hospital orderly had been sent out with a wheelchair to retrieve us.

  When we got back to dad’s room, my mother had been waiting, tight-lipped and livid, her eyes accusing me.

  “Don’t be angry at her, Sophie,” he’d said gently. “Don’t ever be angry at her for any of this.”

  But then he’d died, and anger seemed to be the only thing my mother and I had left between us.

  The room door opened, startling me out of my reverie, and a nurse from the night shift came in. She checked the chart and asked a few questions. Then she promised not to bother me for a couple of hours, dimmed the lights, and slipped out the door.

  A couple of hours. That gave me until about nine.

  I threw my legs over the side of the bed, various aches and pains pinging in protest, and padded barefoot across the cool hospital floor over to the windows. It was dark outside, the lights from the rooms on the other side of the courtyard shining yellow and warm. Several had their vertical blinds pulled closed; two had the lights dimmed like mine, while in others I could see nurses tending their patients, televisions on, a family standing around a bed. I reached over and pulled down the handle of the window closest to me, swinging it open and feeling the night air sweep over me like the breath of freedom.

  I leaned out the window, looking north up the hill. Beyond it were some woods with a footpath through them leading straight to McKenzie Park. It was only a few blocks from there to the Campbells’ house.

  If my dad and I had managed to escape UMH in broad daylight when he was terminally ill, then I could certainly do it in the dark with a slight case of smoke inhalation.

  I walked back to my bed, retrieved the bag of clothes Mrs. Campbell had brought me, and headed for the bathroom to change.

  13

  ESCAPE FROM UMLOT

  None of the clothes in Mrs. Campbell’s bag had ever been mine. There was the shirt on top, which had been Emma’s, and the rest of the clothes were blatantly new and obviously hand-picked with my darkly unique fashion sense in mind. The tags had all been cut off, but everything still had its in-store smell and neatly-on-display creases. At the bottom of the bag there was even a pair of new sneakers, some black army-style lace-up boots, and a smaller plastic bag full of panties and several bras.

  After the underwear, I slipped on a pair of black skinny jeans and a dark t-shirt. I started to put on the boots, but there was something stuffed inside the right one. I reached in and pulled out a pair of black, elbow-length leather gloves. My eyes prickled with tears as I imagined Emma picking them out for me. The gloves went on, then a black hooded sweatshirt over everything to complete my ensemble. The simple act of getting dressed had revealed how sore my body was, and I was a little out of breath.

  I wadded up the hospital gown and crammed it into the bottom of the clothes bag. I couldn’t get the bracelet off without a pair of scissors, so I tucked it inside my sweatshirt sleeve. One last look in the mirror to pull the hood up over my head and around my face, and I was ready to go. I turned off the bathroom light, slipped back out to the dim hospital room, and set the bag of clothes next to the bed.

  “Going somewhere?” a voice behind me asked softly.

  I spun, arms raised, hands out, poised in some instinctual posture of defense.

  Marcus sat in the chair near the end of the bed, his legs sprawled out casually in front of him as if he were just another friendly hospital visitor. He was dressed all in black, just like I was.

  “How the hell did you get in here?” I demanded. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “Calm down,” he said, holding his hands out in a gesture of peace. “You’re the one who opened the window for me.”

  “What are you talking about?” I snapped. “I didn’t open it for you. I opened it for me.”

  “Oh,” he said, sounding surprised. “I thought you saw me out there. You looked right at me.”

  “That is really creepy. You’ve been out there perving me, just waiting for me to open my window so you could climb in?”

  “I wasn’t perving,” he said, indignation in his voice.

  “Really? Then what were you doing?”

  “Gee, I don’t know. Worrying about you. Hoping you were safe. Making sure CAMFers didn’t come take you away.”

  That stopped me in my tracks. He’d been out there worrying about me?

  “I like your new gloves,” he said, ruining the compliment by adding, “You must go through a lot of them.”

  “Only recently,” I said. Was he trying to charm me?

  “You still haven’t told me where you’re going dressed like some emo ninja,” he said, eyeing my outfit again and raising one of his dark eyebrows.

  “I always dress like this,” I snapped. “And no, I haven’t told you where I’m going.” Anger suddenly welled up in me. If he’d wanted to keep me safe, he could have told me something useful in the cemetery. “Why should I tell you anything? You didn’t bother telling me the CAMFers would burn down my house with me in it!”

  “Hey, I tried to warn you.”

  “Oh my God! You call that warning me? You fo
llowed me around, made vague threats, and insisted I come with you to who-knows-where. Why didn’t you just say, ‘They’re going to burn your house down,’? I probably would have paid attention to that.”

  “I was vague,” he said, anger in his voice now too, “because I didn’t know what they’d do. I never thought they’d be that aggressive to someone with connections.”

  “Connections? What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Your mom’s the town shrink. You go missing and people notice.”

  “They didn’t try to take me,” I pointed out. “They tried to burn me alive.”

  “I doubt it. They were probably just trying to smoke you out, or make it look like you died in the fire,” he said this so casually, as if it were an every-day thing. “But you’re right. I never should have let you leave the cemetery alone. I saw the smoke, but by the time I got to your house, they were loading you into the ambulance. So, I followed you here, and I’ve been watching you ever since. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  “Okay?” I echoed, hearing my voice escalating to something bordering on hysterical. “I’m not okay! My house is gone. Everything I own is gone.”

  “Keep your voice down,” he warned, nodding toward the door. “I know this has been rough. I wish I could change that, but I can’t. We’ve all lost things, important things, to the CAMFers. And I’m sorry your house is gone. I really am. What about the thing in your backpack? You still have it, right?”

  “Is that what you came for?” I felt my body go cold.

  “It’s one of the things I came for,” he said, not a hint of apology in his voice.

  “Well, it’s not here,” I said, looking away from him.

  “What do you mean, ‘it’s not here?’”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “Yes you do,” he insisted, his eyes doing a quick scan of the room. “I saw the Fire Chief load it into the back of the ambulance with you.”

  “You mean the Fire Chief who set my house on fire?” I asked, watching the words sink in, seeing understanding wash over his face.

  Marcus sat back down heavily in the chair, much like my mother had earlier. He voiced a few choice expletives before looking up at me and asking, “He’s the CAMFer spy?”