“Austin’s outside. Here to see you.” I tried to judge her reaction, but she was stoic.
“So?”
“Well, he wants you to hear him out, you know. Before you make any rash decisions.”
“Before I make any rash decisions? What about his rash decision?”
“I know. Trust me, I know. But, I really think he’s genuinely sorry and that he’s honestly trying to change.” I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth, much less what I was about to say. I said it anyway. “Maybe you should give him another chance.”
Jenny didn’t miss a beat. “You know, if I took advice from anyone, it wouldn’t be you!”
I bent my head in shame. As much as her harsh statement stung, it was true. My short history with boys hardly warranted giving anyone advice. But how could I explain to her the hopeful feeling I had of Austin’s turning around without giving away what I’d seen over his head?
I gave it one last ditch effort. I took a deep breath and turned slowly to face her and her shadow directly. “I just don’t think you should give up hope on him.”
Her eyes narrowed in hate as her shadow’s head bent to whisper something in her ear. Immediately after, poison dripped out of her mouth. “Iris…I think you’re the last person I’d listen to about not giving up hope.”
My eyes grew wide and my heart sank. I couldn’t believe she had actually reached down and ripped open that half-healed scab. Her poison promptly seeped into my now raw, open wound and quickly spread through my body.
Seeing my pained, panicked reaction, Jenny’s face changed slightly, but she didn’t apologize. Instead, she got up and left with the excuse of having to tell Austin to leave.
I collapsed onto the floor, curling up into a ball against my dresser, and wept bitterly. My long-forgotten pain was eating away at my insides, and my world was crumbing around me. I felt crushed and defeated underneath the rubble.
As if to confirm my sentiment, through my cries and the muffled sound of the TV, someone clamored to the bathroom, swung open the door, crashed onto the floor, and vomited uncontrollably.
Hanna.
Chapter 24
THE BLAZING WHITE LIGHT stung my eyes until they were able to adjust. Through the glimmer, I could see the glowing man standing just in front of me only a few feet away, once again in the deserted parking lot.
He had a look of urgency in his eyes, and as he slowly turned his face to the left, he lifted his arm to point at something. I pivoted toward the direction of his focus, and at first the vision before me was blurry until I was finally able to make out a disturbingly familiar object. It was a single hospital bed complete with monitor and IV stand, isolated and randomly out of place in the dark, foggy parking lot. The lone streetlight shining on it was the only other object in sight.
I couldn’t see who was on the bed. I was hesitant to go check, but when a warm hand touched my back urging me forward, I drifted toward the vision of the hospital bed automatically, as if I were on a moving sidewalk.
As I drew closer, I could tell the person lying there was a female with long dark hair. The image reminded me so clearly of myself at fourteen that I almost screamed and ran in the opposite direction. But my feet seemed attached to the moving walk that kept propelling me forward. There was no escape.
Once I was close enough to reach out and touch the girl, the forward motion halted and all was calm. There was no sound or movement, as though everything had been set to mute and put on pause. Although I could only see the girl’s back, I could tell it wasn’t me. Still, there was a strange familiarity about her.
I thought about touching her to see if she was awake and would roll over to face me, but I didn’t have to. Suddenly, the bed or the space on which I was standing (I wasn’t sure which) whipped around so swiftly I scarcely had time to realize what was happening. I ended up on the other side of the bed and immediately recognized the face as Hanna’s. She was pale, barely conscious, and deathly ill.
I woke up with a jolt and sat up straight in bed. The clock on my nightstand read eight twenty. A tad too early for a Saturday, but I was wide awake. There was no way I could go back to sleep now.
I shivered and wrapped my blanket around me, gazing out my window. The forecast was for heavy snow today, but so far it was just a soft flurry. As it quietly fell onto the pale, dead grass on the ground, I was reminded of my dream.
Some people say dreams often represent what’s been on our minds recently. If that were true, then this dream made perfect sense. Hanna’s condition had been progressively deteriorating since Wednesday night. At first she had just been nauseous off and on, and at times she had still been able to keep some liquids down but not much food. We all assumed she had a twenty-four-hour bug. When it persisted past twenty-four hours, we thought she had the flu. By Friday night, she had gotten incredibly weak and could hardly even keep down any liquids. Nevertheless, she had insisted we didn’t take her to the hospital. She’d said it was just the flu and would eventually pass. I wasn’t so sure.
Some people also say that dreams can foreshadow things to come. If that were the case, I needed to go check on her right away.
I jumped out of bed and rushed to her room. I knocked but didn’t hear anything, so I pushed open the door and tiptoed to her bed. Her room smelled of sweat and bile, and a trash can sat beside her bed, which I purposefully avoided. She was facing me, but just like in my dream, she looked deathly ill and pale.
“Hanna? Are you awake?”
She didn’t move.
“Hanna?” I pushed on her shoulder gently, and then not so gently.
Her eyes shot open and she jerked in her bed. After blinking a few times, she looked at me and frowned as if she were confused.
“Hanna, how do you feel?”
She only mumbled in reply and then licked her chapped lips. With all the vomiting she’d done in the last several days, she must have been terribly dehydrated. Maybe that was causing her incoherence.
“Do you need to go the hospital?”
Normally I would have expected the usual, “No, I’ll be fine,” from her, but this time I would have been surprised to get any type of response at all.
Before she could answer, she lurched up in bed, reached for her trash can, and vomited. Then she closed her eyes, still drooped over the trash can, and nodded her head slightly.
That was all I needed.
“Mom!” I barged into her room just seconds after pounding on her door. She was blow-drying her hair, getting ready for work. Upon seeing the horrified expression on my face, she turned off her dryer, leaving her hair in a frizzy mess all over her head, and stared at me expectantly.
“Mom, Hanna needs to go to the hospital. She can barely talk and she looks horrible! She actually nodded when I asked her if she needed to go.”
That registered with her. She knew how insistent Hanna had been in not making a fuss about her illness. “Okay. Get Jenny up and tell her we’re taking Hanna to the hospital. See if you can help Hanna up and get her into some clothes. I’ll be ready to go in just a few minutes.” She started blow-drying her hair again but with a new purposeful vigor.
I bit my lip as I left her room and headed to Jenny’s. My mother had said, “we,” but I wasn’t quite sure yet if “we” was going to include me. I had already failed to show for Jenny when she was at the hospital with her miscarriage. I really didn’t want to abandon my other sister as well by staying at home, waiting by the phone instead of waiting in the hospital room by her side. But could I handle it?
I told myself she wouldn’t be there long and I wouldn’t have to worry about it. I would tell them I might follow them up there later. They would call in a few hours and tell me it wasn’t that big a deal. They were giving her fluids and medicine, and she’d be home later in the afternoon. That’s what I told myself.
After beating on Jenny’s door, I was greeted with an annoyed, “What?” from within her room.
I rolled my eyes impatiently a
nd took a deep breath. She doesn’t know yet. Give her a break, I reminded myself.
I pushed open the door, flicked on her light, and waited in the doorway until she rolled over to face me. “Hanna’s really sick. Mom’s going to take her to the hospital, and she wanted me to get you up so you could go with her.”
She squinted her eyes and moved her hand to cover them as her shadow began to materialize out of nowhere over her bed. “I suppose you’ll be staying here again?”
The acid of her tone and the meaning behind her words ate away at my open wound once more. I slowly turned away and trudged miserably to Hanna’s room to get her dressed and ready for a trip I wouldn’t be brave enough to make any time soon.
Eleven-thirty. It had been almost three hours since they left. It took about fifteen minutes to get to the hospital, an hour or two in the emergency room on a Saturday, and who knows how long to then wait on the doctor…but I was beginning to lose patience. I had resolved to wait for my mother to call me before calling her, because I felt so guilty about staying home. It was like I didn’t have the right to call and check up on her. If I was there, I wouldn’t have to call. So I kept waiting.
Twelve twenty-two. The phone finally rang. I nearly fell out of my chair at the kitchen table to answer it.
“Mom?”
“Iris? Sorry it’s been so long, sweetie, but we just now got to see the doctor. The emergency room was horrible! There were three people from a bad wreck. There was some guy groaning with a kidney stone. And then some older man with chest pains came in. They were all rushed ahead of us.”
I tried not to imagine the scene of the emergency room with all of its terrifying shadows and sick people. I had only seen an emergency room once since my changed vision, and that was enough to never want to see it again.
“It took forever to finally get back here,” my mom continued, “and then they had to run a flu test and set her up with an IV and everything.”
The memory of my dream popped into my head and I shuddered.
“Iris? Are you still there?”
“Yes. Sorry, Mom. So did they find anything out yet?”
“Well…you’re never going to believe this…” She paused as moaning and the sound of vomiting in the background replaced her weary voice.
“What was that?” I asked anxiously, knowing full well what it was.
“Oh, Hanna still can’t keep anything down. They tried to give her some ice chips, but her poor little body can’t even handle that.” She was near tears, but I hadn’t gotten my news yet, which, by the sound of it, was either extremely severe or unusual…or both.
“Mom.”
She sniffled in response.
“What were you going to tell me?”
“Um…” She was trying to compose herself but didn’t succeed as she sounded near tears for the rest of her report. “Well, she tested negative for the flu. So then they started asking her all these questions about any exposure she may have had to anything. She could hardly answer them, so we had to help her with what we knew. When they asked if she’d been out of the country recently, we told them she went to Haiti over Thanksgiving break. Then they asked again how long she’d had symptoms. When we told them, they got all quiet and serious.”
She paused for what seemed like an eternity but in reality was probably only a few seconds. “They think she has malaria.”
I was momentarily speechless. But only momentarily. “What? Are you kidding me?” I couldn’t stop the unexpected anger boiling inside me out of control. Suddenly, I was so resentful at the fact that my sister’s charity was the reason for her illness. “How could God do this to her?” I yelled through the phone at my innocent mother. “She’s done nothing but good for other people, and she gets repaid with malaria?”
“Honey, I—” My mother broke off. She was crying, and there was nothing she could say. No doubt she had similar thoughts or she would have corrected me. “I’ll call you later when the test results come back.” She hung up.
Great! I slammed the phone back on its base. Now I’ll have to wait another eternity to hear more bad news.
I stumbled into the living room, blinded by angry tears, and stood arms crossed in front of the window by the front door. The snow and wind had begun to pick up, covering the ground with a thin blanket of white. I should’ve gone to the hospital to be there for Hanna, but anxiety and fear held me tightly in their claws and refused to let go.
I was lonely and miserable. I needed someone to talk to, someone to assure me everything would be all right, even though it wouldn’t, and to tell me I wasn’t being a horrible sister by staying home, even though I was.
I called Kyra first and got her voicemail. I called Lexi second, and she also didn’t answer. I was running out of options. Nicole was practically a stranger to me now so I didn’t feel comfortable talking to her about serious things, and Josh and I were basically not on speaking terms.
That left Patrick. Besides a few short, bizarre conversations, I hadn’t really talked to Patrick ever since the night at his party. The few times he had spoken to me, he left me even more confused than before. I wasn’t sure if he would want to talk to me or if I would have to suffer another odd rejection from him. I considered the alternative—suffering by myself—and began dialing his number.
It only rang once before he picked up. “Hello, Iris?” He sounded startled and a bit panicked.
“Hi, Patrick. I don’t really know why I’m calling you. I…I just needed someone to talk to. There’s no one else I can turn to right now.” I did my best to fight back the tears that threatened to distort my voice and make me lose my cool. “You had always been there for me in the past, and…I need that again. Hanna’s in the hospital.”
“I’m so sorry Iris,” he said. The sorrow was so thick and heavy in his voice I could imagine tears welling up in his eyes.
“They think she has malaria. I’m still at my house right now. I don’t know what to do.” My choice of words and tone were more pathetic than I had planned.
His reply surprised me. “Iris, you need to go to the hospital. I would go with you, but I can’t. I just can’t. I’m so sorry…” He trailed off, and it sounded for a moment as if he were trying to fight back tears himself, though I wasn’t sure why. “Iris, I just…” There was a sudden silent pause, before a quick, almost frightened, “I’ve gotta go.” Then a dial tone.
Three forty-three. The phone rang again. It took slightly longer for me to get to the phone this time because I had to set down my book and run from my room. After the news of my sister, and being chided and hung up on by Patrick, I had done my best to escape my worries by reading, but it was a worthless attempt. I could hardly focus on anything.
“Mom?”
Nothing but crying.
“Mom?”
“The test was negative…” She trailed off and continued whimpering.
I was no doctor, but I was pretty sure a negative test for malaria was a good thing. If she was still crying, that meant it was something worse than malaria. I opened my mouth to question her, but changed my mind. Instead, I clung to my last few seconds of ignorance, like a little girl squeezing her eyes shut and plugging her ears, hiding in the corner of her little glass box.
Moments later, she dropped the bomb and glass shattered all around me.
“They think she has leukemia.” My mom immediately burst into sobs, which grew loud in my ear for just an instant before I dropped the phone and collapsed onto the floor. Her harsh musical hysteria instantly decrescendoed into an indistinct murmur. From where I sat, alone in the middle of the dining room floor, her faint, distant cries seemed so remote. We were worlds apart. Sharing the same agony, yet with such an immense barrier hanging in the way…my fear.
“Iris?” My name resonated through the dangling receiver before a brief silence. “Iris…you need to be here.”
Tears streamed down my face as I banged my head back against the wall by the suspended phone. I turned to it as if hop
ing it would tell me something different but was met with a dial tone.
She was right. I had no excuse for myself but my fears. There was nothing I could do now but face them.
By the time I left the house, the snow had transformed into a full-fledged blizzard, which seemed fitting for such a mournfully dreadful day. The ground and streets were concealed in a thick powdery white, and the sky was filled with a profusion of giant snowflakes. Therefore, the drive to see Hanna had been one of the most dangerous I’d ever experienced. Once I reached the hospital, my already intolerable anxiety and fear had reached new extremes, gripping me in ways I didn’t know possible and in places I didn’t know existed.
I twisted the key out of the ignition and pushed open the car door. A blast of icy wind and snow promptly blew into my face, but I bravely stepped out into the angry storm and headed toward the looming building in front of me. The sky was hazy gray and barely visible, and the parking lot was full of cars but no people, which meant it would be packed with people inside.
The moment I entered the hospital’s large, high-ceilinged lobby, I gazed upward and gasped. If I had been shocked from seeing the small-scale scrimmage of light and dark above Austin’s head, I was paralyzed and alarmed with amazement at the sight of the epic war taking place in this entire building. Bursts of glimmering, bright light flashed through waves of murky darkness in an ever-moving, ever-changing, and never-ending battle of good and evil.
The last time I was in a hospital, when my eyes were first unveiled to the vision of shadows and light figures, I had been so horrified and frightened in my already traumatized state that my perception of the mass and chaos was quite different. I didn’t even remember seeing the light figures in the middle of it all. Seeing it now was like revisiting a city you had only experienced as a small child. While the distant memory of the city is fuzzy and distorted, when you’re older, it’s clearer and more distinct, as though you had only been to the city in a dream before.
Shadow Eyes Page 27