Between Here and Forever

by Elizabeth Scott

  Worry.

  Fear.

  “Well, Tess can always move her things back,” she says, and she’s smiling and calm.

  And lying.

  I let her, because I know what it’s like to need to believe in lies. I once believed I could make someone who loved Tess love me.

  I once believed someone could see me, just me. I once thought I could be happy like Tess was.

  I know better now.

  twenty-four

  Dad and Mom are gone to see Tess by the time I wake up—I like to sleep as late as I can on the weekends. Past noon is best. Whoever decided high school should start when it’s still basically dark outside should be shot.

  I take a long shower and dry my hair, then debate what to wear to the hospital. Then I get mad at myself for doing that because Tess doesn’t care what I wear and it’s not like I’m trying to impress anyone. Right?

  Not that I can imagine impressing Eli, even if I somehow managed to find an outfit that makes me look both taller and curvier. I finally throw on an old shirt and jeans that are ratty around the bottom of the legs because they’re too long for me. (I have yet to own a pair of pants that don’t end up dragging along the ground at some point or another.)

  Mom and Dad get home late in the afternoon, just as I’ve finally headed downstairs and am grabbing something to eat. They both look tired and sad, how they always look when they get home from visiting Tess, and especially on the weekends, when I think they remember Tess dragging us all down to the beach or Tess sighing over her homework or Tess getting phone call after phone call or talking to the three or four or twelve people who’d stopped by to say “hi” to her.

  “What have you been doing?” Dad says, trying to sound cheerful and failing miserably.

  I point at my bowl of cereal.

  “You don’t have to stay home all the time, you know,” he says. “You can go out. If anything … if anything happens, we’ll find a way to get in touch with you.”

  I don’t say anything, because we both know I don’t go out. I didn’t when Tess lived here, and I don’t now, except to see her.

  I finish my food fast and escape to the ferry.

  When I get to the hospital, Clement is sitting outside, looking at his watch.

  “You look like a little bird,” he says when he sees me. “All that hair and those eyes.”

  “Birds don’t have hair, Clement.”

  “I know that,” he says, and sounds almost petulant for a moment, like a little kid, like Cole. “But feathers, hair, it’s bascially the same thing. Is it so hard to take a compliment?”

  “Thank you for saying I look like a bird,” I say, and he shakes his head at me and digs around in his pockets for a cough drop.

  “Never loan your car to anyone,” he says as he unwraps the cough drop and pops it in his mouth. “You always end up waiting for it to come back.”

  “You loaned your car to someone?” I didn’t know Clement liked anyone in Milford well enough to loan them anything, much less his car.

  “I told Eli he could take the car while I was at work,” Clement tells me. “But here I am, done with work, and is my car here? No. His father was the same way, only he’d bring the car back with no gas in it. You don’t do that, do you?”

  “I don’t have a car,” I tell him, pointing at my bike as I realize what has been right in front of me all along.

  Clement is Eli’s grandfather. The family here that Eli talked about. The reason why he’s working at the hospital.

  Talk about missing the obvious. I lock up my bike and tell myself I won’t ask Clement where Eli has gone, or what he’s done today.

  “I’m sure Eli will be here soon,” I say instead, which really isn’t much better than asking about him because I’m still mentioning him.

  “I know,” Clement says. “He’s meeting you. What did he say to you in the cafeteria, anyway? He wouldn’t say anything when I asked him about it.”

  “He’s not meeting me. He’s coming to see Tess.”

  Clement snorts, then chokes on his cough drop. I know I should pound his back, but he feels so frail when I tentatively tap my hand against him that I’m afraid I’m going to snap him in half.

  “Damn things,” he says, waving my hand away. “I’m always swallowing them. Harriet got me hooked on them, you know. Nagged and nagged me to give up smoking and finally brought home a box of lozenges that were supposed to help me quit. To this day, I spend more time taking them than I ever did sitting around for ten minutes after dinner with a cigar.”

  “Wait. You’re not eating cough drops? You’re eating those things people take to quit smoking?”

  “Who eats cough drops?” Clement says. “Do you know what those things taste like?”

  “No,” I say, folding my arms across my chest. “We don’t have them over across the river. We just got chewing gum last year, you know.”

  Clement grins at me, then glances out into the parking lot and says, “Ah, there’s Eli now.”

  I follow Clement’s gaze and see a long, expensive car pull into the lot.

  Eli gets out, moving toward us, and I swear I actually shiver inside when I see him coming, this little hot jolt worming its way through me.

  Remember Jack, I remind myself.

  Remember Tess.

  “Sorry,” Eli says as he reaches us, handing the keys to Clement. “I got—I was on the phone.”

  “Is there gas in the car?” Clement says, and Eli grins, then nods.

  “Good,” Clement says. “Now I can go back to work.” And then he heads back into the hospital, leaving me and Eli alone.

  “I thought … I thought he was leaving,” I say, feeling a little awkward about being alone with Eli even though we’re in the hospital parking lot and there are a few people around. It’s just … well, it’s the weekend. And Eli is standing next to me.

  “He doesn’t like being home much,” Eli says. “He—he says he gets bored, but I think being there makes him sad.” He crosses his arms, tapping the fingers of his right hand against his elbow. “Were you—he didn’t say anything while you were waiting, did he?”

  “Just that I look like a bird,” I say, and Eli stares at me.

  “I don’t see it either,” I tell him, and we head inside.

  twenty-five

  Claire is in Tess’s room when we get there.

  “Hey,” I say, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

  “Someone called in sick, and here I am. You know I’m not turning down extra pay.”

  I walk over to her and look at Tess. “How is she?”

  “I’m just checking her IVs,” Claire says. “They’re more short-staffed than usual, so I’m making sure no one’s running low on anything.”

  I sit down in my usual chair and Eli comes in then, looking a little worried and hesitant.

  “So, you’re Eli, who’s here to talk to Tess,” Claire says, and Eli nods, crossing his arms over his chest. I’m starting to think he’s shy. The fidgeting, the whole arm crossing thing—it’s all stuff people do when they’re nervous.

  Claire looks at me, raising one eyebrow like she knows something, and then says, “Well, I’ve got to get back to work, check more IVs and things. Have fun.”

  “Bye,” Eli says at the same time Claire says, “fun,” and that’s when I see Tess’s eyes move again. Under her closed lids, there is motion, like she’s seeing something. Like something—someone—is reaching her.

  “Did you see that?” I say, standing up and leaning over Tess, willing her to open her eyes.

  “See what?” Claire says, and Eli says, “Yes.”

  The next few minutes are maddeningly slow. Tess doesn’t open her eyes, but the doctor on call is paged, and I sit, impatiently waiting for him.

  Claire won’t stay, though. She says she didn’t see anything.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, after I’ve asked her for what feels like the thousandth time. “I wasn’t looking at Tess. I was talking to you.
”

  “But—”

  “Abby, I really do have to get back to work,” she says, and moves past me, not even looking back as she leaves the unit.

  “Are you sure you paged the doctor?” I ask the nurse who supposedly made the call, and she says, “I’m sure,” her voice filled with something that sounds an awful lot like pity.

  I swallow.

  As I stand near the nursing station, waiting, Eli is a silent and weirdly reassuring presence. I like that he’s not trying to tell me how the doctor will be here soon or anything like that. I glance at him a couple of times and he smiles at me, then goes back to drawing on a piece of paper he must have gotten from one of the nurses.

  I walk over to him—not to stand near him, but to see what he’s drawing. I know it for the lie it is—I do want to see what he’s doing, but I also just want to be near him—and still walk over there anyway.

  Eli is not an artist. He’s just doodling, like I do sometimes, like lots of people do, squiggly lines and boxes, and it really hits me that he’s a guy, past all his beauty, he’s a person, and then—

  And then, for the first time in almost two years, I want to do something with a guy other than wait for him to go away. I want to touch him. Not in a just-thinking-about-it way, but for real. Not like—not like I did with Jack, I’m not that stupid, I’m not going to pretend I could ever be someone Eli would really want to see—but I want him to hold my hand, tell me without words that everything will be okay. That someone is here with me.

  I haven’t wanted someone to comfort me in a long time, but I want it now.

  “You don’t have to wait,” I tell Eli, because wanting something and acting on it are two very different things and I trust my heart and body about as much as I believe that the nurse who said she paged the doctor actually paged him.

  Which is to say, not much.

  “I don’t mind,” he says, making another box on the right hand side of the paper, then the left.

  “The doctor’s not going to come.”

  “He’ll come,” Eli says.

  “No,” I say. “No one … no one believes me.”

  Eli stops drawing and looks at me. “I believe you.”

  I fold my hands into themselves so I won’t reach for him. I force myself to think about Tess. About what she needs. “Can you—if you asked Clement, would he be able to get a doctor here?”

  Eli shakes his head. “He’s not—he doesn’t have any real power.”

  “But he gave all that money—”

  “He can’t—it doesn’t work like that,” Eli says, and when I laugh because, hello, of course money does things everywhere, he touches my arm. “People in Milford think he’s strange and I don’t think—I don’t think anyone would even talk to him if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s, you know.”

  “Rich.”

  Eli looks down at his notebook. “Yeah.”

  I go back to Tess’s room. She’s lying there, perfectly still like her eyes didn’t move, like there wasn’t something she was watching behind her closed lids, like there wasn’t something she saw with her eyes wide shut.

  “Wake up,” I say, my voice angry, a whispered hiss, and when she doesn’t move I grab her chart—yes, I know I’m not supposed to touch it, and no, I don’t care—and write a note about what I saw on the blank back of a card that was once tied to a bunch of flowers blooming brightly in the corner. And then I stick that card on her chart’s clipboard.

  Those flowers … they wilted into nothing ages ago, but my parents have kept the cards, have them waiting for Tess to look at. I figure she won’t miss the back of the one that’s been signed by Beth, stupid Beth with her boxing up all of Tess’s things and her stupid signature, all swooping capital letters like she’s some sort of star.

  The nurse who paged the doctor comes in then, sees me sticking the card onto Tess’s chart, and says, “You need to leave now.”

  “I’m waiting for the doctor,” I say, and she puts her hand on my shoulder.

  “Abby,” she says, and I’m startled that she knows my name. Almost no one uses it here; I’m just a visitor, I am just Tess’s sister. “Sometimes patients move a little. It’s not—it’s a good sign, of course, but it doesn’t mean she’s going to wake up tonight.”

  “I know what I saw.”

  “You miss her,” the nurse says, and I start to laugh because I do miss Tess, but not like she thinks. I’m not the devoted sister, I’m not the noble, plain girl who sacrifices all for her sister to come back. I want Tess to wake up so she’ll go away.

  I want her back in her life and out of mine.

  “Maybe you want to take her somewhere—a walk, maybe?” the nurse says to Eli, like I’m a toddler or dog or just a teenager not worth listening to because Tess isn’t moving now.

  “Tess,” I say, looking at her. “Please.”

  Nothing.

  “Can you—?” the nurse says, gesturing at me to Eli, giving him a help-me-out-here look.

  “I saw it too,” Eli says. “So why can’t we wait for the doctor?”

  It works. I can’t believe it, but it does, and so we wait. Me and him, sitting in Tess’s room, on either side of her bed.

  It takes me a long time to say it, not because I don’t know how, but because I’m afraid to say it.

  “Thanks,” I get out, after we’ve sat there for a while, and I was right to be afraid to say it because when he says, “Sure,” easily, like it was nothing, I want him to have said something else, and I don’t even look at Tess to see if his voice has moved her again. I just—

  I’m too busy thinking about how he’s moved me.

  twenty-six

  The doctor doesn’t come, and visiting hours end.

  I ask if I can wait anyway, knowing I’ll be told no.

  I am, but the nurse who said she paged the doctor, the one who put her hand on my arm and said “You miss her,” like what I feel for Tess is that simple, says, “If the doctor has anything to report, we’ll be sure to let you know,” as I’m headed out of the unit.

  “Thanks again for, you know, before,” I tell Eli as we leave the hospital. “See you tomorrow?”

  He shakes his head. “Clement and I go to church, and then I have—there’s some family stuff.”

  “Oh, right.” Stupid. He just gave up his Saturday night to be here, so why would he want to give up his Sunday too?

  “I can meet you on Monday, though,” he says. “Regular time?”

  I shrug, like I don’t care if he shows up or not.

  But I am supposed to care. For Tess, at least. So I let myself say, “I know Tess will like that,” before I start to walk away.

  “Hey, can I—can I take you home?”

  I freeze. I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. No one has ever asked me that before. Jack would sometimes walk me back to the house after we talked, but he never asked, and we both knew he only did it for a chance to see Tess.

  I take a deep breath.

  “You want to talk about Tess some more or something?” I ask, mostly to remind myself why I’m here, why he’s here, but when he says, “Yeah, sure,” I feel the bits of me I broke with Jack, those stupid hopeful bits, bleed open.

  I feel grubby in his car, my crappy clothes a reminder that I don’t belong here. Tess belonged—belongs—in this car. Not me.

  “Tess belongs here,” I say, and Eli, pulling out of the hospital lot, looks at me like he doesn’t understand.

  “This is her kind of car,” I say. “I can see her in here, you know? She’d like it.”

  “I don’t like it,” Eli says. “It’s like driving a bus. I used to … I used to have my own car. My parents told me I could get a car when I turned sixteen because that’s what everyone did, and they wanted—they wanted me to be like everyone else. I was going to get a, you know—”

  “Super-fast sports car?” I say. “Let me guess, you wanted a red one too, right?”

  “Silver,” he says with a quick grin at me. “B
ut we got to the lot and there was this car over in the corner, some car an old lady owned and that her kids had gotten rid of when she died, and it looked so sad. All alone out there, you know? And her kids hadn’t even bothered to clean out the glove box. When I looked in it, there was a shopping list. Eggs, bread, tea, all in this tiny, old-lady handwriting. And I kept thinking, What if that’s the last thing she ever wrote? What if she’d made the list and put it in the car so she’d remember it when she went out and she never got to go out and just—I don’t know.”

  I stare at him, entranced in spite of myself. “So you didn’t get a sports car?”

  “Nope,” he says. “I got a baby blue sedan with low mileage. It had this huge, soft plastic thing on the gearshift, I guess because the old lady had bad hands or something. When I was upset, I’d pick at it. My parents—” He taps his fingers against the steering wheel. “My parents thought I was crazy.”

  “So what happened to it?”

  “My parents sold it,” he says. “Before I came here, they weren’t … they weren’t real happy with me.”

  “No, I mean, what happened to the shopping list?”

  “What?” he says.

  “The shopping list. What happened to it?”

  “I left it in the glove box,” he says. “I didn’t want to throw it away. It was her car first, you know? Plus—I don’t know. My parents have never done anything like make a shopping list.”

  “They don’t like shopping?”

  “They like shopping,” Eli says. “But not for food. They have people who do that. Pick out menus, buy the food, and make it. All that stuff.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. They don’t—they like the house to be run for them. Someone to cook, someone to clean, someone to take care of the laundry.”

  “Right,” I say, like it’s no big deal, but inwardly I’m feeling even grubbier. Jack’s parents had money but not like this, not money to have someone do all the little things that make a house run for them. “You must miss having all of that.”

  “No,” he says simply. “So, how come you don’t drive?”