by Capri S Bard
Darcy looked at her bare body long enough to be pleased with what she saw. She was pleased with her hair, her smile, her curves along the sides of her breasts, the inward contour of her waist, down to the slight dip in the back of her knees that showed her tendons, which sloped into her slender but strong calf muscles.
Beautiful. It wasn’t a word she had ever used to reference herself. Yet as she let herself be honest, she knew that if it were somebody else’s body she was scrutinizing ‘beautiful’ would be the word she would use. With this new identity, she smiled and breathed deep.
She awoke the next morning to a quiet house.
She slipped on her clothes as she checked the time. “What?” she screamed.
She arrived at the hospital and raced down the hall toward the nurse’s station. Rounding a corner her feet froze so suddenly that she nearly toppled over.
Coming down the hall in the distance was someone on a stretcher being pushed by Jess.
A nurse joined her as they wheeled the person toward surgery. When the stretcher turned she could see the person’s face. Darcy had seen her mother’s vacant stare before but this was different; worse, much worse. She knew that life outside this hospital was only a dream now, and in that moment she stopped dreaming altogether.
As the women pushed her mother’s stretcher through heavy swinging doors, Jess held up her hand signaling Darcy to wait outside.
After Darcy took a long trembling breath, she again saw Jess appear through the doors and quickly approach her.
Taking Darcy by the hand she led her close to the wall and spoke soft and slow.
“Someone found her early this morning at loading. She was screaming your name. I was about to call you when I heard another nurse scream for help. I ran back and saw your mother on the floor. She had cut both her wrists. She cut so many tendons in her left hand it will take several hours in surgery to correct the damage. I’ll be in there with her the whole time. She’ll be fine.”
Darcy said nothing.
“Did you hear me, sweetie?” Jess asked.
“It’s my fault,” Darcy said as she dropped her eyes to the floor. Her shoulders drooped as she bit her lip until it bled.
“No, now don’t say that,” Jess said putting her arm around her.
“Did she say anything else besides my name?” Darcy asked.
“Not until she was being placed on the stretcher. She started crying and saying, Hopi, over and over.”
“My sister,” Darcy said as she turned and leaned her forehead on the wall.
“Oh, honey, I didn’t know,” Jess said as she wrapped her long arms around her.
“Anton,” Jess called out to a new resident while still holding Darcy tightly. “I need you to stay with her until I come out of surgery. Got it?” Jess wasn’t about to let her friend sit alone in the waiting room.
“I’ll be fine,” Darcy said pulling away from Jess with a shrug of her shoulders.
“No, Sweetie. You shouldn’t be alone. I’ll come out every half hour and update you.”
“No,” Darcy said, “Just let me know when it’s over.”
Jess looked at the doctor standing beside them and said sternly, “Stay – with – her.”
Anton nodded his head in agreement.
Squeezing Darcy’s hand, Jess hurried away through the swinging doors.
Anton stayed with Darcy as he’d promised though he was not great company. He hardly said two words while waiting with her for over three hours. All the while he stayed at her side.
When Jess returned with an update she saw Darcy with her head on Anton’s shoulder. She had fallen asleep and Anton had never moved.
Jess smiled and whispered, “Good job, Anton.” She sat next to her friend and patted her knee. “Darcy? Sweetie, wake up,” she called softly.
Darcy awoke with a start. “How is she?” she gasped with her first words. “How did it go?”
“Slow down, honey,” Jess said with a compassionate smile. “She’s going to be fine.”
“My mother’s never fine,” Darcy said crossly.
Jess placed her hands firmly over Darcy’s and said, “Sweetie, we did have to give her a transfusion because she’d lost a good deal of blood, but she will recover from her injuries just fine. She’ll be in recovery for a couple of hours and then she will be taken to the psych ward for evaluation.”
“It’s about time,” Darcy whispered.
Anton slowly slid from his chair as if he were trying to slip away without being noticed. Jess, however, looked up and said, “Thank you, Anton. You’re a dear.”
Darcy looked up and gave him a half smile. Anton squeezed her shoulder and stepped away.
“Has your mother ever tried this before?” Jess asked.
“She lost a baby before Vincent or I came along. Dad said she was never quite right after that. She was always clingy, and controlling and weepy but no, not this. Dad said she had gone through a great deal in her life and just didn’t know how to deal with it all. All of us knew this would happen someday. The last thing my father ever said to me was, ‘take care of your mother,’ and I couldn’t even do that.”
“This was not your fault,” Jess tried to reassure her. “You couldn’t have known.”
“But I did know. I knew leaving would be the death of her. And I tried to leave anyway.”
Darcy spoke as if she were slowly dying herself. That’s the way she saw her life; over.
“You talk like you’re not going to school. We could easily have her transported there and you could go to school and be close to your mother.”
“You don’t understand,” Darcy said harshly.
“Then tell me. Help me understand. Why the hell does your mother and this place have such a hold over you?”
“Come with me,” Darcy said sharply.
Together they walked to the elevator and rode up two floors. Stepping out, Jess saw bulletin boards covered in newborns’ baby pictures. She saw a cart filled with flower arrangements; some were pink and some were blue. There were poster-sized pictures of doctors holding newly delivered babies. The doctor’s hazel eyes shone brightly between her hat and face mask. The babies were covered in white gooey vernix and crying with open mouths. Jess noticed immediately this floor was very different than any other floor she had been on in the hospital.
Here, the staff smiled. The new parents smiled and even visitors smiled. On the surgery floor and every other floor where Jess had worked, people were scared, worried, and unsure of their future. This nursery floor had future floating in the air.
“Why are we here?” Jess asked very softly.
Darcy didn’t stop to answer her question. She walked down the hall and stood in front of a long window and paused. Inside were newborns all wrapped in the same style of blanket; white with pink and blue borders. One was getting a bath and even though Jess couldn’t hear a sound through the glass she could see the baby’s mouth wide open, red faced, and with each inhale the baby’s lower lip quivered. This baby was not happy about his first bath.
“This is where my earliest memories start. My mother would bring me here to look at all the babies. She would stand here for hours and weep.” Darcy pointed through the window, “‘This is where they brought her,’ mother would say to me. ‘Everything seemed fine; a perfect baby, and then she just stopped breathing. Just like that she was gone. Only minutes old and she was gone’.”
Darcy stepped away from the nursery window and turned toward the exit at the end of the hall. Instead of going through the doors when she got there she turned around and started back down the hall slowly.
“This is where they entered when Dad brought her into labor and delivery. Her contractions were hard and she had prolapsed. They brought her down the hall before sitting her in a wheel chair. They paused at admitting while nurses argued over rotation schedules.”
Darcy closed her eyes as if remembering every detail.
“It was the middle of the night so the cleaning crew was mopp
ing the hall and the ward smelled of bleach and flowers. One nurse yelled at the other and said, ‘fine, I’ll take her then.’ That nurse with short brown hair took mother to this room.” Darcy stopped in front of labor and delivery before opening her eyes. It was as if she’d walked that hall a hundred times before.
“Room 1197 is where Hope was born and it’s where I spent many days listening to my mother’s story of having her first child, of holding her only a moment before the nurse whisked her away to the nursery. I spent every April 15th here, watching my mother sob. Once we even saw a code blue behind the glass and my mother cried and cried. She even tried to console the mourning parents by saying, “‘Maybe God will let you keep the next one.’”
“Oh, holy shit,” Jess gasped aloud.
A new mother was walking down the hallway in her hospital gown and gave Jess a sharp stare.
“Sorry, Ma’am,” Jess said with an embarrassed smile.
Darcy continued down the hall to a very large bulletin board where she took a single picture from the wall. It was a photo of a doctor holding a newborn. There was a small amount of blood on his gloves and down the side of the wide-eyed baby who wasn’t screaming as all the other babies were in their pictures.
Jess noticed immediately that Darcy’s mother was in the background.
Darcy handed the picture to Jess and said, “Mother never let them take the picture down.”
Jess handed the picture back to Darcy.
Heading to the nurse’s station Darcy leaned over the desk and asked, “Do any of you smoke?”
One nurse looked up with a confused look. “I think Earl is the only one around here that smokes.”
“Earl, can I use your lighter?” Jess said to a dumpy old man working at a computer tablet.
He reached in the pocket of his white smock and handed her a lighter.
Darcy opened a metal trash can and took out the plastic bag. She was beginning to get the attention of the other staff.
“Sweetie,” Jess called to her friend with concern.
Holding the picture over the trash can she flicked the lighter and the flame rose and grabbed the corner of the picture and hungrily engulfed its fuel.
“Hey, you can’t do that,” one young nurse yelled.
An older woman held her hand up and stopped the younger nurse from halting Darcy’s moment of catharsis.
Darcy dropped the flaming picture into the trash and simply walked away.
She didn’t go to Celestial Hope to finish medical school. There was no amount of asking, coaxing, or begging from her friends that would make her leave her mother. She felt responsible for her mother’s sanity. It was a weight she carried for almost twenty years.
Earth date: 2341 CE
Approximately 95,000 BE
At a vacation resort in the Asteroid Belt
Darcy convinced her mother to take a small trip to a nearby asteroid that had been built into a vacation resort. There was a giant water park for children of all ages. There was fine dining. There were shops for trinkets, or clothes, or jewelry. Darcy had grown restless and needed to get away so she and her mother took a shuttle ride to the vacation destination.
They arrived at their room and her mother was ready to head to the bar.
“I think I’ll shower first,” Darcy told her mother.
“Well, don’t take all day. I don’t want to be down there all by myself while you lollygag. And don’t waste the hot water. I won’t have people talking about my selfish and undisciplined daughter.”
“Mother, no one will know how long I shower. And no one cares,” Darcy said rolling her eyes.
Her mother looked at herself in the mirror before leaving. The door closed slowly behind her.
Darcy shed her clothes onto the floor. She looked at the little pile then one by one she picked up each item and folded them. She put them in a neat little stack on the top of her suitcase. She closed the door of the bathroom as she caught her reflection in the full length mirror hanging on the back of the door.
She saw how her hair had become quite gray at the edge of her hairline. There were lines that were growing deep by the corners of her mouth. Her breasts that were once perky and nicely curved were now sagging toward the floor. Her waist had shrunken from a nice curve into a bumpy skeletal figure. Her knees had faded into knobs on the front and tight rope looking tendons in the back. Her calves had grown thick but were still strong and showed that she lived much of her life on her feet. She placed her hands firmly on her hips, thrust out her chest and stared at her forty year old body.
“Like I’m proud to be a woman,” she said aloud reminiscing. “Humph,” she sighed.
Her hands fell limp next to her boney hips. She turned on the shower and stepped into the tiny streams of water and added her tears to the flood that washed over her body. She leaned against the shower glass and sobbed with a deep moan. She felt death rising from deep within her soul. The mirror had proved her body was fading as well.
When she finally joined her mother at the bar her mother called out in a tipsy voice, “Well it’s about time.”
Darcy looked at the man behind the bar and tilted her head as if to say, ‘I’m sorry,’
He understood.
“Darce, pay this gimp. He says he won’t give me another ‘til I pay up.”
Darcy laid down her card on the bar.
“I can’t take this, Ma’am. But you can get unified money from the kiosk at the desk through those doors.
Darcy turned away from her mother slightly and leaned toward the bar keep. “Could you give her another? I’ll pay double when I get back.”
The man turned his head and scratched behind his ear, “alright. But hurry back.”
Darcy hastened through a glass door as she stood in awe of the giant room full of water slides, pools and hot tubs. Water, like bolts of lightning, was rocketing through the air. Wet kids ran past her squealing. Darcy almost smiled. She looked around and spotted a long desk close to the wall.
Exhaling a tired sigh she walked over to the desk to ask where the kiosk was.
A woman pointed her back toward the door where she had just come. The kiosk was obscured from plain view behind some tall plants. When she had withdrawn her money she came from behind the plants to see a young girl of about ten, race to the deep end of the pool and jump feet first.
“Don’t run, Aster,” a man called out.
Darcy froze, lost her breath, and felt her face pinch all at once. She knew that voice.
297 AE
Aboard the EGRESS
“Rhys! Rhys!” Molly squealed, while she nervously rubbed the palms of her hands over her knees several times.
Tala giggled.
“Let her read,” Deni said as she too laughed heartily.
“But do you think it’s Rhys? You do, don’t you. Oh! Wouldn’t that be wonderful? But wait! Who’s the kid and is he married? He’s probably married, isn’t he?” Molly was a fountain of questions. “How long’s it been, twenty years?”
“Let her read,” Deni repeated herself.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I just want to know what happened.”
“You sure you don’t want to share this story with any of the others?” Tala asked. “I mean this is exciting stuff.”
Molly’s excited expression drooped.
“Just us for now, Love,” Deni said plainly.
“Am I being selfish?” Molly asked softly.
“Not at all,” Deni said. “Now if you never wanted anyone else to read it ever then that would be stingy. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking a special moment for yourself. I’m just glad you let me share it. This story is amazing. I mean, can you imagine having someone control you so much that you give up school, or a lover, or a future of happiness?”
“It’s got to be Rhys,” Molly said as her excitement began to grow again. “Read! Read! I have to know if it’s Rhys.”
Tala looked back at the page she had been reading, but instead of s
aying a word she looked back at the two listeners. She gave a smirk and read the next line slowly.
Earth date: 2341 CE
Approximately 95,000 BE
At a vacation resort in the Asteroid Belt
“Rhys?” Darcy called softly.
The man, who only wore swim trunks, was muscled in all the right places.
He didn’t hear Darcy call his name.
Darcy wanted to hide back behind the tall plants again but as she was considering just that, Rhys saw her.
“It’s you,” his lips said without a sound.
The many playful voices in the large room made it hard for them to hear one another.
He closed the distance between them while she tried hard to make her legs move but couldn’t.
Drawing close, he stood directly in front of her. They stared long and deep.
“I could get us a drink,” he finally said.
“No,” Darcy answered quickly.
Rhys’ face fell as he said, “Oh, alright then.”
“No, I mean I have to do something first. Stay right here I’ll be back.”
Darcy ran through the door and shoved money at her mother and dashed away.
“You know I don’t like to be left alone, Darce,” her mother yelled after her.
Darcy didn’t turn back. She headed straight for Rhys as her heart skipped a full beat.
“Daddy, did you see me. I went down the tallest slide in the whole park.”
The same girl Darcy had seen earlier came running toward Rhys; wet from head to toe.
“Aster, come here,” Rhys said as he put his hand on the girl’s wet head. “Aster, I’d like you to meet an old friend.” Looking to Darcy with a nervous smile he said, “Darcy, this is my daughter.”