Perfect Escape

by Jennifer Brown

  THIRTY-THREE

  By the time we reached the hospital, Bo had whimpered softly a couple times, so we knew for sure he wasn’t dead, and even though none of us said so, I knew what had been on all of our minds at first—that Bo could have died while we were skinny-dipping and telling stupid jokes and climbing on a ridiculous jackalope and laughing it up like this was some fun summer road trip.

  For the few minutes while we drove toward the hospital, all of us seemed to kind of be in our own heads. Rena held Bo against her shoulder and was whispering and singing into his ear. Grayson stared out the window, and I was busy following the blue H signs and trying to pinpoint where exactly I’d gone most wrong over the course of the past week. Or month. Or, hell, I don’t know, my whole damn life, from the minute I popped my perfect little head into Grayson’s imperfect little world and called him the messed-up one.

  God, I was so stupid to think he was getting better. So blind.

  I pulled up to the emergency room entrance, let Rena out, and then parked, taking so many deep breaths to calm myself I started to get dizzy and my hands started to feel numb.

  When I opened my door, Grayson didn’t move. I paused. “You staying here?” I asked, not wanting to push him any more than I already had. “You don’t have to come in.”

  He nodded slowly, then, even more slowly, opened the car door and stepped out. I waited while he tucked handfuls of rocks into each pocket, not saying a word, and then we walked through the parking garage together.

  “He’s gonna be okay,” I said, not sure why I was feeling the need to say this out loud. “He’s just sick.”

  Uh. “We should’ve taken him to a doctor yesterday. Or the day before.”

  “We tried. And we’re not his parents. Rena is.”

  “We shouldn’t have ever left home,” he said, his voice sour. “We should be home right now instead. With our parents.” The automatic doors swooshed open in front of us, releasing that unmistakable hospital smell. “We shouldn’t even be here,” he continued, pausing before stepping across the threshold. “God knows what kinds of diseases we’ll pick up here. Probably get influenza and die in California. Nobody will know who we are. We’ll just rot in a Dumpster somewhere.”

  “Cheery,” I said, doing my best to ignore him by gazing around the waiting area for Rena.

  There were two old ladies sitting side by side, clutching each other’s hands, and a teenager across the room whose finger was pointing the wrong direction. In another area a baby cried relentlessly, but it wasn’t Bo, and nearby a little girl lay limply across her mother’s lap, staring at a TV screen and sucking her thumb.

  No Rena.

  “Excuse me,” I said to a passing nurse. “We’re looking for our friends? A blonde girl and a little baby? We were parking the car.”

  She looked confused for a moment, and then recognition struck. “Oh! Yeah, they took her back right away. I’m sure she’ll come out as soon as she can.”

  So Grayson and I sat in the same room as the old ladies and waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  Hours had gone by. God only knew what time of night it was. I started feeling drowsy, but I couldn’t rest because my stomach was rumbling too loudly.

  I flagged down another nurse. “Um, we were waiting to hear something about the blonde girl with the baby? Um, Bo? And Rena?”

  “They’re in with the doctor right now,” she said.

  “Can we go back?”

  The nurse pressed her lips into a thin line. “I’m sure she’ll come out as soon as she knows something. Might take a while.”

  I sat back. My stomach growled again. I felt washed out, and, as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I wished I were home, sleeping in my own bed, wearing clean underwear and texting Shani about her stupid love life. For a minute, the urge was so strong, had Grayson asked one more time to leave and head back to Missouri, I wouldn’t have hesitated. I would’ve driven all night long.

  But unlike Grayson, I knew that the life I was imagining back home wasn’t going to be the life waiting for me when I got there. What waited for me was lots of explaining, lots of crying, and lots of grounding. Lots of disappointment. Lots of people hating me.

  My stomach cramped up again.

  I couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m going to get something to eat. Want anything?” I asked, standing up. Grayson had finally made himself comfortable in our little area. He’d laid Kleenex across the arms of the chair, and the two little old ladies had disappeared behind the emergency room doors. I had changed the TV to Discovery Health, and he was absorbed in some story about a little girl with a bleeding disorder. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. “I’ll bring it to you. You can wait here for Rena.”

  He nodded. “A sandwich or something?”

  “I’ll see what I can find.”

  It felt good to be up and about again. Something about sitting still and waiting made time seem insufferable. Not knowing what the doctor was telling Rena about Bo was driving me crazy, and I had to fight the urge when I walked past the ER doors not to storm in there and look for her room, so I could find out what was going on.

  Instead, I took a left and pushed through the doors underneath a sign that read HOSPITAL. The hallways were dark, buttoned up for the night. I wasn’t sure which way to go, so I took a right and kept moving, past outpatient offices. There was silence. My shoes made echoed clopping sounds down the hallways. Twice I heard the hum of machines and followed the noise, hoping to find a vending machine, but only found a squat ice machine or a mini fridge with a coffeemaker on top.

  I turned a corner and walked some more, coming up with nothing but more empty waiting rooms and dark alcoves. It was as if nobody ever got sick in this town. Finally, I happened upon a cafeteria, closed for the night, not to open again until six A.M.

  For a minute I stood there, my palm pressed against the glass window of the cafeteria, and looked longingly at the bags of chips and cinnamon rolls and bananas sitting on the counter. I wanted to cry, it looked so good.

  Finally, I turned and went back the way I’d come and headed toward a door to the outside I’d seen when I left the ER waiting room. I’d never been this hungry in my life. Not eating was no longer an option. I’d just swing out and get something real quick.

  I grabbed my keys and patted the money in my front pocket and trotted out to Hunka. Surely someplace would be open all night.

  Rena and Grayson wouldn’t even know I was gone, much less miss me.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Half an hour and what felt like a hundred stops later, I plowed through the doors into the empty hospital corridor, juggling three bags. I’d driven around forever looking for a place where I could get Grayson a sandwich, but no place was open. So I’d finally found an all-night grocery store and had gotten stuff to make our own sandwiches. My plan was to stake out a clean-looking corner in one of the empty main lobby waiting rooms, drop the food off there, then go get Grayson and let him go to town with the new antibacterial wipes I’d bought. We could picnic in the dark, and then maybe stretch out in the shadows for a free night’s sleep.

  But no sooner had I stepped inside the building than I saw a ripple of blonde hair in a baby-blue sweater stepping off an elevator down the hall.

  “Rena!” I shouted, much too loudly in the silence, and she turned.

  “Kendra? You’re still here?” she said, blinking at me.

  “Of course. I mean, I just got back. I brought sandwiches.” I held up the bags. “Didn’t Grayson tell you where I was?”

  She shook her head confusedly. “I didn’t think you guys even came in when you dropped me off. They admitted Bo hours ago. I’ve been upstairs.”

  “Admitted Bo? Is he going to be okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and for the first time I noticed how tired her eyes looked, as though she were way older than she appeared to be. “He got some virus, and you know how he wouldn’t eat much? W
ell, he got dehydrated, I guess. But they’ve got him on an IV now, and they said he should be fine.”

  I held my hand over my heart, relief washing through me. “Thank God.” But Rena was sort of swaying, and I reached out to steady her. “Hey, you okay?”

  And that’s when the tears started for real. Her bottom lip quivered and then crumpled completely, and her face scrunched up, and she started to look like she was going to buckle at the knees. I put the bags on the floor and grabbed both of her arms, stepping in close. “Hey,” I said, over and over again. “Hey, are you okay?” because that’s all I could think to do.

  “I should’ve known,” she cried. “A good mother would’ve known. What if they take him away from me? He’s all I’ve got.” She leaned into me. Bent and laid her forehead on my shoulder lightly. I smelled the funk of the river and sweat and sleep, but underneath a sweet smell, like oranges or something citrusy, and I felt the weight of her against me and I realized… I hadn’t been leaned on—literally leaned on—by a friend since the day Zoe whispered in my ear not to forget her and then moved away.

  So I leaned back. And I closed my eyes. And breathed in. And I wished with all my heart that I were minutes away from Zoe’s house rather than hours, and I wished with all my heart that I’d tried really letting Shani or Lia in, rather than holding them out to keep plenty of room for a memory. And I mostly wished that I hadn’t been spending the past three years building a wall around myself, because once I felt Rena’s warmth, I realized I’d been cold for so, so long. I rubbed her back and pulled her hair out of her face, and after she was done crying, I used my fingertips to wipe the tears off her cheeks.

  And I told her that all mothers make mistakes sometimes and that nobody’s perfect and now she knows to take Bo to the doctor right away in the future. And I told her about my mother, about how she was all about my brother most of the time and I felt so ignored and alone, but that I never once, not in my entire life, doubted that she loved me as much as she loved him. That the love was different, but it was inescapably there, and that’s what makes a mother good. And I told her that I knew she had that love for Bo because I could hear it when she sang. And all of that was true, even if I wasn’t sure Rena would ever really get it.

  And by the time I was done talking, I was crying, too, because I missed my mom so much. Grayson got all of the attention, but he never got all of the love. There was enough of that for both of us. I never could have doubted it. I should have counted on it, leaned on it, rather than run away from it.

  Rena smiled and wiped her eyes and kissed me on the cheek and said, “I called my mom.”

  I stared. “What’d she say?”

  A couple more tears slipped out, and for a second I thought she was going to break down again. “She cried. She said she’d been looking for me. She divorced that jerk she was married to. She can’t wait to meet Bo. She’s coming here.”

  “Omigod, that’s great!” I cried, and hugged her. “I told you!”

  “Yeah,” she said, looking flushed and smiling sadly. “I guess.”

  And then we went and got Grayson, and when he saw Rena, he stuffed the rocks he was holding back into his pocket, and the Kleenex fell off the armrest of his chair and he didn’t even notice.

  Instead of going to a dark corner in the lobby, we followed Rena up to Bo’s room, and Grayson ate his sandwich wearing rubber gloves and poking the pieces up under a surgical mask, and we laughed at him softly so as not to wake up the baby, and then we laughed about that, because just hours before all we wanted was for the baby to wake up.

  After a while, Rena stretched out on a cushioned bench next to Bo’s crib, and Grayson pushed together two chairs for himself. I found a pillow in a drawer and curled up with it on the floor. A nurse came in and glared at us, but we must have looked really tired because she left without saying anything and then came back with a blanket for me. I was just happy to finally see Grayson lying down, even if he did seem tense, as if he were lying on a bed of broken glass.

  The whir and hum and beeps of Bo’s machines began to lull us all to sleep, and pretty soon the spaces between our hushed conversations were getting longer and longer. The last thing I remember hearing was Grayson whispering, “I have a tough one for you. As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Every wife had seven sacks, every sack had seven cats, every cat had seven kittens. Sacks, cats, kittens, wives. How many were going to St. Ives?”

  And Rena giggling, then whispering back, “That’s Mother Goose, you dork.”

  And then drifting and drifting into a world where brick walls were falling and opening up to the sun, which bore down on my face and made me smile.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I awoke to the sounds of a baby crying and lots of rustling going on. At first I was really confused. I was lying on a cold tile floor with a flimsy blanket wrapped around me. But it didn’t take long for my brain to catch up, and I realized the crying baby was Bo, and the rustling going on was a nurse and Rena changing his diaper and chatting happily about how much better he looked already.

  I sat up and blinked, looking around for a clock. But when I turned my face, I found my nose practically touching-distance from my brother’s, which was poking out from under the arm of a chair. He was sleeping with his mouth open, acrid breath drifting out at me. I grimaced but inwardly smiled. I was glad he was finally getting some real sleep.

  “Hey,” I whispered to Rena, pulling myself upright. “Bo’s awake.”

  She nodded, smiling. “And his fever’s down. He woke up wanting to nurse.” She finished changing his diaper and snuggled him until his cries died down.

  “What time is it?”

  She looked over my head and I turned. There was the wall clock. “Almost ten,” she answered. “I guess we were all pretty tired.”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  I pulled myself up off the floor and stretched, then walked over to Bo and tickled the side of his cheek with my finger. Grayson snorted and began stirring.

  “I’m so glad he’s better.”

  “Yeah,” Rena said, caressing the back of his head. “Nurse said he’ll probably need to stay here today, but if he keeps improving, maybe I can take him home tomorrow.” She was silent for a minute, then shrugged. “Wherever home is.”

  “Won’t your mom take you home with her?”

  She shrugged again. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  And we were both silent then, because we both understood what this meant for us. Wherever home was, it wasn’t going to be in Hunka anymore, sucking down granola bars and warm chocolate milk and challenging one another with riddles. Even though I hadn’t planned on Rena, I sure was going to miss her.

  “You want us to wait for you?”

  She shook her head. “You guys go on ahead. I’ll figure something out.”

  As if on cue, Grayson sat up and wrung his hands, looking worriedly toward the bathroom. He didn’t even need to open his mouth for me to know what he was thinking. I leaned over and rummaged through one of the bags I’d brought in last night and pulled out the tub of antibacterial wipes. Wordlessly, my brother took it and headed to the bathroom.

  Rena watched the door close behind him. “He’s a good guy,” she said.

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets and stared at the door, too, as though we would find some great truth about my brother there. Behind the door I could hear muffled uh-uhs.

  “A little quirky sometimes, but… good,” she said, and when I looked back at her she was staring at Bo, tracing his ear with the tip of her finger. “It’s good to know that good guys still exist out there somewhere, you know? They’re not all like Archie or my mother’s jerk husbands or Sal.”

  I sank into one of the chairs Grayson had slept on the night before, and stuck my finger under Bo’s curled hand, wiggling it so he’d make a fist. It sure sounded like Rena had known a lot of bad guys over the course of her life. Grayson, who seemed like a real pain to me, must hav
e looked like a dream to her.

  “You’re really lucky to have him,” she added.

  I glanced back over my shoulder at the bathroom door. I could hear water running and Grayson muttering rhythmically. I swallowed. “Yeah,” I whispered, “I guess.”

  We both touched and jiggled the baby for a while, soaking up his contentedness, and after what seemed like a really long time, Grayson came out of the bathroom, his hands so washed he looked like he was wearing pink gloves. He stepped over the door’s threshold several times counting. Great. A new compulsion. Well, a new old compulsion. He’d done the doorway thing before but had kicked it in treatment two years ago. That was the thing about Grayson—you never knew when a new compulsion would crop up or an old one would reappear. You never quite knew what to expect. It wasn’t even worth commenting on.

  I untangled my finger from Bo’s hand and stood up. “Listen, why don’t I get us some breakfast?” I said. “I saw cinnamon rolls in the cafeteria last night. Can’t get ’em out of my head.”

  “Sure,” Rena said.

  I turned to leave, tugging on Grayson’s filthy T-shirt as I passed him, forcing him to stop. “Come with, Grayson. I’ll need extra hands if we want coffee.” I wasn’t really sure I would need extra hands, but for some reason I really needed him to stop going through that doorway. I really needed him to be Rena’s “good guy” for a while longer. Especially since I had a feeling it wouldn’t last.

  He stepped through the doorway another nine times (great, he had me counting now, too), and then into the hallway and back into Rena’s room another thirty-six times, and then, reluctantly, as if this number wasn’t high enough and he wasn’t sure it would do, followed me.

  “Why thirty-six?” I asked while we waited for the elevator.

  “Huh?”

  “You went in and out of that door thirty-six times. Why thirty-six?”

  The elevator door opened, and I stepped in next to a nurse in pastel purple scrubs with lambs on them, but Grayson looked inside with wide eyes, panicked. I sighed, stepped back out, pulled his shirt again, and said, “Stairs.”