“What do you mean, she was too small?” Des didn’t want to interrupt him, but she couldn’t stand it. The quiet in the room. How focused Sam and Lacey were.
Sam unscrewed the syringe from the needle port. Sarah was moving, groaning. One of the paramedic guys started taking her blood pressure. Lacey reached into her bag and pulled out a bag of clear fluid and tubing. Knew exactly what to do with it. Set it up to run into Sarah’s body. Like it was okay to take a drink through your arm instead of your mouth.
Des had hated every moment Sarah had been in the hospital. Hated it more because their dad had just died there. Hated the strange bags of fluid and having to ask for blankets and ice water to give to her dad and her sister. Hated that multiple people had to help them go to the bathroom and watched them the whole time. She hated that they could never sleep.
She hated that eventually, her dad did nothing but sleep.
She hated that eventually, her strong, fearless sister didn’t care who saw her when she peed.
“Sarah!” Sam yelled. And Des jumped.
Sarah opened her eyes, and almost as soon as she did, color rose from her neck. Sam turned her to her side and Lacey held a wastebasket for Sarah to throw up in.
Des hated that. Hated that Lacey would know that Sarah needed a trash can to throw up in. Hated that Sarah had to throw up.
“Des?” Sarah met Des’s eyes, then Des had her hand in Sarah’s supershort hair, feathering it, smoothing out the cold drops of sweat embedded in it. “So sorry, Desbaby.”
Lacey was fixing Sarah’s IV and Sam had his stethoscope out, listening to Sarah’s back and heart.
“It’s okay, Sarah, I’m so glad you called me.”
Des looked at Sam, worried about how strange Sarah seemed.
“Sarah’s going to feel really emotional from the fentanyl overdose and from the medicine we used to help her through it. She’s okay, I promise.” Sam squatted and looked in Des’s eyes. She believed him. When he was like this, and not yelling, she believed him.
She reached over and wiped the tears off Sarah’s face and she believed him.
“Sarah’s pain isn’t under control. It should be. The repair to her hip was complicated. Remember we talked about how it involved the head of her femur? The part that moves in the socket?”
Des nodded.
“A lot of complicated things have to happen for that part to heal correctly. As much as I can gather from Sarah’s ortho docs and the surgeon, they’re not sure the repair’s holding. She started seeing a neurologist because her pain isn’t under control, either. He prescribed a patch with narcotics for her to wear all the time, but Sarah’s little.” Sam looked at Lacey and Lacey made a face that was not nice. “The first time she was started on the patch the home health nurse should have stayed, at least for an hour, to see how she tolerated it.”
“Fluids, too, get her blood pressure to go up.”
“That’s right, Desbaby.”
Des stroked over Sarah’s eyebrows, winged and arched high. She seemed to be sleeping. “She’s really okay?”
“Yeah. The patch is pulled off. She did a good job calling 911. Calling you. I’m glad you called me.”
“Does she have to go to the hospital?”
Sam looked at Lacey. Lacey looked at Des with her really beautiful it’s okay look that she’d been giving Des since they were girls. Des trusted that look with all her heart.
“I’m going to take her home with me to spend the night. She doesn’t really need anything other than a good nap, and when she’s up to it, some pizza. Lacey’s going to take out the fluids in a bit.”
She felt hands on her shoulders, and she looked back and it was PJ, his dark curls falling over his blue eyes.
“Lacey texted me.” PJ would have been in rehearsal. Des turned to Lacey. “Thanks.”
Lacey smiled. “Of course.”
“What do you need, Lace?” PJ asked. PJ had been in love with Lacey since she first made him mac ’n’ cheese, read him a story, and tucked him in as his babysitter. Like everything else, PJ took unrequited love to the next level.
“I’m good,” Lacey said, but snuck a cross-eyed look at Des.
“Hey, Sam,” said Des, “are you sure I can’t take her? Or stay here?”
Sam stopped typing something into his laptop, which the paramedics had handed to him. “Des, no. I’m good. We’ll play nice, I swear.”
Watching Sam try to talk to Sarah was like watching someone fall through lake ice from the shore—sickening, with a terrible sense of urgency that must be necessarily delayed.
None of Des’s attempts at rescue had ever worked.
It was dumb, maybe, but Des just wanted everybody to love each other. She wanted Sunday dinners back, where they would all meet for a couple of hours at Patrick Burnside’s house, the house they all grew up in, the house they had to sell to childhood friends to get on top of his final medical expenses. They would eat something simple and make enough noise that whatever they were actually saying didn’t matter.
She closed her eyes, breathed in. Breathed out. Thought about the chipped laminate of their dad’s pink kitchen table and the smell of pot roast and potatoes in the Crock-Pot. How the back screen door would open and close with blasts of cool air and the smell of her dad’s cigarette smoke drifting from the porch.
“Sam,” whispered Sarah. Des opened her eyes and hurried over to help Lacey and PJ guide Sarah to sit on the couch.
She looked at Sarah, whose chin looked pointed and whose collarbones were so prominent they stood out like the handlebars on the homemade bikes Sarah used to build. “Go to Sam’s. Eat pizza. Don’t fight.”
Sarah nodded, leaned her head back on the couch, and closed her eyes. “You have a date, right?”
Des ignored her. She’d always called Sarah and Lacey and talked about this kind of thing. Boys. Men. New recipes for roasted vegetable salads. Going back to school, work conflict. Sarah and Lacey were actually friends first because they were in the same grade. But their interests diverged early in high school. Lacey still hung around the Burnsides’ place all the time, and as Des got older, she and Lacey got closer. Lacey shepherded her through high school, took her to parties with older kids, pushed her to go to college.
Lacey was a good big sister.
Even when she had called Sarah to talk last night, even when their talking had gotten around to their day, and even when Des found herself saying a little about Hefin, about their lunch, she stopped short of telling Sarah everything, where she never would have before. Before, she would have described every time he squinted, the way he had said every word, how she had surprised herself by insisting they spend more time together. But all she had said was that she had a date with “this guy.”
Des didn’t want to spend an hour with her heart in her throat and walk out the door this way, though. Sam was banging the trackpad and one-finger-typing on his laptop. Lacey had gone over to talk to PJ, and he was talking to her because he would always talk to Lacey even when he wouldn’t talk to anyone else.
She rested her head on Sarah’s shoulder, and Sarah finally let Des hold her hand.
“I’m a mess, Desbaby,” she whispered into Des’s hair.
“Kinda.”
“I don’t want to go to Sam’s, but I think I really want pizza.”
Des hiccuped a laugh. “Just go over there. He’s not so bad.”
“He’s worse. But I like his massive TV and he always lets me control the remote.”
“There you go.”
“And sometimes I can get him to do that thing where he sort of cracks my shoulders.”
“You love that.”
Sarah sighed. “I do.”
“I’m right here, and I can hear you.” Sam turned in his chair.
“Don’t care,” Sarah whispered. She sounded sleepy, like tired sleepy instead of drugged sleepy.
“Hey PJ,” Sam said, “could you help me get Sarah to my car?”
PJ and Sam started
getting Sarah’s things together while Sarah dozed on the sofa.
“You okay?” Lacey sat next to Des and put her arm around her.
“No. Not really.”
“Yeah. Scary.”
“And my brothers and sister are dumb.”
“True.”
“You were amazing, though. I don’t even know how you know how to do that stuff. It blows my mind you do it every day at your job and you can still be so normal.”
“Oh. But I’m not normal. I’m totally disturbed. Being a single mom has broken so many connecting parts in my brain that I routinely make outrageous decisions like working with your brother.”
“True. I feel like I should pay you for that.”
“Oh. I’m keeping a running invoice.”
“Hey, ladies, I can still hear everything you’re saying.” Sam came out of Sarah’s bedroom with a bag.
Lacey rolled her head over and put her forehead against Des’s. Whispered, “So you have a date, huh?”
“Yeah, I mean, I did. This whole afternoon has not really opened itself up to feel ready for a first date with the guy I’ve been obsessing over from afar.”
“Is The Woodcarver taking you someplace fancy?”
“I don’t think so. We’re going over to that sports-field complex on the Southend.”
Lacey wrinkled her brow in her expressive face. “You going to a game?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sam’ll take care of her, Des, you should enjoy yourself. You’ve had a rough time of it, too.”
Des leaned back and pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes. It didn’t pop whatever had gotten so tight in her chest. “Will you call me? Because I can’t call to check in on my stupid phone.”
“Yes. Though I think your phone’s breaking like that is one of the best things to happen to you. It’s not your job to check on these people all the time.”
“I just wish they would check on themselves.”
“Before they wreck themselves, I get it.” Lacey stretched out her legs.
Sam and PJ came over and gently woke Sarah up, helped her limp to the door. Des and Lacey followed, turning out lights and grabbing Sarah’s bag.
As quickly as her date anticipation had been doused when Sarah called, it smoldered back to life, low and hot, when she saw Sarah safely into Sam’s car.
She chased the opposing cold guilt with a new, small memory—touched her neck where she felt that memory. She pulled the paper sack map from her front pocket, where she’d been keeping it and leaned against POS Limo to look at it again.
In the little outline of the couple, the man and woman were holding hands. She just didn’t think his pencil could say something that wasn’t true.
Chapter Nine
Hefin sat on the stoop of his condo, waiting for Des.
She was late, and it bothered him a bit more than it should. The weather was fine, and he hadn’t even checked it though he should done before asking her to the batting cages. He wondered if she’d stand him up.
The idea should bother him less than it did.
He didn’t even have her number, which made their arrangement seem rather tenuous, somehow. Looking at the fluff of clouds race in all the clear blueness, he could almost believe he had imagined her. The sparks in her hair. Freckles like ochre flicked onto canvas from a fan brush.
He watched a navy blue limousine turn carefully into the loop in front of his condos and wondered which of his neighbors had hired it. He hoped that whoever it was hadn’t paid too much because the beast had seen better days—it was boxy, low-slung, and the door edges and joins were outlined in rust. It rolled carefully to a stop and the driver’s window, dark with bubbling and peeling privacy film, squeaked its way slowly down.
He somehow knew it would be her, and it was, this unlikely woman leaning on her arm hooked out the window of the world’s unlikeliest vehicle. He would have liked to play it cool, to lean back on the stoop and raise an eyebrow, cross his feet at the ankles.
Instead, he was grinning like a child, stumbling off the last step in his eagerness to get to her. Of course, at the end of the day, he was just a small-village Welsh boy good at math and filling notebooks with drawings. Not cool at all.
“Burnside’s Fine Limousine Service at your service, mister.”
He laughed, and the way she lit up made him realize that his laugh was giving her something she wanted. “You drive a limousine?”
For the first time, he noticed the chauffeur’s cap she was wearing. She adjusted it so it sat perfectly over her ears and straightened an imaginary tie. “Family business.”
“Can I get in?”
“Wait, let me do this right.” She got out and walked around to the passenger’s door in front, holding it opening with a little flourish. “Your steed. I’d set you up in the back, but that seems a little … weird.”
He walked around and stood in front of her. Couldn’t help tapping up the visor on her cap, just to touch something connected to her. “Even though I’ve never ridden in a limousine, I think I’d rather ride up here with you.”
One of those streaks of pink raced up from the neck of her T-shirt and over her jaw. She rolled her eyes. Trying to be cool, too. She opened the door wider so he could get in, but then stopped. “Hey, Hefin?”
“Yeah.” He looked back at her. She was holding the door tight, whitening her knuckles. The sun washed right across her face and he realized her eyelids were a bit puffy, her fair skin shadowed blue above her cheeks.
“You still want to do this? Hang out with me?”
“How was your morning?” He was going entirely by feel here, and it felt like forcing a skew through a block of ebony. He wasn’t sure he had the muscle. She sighed, long and bumpy. “Shitty.”
“I can’t promise hanging out with me will make it better, but I’ll try.” His heart seemed to tip, like his words came as such a shock it almost fell over. He tried to steady it. “I mean, I’m only passable company, but the weather’s lovely, and you’ve brought round the limousine.”
“Get in,” she said, and nudged his foot with hers. She was wearing the red trainers with the hole over the toe, God help him.
He slid into the front bench seat of the limousine. There was a cardboard scent tree and a rosary hanging from the review mirror. A small Virgin Mary was fixed somehow to the dash, near white from sun bleach. There was an engraved brass plate over the stereo console that read PATSSRICK J. BURNSIDE LIC #70813. A tatty Irish flag pennant waved from a cup holder.
He settled in and his hip crinkled something—a white paper bag—just as Des was sliding in. “That’s for you.”
“You got me a present?” Fuck. He patted his pocket as if it might hold a bouquet he had accidentally stuffed there.
“Look and see.”
He opened it up to find a stack of cream-filled pastries with chocolate icing on. He stared at them like they might start to talk to him. Tell him what to do with the perfect woman when you found one in the wrong place at the wrong time and were very likely the wrong man. They did not say anything because donuts didn’t talk and he was going mad.
“Thank you, I—”
Des reached back behind the bench seat and brought over a paper hot cup with a tea tag dangling from the rim. “This too. I wasn’t sure how you took it, but given your eating habits I guessed and put in all the sugar and cream.”
She held it toward him, her eyes clear and expectant. She was so pretty, the cap almost obscenely adorable. He was dead. So, so, so dead. “That’s perfect.” He took the tea; of course, her fingers touched his. The answering wave of gooseflesh over his neck was predictable.
She started the limousine, and he reached back to put on his safety belt. It caught, and as he was fiddling with it, he felt her all along his side, warm and soap-smelling. She brushed his hand from the safety-belt pulley.
“Here, there’s this weird trick to it—you’ll never get it.” She had to lean in closer and her shoulder was agai
nst his chest, her upper arm against his cheek, and it should have been sort of awkward, except he never wanted her to move. “There.” She slid back, holding the buckle and pulled the belt across his chest and clicked it in place, her hand snugged tight against his hip. The blood bounced so hard and fast against the base of his cock he jumped when the buckle locked and she pulled her hand out.
“Thank you.” He put the pastry bag in his lap.
“You’re welcome. Southend fields, huh?” She took off the cap and smoothed her hair back. He already missed it. He would have chauffeur fantasies for the rest of his life. She reached over again, and he realized she was going to open the glove box. As she leaned over, he closed his eyes tight. The ends of her hair brushed his arm as she moved back into place and his blood rushed low again.
“Right. That’s okay, then?” His voice was about an octave lower than usual. He cleared his throat.
“Hire’s choice.” She smiled.
“Do you really drive this?” She pulled away, expertly checking her mirrors to navigate the large vehicle.
“Well, not for money. The business was my dad’s. This was our family car, though. Perfect for four kids. I learned to drive on this hoss. I think I could drive anything. Now, I drive it because I had to sell my car for rent money.” She looked over to intercept his look of sympathy. “It’s fine. I mean, it’s actually a first-class pain in my ass, and I’m giving rides to the whole freaking neighborhood and my family besides, and the gas is ridiculous, but in this town, it’s better than the bus.”
“All your family is here?” He liked watching her drive. She was confident accelerating along the on-ramp, merging the limousine into traffic. Her gaze darted from the mirrors to the other cars. He drove, of course, but had never quite felt comfortable on the wrong side of the road, and had only ever really needed to drive in the States. She looked serene while driving, and wise.
“Yes. Two brothers and a sister. Sam’s the oldest, he’s a doctor. Then there’s Sarah.” She paused then, pressed her lips tight together. Took a breath that made Hefin think she needed it. “Then me, then my little brother PJ. They all live here in Lakefield. Actually, they all live in the same neighborhood we grew up in. We Burnsides are well rooted.”
Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series Page 8