“It would help me out, too.”
“Don’t go there, Des. Please don’t guilt me into this.” Sarah was on her good side, on her sofa, an afghan their mom had made bundled around her.
Des had tried to see her on Sunday after Hefin had left, and all through the first part of the week, but Sarah held her off.
Carrie had Des visiting satellite branches to do a survey of their site-page needs, and between that and taking Rennie and his friends to after-school stuff and hauling some items to Sam and Lacey’s clinic in the limo and putting together a Web portfolio of her own to send to friends for some ideas, this was the first time anyone had gone to see Sarah in days.
She looked terrible.
She was pale, not as pale as when she had reacted to the fentanyl, but her skin looked greasy and gray. She had obviously not washed her short dark hair, which was normally as glossy as a seal’s and framed her unusual eyes.
Sarah, though a tomboy from the start, was always beautiful. Like their mom, who even in snapshots always looked a little like a celebrity.
The whites of Sarah’s eyes looked strange, almost too white, like they were made of glass or painted. Sarah kept brushing her hands over the sides of the cushions, and all of her nails were different lengths, all of them ragged. Her hands were stained with muted, transparent colors, like watercolor paint or markers.
Des leaned over and brushed over the marks. “What’s this?”
“Ink. You know Marnie?”
“Yeah. She has that T-shirt place, right? Are you helping her screen shirts again?”
“No, she opened a letterpress last year, it’s what she’s actually apprenticed in. She’s been printing on her own, but has been swamped lately with summer wedding jobs. I’ve been helping her because I’d like to partner with her, once I’m more recovered.”
Des kept tracing the splashes of ink, her stomach tight. “Is that why you crashed today? You’ve been helping her all week?”
“I just need to rest a bit, get weight off of my hip and leg.”
Des looked at her sister. Who was totally lying. About what, she didn’t know. She grabbed the edge of the afghan, focusing on a rainbow granny square, had a sudden flash of her mom crocheting in front of the television. “Let me see, Sarah.”
“No,” said Sarah, but there was no strength in it.
Des pulled the afghan away. Sarah was wearing a pair of Sam’s old track pants from high school, the waistband folded multiple times and the drawstring cinched. Des picked at the knot and loosened them, and pulled the loose pants down over Sarah’s hip, her hands shaking.
And then her stomach bottomed out and her eyes blurred with tears.
“Oh Sarah.”
Sarah tensed. “It looks worse than it is, I swear.”
Des looked at the angry red scar that traveled from her bikini area up over the flare of her hip and down her leg. It didn’t look totally closed in places, and the openings looked like swollen red suckers, like from a tentacle. The worst was that Des had uncovered a surgical drain—a clear tube sutured into one of the scar’s openings connected to a little plastic bulb filled with what looked like blood and pus. Sarah hadn’t had drains since her last surgery. Des gently touched it, and Sarah hissed.
“Why do you …”
“It’s not a big deal. It’s just that between the PT and trying to do a few things, not even that much, and all the surgeries, the scar’s kind of fucked. I got this abscess and …”
“Oh my God, Sarah. I remember that your surgeon said that an abscess was a big complication. That it meant things weren’t healing, and the abscess could turn into one of those things, a fist …”
“Fistula,” Sarah supplied, and closed her eyes.
“Right. And then get into the joint. This is bad. I don’t understand. Does Sam …”
“Don’t. Just don’t, Des. Look. I see my surgeon. He knows. I’m on crazy heavy-duty antibiotics. My lab work shows I’m a little low on protein, it’s probably why I’m not healing, and so …”
“You look a little low on everything, Sarah.” Des couldn’t help it. Sarah’s arms and legs looked almost fragile, she had dropped so much weight. Burnsides were always thin, but Sarah was bordering on emaciated, her skin tight, her color wrong. Sarah had always been so active that her body had curved out in lean muscles, and like Des and their mother, had hips and an ass. But Sarah looked fragile. Tiny, instead of compact and strong.
“I know. I know.” Sarah yanked up the pants and pulled the afghan back over. “It just takes a lot of calories to heal and get around and it’s hard to get them in. I just need to up my protein.”
Des looked at the coffee table where there was a half-empty glass of orange juice and part of a dry-looking energy bar inside its wrapper. “Is this the kind of stuff you’re eating?”
“You sound like Sam.”
Des clenched her fists. “Sarah. Jesus fucking Christ, Sam’s a doctor. A doctor! If I sound like him, then I’m really upset, because that means you’re getting actual medical advice to take better care of yourself.”
“I just need to get the scar healed up and maybe put on a pound or two and get cleared for surgery. Then everything will get moving in an upward direction.” Sarah said this with her eyes closed. Like it was a mantra. Like it took too much effort to actually say. Des smashed the heels of her palms against her forehead and tried not to come apart. She looked at Sarah, really looked at her. This was why Sam was freaking out all the time. Getting angry. Sarah was slipping away. Right in front of all of them. There was barely any of her left, and what was left wasn’t holding any more than the places where she had been cut into.
“You’re moving in with me. I’m telling Sam.” Des tried to keep her voice steady, but the edges of it were filled with angry tears.
“No. Find another roommate to make rent. Ask Sam for money, whatever, just no.” Sarah still had her eyes closed.
“Is that how you’re making rent, Sarah? Sam?”
Sarah squeezed her eyes tight but didn’t open them. Des ignored the tear that slid along Sarah’s nose. “Fuck you.”
Des swallowed. “Then I really don’t care. If Sam’s paying, then he gets a say, and I bet he’ll say you’re moving in with me.”
Another tear collected against Sarah’s nose and she shuddered a breath in, held it. Des held hers. Let her own tears fall. “Okay,” Sarah whispered.
Des grabbed for Sarah’s hand again, but Sarah pulled it away, tucked it under the afghan, and turned her face into the cushion. “I’m just so worried, Sarah. That’s all.”
“I know. I’m worried, too. I know. You have to know this isn’t me, and I’m tired. I’m tired of not healing, of the pain, of dragging myself through half a day and barely making it. I don’t …” Sarah looked at Des, her funny eyes filled with tears. “I don’t mean it Des, you have to know that.”
Des squeezed Sarah’s hand. “I do. It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”
Des sat with her until she fell asleep. It didn’t take long. She counted Sarah’s inhales and exhales, remembering the number that was normal from the nurses in the hospital. She counted for a long time, her tears steady. When she was sure Sarah would carry on the work of breathing, Des walked to the little galley kitchen, cleaned up the awful mess of uneaten takeout, water glasses, and prescriptions.
She shoveled through the rest of the mess in the little apartment, found Sarah’s phone. Called Sam. He answered in a panic because the call was from Sarah’s number. Des explained what they needed to do, and Sam said he would help her take care of it.
Before she left, she counted Sarah’s breaths, matching her own to the rises and falls of her chest. Then she adjusted the blinds until the front room was dark.
Sarah lived on the second floor, and the steps were along the outside of the building—no elevator. She thought of all the take-out containers and hated herself for not realizing that Sarah couldn’t manage to get groceries into her apartment on her own.
When
she got into the POS limo, she was shaking. She wrapped her arms around the wheel and pushed her head into her arms. The parking lot of Sarah’s building was starting to fill up, everyone coming home to make their dinners and settle in, watching TV, making calls, maybe getting dressed up to go out.
Sarah would probably sleep on that couch all night, her hip hurting and stinking with infection, the kitchen bare of food, nothing but an old afghan covering her as the night got cool.
She started the Lincoln, pushing tears off her face. She drove the few turns to her own house on autopilot, unable to get the image of the mess of Sarah’s hip out of her head.
Des breathed in deep, turning carefully into her own short and narrow drive so she didn’t clip the cars parked along every inch of the curb, and was gratified when she didn’t even need her usual three-point turn to make it.
Des inched forward until the tennis ball hanging from the ceiling of the shadowy single garage thunked softly against the windshield, and cranked off the ignition. Her phone hummed next to her as soon as she stopped. Her best friend Lacey had probably seen her pull in from her big living-room window down the street and called as soon as Des parked.
“How’d it go?” Lacey asked.
“Honey,” Des said, her voiced rubbed out. “I can’t. Call Sam.”
“Oh, Des.”
“Yeah.”
They sat in silence over the connection for a long minute. “Come over,” Lacey said. “Eat dinner with Nathan and me. We’re having something really disgusting like box mac and cheese and Tater Tots. Then we could all watch a movie about evil robots that turn into cars and trucks and I’ll make root beer floats.”
“I think I’m just—done. Could we do that this weekend, maybe?”
“I’m worried about you, Desbaby. I’m worried about you worrying all the time. At least call that pretty woodcarver and make him distract you.”
Des closed her eyes and felt damp grass seeping into soft jeans, a big hand at her jaw, warm lips against hers. His face in her neck, his breath panting over her shoulder, his hips working against hers in slow rocks that moved him inside her in heavy, stretching glides that built and built and built.
Yes, that would completely distract her—and break her into even smaller pieces.
Lacey started saying something to Nathan, so Des hauled her busted-ass carcass out of the Lincoln, and squeezed herself sideways along the side, trying not to snag her shirt on car rust from the front or cover her last good skirt in cobwebs from the back.
Once she exited the garage, she reached up and gingerly pulled down the single door until it rested on the roof of the Lincoln, which she had figured out how to protect from scratches by duct-taping a foam pool noodle to the bottom edge of the garage door.
She kept walking to the end of the drive and hauled open the squealing back door of the limo and grabbed her orange traffic cone out of the back passenger bay. She looked down the narrow street, crowded with parked cars, shaded with old trees, and let herself close her eyes for a minute, listening to Lacey talk to Nathan.
Then she mentally smacked herself, hard, and snugged the orange cone behind the stretch limousine’s bumper to warn traffic not to careen into the vehicle, which overshot the end of the driveway by half a foot.
Des executed the hip-bump-smash-push necessary to reshut the back-passenger-bay door, and tried not to catch the fluttering banner of privacy film peeling off the window in the door.
POS Limo, tucked in for the night.
Des interrupted and they said their good-byes. Des leaned against POS Limo, to put away her phone, but had failed to notice Betty, her landlady, lying in wait on her own porch next door.
Betty marched over, smiling but determined. Beautiful in a wise-hippie sort of way.
“Destiny Marie.”
Des winced. “Hey.”
“Don’t hey me. I’ve been looking for you all day.”
“Sorry.” Betty looked at her, and Des knew she expected her to elaborate, but Des was beyond elaboration. Beyond explaining herself to anyone, especially anyone who she had known her entire life, maybe especially all of the people she had known her entire life.
“You know I wouldn’t evict one of Paddy and Marie’s kids, but you’ve never out-and-out missed a rent payment until this month, Destiny.” Betty was obviously going for the jugular, and Des had to admire that.
How Betty always confronted everything.
Life or death, it didn’t matter. Betty faced it.
She had realized, recently, how young Betty had been when she lost her husband, Marvin. Younger than her dad had been when he lost his wife, a mother to little children.
That kind of loss must move the way the ground feels under your feet, the way you look at other people when they cry or when they laugh or when they do anything. That kind of loss must change the number of breaths you’re supposed to breathe in an hour until you can imagine just not breathing at all. Loss like a crater that you sit on the edge of, throwing things into it in the hopes you can hear them hit the bottom.
Betty’s husband had been sick a long time; Des barely remembered a time when he was well, except for a flash of Betty in a summer halter dress, the same braids she wore now, sitting in the lap of a tall brown-limbed man with a huge smile, his chest bare with tiny circlets of dark hair, teasing Betty’s nape with a cold beer bottle.
One of her mother’s cookouts. Millions of breaths ago.
She felt tears threaten, coming up behind the ones for Sarah. She took a deep breath and focused on the geraniums planted in Betty’s window boxes.
“I know. And I appreciate it, Mrs. Lynch. I really do. I can give you part of it right now, and then my first check from the library will come—”
“Hush.” Betty interrupted and looked away from Des. Des swallowed, hard, past the constriction in her throat and tried to ignore the flush on Betty’s neck.
Des closed her eyes. “Thank you, Mrs. Lynch.”
Betty let a small smile surface and leveled her stare back at Des. “You were always a good girl, Destiny.”
“I know.”
“Mmm.” Betty touched Des’s shoulder. “What are your dinner plans, Destiny Marie?”
Des ignored the little ragged edge of guilt that came with getting ready to lie to a woman she had known since birth. Almost as hard to ignore as her growling stomach when she remembered that Betty always made her meat loaf with that delicious sugary glaze stuff on Thursday nights.
But Des couldn’t sit at Betty’s little banquette right now and eat meat loaf and canned green beans and dry dishes while she washed and have “just one” cup of coffee before she left. She couldn’t. She couldn’t, even knowing that Betty would sit at her banquette alone and have too many leftovers. Not even knowing that Betty fell asleep in front of the TV most nights, curled up in her late husband’s plaid glider.
“Actually, Mrs. Lynch …”
“It’s fine,” she interrupted, looking back up at her own porch. “I know you’re busy, these days, and that’s good. It’s just that Rennie usually comes over on Thursdays, but he’s at the school, working with the guidance counselor on a scholarship application.”
Des smoothed the wrinkles in her skirt, looking away from Betty as Betty looked away from her.
“Well.” Betty flipped back her shiny blond-and-gray braid, and actually turned to walk back to her house. “How’s the Lincoln running for you, Destiny?”
Des looked up. Betty had changed direction to stand next to her and put her hand on the limo, patting it like a horse. “Okay. Rennie is still begging to convert it to run on vegetable oil.”
Betty smiled. “I think you should let him. He’s smart, that boy. You know, he reminds me so much of Marvin.”
“You’ve said.” Des watched Betty scrape off a little rust with her nail.
“I think it’s nice you’ve been driving folks in the neighborhood. Your dad would have liked that. He always talked about starting a door-to-door service for ne
ighborhood folks once he retired. You know, like you’re doing for some of the older people who need to get to an appointment. Or for your sister. Rennie. It’s a treat to ride in Paddy’s limo.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Lynch.”
Betty reached up and kissed Des’s cheek. Des cleared her throat over the tears again. “You have a good night, Destiny.”
Betty went back into her house and Des stayed where she was, looked out over the street. Her phone started buzzing and she peered down to the corner to see if she could see Lacey standing at her front window, but the curtain was closed.
“This is Des Burnside.”
“Hey.”
“Hey, Sam. I’m sorry I called like that earlier … I just. I didn’t know Sarah was so bad, not like that.”
Sam sighed, long and frustrated. “No, you were right to. I went over there. Thanks for cleaning up, by the way. I haven’t had a chance to, lately.”
“She needs so much help, Sam. And I can’t even believe that because it’s Sarah. Sarah doesn’t need help, not ever. This is scaring the shit out of me.”
“She’s planning on scheduling the surgery as soon as a she gets an okay, and honestly, Des, I don’t know that she’s going to get one.”
Des felt her heart stop, actually stop inside of its space in her chest. She choked in a breath, her spit thick in her throat. “What do you mean?”
Sam was quiet, and the screen of her phone slicked against her face with sweat.
“She’s not healing like she should. She’s doing too much, then has to spend days lying around in pain, doing nothing. I think … I think she’s depressed, maybe.”
“I should be with her more. I can’t believe I didn’t realize what a bad idea it was that she lived on the second floor. You have to work, and all this time I wasn’t working, I could have been picking up more of the slack, and …”
“Stop. It’s not like that. But yeah, I can’t help her like I want to. And she was asleep when I went over, so I didn’t talk to her about moving in with you, but that would be better. You’re on one floor and Betty had that wheelchair ramp put in for Marvin years ago.”
Des hunched over, restless. “Do you think she’s going to need a wheelchair?”
Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series Page 14