by Kara Thomas
Friday night, at the lake house. I couldn’t sleep. I can feel the quilt on my bare legs, my feet carrying me outside, following the light of the moon to the dock—
A scream splits the quiet. I’m running, my chest about to burst with panic.
The scream came from me.
I stumble, lurch forward, elbows and knees hitting the floor. Warmth trickles down my hand. A flash of the drain in the emergency room, the water swirling pink, my hands furiously scrubbing.
“Whoa! What is going on?”
Hands, grabbing me. Cold tile beneath my palms. A chorus of machines beeping. I’m not in the Marcotte lake house, or the emergency room bathroom—I’m in a hospital hallway.
I stumble and blink until my forearm, streaked with blood, comes into focus.
The woman holding me shouts: “Someone get me a towel. She ripped her damn IV out.”
My heart is hammering. Nurse Scott’s face is in mine. “Claire, I need you to breathe.”
“I heard screaming,” I say.
“No, honey, you were screaming.” Scott presses a towel to my bleeding arm. “Very loudly, while people are trying to sleep.”
A small crowd of nurses have gathered to gawk. Muttering: head injury. Scott extends an arm like we’re going to cotillion and walks me back to my room.
Once I’m in bed, Scott holds my arm down, wiping away the blood with an alcohol pad. “Oh dear,” he clucks. “Look what you did.”
I close my eyes as he tears a fresh needle from its packaging and guides it under my skin.
Look what you did.
* * *
—
Someone is rustling me awake. The clock overhead says it’s 7:45 a.m. Scott is hovering over me, holding a blood pressure cuff.
“Good morning, Starshine.” He hooks the blood pressure cuff around my arm. “Nurse Scott says hello. You’re not going to run off on me again, are you?”
Last night wasn’t a fever dream; I really did tear my IV out of my arm and take off running down the hall, screaming. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what happened.”
He sticks the tip of a thermometer in my ear. “Ambien happened.”
Scott enters my temperature into the laptop on his cart. I wriggle so I’m sitting up slightly. “Ambien makes people freak out like that?”
“Does a bear crap in the woods? Hold still,” Scott says, hitting a button that makes the blood pressure cuff tighten around my arm. The machine displays numbers that mean nothing to me. While he’s putting the numbers into the computer, I sit back. “Are my parents here?”
“You were sleeping when they got here, so I sent them on a coffee run so they wouldn’t wake you,” Scott says. “They’re very loud.”
“I know.”
He unwraps the blood pressure cuff from my arm. “There’s a lady outside who wants to see you, though.”
“Who?”
“I think your grandma? She’s short and dressed real fancy,” Scott says. “Wasn’t happy I told her she’d have to wait outside until I checked if you wanted to see her.”
My nana has been dead for three years. Her fanciest clothes came from Chico’s and she sometimes left the house with parakeet crap on her shoulder. There’s only one person who could be waiting outside the room, and I cringe at the thought of Scott telling Marian Sullivan-Marcotte she had to wait.
“You can send her in.” I shift in my cot so I’m sitting up as straight as possible.
Scott leaves, dragging the cart behind him. Some murmuring outside the door, and Kat’s grandmother steps into the room, holding a Louis Vuitton bag in front of her chest.
“Claire.” Marian sets her bag down on the chair by my bedside and clasps her hands around mine. She smells like Chanel No. 5; I only know what it is because Marian is the only woman I’ve ever known who wears Chanel No. 5. The smell makes my stomach clench because whenever Marian is around, Kat is close by.
Kat’s grandmother is here and Kat isn’t and this is all so wrong.
I swallow. “Hi.”
Marian sits in the chair and crosses her legs, as if sitting down for an interview. She looks prepped for one: Her blond bob looks like it was styled in a salon, and her arms are toned and tan beneath a sleeveless white silk blouse. She must be nearing seventy now, but there’s barely a line detectable on her face.
It occurs to me that maybe she is prepping for an interview. Marian was always on CNN or something when we were kids, ripping apart some bill or sparring with her opponents. If her granddaughter is missing, Marian Sullivan-Marcotte will burn the world down to get her back. The look in her eyes reminds me of Kat, furiously focused during an exam, as if her life depends on it.
“I haven’t seen your parents yet,” Marian says. “They’d already left the lake house when I arrived this morning.”
My stomach does an accordion fold at the mention of the lake house. “I’m so sorry we used the house without permission.”
“Oh, Claire, that is the last thing on my mind.” Marian’s forehead knits with concern as she takes me in. “I hear they’re considering operating on your brain?”
I nod. “If the swelling doesn’t go down they have to drain it somehow.”
“My God. Do they know how a procedure like that would affect your memory?”
My throat tightens. I hadn’t even considered that. “I don’t know. I—I’m trying so hard to remember what happened.”
“Claire. That’s not why I’m here. I know how badly you want to help.” Marian averts her eyes. “My son and daughter-in-law wanted to come with me. They feel terrible they haven’t been here yet—Johnathan went straight to the mountain this morning to help with the search.”
“How long do they think it’ll take to search Devil’s Peak?”
“Some parts of the terrain are too dangerous to search,” she says. “Most of the volunteers aren’t experienced hikers.” Marian’s eyes lock with mine; something shifts in her expression, as if she were seeing me for the first time, remembering who I am. Deciding that I deserve more than a politician’s non-answer. “It could take weeks to search the whole mountain, I’m afraid, and that’s if the sheriff gets FAA approval to use a drone in the search.”
I don’t know what to say; I can’t wrap my head around the chaos we’ve caused with one simple decision. Blow off prom. Spend the night in the woods.
Marian moves her hand toward mine. “I don’t want you to blame yourself, Claire. I know my granddaughter, and as responsible as she is, she thinks she can evade the rules.”
Unease creeps over me. Did I say I blamed myself? And why hasn’t she mentioned Jesse? Her granddaughter isn’t the only one who’s missing.
“Is Jesse’s aunt in town?” I ask.
Marian’s gaze drops to my bed. She smooths a hand over the blanket, careful to avoid the tubing sending fluids to my IV. “I only saw her briefly at the sheriff’s station. She’s staying at the Motel Six across the street.”
“From the hospital?” I ask. The lake house is almost forty minutes away from Sunfish Creek Hospital; when Dad mentioned how long they had to drive to see me every day I added it to the list of things to feel guilty about for the rest of my life. The thought of Jesse’s aunt only being able to afford a budget motel forty minutes away from Bobcat Mountain makes me incredibly sad.
“I offered her to stay at the lake house, but I think she felt like it would be too crowded,” Marian says.
I’m about to say that I hope my own parents aren’t imposing by staying at the lake house when my IV makes its gong sound, signaling that my bag of fluids is empty.
“Claire,” she says, a sudden urgency to her voice. She touches her fingertips to mine. “You are so important to my granddaughter.”
I don’t know what to say. What can I say that won’t sound insincere? There are no words
to describe what Kat is to me. She showed me how to use a tampon. She made me laugh so hard once I pissed myself in her pool because I couldn’t get out in time. She’s allergic to bananas and she would die for her dog.
I can’t think about what will happen if she doesn’t come home.
Marian takes my hand again. “I know you and Katherine trust each other with everything, and well—it’s important to me that you feel as if you can trust me as much as you trust her.”
I nod, too startled to process, unable to think around the bong-bong of my IV machine.
She gives my hand a quick squeeze before whisking out of the room, calling out, “Excuse me? This machine has been going off for several minutes and no one has come to check.”
* * *
—
Time moves slowly in the hospital. There’s no TV in my room, and as far as I know, the searchers haven’t found my phone. My only link to the outside world is my parents, who try to keep me occupied with mindless reading material. Only magazines filled with overpriced designer dresses and celebrity gossip, never newspapers. They say too much stimulation can put stress on my brain and slow my recovery, but I have to wonder if they’re trying to shield me from whatever the news is reporting about Kat and Jesse.
I wake in a tangle of IV tubing, sensing someone in the room with me. A brown hand is by mine, the ring finger occupied by a thin gold band with a small ruby in the center.
My gaze travels up to the owner’s face. It takes me a beat to recognize her: Dr. Ashraf, from the ER.
“Hi, honey,” she says. “How are you feeling?”
I blink the sleep from my eyes, unsure if it’s day or night. The clock over the sink in my room reads 6:10. The whiteboard on the adjacent wall reads today is tuesday.
“Tired,” I say as Dr. Ashraf’s face comes into focus. “They wake me up for my vitals every half-hour.”
“I know. It sucks.” Dr. Ashraf rifles through the file in her hands. “I’ve got your most recent scans. Your swelling has gone down significantly.”
“So no surgery, then?”
“No surgery. The neurologist agrees that you’re healing nicely. You’re not experiencing dizziness, confusion, loss of consciousness?”
I swallow, thinking of the Ambien incident Sunday night. “Not recently.”
Dr. Ashraf sits me up. “How’s the pain?”
“Not bad.”
“As long as you’re feeling all right, I think you can probably go home soon.”
My pulse quickens at the thought of busting out of this hellhole—taking a shower, getting a real night’s sleep, and finally, being able to get cable news. “How soon?”
Dr. Ashraf looks at the clock. “How does by lunch sound?”
She gives my knee a squeeze. Instead of running out of the room, like all the doctors do as soon as they have nothing left to say to me, Dr. Ashraf sits at the edge of my bed and folds her hands over her knee. “How are you doing mentally?”
I shrug, pressure mounting behind my eyes. I’m missing the most crucial thirty-six hours of my life, and I’ve been lying in a hospital bed for the past two days while a search party combs Bobcat Mountain for my friends’ bodies.
Dr. Ashraf cocks her head, so I say, “I’m having some anxiety.”
“I can prescribe you something called Ativan,” she says. “You can take it as needed, especially if you can’t sleep.”
“Thank you.”
Dr. Ashraf sits at the edge of my bed, crosses her legs at the ankle of her black leather boots. “How about your memory?”
“I still can’t remember anything that happened Saturday.”
Dr. Ashraf’s forehead knits up. “Nothing at all about how you got hurt?”
I shake my head. “Is it weird I still can’t remember?”
“No. Even when people heal completely from an injury like yours, sometimes they can’t remember the accident. It’s your brain’s way of protecting you from the trauma.” Dr. Ashraf forces her mouth into a smile. “I didn’t mean to worry you, Claire.”
She stands, adjusts the lapel of her lab coat. “I’ll go get that discharge paperwork started.”
On the way out, she glances down at the scan of my brain, the smile completely wiped from her face, but I don’t let it worry me. Because I’m going home.
* * *
—
As it turns out, I am not going home.
Mom is; she is already on a bus to Long Island by the time I’m officially discharged. She has two patients in crisis and even though not everything is always about me, I wonder if maybe it’s about me. I still haven’t apologized for being such a bitch to her the other day, but she still won’t apologize for not letting me speak to the sheriff until Sunday night.
Sheriff McAuliffe is the reason I am not going home, even if Dad won’t come out and say it. Despite Dr. Ashraf’s promise to have me discharged by lunch, it’s almost four thirty by the time we arrive at the lake house.
The sight of Kat’s parents’ Ford Escape nestled in the curve of the driveway sucks the air out of my body. What am I supposed to say? Sorry I made it back and she didn’t?
“It’ll only be a few days,” Dad says. “In case your memory comes back, it’ll be better if we’re close by. It’s the right thing to do, Claire.”
I command myself to unbuckle my seat belt, follow Dad up the driveway to the house, even though I’m debating shutting my head in the car door just to get sent back to the safety of the hospital.
I can’t do this. I’m afraid of people I’ve known almost my whole life. Mrs. Marcotte, who has clipped and saved interesting New York Times articles for me since the seventh grade, when I announced I wanted to be a journalist. Mr. Marcotte, who dutifully sat beside his wife and watched the plays Kat and I put on as children, even though there were probably a thousand other things he’d have rather been doing with his precious time at home on leave from the air force.
Dad waits for me by the front door. He holds a hand out to me, unsmiling. I grab it as the door swings open.
Elizabeth Marcotte stands in the foyer, cell phone propped between her ear and shoulder. She gestures for us to come inside, says into the phone: “Tell him it doesn’t matter how late it is—listen, can I call you back?”
Mrs. Marcotte lowers her phone with one hand, clasps a hand over her mouth with the other. “Oh. Sweetheart.”
Dad clears his throat. “We didn’t mean to interrupt your call—do you need us to give you some privacy?”
Kat’s mother’s fingers move to the chain on her necklace—a delicate diamond infinity loop she’s worn since we were kids. She shakes her head. “Oh no, that was just my sister-in-law. I can call her back—come on in, Johnathan is in the kitchen.”
Dad still has me by the hand; he tugs me into the kitchen, my pulse in my ears.
“Can I get you guys coffee?” Mrs. Marcotte is saying. “I just made a pot—”
A man’s voice cuts through Kat’s mother’s chattering.
“Claire Bear?”
Mr. Marcotte is in jeans and a white T-shirt, a fleck of shaving cream on his tanned jaw. Like Kat, he’s tall, his skin golden in the summer months, nose dotted with freckles.
Mr. Marcotte retired from the air force last summer and took a job with United Airlines. The last time I saw him was months ago, sneaking through the door in his pilot’s uniform.
He stands from the table and pulls me into a hug. “How are you, sweetheart?”
My throat seals up. Over his shoulder, I catch a glimpse of his wife, watching me, her fingers working the chain on her necklace. Last year, when my nana died, Kat and her mom were on our doorstep with a card and a homemade meal within a few hours. How am I so bad at this? How do I still have no clue what to say to Kat’s parents when I’ve had days to think it over?
“I’m sor
ry,” I choke out.
Mr. Marcotte plants his hands on my shoulders. His eyes—steel gray, like Kat’s—meet mine. “What are you apologizing for?”
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand, almost scratching myself with the hospital ID bracelet I’d forgotten was there. “I still can’t remember what happened.”
Mrs. Marcotte’s composed expression collapses. She turns to the coffee maker, hands trembling, as it gurgles and spits into the pot.
Kat’s father steps back from me as Dad considers him, almost as if he’s surprised to see him here. “Are you headed back to the mountain?”
“They called off the search for the day. Thunderstorms expected for tonight.” Mr. Marcotte sighs, runs a hand through his curls, the same shade of dark blond as Kat’s. The skin under his eyes is a sickly shade of gray.
Fear pulls at me. A few months ago, I’d mentioned around Mr. Marcotte that I was terrified of flying; he winked and said he gave every nervous flier the same advice: Look at the flight’s crew, how calm they always are. You don’t need to be scared until they look scared.
For the first time I can remember, Kat’s father looks scared.
A low rumble outside. Not thunder—tires crunching gravel, the slam of a car door shutting. From the way Mr. Marcotte’s expression darkens, it’s obvious they hadn’t been expecting anyone.
My gaze moves from Mrs. Marcotte, her hand trembling around the handle of the coffeepot, to my father, still standing in the kitchen archway, arms crossed in front of his chest, to the back door, where Sheriff McAuliffe appears behind the pane of glass.
Mrs. Marcotte yelps, jumping back to avoid a tidal wave of scalding coffee. The pot hits the tile and shatters.
“I’m so sorry,” Kat’s mother blurts. McAuliffe stands, watching from the other side of the door, his hand frozen mid-knock.
My dad is at my side, murmuring into my ear: “Claire, let’s give them some privacy.”
I stare at McAuliffe, still on the other side of the door. Mr. Marcotte doesn’t seem to register his presence; he watches as his wife scrambles for the glass shards with trembling fingers. His eyes dart back and forth until he can’t take it anymore, snaps: “Beth. Let me take care of that.”