Judging by Ben, Charlie had managed to right herself. The transition would not have been an actual change so much as a reversion to type. Charlie had never been a rebel. She was one of those easy-going, popular girls, the sort who got invited to everything, who effortlessly mixed with the crowd. She had a kind of natural affability that had always eluded Sam, even before the accident.
What was Charlie’s life like now?
Sam didn’t even know if her sister had children. She assumed so. Charlie had always loved babies. She had babysat for half the neighborhood before the red-brick house had burned down. She was always taking care of stray animals, leaving pecans outside for the squirrels, building bird feeders at Brownie meetings and once erecting a rabbit hutch in the backyard, though, to Charlie’s utter disappointment, the rabbits seemed to prefer the neighbor’s abandoned doghouse.
What did Charlie look like now? Was her hair gray like Sam’s? Was she still thin, muscular, from the perpetual motion of her life? Would Sam even recognize her own sister if she saw her?
When she saw her.
A sign welcoming them to Dickerson County flashed outside the window.
She should have told Stanislav to drive more slowly.
Sam thumbed to the browser on her phone. She re-loaded the MSNBC homepage and found an updated story about Rusty. Guarded condition. Sam, even after a lifetime in and out of hospitals, had no idea what that meant. Better than critical? Worse than stable?
At the end of Anton’s life, when he was finally hospitalized, there had been no updates on his condition, just the understanding that he was comfortable today, that he was in discomfort the next day, and then the solemn, unspoken understanding between them all that there would be no tomorrow.
Sam swiped up the Huffington Post in her browser to see if they had more details. Her breath caught in surprise when a recent photograph of Rusty appeared.
For reasons unknown, whenever she listened to her father’s voicemails, Sam conjured an image of Burl Ives from the Luzianne Tea commercials: a robust, round man in a white hat and suit, a black string tie held together by some sort of gaudy silver medallion.
Her father was nothing like that. Not before, and certainly not today.
Rusty’s thick black hair was mostly gray. His face had the texture if not color of beef jerky. He still had that lean look about him, as if he’d finally made his way out of a jungle. His cheeks were hollow. His eyes sunken. Photos had never done Rusty justice. In person, he was perpetually in motion, always fidgeting, gesturing with his hands like a Great Oz, so that you did not see the weak, old man behind the curtain.
Sam wondered if he was still with Lenore. Even as a teenager, Sam had understood why Gamma had taken such a dislike to the woman with whom Rusty spent most of his time. Had he given into the cliché and married his secretary after an appropriate period of mourning? Lenore had been a young woman when Gamma was murdered. Would there be a half sister or brother waiting at the hospital?
Sam dropped her phone back into her purse.
“Okay,” Stanislav said. “We got one more mile, according to the Wave.” He indicated his iPad. “You say two hours, then we go back?”
“Approximately,” Sam said. “Maybe less.”
“I get some lunch from a restaurant. The hospital cafeteria, that food’s no good.” He handed her a business card. “You text me. Five minutes, then I meet you out front.”
Sam resisted the desire to tell him to wait in the car, engine running, wheels turned back toward Atlanta, and instead responded, “Okay.”
Stanislav engaged the turn signal. He ran the butt of his palm along the steering wheel, taking a wide turn into the winding drive of the hospital.
Sam felt her stomach clench.
The Dickerson County Hospital was much larger than she remembered, or maybe the building had been added onto in the last thirty years. The Quinn family had been to the emergency room only once before the Culpeppers entered their lives. Charlie had fallen from a tree and broken her arm. This had happened for typical Charlie reasons; she had been trying to rescue a cat. Sam could recall Gamma lecturing over Charlie’s screams during the car ride to the hospital—not about the idiocy of rescuing a creature whose every bundle of nerve and sinew equipped it with the ability to climb down a tree on its own—but about anatomical structure:
“The bone running from the shoulder to the elbow is the humerus. This we call the upper arm, or, simply, the arm. The humerus connects with two bones at the elbow: the radius and the ulna, which are regarded as the forearm.”
None of this information had abated the screaming. For once, Sam could not accuse Charlie of overreacting. Her broken humerus, or arm, as Gamma had called it, jutted up like a shark’s fin from Charlie’s torn flesh.
Stanislav pulled the Mercedes under the wide concrete canopy at the main entrance. He was a large man. The car shook as he hefted his frame from behind the wheel. He walked around the back of the car and opened the door for Sam. She had to lift her right leg to get out. She was using her cane today because there was no one she would meet who would not know what had happened.
“You text me, I come five minutes,” Stanislav said, then got back into the car.
Sam watched him drive away, a peculiar tightness in her throat. She had to remind herself that she had his number in her purse, that she could call him back, that she had a credit card with no limit, a jet at her disposal, the ability to flee whenever she wanted.
And yet, she felt as if a straitjacket was tightening around her arms as the car moved farther away.
Sam turned. She looked at the hospital. Two reporters were on a bench beside the door, their press credentials hanging on lanyards around their necks, cameras at their feet. They looked up at Sam, then back down at their phones, as she made her way inside the building.
She scanned the area for Ben, half expecting to find him waiting. She only saw patients and visitors idling around the lobby. There was a help desk, but the color-coded arrows on the floor were clear enough to Sam. She followed the green line to the elevators. She ran her finger along the directory until she found the words ADULT ICU.
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Sam rode up alone. She felt as if she had spent most of her life riding up or down in elevators while others took the stairs. The intercom dinged as she passed each floor. The car was clean, but smelled vaguely of sickness.
She stared straight ahead, forcing herself not to count the floors. The backs of the elevator doors were polished satin to hide fingerprints, but she could see the anamorphic outline of her lone figure: an aloof presence, quick blue eyes, short white hair, skin as pale as an envelope, and with a sharp tongue just as prone to inflicting tiny, painful cuts in inconvenient places. Even with the distortion, Sam could make out the thin line of her own disapproving lips. This was the angry, bitter woman who had never left Pikeville.
The doors opened.
There was a black line on the floor, much like the line on the bottom of the pool, that led to the closed doors of the Intensive Care Unit.
To Rusty.
To her sister.
To her brother-in-law.
To the unknown.
The stinging of a thousand hornets ran up and down her leg as Sam made her way down the long, forlorn hallway. The sound of her shoes slapping hospital tiles bongoed along with the slow thumps of her heart. Sweat had glued her hair to the nape of her neck. The twigs of delicate bones inside her wrist and ankle felt ready to snap.
Sam kept walking, choking down the antiseptic air, leaning into the pain.
The automatic doors opened before she reached them.
A woman blocked the way. Tall, athletic, long dark hair, light blue eyes. Her nose appeared to have been recently broken. Two dark bruises rimmed beneath each eye.
Sam pushed herself to move faster. The tendons cording through her leg sent out a high-pitched wail. The hornets moved into her chest. The handle of the cane was slippery in her hand.
She felt so nervous. Why was she nervous?
Charlie said, “You look like Mama.”
“Do I?” Sam’s voice shook in her chest.