She had it all along. Alex and I loved her more than the world. She had it all along, but she couldn’t see it. She still doesn’t see it and I know now that she never will.

I hear the door open and I breathe in fast to suck back the tears that had been rising to the surface.

I don’t even see Jeff, but I know that it’s him; I can sense him like a dark, loathsome shadow moving along the wall behind me. And I can smell the oil and engine muck lingering on his clothes.

And my mom’s face lights up.

A pained smile covers the entirety of her face, the kind of smile I should’ve seen when I walked through that door.

I can’t cry. I’m hurting so much right now that I can’t even cry. This pain is beyond tears.

I stand up from the chair and pull my purse and duffle bag over my left shoulder. I still don’t look at Jeff, but I know he’s standing near the television by the wall.

“I have to go, Mom,” I say, leaning over and hugging her carefully. “I love you. You get better, okay?” But I know my words are hollow.

She strains to hug me back; the smell of rubbing alcohol rises up in my nose as she moves her arm around me and then just as quickly lets it fall away.

“Long time, no see,” Jeff says. “How’ve you been?”

I look over at him. He stands holding a bouquet of flowers next to where his heart is supposed to be. He’s smiling faintly, but it’s so easy to see that right now he’s sober and hopes that either I believe the lie he knows my mom told me or that I’ll leave quietly and not cause a scene; maybe even forgive him. I don’t need to be a Praverian to know what he’s thinking, how he’s rehearsing his lines for my mom about how sorry he is and that he’ll never do it again. And I don’t need to be a psychic to know that my mom is about to tell him that she believes him and that she forgives him.

I walk toward Jeff and his smile gets a little bigger, but underneath it he knows the disingenuous effort is wasted.

Without a word or a single discernible expression on my face, I pull back my fist and bury it in his head. His skinny body collides abrasively against the wall and the flowers tumble tumultuously from his hands, scattering on the floor beneath him like dead promises. Absolute shock freezes his expression in place. He doesn’t speak and neither do I.

Slowly he brings up his hand, wiping the blood from his broken nose, but never takes his stunned eyes off me.

I walk past him and right out the opened door. Two nurses are standing at the counter watching me with big eyes and surprised faces. The one with blond hair, pulled up into a ponytail, passes me an applauding smile and I step inside the nearby elevator.

I don’t see much of anything on my way through the maze-like halls of the hospital as I make my way out. I don’t hear the same housekeeper asking me if I found my way alright as I pass her again now on the first floor. Every sight and sound blends into one another; voices are subdued behind a thick curtain of thoughts swirling around inside my head. But I don’t see any of those, either. It’s like that one memory of my mother smiling down at my clown-like face with the camera clasped in her hand has frozen in my mind.

But I force it out and replace it with Beverlee’s face staring down at me with all of the love that my mother gave up.

I push myself down the last long stretch of hallway and I don’t really notice how much it’s moving, how the walls are swaying in and out. The early evening sunlight soon to slip behind the horizon shines dimly out ahead, making the EXIT sign more visible above the tall glass doors.

I make it to them, stepping out and into the Georgia heat. The white concrete seems vast and endless and I feel like I’m standing in an ocean of smooth cement. The thin clouds streaking across the sky appear so close. Everything around me is larger than before: the towering glass walls of the hospital, the landscaping, the blacktop parking lot. I feel so small underneath the sky as it begins to close in all around me from every side.

I hear voices: “Miss? Are you alright?” And feel a hand clutching my elbow.

But the ground seems to pull out from underneath me, sending me crashing to my knees. Cars and people’s legs and rust-colored clay flower pots all spin around in a haze of brisk, chaotic movement.

I lay on my back against the hot concrete as everything goes still, my gaze fixated on the sky, lost in some other place where painful memories are forbidden. Voices are moving all around me, but I see no one, at least not their faces. Their bodies crowd around mine like a mass of fabric and shoes and I just stare up at the sky until my eyelids shut out the world.

22

A DULL AND STEADY beep, beep, beep sounds nearby, constant and slow like dripping water. Something squeezes my arm so tight that for a moment it’s the only part of my body that I can feel. Crushing pressure. It slowly eases, allowing the blood to flow through the rest of my body again. Another series of different beeps chime in my head. It feels like there’s fire in my throat and I try to call out for water, but I don’t think my lips are moving. I smell potent cleaners and body lotion and hospital soap and plastic.

My legs feel bare and exposed, though warm underneath a heavy swath of fabric. My feet are cold and the sheet I’m lying on feels unnatural against my skin; stiff like starched cotton, and it smells new, right out of the package.

Something’s in my arm, like an oblong knot preventing me from bending at the elbow. I feel something similar in the top of my hand; a rubbery tube moving along my vein. Something sticky is pressed over it, pinching my skin into an unnatural fold causing the area around it to itch.

“Miss Lancaster?” I hear a woman’s voice say from somewhere above me. “Liv Lancaster, can you hear me, hon?”

I don’t know who these people are, or why it sounds like they’re talking to me, but as I come around I become more desperate to find out.

“She’s waking up,” the same voice says as if to someone else in the room.

My eyelids are heavy, as though some invisible weight lies over them, but I manage to open them a slit. The overhead light is blinding and I squint them shut quickly and try again with my gaze looking downward this time. The room begins to come together in a series of indistinct objects that take many long seconds to become clear to me.

A black and white clock is mounted on the wall next to the television. I can hear it ticking so loudly in my ears, and the toilet water running in the nearby restroom until it cuts off with a thu-rump. There’s a giant window covered by thick, gray curtains, but I can make out that it’s dark on the other side of them, maybe very early morning. At the foot of the hospital bed is a tall rectangular table made to slide perfectly over the bed and my lap. A fat, clear container sits on top of it with a fancy lid and a rigidly-shaped straw poking from the top. The outside of the cup sweats, a pool of water forming underneath it.

“Miss Lancaster?” the nurse says as she stands to the right of the bed jostling the IV machine, where I notice at the end of the tube in the bend of my arm, a needle is sleeping underneath the dressing tape. “You really took a fall. How are you feeling?”

I close my eyes and squeeze tight as if to reset the scene, but when I open them again and let them blur back into focus, everything is the same.

“W-Who are you talking to?”

It still hasn’t completely hit me yet that I’ve been impaled by needles.

The nurse presses a few buttons on another machine and leans over me, adjusting tubes here and there until she comes to the one laying at the base of my nostrils, feeding me oxygen.

“You, silly,” she says, smiling at me all bubbly-like. “How are you feeling?”

I’m thoroughly confused and as I’m still trying to fully wake up, knowing that some kind of drug is trying to force itself the rest of the way out of my system, I realize that she really did just call me Miss Lancaster.

As if this isn’t strange enough, the way the nurse leans away from me and looks toward an area of the room I still can’t quite make out, the bright and bubbly smile dissolves completely from her face. I stare harder toward the shadowed area, letting my eyes focus, but still coming up short.

The nurse looks back at me and she’s smiling again.

“I’ll leave you to your family now,” she says, patting my leg. She flicks the fluorescent light off that had been shining directly over my bed and exits the room.

I stare speechless at the door when it closes softly behind her. When I’m able to tear my eyes away, I look over to see Isaac standing on the other side of my bed.

“Isaac!” I start to get up from the bed, but he catches me before I’m sitting completely upright and gently pushes me back down.

“God, I am so sorry,” he says and I can hear trembling in the back of his throat.

I still don’t understand anything. Not what happened, or how I got here, or even where I am, but more than anything I want to understand what Isaac is sorry for. Why does he look so pained, struggling with everything in him to keep from breaking down in front of me?

“S-Sorry for what, Isaac?” I reach out my hand to him and he takes it, kissing the tops of my knuckles and then pressing the back of it to the side of his face. “Sorry for what?” I repeat softly.

“For putting you through this,” he says, “and for letting it go on as long as it did and not telling you.” He isn’t struggling to say these words; they come out plainly and resolutely as though he has already gone through all of the reluctant motions beforehand.

“Putting me through what?” I look to and from his eyes and his hand holding mine, the way his thumb constantly brushes over my knuckles. “Isaac?”

He looks right at me, his gaze impenetrable. “Do you trust me?”

I want to ask him why he would even ask me that question but instead, I just nod a series of tiny, rapid nods.

He studies my face for a second longer, searching for the certainty of my words and then he nods as well, squeezing my hand a little tighter below.

Genna Bishop steps out of the shadows.

The blanket covering me crushes under the weight of my fist. I look between Isaac and Genna, finding no immediate explanations. I start to move from the bed again, but Isaac stops me again; the dressing tape over the IV in the top of my hand pinches my skin as I pull backward. The heart rate monitor starts beeping faster beside me.

“Isaac! She’s in the room,” I say, pointing, “The Praverian. She’s behind you!”

His face remains calm and poignant and when he doesn’t bother to turn and look, I know he’s aware of her presence already.

My head snaps back to look only at Isaac for answers, but I keep Genna in my peripheral sight.

“She’s here to help us,” Isaac says and my face squeezes into an unbelieving knot.

“What?”

Genna steps closer, the shimmering blackness of her hair draping over her shoulders like silk, her sparkling emerald-colored eyes brilliant as she pushes her way through the shadow. “He’s right,” she says but I don’t believe her. “I’ve been trying to help you all along.”

I realize I’ve been shaking my head no, over and over, the closer she draws.