Not one patient there yet. You’re the first person to ever enter it. Okay?”
Hannah nodded.
“Good. Now take a step onto the clean, bleached floor.
You can do this.”
Hannah kept her eyes squeezed shut. “Oh God, oh God.”
She tried to envision pristine flooring, but in her mind the
carpet came alive, all those germs from all those people just waiting for their moment to get inside and pollute her. “This isn’t going to work.”
“It won’t if you believe that.” She grabbed Hannah’s hand.
“Now take a step forward. Ooh, watch out for all the clean-
ing supplies. Don’t want to trip on that disinfectant. Do you smell all that bleach?”
Hannah giggled in spite of herself. She focused her atten-
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tion on Maya’s voice and the feeling of Maya’s hot, dry hand
in hers, allowing her to skid around the edges of the panic
just a bit, just enough to take a small step, like dipping toes into a pool.
“Awesome. Now I’m going to lead you over to your bed.”
Hannah stopped. “Can you check it first?”
“Check it for what?”
“Everything.”
Maya sighed. “Stay there. Keep your eyes closed.”
Hannah saw pink light behind her lids as Maya flicked on
the bedside lamp. “Be thorough!” she called. She could prac-
tically feel Maya’s eyes roll, and yet it was a comfort—her
predictability.
After a minute Maya announced, “Perfectly clean,” and
switched off the light again. “Not a speck or a stain.”
Hannah felt Maya’s hand grab her fingers, drag her over
to the bed.
“Now, I’m going to pull down the sterilized blanket and
you’re going to get under the nice, brand-new, hot-washed
sheets.”
Hannah sat on the bed and Maya took off her shoes as if
she were a small child. Maya stroked her arm a few times.
“Now lie back.”
Hannah slowly lowered her back down onto the bed.
“Spin a little.”
Hannah turned and Maya took her legs and slid them under
the covers. She realized she was trembling as Maya pulled the sheets up to her chin, tucked in the edges around her like a
parent would do, left the dirty duvet at her feet.
Hannah opened her eyes. “You’d make a good mom,” she
said.
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Maya smiled. “Thanks.”
“We’re all seeing in real time why I wouldn’t.”
They both laughed, and new tears pushed at the back of
Hannah’s eyes, born of gratitude.
“Xanax, please?” she whispered. “It’s in the side pocket of
my bag.”
Hannah heard Maya’s feet padding away, heard her curse as
she stubbed her toe, heard the bathroom light snap on, Maya
fumbling with the bag, the rattle of the bottle…padding back.
“Open,” Maya said.
Hannah opened her mouth and the tiny, weightless tablet
dropped onto her tongue. She swallowed it dry, anticipating
the gentle warmth that would soon spread across her brain,
making her limbs heavy, as if she could feel gravity pressing down on her, holding her in place. All she needed to do was
survive the night. Six hours. She could do it.
She opened her eyes to see the outline of Maya’s features,
her familiar eyes compassionate and love-lit in the dark.
“Thanks,” she said. She let her lids go heavy. “Can you turn
the bathroom light back off?”
“Your eyes are closed. You can’t see it.”
“No, I’ll be able to tell.”
“Not if you’re asleep.”
“But I won’t be able to fall asleep with the light on.”
“Yes, you will. Just let the kind pharmaceutical fairies take you away.”
“But,” Hannah said, “why does the light need to be on?”
“Gently taking you away off to dreamland…”
“Wait a minute.” Hannah sat up. “Are you afraid of the
dark?”
“What? No!”
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“You are!” she shrieked. “I can’t believe it. Is it the boogey-man you’re worried about?”
“I’m not afraid of the dark.”
“Boogey, boogey, boogey, boogey!”
They were both laughing now.
“I can’t wait to tell Blue!”
“When did this become about me?”
“Oh my God, you’re scared of the dark—and you know
what’s the best part? That’s, like, the one thing I’m not afraid of.”
“Oh, piss off.”
“Speaking of being pissed,” Hannah said, turning serious.
“I feel really bad about Blue. I think she was genuinely upset about the whole Renee thing.”
“Oh, whatever! She’s being ridiculous.”
Hannah sighed. “We don’t know that. Maybe Renee did
something really bad.”
“What could possibly be that bad? Blue’s just queen of the
grudge. Remember that time she didn’t speak to Renee for
like two months because Renee ran over her pet lizard?”
“Well, yeah, but… Blue loved Edward.”
“It wasn’t intentional! As far as I know… Look, don’t worry
about it. I have a feeling they’ll be friends again soon enough.”
“Really?” Hannah said doubtfully. “I don’t see how, but…
good night, then.” She watched Maya’s shadow move to the
bathroom. “Maya?” she said. She knew she shouldn’t but
couldn’t stop herself. “Henry’s okay, right? Do you think he’s wondering where I am?”
She heard the bathroom door close.
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MAYA
Maya stood on the other side of the door, leaned against it,
breathed. She didn’t understand the point of asking a ques-
tion when you didn’t want the answer. Sometimes Hannah’s
issues felt like a personal attack on her, forcing Maya to remember over and over again why they were there. She knew
this was unfair.
She looked at Hannah’s Xanax bottle. About ten pills left
out of sixty and it was filled less than three weeks before. Maya envisioned shaking them out into the chipped white toilet,
flushing them down like she used to do with her mother’s pills no matter how many times it got her in trouble. She would
do anything to exorcise the terrified animal who had taken
over her friend’s body, made her need drugs and plastic bags
and antibacterial soaps. Anything to return the Hannah who
existed before Henry had been stuffed into an ambulance
like a couch into a moving van, rushed to the ER in a dizzy-
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ing blur of blue light and howling, the smooth black summer
night shattered with emergency.
Maya had been so sure in those first days when Henry was
in the ICU that everything would be fine, t
hat Henry was
young and strong and that life would not allow such an injus-
tice. She visited, she talked to him, she brought him presents for when he woke up. But once he was moved into a home—
his condition accepted as it was—she found excuses not to go.
There was always something she had to do, a reason she had
to put it off one more day and then another. Just like she’d
done with those bills that kept piling up on her kitchen table.
Better to stuff them into a drawer, pretend it wasn’t happen-
ing. What else was she supposed to do? She couldn’t fix it.
And she knew she had to keep moving or she’d end up like
Hannah, stuck inside that night, roaming the halls and rat-
tling the chains of fear like a ghost.
She sighed, looked around at the bathroom, the tiles skin
pink, the natty white towels neatly folded over the bar, the
white bath mat draped upon the tub. All the people who had
paused here on their way to somewhere else, on their way
home. She thought about her house, the only thing that had
ever belonged to her. Why couldn’t she hold on to anything?
Don’t pick at it, she told herself . This was what she thought when something was wrong in her life. When she was a kid,
her father always reprimanded her when she scratched at the
scabs on her knees. It turned out to be the only useful thing he’d ever taught her. Don’t pick at a wound. It just makes it worse.
A sudden familiar restlessness kicked up in her, an itch.
She’d always enjoyed attention, but in moments like this,
something happened in her, a craving so strong and wiggly
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95
that she had to sate it just to sit still again. She pulled out her phone, scrolled her contacts, called the twenty-one-year-old
with the scaphoid fracture. What was his name? Justin, Dustin?
Jeff? Whatever. Irrelevant.
“Yo.” He picked up. His voice was thick with sleep.
Yo? She removed the phone briefly from her ear and stared at it, annoyed. “Hey, it’s Maya!”
There was a silence, one second, two, eternity, and then,
“Oh yeah, the nurse with the big boobs.”
“Medical transporter with the big boobs.”
“Right. Come over. I miss you.”
Maya rolled her eyes and gave her phone the middle finger.
Usually it was enough—the cheap thrill of men’s desire—so
easy to provoke—a momentary distraction. But tonight, a
tiny sadness, the size of a single tear, welled inside. She didn’t understand why. What was she expecting? She flashed back
to Steve at work asking, “When are you going to have a real
relationship?”
Was that what she wanted? A real relationship? She peeked her head out of the bathroom, saw Hannah’s shadow in the
dark, clutching her blanket to her chin.
No.
She wanted a good time. He just wasn’t it.
“I think you have the wrong number!” she said into the
phone.
“But you called—”
She hung up, smiled into the mirror to cheer herself. Be-
hind her, the leaky bathtub faucet dripped—tock, tock, tock—
the sound of insanity. She got undressed for bed, caught sight of the small constellation of scars on her back from the time East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 95
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when she was seven and her mother had thrown plates at her
in a fit of rage. The lines were faded now, a mark of time.
Back in high school, after she and Hannah and Henry had
gotten ripely stoned on the roof of Henry’s house one night,
the moon so low it was a fourth companion, she’d showed
them the marks on her back. She’d never let anyone see them
before. She feared pity, thought it contagious.
Now she closed her eyes, brought the memory into focus.
She could see Hannah vividly, her cheeks so round back then,
that peachy blush she used to wear, too orange against her
pale skin. She could see herself, too, her T-shirt collar cut off at the neck, her arms wrapped around her knees, her long
hair grazing them. Her mind flickered to Henry, the image
of him smudgy. It was strange the way she could remember
each of his features but not quite add them together to make
a face. No matter how hard she tried, her mind would not
let her see him.
Maya was laughing when she showed Hannah and Henry
the scars, shrugging them off as nothing. What else could she do but make it not matter?
But then Hannah had put her hand on Maya’s back, traced
her soft fingers over the white raised slashes, and maybe it was the pot, maybe it was just that Maya was so fucking high, but something shifted inside her. She could feel Hannah’s fingers penetrate her skin, her bones, probing until they found how
deep the cuts actually went, pressing lightly on the wounds
to staunch a bleed that had never actually stopped.
“You’re like a whale,” Hannah said, voice hoarse with the
weed and with a kind of soft wonder.
Why did Maya feel like she wanted to cry?
“Henry, tell her she’s a whale,” Hannah said.
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“You’re a whale, dude,” Henry said. He was lying back on
the slant of the roof, looking at the sky.
“What the fuck does that even mean?” Maya said, taking
another drag on the joint. It helped to say fuck, to carve her mouth around the hardness of the word. It was instinctual to
reject softness. Isn’t that what all the motherless did? Made themselves not need it, disdain it even. But it got in anyway, slipped in some side door of her. Thankfully, no matter how
much Maya resisted it, Hannah and her softness always got in.
“Henry, tell her what it all means,” Hannah said.
Henry shook his head in wonder, an unfathomably deep
question to ponder.
Hannah sighed, exasperated that her profound pot-induced
insights couldn’t be followed. “Because whales are all scratched up from shark bites and orcas and what not,” she said. She
nudged Henry. “Remember that documentary we watched?”
“You watched,” Henry said, gazing up at her. “I was watch-
ing you.”
Hannah bent over and kissed him, then sat back down, re-
clined against him. “Whales are awesome, man. They’re all
like, ‘Whatever. Go ahead and try me. I don’t care.’ They just keep cruising on, getting bigger and bigger until they’re bigger than everyone, the biggest on earth.”
“Whales are outrageous,” Henry said.
Hannah sat back up then. “That’s you, Maya. Inside I mean.
You’re the biggest person I know. No one can break you.”
She’d spread her arms as wide as the future.
Maya laughed it off, but then Hannah said, “Don’t you get
it? She threw plates at you and the plates are what broke. Not you. She was aiming for you but only destroyed her china.”
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her eyes,
and the scars on her back, those marks of hatred
and violence, of being unloved, they were reordering in her
mind— shit, was this pot laced?— transforming into the shape of a whale. And where once there was her mother’s fury, now
there was a benign, resilient mammal tattooed on her skin, in her heart. Where once there was her mother’s fury, now there
was Hannah and her love, not replacing it— if only! —but covering it like a soldier lying over the wounded.
She wanted to say this but it was at once too corny and too
meaningful. Instead she said, “You’re stoned, Hannah.”
“She is,” Henry said.
“I am,” Hannah replied, and then she threw her head back
with that great laugh she had, so genuine and rewarding.
She thought of present-day Hannah, too frightened to even
walk into a motel room. Was it possible to miss a laugh so
much you sprained your heart? She could hardly fathom Han-
nah smoking pot, much less sitting on a rooftop or throwing
her head back with such pure perfect joy.
She caught her reflection in the mirror. A whale. She rolled
the word around in her mind like a pool ball, smooth and
calming, knocking out worries of what she would do if the
bank loan didn’t come through. It would, of course—but just
in case, it helped to be reminded that she was a survivor. She looked again at Hannah’s Xanax, picked it up and tucked it
in her own bag. She would prove to Hannah that she didn’t
need it. That Hannah was a whale too. She walked out, leav-
ing the bathroom door open enough to create a strip of light
across her bed.
“You still awake?” she said.
“Unfortunately,” Hannah said. “Why?”
She had the impulse to tell Hannah about the situation
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99
with her house, to say, “Look! Another shark attack.” She
didn’t know why, who she was trying to convince that she’d
survive it.
But then Hannah said in a small, tired voice, “You’re not
really afraid of the dark, are you?”
“Of course not,” Maya said. She walked back to the bath-
room, turned off the light. “Go to sleep.”
She got into bed and pulled out her phone, checked her so-
cial media feeds, refreshing them several times in case some-
thing interesting should come in. It didn’t. She cheered herself with the reminder of her secret plan. Fired off a quick text.