I found my composure as quickly as I could, and still I stuttered. “So, uh,” I began, “should we not mention… or does that mean she thinks she’s the only one who’s been hurt?”
“She thinks Jill was driving, and so she knows Jill is recovering in the hospital as well.”
“But are you ever going to tell her?” I asked in amazement. I imagined Eileen going her whole life without ever knowing what had happened in The House on Seminole Street. I felt faint, wondering what it would take to sustain this fiction.
Mrs. Neilson sawed at her neck with her scarf. The skin there was a scuffed shade of pink. I had to resist the urge to reach out and pull her hand away. I couldn’t stand to witness any more suffering. “Eventually, I’m sure. Yes. We are trying not to upset her for the time being. Her jaw is wired shut, and she can’t scream.”
* * *
When I’m interviewed about this, which isn’t often, the reporter always wants to know about Eileen’s mouth, fastened into a grimace with metal wires, her broken teeth bared. I’m encouraged to talk about the puckered red incision horseshoeing her left ear, slathered in Vaseline, and how the windows were double-locked for her safety so that the small white room reeked of blood and saliva, like a dentist’s office after wisdom teeth surgery.
But what I want to talk about is the way Eileen looked at us when we came into the room, with a desperate remorse that haunts me to this day. If she could speak, I knew she would be apologizing that we had to see her like this.
Eileen’s older brother stood protectively at the head of the bed, eating a bran muffin without a napkin. I recognized the shopping bag folded in the small wastebasket at his feet. Someone had brought them muffins from Swanee’s, the fancy French bakery on Main Street with the Bonjour! sign on the door. I kicked myself for not thinking of doing that.
“Look who’s come to see you, Eileen,” her brother said. Eileen whinnied a greeting.
Bernadette perched on the edge of the bed, delicately, so counter to the coarse physicality we showed each other at The House that I discovered a new loss to mourn. We were always piling into beds, feet in faces, accusing someone of smelling or having crusty toes. Never before did we have to worry about hurting anyone.
“We miss you at The House, Eileen,” Bernadette said. She shot me a look. You’re president. Saysomething. I was standing there, recalibrating, like I had blown a fuse.
“We brought you something to perk up the room!” I said at a tinny pitch that made my own ears ring. I tried to untie the yellow ribbon binding the yellow blanket—three places I had to go to find it—but my fingers would not cooperate with what my brain was telling them to do. Eileen’s brother stepped forward to help, but it wasn’t his job to help. It was mine. I hadn’t even brought him anything to eat. I raised the bundle to my mouth and gnashed at the ribbon with my teeth until it tore. Eileen’s hands fluttered at her sides nervously while I shook out the blanket and tucked it into the lower corners of the bed with aggressive precision.
“Better already,” I declared, and Eileen gazed fondly at the blanket for my sake.
“Is there anything else we can bring y’all?” Bernadette asked. “Magazines? Or maybe a puzzle?”
“A puzzle.” Mrs. Neilson gasped as though it were a new invention. “Now, that sounds fun.”
There was some commotion out in the hallway, a woman’s voice raised in alarm. My pulse blew out my ears, and my vision clotted. He had found me.
“It’s okay,” Mrs. Neilson was saying to the guard, who had occupied a wide stance at the door. “You can let her through.”
In walked the woman who had shooed the press out of our way with her lit cigarette, the one in the newsboy cap, although that day she had her yellow-blond hair tucked under a beret, pinned at a traditional Parisian tilt. She would be a part of my life forever, but at that moment, I didn’t even know her name.
“Sorry that took so long,” she said to Mrs. Neilson, passing her a brown paper bag rolled tightly shut. “I got a little turned around trying to find my way back here.” The woman noticed the blanket on the bed. “How pretty,” she commented. “You girls should help yourself to some muffins. I got too many.”
“I’m just going to pop out a moment.” Mrs. Neilson left the room, the brown paper bag pinned under her arm like an evening clutch.
The woman went over to Eileen’s bed, stooped down, and examined her face. “What do you think? More Vaseline?”