Eileen nodded eagerly. At the foot of the bed, the yellow blanket lifted and lowered as the woman swathed Eileen’s lips with a Q-tip. Eileen was curling her toes.
“Are you members of Eileen’s sorority?” The woman capped the jar of Vaseline and tossed the Q-tip in the trash, which was filled with used cotton balls and gauze dressings, the grayish white of bodily fluids exposed to air. Though I was certain my face was the same sickly shade, I dug deep to lift my chin and extend my hand.
“I’m Pamela Schumacher, chapter president.” I tried to smile, but I was still wincing. No one tells you how painful it is to be afraid, like a bee sting to the entirety of your central nervous system.
“Martina Cannon,” the woman said, giving my hand one taut tug. “Most people call me Tina.” She was nearly as tall as Denise, and she smiled down at me with something that felt like reverence, but all these years later, I know it wasn’t that. It was optimism dueling fear. When Tina saw me, she saw her last hope.
“Are you family of Eileen’s?” I asked, wanting to know everything about this beautiful woman with the rotating selection of stylish hats. She looked to be in her early thirties. Maybe a cousin or a young aunt.
“I’m not.” Tina noticed that the sun was hitting Eileen directly in the eyes, and she went over to the window and adjusted the blinds.
I frowned at her. “Are you a nurse?”
“Just helping the families out,” Tina said with an evasive smile that infuriated me.
Eileen lifted her hands, miming the act of writing something down. Her brother handed her a pen and a pad, on which I read dispatches from her new one-word world. Socks. No. Yes. Day? We all waited while she scribbled her note, then handed it to her brother to read out loud. His eyes traveled the message, and his face tightened.
“Eileen wants to know if Denise and Roger got back together last night, Pamela.”
I must have looked horrified. We all must have, because I realized we were frightening Eileen.
“Tell her, Pamela,” Bernadette said, shooting me a panicked look.
I remembered what Mrs. McCall had said about diction. “He regrets breaking up with her for sure,” I told Eileen.
Eileen couldn’t smile, but she looked pleased.
I smelled Mrs. Neilson before I saw her. Another cigarette, another lung-wrenching layer of perfume. “How’s it going in here?”
I coughed into the crook of my elbow. Eileen’s shoulder blades tensed, released, and tensed again. I realized she was trying to cough herself but couldn’t, not with her mouth armored shut. Her eyes watered, and soupy bile dribbled out of one cracked corner of her mouth, pooling in the depression of her collarbone. Mrs. Neilson looked around for something to wipe it up, considered the yellow blanket we’d brought, and ultimately removed the silk scarf from her neck.
“I think it’s time for Eileen to rest,” Mrs. Neilson said in this awful, broken voice. She was dabbing at poor Eileen’s chin like she must have done when she was a baby. But I want you to know something about Eileen, which is that after she got out of the hospital and the hair on the left side of her head grew back, she realized she looked better with it short, tougher and cooler. She moved to Tampa for business school, and to get over her fear of strange men she began driving taxicabs at night. She met her husband while shuttling him home from the airport—he could only see her from the back and he called her “sir”—she turned around and they had a good laugh about it. Eileen could have chosen to view the world as an ugly and hostile place, but instead she was nimble in her life in a way that most everyday people can’t manage. Next month, it will be twenty-four years she’s been married to her soul mate.
“We’ll see you soon, Eileen!” I said with that strange jangly cheer, and I went out in the hallway and bent over, putting my hands on my knees. For a moment, I couldn’t tell if I was going to cry or throw up. Then I did both.
* * *
I was in such poor shape that I couldn’t remember where I’d parked the car Mrs. McCall had lent us. Bernadette and the others were of no help. Upon arrival, I’d dropped them off at the entrance to the hospital, like men do when their wives wear heels.
We were going to catch a ride back to The House with my police escort when Tina appeared and insisted on being the one to take us, though she had to transfer a bunch of stuff into her trunk to make room—loose bottles of shampoo and soda, old newspapers, and half-eaten bags of pretzels. To my surprise she drove slowly, like someone much older or, more likely, someone who didn’t know her way around town.