In the end, I stuck with the sick children idea. I wanted to be able to sit down and have Mabel sit next to me, and I wanted to hold some bald little boy’s teeny hand and say, No matter what, it’s going to be all right. It would be a lie and it would not be a lie.
And so I did. Just before the holidays, I went back there. With Mabel.
“While I can’t say I’m enjoying reliving pulling up to this place for the thirty thousandth time, I am enjoying that you are going in there as a healthy person and coming out in an hour,” my dad said when he dropped us off.
Full circle, as they say.
“Me too,” is what I said out loud, and I think my voice wobbled a bit.
“I’ll be around the corner. In the café that is not the hospital cafeteria,” he said. “That coffee was so shitty.”
“Yeah, well, the morphine was pretty subpar as well.”
“Touché,” he said as I went into the back and clicked on Mabel’s leash.
“Ready?” I asked her. “See you soon, Dad.”
“Yes.” He looked down at his hands or at the keys in his hands. “Soon.”
Mabel jumped out and then we were in the lobby, where I showed our documents, and then we were on the elevator headed up to the twelfth floor.
The elevator dinged and Mabel and I stepped out. Those same orange chairs where Connor had told me about the girl he’d watched be killed. Back when that story was the story of someone else.
I looked out the window. The scaffolding from the construction was down, and the piles of dirt were just little anthills now. How long before you can actually tell what a building will be? Because I still had no idea what was being built here.
I walked to the nurses’ station, strung with paper candy canes and Santa’s hats, and blinking red and green lights. Everything was both cheerful and dark, the way Christmastime always seems to me. Mabel’s nails clicked along the hallway. It reminded me a little of going back to camp as a counselor. Like I could see everything I used to do and love: the gum tree, the archery targets fastened to bales of hay, the plaques in the auditorium with all our names. I was there to tell the campers what those things were and how to see them and use them now.
Really, all those things were far behind me and so were these bright fluorescent lights, the old people slumped in wheelchairs, the empty gurneys, the doors slightly ajar, where I could see people crying and holding hands.
Click click went Mabel’s nails. It was hard not to remember Verlaine’s footsteps, headed toward my room.
“Look at you!” It was Alexis, who had been there when they’d put in my central line. “Lizzie!”
My hand fluttered up to my chest. It happened practically automatically. I thought I was just another patient to her. One of so many. But maybe she remembered everyone. Maybe they all did. We were their campers.
“And who’s this?”
“This is Mabel,” I said. I was being talked to as if I were twelve. Ah, well, I suppose I would always be sick to these nurses. I couldn’t really blame them.
“Hello, Mabel!” She came out from the nurses’ station and bent down. She held out her hand for her paw, and Mabel gave it to her.
“She just got her certificate!”
“How great,” Alexis said.
“We’re just here to say hi. My job—our job—is at the children’s hospital.”
By now some of the nurses had gathered around, some I recognized, some I didn’t.
“That’s really great!”
“Doesn’t start for a few weeks, though,” I said. “After the holidays.”
“Hi, Lizzie.” Collette. She was shuffling around the counters and emptied a few cups filled with paper clips and pens and other office stuff.
Collette.
“You look great. How are you feeling?” She came out from behind the nurses’ station and squatted. But more to talk to me.
She held out her hand. On her palm was a plastic barrette. It was purple. It was shaped as a butterfly.
“I found this in your room when you were gone. I don’t know why, but I saved it. It was so sweet and it reminded me of you. And it made me think of you flying away from here. Maybe I just knew you’d be back. Or that Connor would be.”
Just the name made everyone freeze a moment, but I didn’t say anything.
I shook my head. “That’s not mine.”
“No?” she said.
I shook my head. I remembered those barrettes. Red and yellow and purple, all over that little girl’s head. “That’s Thelma’s daughter’s,” I said.
She nodded, looking down. “Well, I guess I saved it for you for some reason. Would you like it?”
“Yes,” I said. I remembered her peering around the curtain. Thelma’s daughter who was now only her father’s daughter.
Collette pressed the barrette into my palm, and we both stood up.
There was an old lady struggling to walk along the hallway. She waved slowly at us as she passed.
I put it in my pocket.
The butterfly.
“Thank you!” I told the nurses as I waved good-bye and heading back to the elevators with Mabel. I couldn’t breathe. I had thought I would visit with everyone and bring Mabel to see some of the patients, but I couldn’t stay another moment. And as I headed down from twelve, dinging past each floor, I fingered the barrette in my pocket. I’ll keep it for you, Thelma, I thought. It was a dumb thought, but it was the one I was having. Then there was a slight jolt in the elevator, as if Thelma was answering me. Or, I thought more realistically, it was some random malfunction that was going to trap me there in that hospital forever, but then—open sesame—we were in the lobby and then we were out the door fast, I don’t remember my feet even touching ground, and then we were around the corner at the café with the decent coffee. There was my father hunched over the newspaper, eating a scone, crumbs on his cable-knit sweater. He looked up at me and I felt in my pocket for the hard plastic and the raised little bumps along the bow-like wings. I have it, Thelma, I thought as I waved to my dad that we were done and ready to go home.