Limbo's Child (38 page)

Oh, who was she kidding? She was just a kid. She desperately tried to shake the whole idea from her head but somehow couldn’t. She quickly peeked over the bin of stuffed animals to see if he was still there. He was. She quickly ducked back down. She couldn’t be certain, but she thought she saw him look her way.

Her whole life right now was such a disaster it seemed wretchedly unfair to be reminded of the dreaded minefield that was every adolescent girl’s social life. In any fair universe, losing a parent should exempt you from such mundane worries like boys for at least a week but obviously not. She decided the whole thing was a silly distraction. She had far more important things to think about now anyway – like living with Amanda or helping Yo-yo. She would just stay here and wait for Amanda to return. Yes…that’s exactly what she would do: hide behind a bin of teddy bears…from a boy she didn’t even know. “Ugh,” she groaned at her own lameness. Then she took another quick peek. He did look really good. Then she shot back down.

“Well this is stupid!” she thought to herself. Then she thought of her mother and Amanda and about what utterly confident, self-assured women they both are…were. They certainly wouldn’t go through life hiding behind bins of fuzzy animals would they? No, they would not. She suddenly thought, “I know what they wouldn’t do, but what
would
they do?” She really didn’t have an answer. What did she
want
to do? Well, she didn’t want to stay hidden behind a bunch of plush animals, that’s for sure. She wasn’t going to do anything rash, she decided, she wasn’t even going to go up and talk to him. She just wanted to not feel like a child for once. So, she was going to just walk around the gift shop like a normal person and if she just
happened
to find herself looking at cards near where he was, that was just fine too. She made up her mind, however her legs didn’t move but remained stubbornly crouched. She sighed, concentrated and
then
she shot up, a little too quickly perhaps. She pulled the robe tighter around her and stood up – straight and proud for a moment – then she saw him and she cringed a little, but at least she didn’t go back down.

He wasn’t looking her way but was still intent on selecting a card. Good. Now what? She couldn’t just go walk over there, not directly. Instead, she had to nonchalantly wander around the store, and THEN find her way to the card section to avoid suspicion. So where to start? She started by picking over the teddy bears, but she had already done that and there was only so much to pick over. So
then
where? She went to go look at the refrigerated cooler full of flowers. This required her to turn her back to him for a moment, but she pulled her hair in front of and behind her ears a few times and managed to turn just enough to keep him in sight. Great. Flowers seem satisfactory, now over to the glass shelves of knick-knacks: snow globes, key chains and shot glasses that said “Fabulous Harrisburg!” Lucy picked up one with a view of the capitol. Who buys this stuff? And in a hospital? Amanda would have said something witty about that. She put it down. She peeked back over her shoulder, still there. Take a breath, where to next?

It was interminable, but she eventually managed to work her way over to the card racks by way of the teddy bears, the floral case, the souvenirs, the candy bars, the pajama racks, the toiletries, the teddy bears again and then the magazine selection. She was there. Deep breath. She was less than two feet away from him, but she couldn’t take a direct look at him without looking suspicious. So, she looked at his hands. They were beautiful – elegant but not at all dainty. Strong and powerful-looking, but not thick or hammy. His forearms were great too, muscular but not bulging or veiny. Good. Guys that worked out too much were vain and self-centered. She was just a few seconds into hand and arm rapture before she realized it would look pretty odd for her to stand there without looking at a card, so she grabbed one at random. She was staring directly at it as if perusing her options, but couldn’t see a thing because she was concentrating so hard on her peripheral vision. He was looking at get-well cards for grandmothers. He was getting a card for his grandmother! He was probably here to visit her too. What a sweetie.

She leaned forward a little and risked a sideward glance. His shirt read “Han shot first.” That made her smile. Her mom was a
huge
Han Solo fan. Ok, so he liked science fiction and that meant he was probably a little bit of a geek too. That was good – geeks weren’t too self-obsessed or vain, but he wasn’t
too
geeky or weird, though he did seem a bit pale. Maybe he played video games in his mom’s basement all day. She leaned in a little closer and took in a deep breath. He even smelled great. He smelled like a mix of cut grass and fresh water and good, clean earth with just a touch of campfire or barbecue. He smelled like summer. He smelled like Texas. He smelled like home. “Nope, definitely not a basement-dwelling gamer,” Lucy thought.

He probably worked outside a lot, maybe with people or animals. In a split second, she imagined they were riding a horse together. She was riding in front with one of his arms tightly around her middle while his other hand held the reins. They were galloping across a beach at sunset. Lucy put the card she was holding over her face to hide her smile. She was getting carried away with herself, she thought. Entirely unpractical and her mom would not approve.
Mom
. She turned away a little sad. She had let herself daydream a little too much. It had been fun to forget for a while, but she had to come back to earth.

She turned to her right to take one last look at him. He was gone! Somehow, he had slipped away while she was daydreaming. Darn it! She craned her neck to see if he was somewhere in the back of the store. She wasn’t certain why, but she just had to see him one last time. He wasn’t anywhere. Maybe he had left? She instantly felt a twinge of regret and turned to make a dash for the lobby to see if she could catch one last look. She didn’t get far.

“Ouch!” Lucy collided hard into the firm midsection of another person and fell backward from the jolt. When she could focus her eyes, she found she was sitting on her backside staring at a pair of vintage wingtips. She slowly scanned up the legs in black jeans that were attached to the shoes. Further up, her eyes climbed until they met a brown t-shirt that read “Han shot first.” Lucy quickly tried to look away, but inexorably her eyes were drawn back. The boy was lowering himself, crouching down until his face was just a few inches from hers, his crystal-blue eyes shimmering, his blonde hair flowing around his face, backlit by the gift shop’s track lighting. He was even more beautiful up close. Perfect skin and perfect teeth too. Great smile. It all seemed to be unfolding in slow motion until finally she realized he was talking to her.

“Um…what?” she said, shaking her head to clear it.

“I said, ‘are you ok?’ I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there. Here, let me help you up.”

It took Lucy a moment to realize he had extended his hand to her. Lucy froze. It was like her hands were stuck to the floor in glue. She let herself fantasize a little. She imagined that he was reaching for her hand asking her to dance, or maybe he was reaching down to pull her up onto the back of a white stallion. “This is silly,” she thought. Finally, she slowly reached up a hand and placed it in his. It fit
perfectly
. All at once he lifted Lucy – she felt weightless and was instantly on her feet. His hand was strong and surprisingly cold. She had a flash of him leaning over her languid, ecstatic body to…kiss her? Or was it to take a bite out of her neck? She couldn’t tell. “That was odd,” she thought. She usually didn’t go in for the whole goth-vampire-romance thing at all, but there were plenty of her friends in Texas who did, so maybe that’s where that came from. She quickly pulled her hand away.

She stood there unsure of what to say. Finally, she just looked down and pulled her hair behind her ears and said, “Um…thanks.”

He just smiled a friendly, normal smile and then said, “Here, you dropped your card, let me get that for you.” Before she could even react he had bent down and retrieved the card she had dropped. He held it for a moment and read it aloud, “Congratulations…on your twins…
step-daughter
?”

Lucy’s eyes widened. She hadn’t even noticed what the card had said.

“Boy…they got cards for every occasion don’t they?” He handed the card back to her.

“Yeah,” Lucy grabbed the card back and stared at it…sure enough, that’s what it said. She lamely tried to think of a cover story. “Yeah…I was getting it for a friend…a friend whose stepdaughter just had…
twins
?” She hadn’t meant it to come out sounding like a question. She cringed. Whether he bought it or not, she couldn’t tell. He just smiled. An awkward silence fell on them.

He took a step forward and just stood there looking at her…deeply. Why was he just standing there looking at her? His eyes were so blue and clear – so deep – she just had to take a step back to withstand their intensity. It was making her very anxious. She was frantically looking left and right for a way out, but there they were, stuck in a narrow aisle, and he was blocking the only way forward. She was starting to have crazy thoughts. Half of her wanted to run away and the other half wanted to step forward. She was having uncontrollable, wild daydreams. She was on a bluff overlooking the sea with him and running into his arms like they were in one of her mom’s favorite corset dramas. Or they were splashing around in the old swimming hole in the moonlight. Or they were dancing in a strange nightclub with all the people forming a circle around them cheering as he swept her off her feet.

“Um…I forgot the envelope,” he finally said as he glanced towards the card rack.

Lucy instantly deflated. “Oh, of course.” She rolled her eyes and awkwardly tried to squeeze herself out of the way in the narrow aisle. As the boy squeezed by he couldn’t help but brush up against her. When his arm touched hers, it felt like an electric shock. She saw a vision of him like a beautiful, wild animal, knocking foes aside to protect her. They looked like zombies. Maybe she liked the goth-vampire-romance scene more than she realized! He grabbed an envelope, and she rocked back and forth on her toes, not certain what to do. She couldn’t really leave until Amanda got back, but she didn’t want to stay here enduring endless embarrassment. She was just about to go back over to the teddy bears to scream into their tummies some more when he spoke.

“So…what you in for?”

“Huh?” she said, dumbstruck.

He looked down at the wide-eyed kitten pajamas. She instantly pulled the robe shut in horror. She had forgotten what she was wearing. He chuckled.

“I figured you must be a patient, that is, unless you make a habit of walking around gift shops in your PJs.”

“Um…no…I’m a, I’m a patient. Here. In the hospital.
This
hospital,” she said as if it wasn’t obvious she meant this hospital. She rolled her eyes at how lame she must sound. He just smiled again.

“So?” he said again.

“So?!” she replied defensively.

“So…what are you in for?” he prodded gently.

“Oh! Um…” She really didn’t want to say she was here because she had been in a car wreck. That would just bring up the whole dead mom thing again, and he probably already thought she was crazy – she didn’t want to look needy too. “Tonsils!” she eventually said. It was the first thing that popped into her head.

“Tonsils?” he replied. “I didn’t know that was an overnight stay. I thought they did that out-patient these days.”

“Did they?” Lucy thought. She didn’t know. She quickly decided to change her story. “Um…I’m sorry…I meant to say…” she tried to think. What was it that little French orphan girl had taken out of her in those stories her mother used to read to her when she was little? “Appendix…I meant to say appendix,” she finally said at last.

“Appendix?” he said a little cautiously, “Like Madeline from the stories?”

She cringed again. Why couldn’t a meteor fall out of the sky and bury her right now!

“Yeah, I’m not having my tonsils out, I’m having my appendix out. Just like Madeline from the stories.” She resisted the urge to bury her face in her hands.

“Yeah, I get those two mixed up all the time.” He smiled.

She blushed uncontrollably. Suddenly desperate to change the subject, she asked
him
a question. “So… what are you here for, since you are obviously NOT a patient like me, because I am definitely a patient. A patient who is having her appendix taken out,
not
her tonsils.” The second that sentence left her mouth she knew she must have sounded like she was an alien pretending to be human. Any moment he would expect her to take her rubber face off. He thankfully didn’t comment.

“Oh, my grandmother’s up on the fourth floor.”

“Really?” That was the same floor she was on. She tried to sound surprised and concerned, but aloof all at the same time. It sounded robotic instead.

“Yeah, I drove in this morning from Philly.” 

“Really?” she said again.

“Yeah. Nothing serious, but she’s the only family I have left.”

He was an orphan? An orphan coming to visit his sick grandmother? So he was cute
and
noble. A noble and
cute
orphan who checked up on his grandmother? What were the odds? All she could think to say was “Really?” Had she already said that? She couldn’t remember.

He laughed a little and said, “
Really
.” There was another awkward silence.