The End of Forever (14 page)

Years of dance training, coupled with anger, made her strong, and she tightened her grip. “Im making it my business for my sisters sake.”

“Has something happened to Amy?” His tone was wary.

“You mean you still remember her name? How interesting. I would have thought you’d forgotten it by now. You haven’t been to see her in ages, have you?”

“I saw all I wanted to see that day in the hospital.”

“And what did you see, Travis?”

“I saw Amy lying there like a vegetable.” He broke her hold and started up the sidewalk that encircled the bay. Erin went after him. His strides were longer, but she kept pace. “I owe you nothing, Erin. Get out of my face.”

“Well you owe Amy—you owe my sister plenty!”

He spun toward her, seizing her shoulders. His expression had become fierce. “I told you once that I’d never met anybody like Amy. She was wild and a little bit crazy, and we had a million laughs together. But when I walked into that hospital room, when I saw her lying on that bed with tubes and wires and hoses—” His voice quavered, and it surprised Erin. He dug his thumbs into her arms until it hurt.
“That
wasn’t Amy. That was some shell.”

“It
is
Amy,” Erin insisted through clenched teeth.

“It’s Amy’s body, but it’s not Amy’s—” He searched for a word. “Where
is
Amy, Erin? Where’s
that special
thing
that made her Amy? That made her
real.
Tell me.”

If her arms hadn’t been pinned, Erin would have slugged him. She hated him. Hated him for asking a question she couldn’t answer. She searched desperately for a way to hurt him. “Well, I think Amy’s really up in that hospital trying to wake up. If they don’t take her into surgery and remove her organs for medical science first.”

Travis’s grip loosened, and she saw his confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“You don’t know, do you? If you’d been up to see her, you’d know that yesterday they declared her brain dead.”

For an instant he looked as if he might be sick, and Erin stepped back, rubbing her arms and feeling confused. It was the reaction she’d wanted, wasn’t it? Hadn’t she come to hurt him? He said, “I–I didn’t know.”

“Well, with your big date with Cindy and all, I can see how it might have slipped by you.” She reached inside her jacket and extracted the teddy bear. “Here’s a little something I thought you’d like to have back,” she said, holding the bear toward him. “Maybe Cindy would want it.”

Travis knocked the bear from her hand, then turned and braced his hands on the cement railing. “You’ve got a mean mouth, Erin.”

She wanted to leave him alone to think about how he’d wronged her sister, but her feet suddenly felt like lead weights. “I told them that they weren’t going to
cut up my sister and give her away. I said that I didn’t care what their stupid tests showed,
I
wasn’t giving up on my sister.” She paused. “Like some people have.”

“You think just cause I don’t hang around Amy’s bedside that I don’t care? That I don’t hurt?”

“You have a strange way of showing it, Travis.”

“What am I? A robot?” His voice dropped, and Erin had to lean closer to catch all his words. “See, your problem is that everybody has to act exactly the same way for it to be legitimate with you.”

“That’s not true.”

When he glanced up, she could have sworn that there were tears in his eyes. But he blinked, and then there was so much shadow that she couldn’t be sure. “So you do penance by hovering over your sister and making sure everyone feels guilty for not caring the way you want them to.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Am I? If they tell you she’s dead, Erin, why can’t you believe them? Let her go. For everybody’s sake, let Amy
go
.”

She shook her head vehemently. “Doctors have been wrong before.”

“But what if they’re not wrong?”

“You’re not getting off that easily, Travis. I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to confuse me so you don’t have to admit you’re so disloyal to Amy that you’re dating before she’s—” She stopped the flood of words because she’d been cornered by them.

“Before what, Erin? Finish the sentence.”

She started to tremble. Below her, waves continued
to hit the seawall, and her head began to pound. “Drop dead,” she told him.

“This is the way I deal with it, Erin. Cindy doesn’t mean anything to me but I’m going on with the rest of my life because it helps me get through, because life is too short to waste.”

Erin felt defeated. “I should have known telling you anything about Amy was a stupid thing to do.”

“I can’t change what’s happened to Amy. And neither can you.”

They stared at one another in the moonlight. The scent of jasmine mingled with the salty smell of the bay. Travis glanced up and down the sidewalk that wound along the water. “You know, I’ve suddenly got the urge to go for a run,” he said. “At this hour you don’t have to get out of the way for other joggers. Yeah, the world’s pretty empty right now. And I’d never have figured that out if you hadn’t come by tonight, Erin. So—uh—thanks for the tip.”

Erin, silent, watched him run away. She had nothing left to say to Travis. He was a total stranger, and Erin wondered why she’d ever liked him, why she’d ever been jealous of Amy over him.

Erin picked up the stuffed bear and started to heave it out into the bay, but she stopped. The bear’s glass eyes glittered in the streetlight. “You’re such a mess, teddy bear,” she said. “I’m sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Erin cuddled the bear and started to cry. As she stared at Travis’s figure, now just a speck in the moonlight, his plea kept coming back to her.
“Let her go
,
Erin. For everybody’s sake, let Amy
go.”

“Erin, what are you doing here this late? Your parents left hours ago,” Laurie, the night nurse, said when Erin stepped through the doors of Neuro-ICU.

“Yes, I know,” Erin said. “I stopped by the house to get some things and told them that I was spending the rest of the night up here. I just want to stay with Amy.” The clock on the wall read three
A.M.
, and as Erin walked through the unit, she remembered how bizarre the machinery had seemed at first. Now her senses had become anesthetized to the blinking green lights and the rhythmic sounds she knew were sustaining life.

She stepped inside the glass-walled cubicle and set down her duffel bag at the foot of Amy’s bed. “Hello, Amy,” she said, squeezing her sisters hand and willing Amy to squeeze hers back.

“I’ll bet you’re wondering why I’m here,” Erin said. “Okay, so you’re not wondering, but I’ll tell you anyway.” The steady hiss of the ventilator was Amy’s only response.

“I miss you. You probably never thought I’d say something like that. But the house is sort of empty without you.” Erin felt her head begin to pound, and
she pressed against her temples. “Oh by the way, I trashed your room. I know you would approve. I mean, if you could have seen how they cleaned it up—even the dust bunnies were gone.”

Erin smoothed the sheet over Amy’s chest. “And I need to tell you one other thing, Amy. I—uh—went to see Travis tonight. He had a date. It was with Cindy, but I don’t think he had a very good time. We sort of argued about him dating and all. It made me so mad, Amy—I don’t know how he could do that to you. But that’s not really what I want to tell you about Travis.” She took a deep breath. “You see, Amy, all these months—even before Christmas—I’ve sort of liked him. I mean, I
really
liked him. I thought I loved him.” Erin’s palms were sweating. Why was it so hard to get the words out? “Remember the night I went to the concert with him? I wanted to go
so
bad, and then when you sort of arranged it to happen … I couldn’t believe it! But you know what? He never stopped talking about you the whole night. I guess I knew way back then that he never could have been
my
boyfriend.”

Erin watched the ragged line of her sister’s heart monitor. “I’ve thought a lot about it, Ames, and I realize that I didn’t really love
Travis
. I just wanted to love
someone
and have somebody love me the way it is in books and movies. Maybe someday it will be that way for me, but it won’t be with Travis. I hope you understand about me liking him behind your back.” Amy’s chest rose up and down in cadence with the ventilator.

“So, how will I tell you when my Mr. Right comes
along? How will I let you know if you’re never gonna wake up?” Erin placed her palm along her sister’s cheek. The skin felt dry and cool. Abruptly she stood and paced to the foot of the bed. “Look, Amy, I didn’t mean to get all mushy on you. Forget all that junk about Mr. Right. I brought some stuff for you.” She reached into the duffel bag and pulled out a book. “Remember this? Daddy used to read it to us when we were little.”

“Nursery Rhymes.”
She read the title aloud. “Remember how we’d both sit on Daddy’s lap and he would read to us? It used to get me mad because you always had a zillion dumb questions like ‘Why did the man put his wife inside a pumpkin?’ or ‘How come she cut off the tails of the poor blind mice?’ ” Erin shut her eyes and tried to block out the images from her childhood. “Geez, Amy, we never had any of the answers. I’m sorry.”

She switched on the light over the hospital bed. “Speaking of Daddy, he’s taking all of this kind of hard. And I don’t think Mom’s doing so good either. They look older, Amy. I guess we all do.”

Erin pulled a chair next to the bed and opened the book. She read a few of the nonsensical rhymes, until her eyelids got heavy and the words began to blur and run together. She realized she hadn’t slept for two days.

“Let me borrow your pink sweater, Erin. Please? I’ll be your best friend.”
Erin jerked awake. For a moment she was disoriented, then she spotted the book lying on the floor near her feet. She reached up and
flipped off the fluorescent light and listened to the steady rhythm of the ventilator.
In, out. In, out.
Across the room a child crouched bedside the machine wearing a flannel nightgown and holding a teddy bear. Her dark hair looked ruffled as if she had just woken up.

Erin shot out of the chair. Her heart raced as she stared hard into the shadows, but now she saw only the wall and a towel on the floor. She was hallucinating. Agitated, Erin fumbled with the light switch. “You ruined my pink sweater, you know. Oh you were sorry and all that, but it didn’t take away the pizza stain on the front.”

“Oh let me go! Please. I’ve had my license for a whole week, and I still haven’t had a chance to use the car.”

“How about if we go together?”

“I want to drive by myself this time. Pretty please? I’ll be your best friend.”

Erin felt herself growing angry as she spoke about the sweater. “You’re so careless, Amy. Why can’t you be more careful? Why can’t you be more responsible?” Suddenly she felt foolish. Hadn’t the doctors told her Amy was beyond hearing? Erin quelled her anger with a long sigh and took up her vigil in the bedside chair.

“I have something for us to listen to.” Erin unzipped her duffel bag and fumbled for the cassette player. “Ms. Thornton gave me a tape of the dance recital, and I thought you’d like to hear your reading. You were pretty good. Even if you were always late for
rehearsals and—” Erin stopped, because her fingers had encountered a sheaf of papers. She withdrew the packet, saw Amy’s name, and remembered the day Miss Hutton had given them to her. At the time she’d shoved them into the bag and forgotten about them.

Erin put on the tape and leafed through Amy’s old tests and quizzes and book reviews. The music from the recital sounded. Shara’s voice sang and Amy’s voice read:

Erin stopped listening to the tape and began reading one of the papers that Miss Hutton had given an A+.