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Little Wards
A "Guest Quarters" Story
By
Cherie Priest
 In my ears there's a noise that may or may not be real. It sounds like a large washing machine with a heavy load, running through a cycle in another room. On another wing. In another ward, perhaps.
My nurse's name was Deskie, and I wondered what that's short for. She drew two vials of blood before patting my shoulder and telling me to lie. Down again.
My inner arm, look. A watery bruise the size of a dime.
The other girl in the other bed had a family that visited a lot.
They were here this morning, a mother and father, with a child who must have been the patient's sister. She might have been her twin, they looked so much alike - straight black hair in braids thicker than ropes, with skin like cinnamon in milk. They are India Indians, dots-not-feathers, as my uncle would put it. My mother would tell him he's rude, but he wouldn't mean anything nasty by it.
The other girl was sick. I don't know what she had, and no one else seemed to know either. Her parents didn't speak a lot of English, and the sister had to do all the talking for them. She's gone to school here and so she's learned how to talk to us, though she had a hard time turning the doctor lingo into her family's language.
She talked to me—right in front of her parents, because they didn't understand. This is what she said, in a pretty accent that was soft around the edges:
"For four years it's been this, one hospital and then another one. We live in them like foster children, four months here, six months there. It's my sister's fault. It's her fault because her blood is bad, and it gets infected all the time. It's some kind of cancer. I don't think she's ever going to get well."
She leaned in close to me, sitting on the edge of my bed. Her voice sounded like wet petals feel. Like satin and damp.
"If that's the way it is - if it's always going to be like this, for years more - and none of us get to live because she takes so long to die ... then I wish she'd hurry up. I want to go to school and stay there. I want to finish a grade and come back to the same friends when summer's over. We can do it here, in America. I don't care. Or we can do it back in Chennai. As long as we can stay. She doesn't have to come with us. We'll bury her someplace. We'll put her in the ground like roots."
Over her shoulder then, she looked to make sure her parents weren't listening, or weren't watching. "You can help her. You can help us."
I played with the hem of the sheet that was tucked up around my chest. "What do you mean? I can't even help myself."
"What's wrong with you? Something wrong with your blood, too?"
"Yeah. But it's not so bad. They're going to send me home next week, that's what the doctor said. I hope so," I added. "I'm tired of this. I'm tired of the needles. The things they put in my veins make me sick. I'm tired of throwing up."
She nodded, as if she understood something I didn't. "You're getting better. My sister isn't." Over her shoulder, again. Then facing me. Breathing down my neck, as if she was zooming in to look at a spot on my ear. "She has something that might help you. It's not helping her, anyway. After my parents leave tonight, you should take it. It might be important. It might help you. It might save you."
"From what?" I asked.
She scared me, and I didn't know why. She wasn't so different from me, really. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt like I would, if I were out of bed. She was my age, and had brown eyes like I do.
I knew she was different, though. She smelled sweet to me, and spicy. A kitchen in a poor part of town. A scarf left on a grandmother's dressing table, beside the powder and perfume. Beside a space heater.
"There's a spirit that comes for girls like you, and girls like my sister. Her name is Acheri, and she comes at night. She brings mercy," she specified too quick. She said it like she knew she should hurry up and put it in, or else I'd be even more afraid. "But she hasn't come for my sister because she can't. My sister is wearing a charm that keeps her away. Do you see the red string, tied around her neck? It's a silk cord. It keeps her safe. But it could be dangerous for you, because if the spirit comes for my sister and gets angry - because she can't take her - she might turn to you, instead. She might decide, 'I can't take the one I came for, but I won't leave with empty hands.'"
I looked over at the sleeping girl on the bed a few feet away. She was wearing a red cord, just as her sister said. Her parents were fretting back and forth between themselves using words I didn't understand.
"Or she might not. There's no telling." She shrugged. "You'll have to take it from her after our parents leave, though. They won't let you do it, if they see you. If you're careful, she won't wake up. She hardly ever wakes up anymore."
After they left I lay there for a long time and watched the other girl in the bed. She barely breathed, barely lived. Supper came around in divided trays and bland flavors, and I pushed it around with a fork, wishing for pizza.
I ran my hand over my head and felt the beginnings of hair there, for the first time in months. It made me smile, like something good was happening—like it was proof that I wouldn't be in the ward forever. I could still grow. I was not dying anymore, from the inside out.
And over in the bed next to mine, the Indian girl struggled to breathe.
My eyes strayed to the cord around her neck. It was just simple enough to miss being called a necklace; it was a small silk choker made of a braid. How important could it be? I could have bought one just like it from a store in the mall, or made one myself if I had the right thread. It could have been a long friendship bracelet, or twisted from a stash of needlepoint leftovers.
It could have been nothing at all. But that wasn't what her sister had said.
After supper the lights went down and we got one more checking up from the nurse on duty. The lights went down, but there was plenty to see by—the ugly white fluorescents in the hallway cast a gleam that melted through the open door to cast long, sharp shadows around the beds.
The noise of the hospital was carried over the intercoms, and along the linoleum, echoing from room to room, wing to wing. It was never quiet. Not really.
On that particular night there were fewer doctors being called, though; I heard fewer footsteps of soft-shoed nurses, and less murmuring from the other kids in the children's ward. I could have almost slept.
But every time I rolled my head to the side and saw the girl—whose name I didn't even know—every time I saw her, the bright red cord on her neck lay there so easy. I could reach over and take it in five seconds. I could wear it myself, under my hospital gown. It wasn't held with a clasp or a latch, but it stayed in place with a bow, tied like a sneaker.
I could pull the blanket up to my chin and no one would be the wiser.
I must have fallen asleep. *** Something in the hall moved like a heavy shadow. It didn't want to be seen, but it had a place to be. Its feet made soft patting sounds against the floor, smooth and quick.
I sat up in bed.
I squinted my eyes close, as if that could make me listen harder.
I tried to get some feel for the shape of it, for its sneaky-quick presence out there in the hall. It didn't move in a two-foot rhythm, but not in four-footed time, either. Not like a dog or a cat, and not like a nurse or a doctor. How could I not remember the Indian girl, and her furtive whispers about a ghost? But this was not a ghost—it couldn't be. Ghosts don't have feet that patter along the hospital halls, and they don't cast shadows—if it was a shadow I saw go flitting past the door across the way.
It must have been a shadow. It didn't have enough shape to be anything else. But what on earth throws a shadow like that?
I saw it jagged and small, growing larger as it came in closer to our doorway. I saw it rising up close on crooked legs and reaching up for the door frame with twisted hands.
I felt my heart go crazy; I didn't even need to look at the machine beside my bed. I could hear the beating in my ears, and I didn't need to see it on the screen—where the soft clamp on my finger shared every secret my body told it.
At night the room was always streaked with shadows that fall long into the room, cut with ribbons of light where the door isn't closed, and broken up when people walk past. But not that night. Not then and there, when the room went black except for that awful outline of something broken and walking.
It stopped at the edge of the room, just beyond the place where I could have seen it clearly. I clung to the covers and thought of the button beside the bed—but I was too afraid to reach for it. I was too afraid to twitch or breathe, and my head was going light.
It whispered.
I didn't understand it. If those were words, I didn't know their meaning. But it sounded like a swear.
There was a scuffling, shuddering cough or lunge.
The door closed, all the way. All the light went out, and I couldn't even see the shadow of the ragged shape. There was nothing but the monitor beeps and the so-soft drips of things in bags and tubes.
It whispered again, and it was closer. Over at the girl's bed it hovered and complained. And stopped. It quit the sullen whisper and the horrible pacing.
I knew, even though I couldn't see it. I knew it was looking at me—just like the Indian girl said. It couldn't take the girl in the bed, so it was looking at me.
"No," I told it, in a whisper no louder than the one it used. "No. I'm not dying anymore. No."
It heard me, but it was thinking. One greedy footstep at a time, but slower as it came to me. I wasn't the one it wanted. But it wouldn't leave empty-handed.
And not five feet away—not two or three steps—there was a girl who was practically dead but practically couldn't die. And only a jump or two farther, there was something else with a tattered shadow and a voice that whispered like oil on rocks. Closer, it whispered, breathing that aggravated string of sounds.
I didn't know what to do. Or rather, I did know what to do, and it was awful. But I did it anyway.
A beeping alarm sounded when the soft, tiny finger clamp was jerked free from my hand. And I hit the panic button, like the nurse called it. And I pulled the covers back up over my head and I shivered, even though the ward was a little bit warm. I breathed there, under the covers and felt my own air steaming up my face. And I couldn't see through the covers, not at all.
But beneath them my little tent went yellow and I knew the lights were on, even though I hadn't heard the door open.
I heard the patter of nurse feet, and someone call out for a doctor. They didn't come to me though, they didn't come for me. They haven't come for me, because I don't need them.
And now, they swarm around the bed of the dead girl who is finally dead; and even though they reach with their paddles and needles and machines, I don't think they can bring her back because I know she's already been taken somewhere else.
It could've been me, but it wasn't.
I did it for her sister, and for her parents, and I did it for me, too, because it wouldn't have been right for me to go with the Acheri. It wouldn't have been right for me to go when I'm not hardly sick anymore, and I'm almost ready to go home.
It was selfish. I can't make myself too sad about it, though. Beneath the covers, where the hospital people think I'm crying for the girl in the next bed, I am holding the broken red cord around my throat. I am tying it there with my fingers, even though they are shaking. I think I will never take it off. END
 Cherie Priest is the author of Four and Twenty Blackbirds, available now from Tor. Two more books will follow soon, including Wings to the Kingdom, which debuts in October of 2006. She also has a werewolf/steamboat/disaster novella upcoming this fall through Subterranean Press, called The Wreck of the Mary Byrd. Although Cherie now lives in Seattle, WA, she was born in Tampa, Florida. In 2002 she graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with an M.A. in Rhetoric/Professional writing; and she also has a B.A. from Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, TN—but apparently SAU doesn't like for her to talk about it much.
Story by Cherie Priest, Copyright 2006
Story image by Rory Clark, Stopped Motion Photography, Copyright 2006 |
