She looked utterly different from the sister I’d last seen. She had short, spiky hair now, bleached a bright yellow, instead of the shoulder-length brown I’d always known. She had little hoop earrings going up the sides of both ears. She had no makeup except for bright red lipstick. She had a ring in her nose like a cow.

But of course, I knew her at once. Even after all this time.

“Nice nose ring,” I said.

“So—can I come in?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t sure I was up for it.

“Just a quick minute,” she promised.

“I’m super tired.”

“I just want to say hi.” There was a nervous energy to the way she stood, as if she were standing on the edge of some tall building’s flat roof rather than just in my doorway.

I felt that same energy—a little bit of that same stomach-dropping feeling. Plus, so many different things all at once—surprised, uncertain, annoyed. She could have called, right? She could have let me know she was coming, at least. Did I really need some weird stealth attack from her right now? She’d had three years to get in touch, and she’d waited until I literally couldn’t escape. It felt like too much. My instinct was to send her away.

But I couldn’t.

Part of me wanted her to stay. A bigger part than I’d realized.

“Fine,” I said, and I kept my eyes on her face as she walked closer.

She set down her bag as she stepped to the side of my bed.

“Hi,” she said.

“Dad said you were in town.”

She nodded.

“Have you seen him?” I asked.

She nodded again.

“Have you seen Mom?”

She shook her head.

“Are you going to? Before you go back?”

She gave a half-smile. “I’m gathering up my resolve.”

I didn’t know what to say. I really didn’t even know where to start. It was exactly as bizarre to see her as it was not bizarre at all. Of course she was here. She was my big sister. And yet it was like seeing an afterimage come back to life.

“You look better,” she said.

“That’s not what Mom says.”

“She’s kind of a bitch sometimes, though.”

She wasn’t wrong. “True enough,” I said.

“And a liar,” Kitty added.

I frowned. “Not sure about that.”

Kit went for a subject change: “How are you?”

“I’m not sure there are words in the world that can answer that question.”

She shrugged, like, Fair enough, and tried a new angle. “How do you feel?”

“Physically? Or emotionally?”

“Either. Both.”

But I didn’t want to share any of that with her. Talking about things that tender required a closeness she had forfeited a long time ago. “What’s with the suitcase?” I asked.

“I was thinking I might come stay here in the evenings. With you. You know: when Mom’s not around.”

I eyed the recliner chair. It was supposed to flatten into a bed, but I couldn’t imagine how.

I shook my head. “No.”

“No what?”

“No, you shouldn’t stay here.”

“Don’t you want company?”

“Not yours.”

She frowned a little. “Are you mad at me?”

I looked away. “It’s just weird to see you. My life is weird enough right now.”

“I want to help.”

“Yeah, but you’re not helping. You’re making things worse.”

She didn’t answer. It was clear that hadn’t occurred to her.

“Want to know who I’ve been staying with?” she asked then, brightly, even chattily, and before I could say no, she went on, “Fat Benjamin. From high school. Do you remember him?”

This was a classic Kitty trick: pretending things were fine until everybody forgot they weren’t. She was trying to lure me in.

I didn’t answer.

“Remember how he used to give me rides home in that Jetta with the broken back windows with Hefty bags duct-taped over them?”

“Did you just call this guy ‘Fat Benjamin’?”

“Everybody calls him that.”

“Seems kind of mean.”

“He doesn’t mind. He’s the cute kind of fat. Anyway, he had a huge thing for me, but I never gave him the time of day because he was so doughy and had that mullet-y haircut? Well, he’s not exactly fat anymore—more ‘chubby.’ He’s cute now! He got cuter! Or maybe my standards went down. Anyway, I’m staying at his place, on the sofa bed, but I can tell he still likes me, and I’m sure I’ll wind up sleeping with him before long if I don’t get out of there.”

I didn’t meet her gaze. Was this her argument for why she should be here? So she didn’t accidentally screw a guy called Fat Benjamin?

She shrugged. “I wish I could stay here instead.”

“Don’t ask me again.”

“I’m not asking! I just said, I wish.”

“We can’t all get our wishes.”

“I just think it would be a bad idea to sleep with him.”

“Then don’t.”

She shrugged. “I’m terrible at saying no.”

I met her eyes. “Well,” I said. “I’m not.”

She was not going to suddenly reappear in my life after three years and make me talk about boys, of all things. She could not just show up like this and expect to pick up in the same na?ve place we’d left off.

“Anyway,” I said. “I’m pretty tired, so…”

“That’s fine,” Kit said, rejecting the hint. “I brought some magazines.”

I shook my head. “You need to go.”

She stepped a little closer. “I’d really like to stay.”

But I just shook my head. And then I turned my face away until she gave up and left.

Eight

THE NEXT MORNING, I learned something new about my hospital room: It had great acoustics.

This was after all the morning rituals: sponge bath, tooth-brushing into a bedpan, medicines, catheter change, bowel evacuation, breakfast of oatmeal and Jell-O, and OT with Priya for three breathless rounds of getting in and out of the chair and two failed toe-wiggling attempts.

My door was right next to the nurse’s station. For the first time, I noticed I could hear voices talking about medicine and medical orders. I could hear someone typing on a keyboard. Someone was making a run to Starbucks. An orderly tried to flirt with one of the nurses, but she shut him right down.

Then I heard Nina’s voice, a little louder than the others. “I need to talk to you about this schedule.”

A man with a slightly nasal voice replied, “Okay, shoot.”

“You gave Ian to this patient.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve made several notes in the chart that she should have someone else.”

“I saw those notes.”

“And you just ignored them?”

“Look, Ian’s wide open right now.”

“Yeah. There’s a reason for that.”

“Are you saying Ian is incompetent to work with this patient?”

“I’m saying he’s not a good match for her. And I think you know it. I’m wondering if you might be kind of hoping it’ll blow up in everybody’s face.”

“What are you saying, Nina?”

“Exactly what you think I’m saying, Myles.”

Sheesh. This guy Myles was a wiener.

“You think I’m trying to bring Ian down? You think I’m sacrificing this patient’s well-being so we can all watch him self-destruct?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t have to. The man’s a time bomb. He’s going to self-destruct all on his own.”

Nina wasn’t having it. “Not with my patient, he isn’t. She’s right on the edge. She’d just gotten engaged. She just lost everything. You need to pair her with somebody kind and encouraging—April, or even Rob.”

“I’m not redoing the entire schedule for one patient.”

Nina’s voice tightened. “She needs someone else.”

“Everyone else is full.”

“So switch somebody out.”

But Myles—some kind of supervisor, maybe—apparently didn’t like being told what to do. In the silence that followed, I could hear him bristle. “It’s not your call. It’s my call. And if you make trouble for me, I promise I’ll make trouble for you. The schedule stays as it is.”

He must have walked off then, because after a few seconds of silence, several nurses, including Nina, started talking trash about him, using words like “jealous” and “control freak” and “little Napoleon.” I might even have found it funny, if I could find anything funny anymore. If it weren’t so clear that the patient she’d been talking about—the one who had just lost everything that mattered—was me.

That’s when I heard a Scottish voice out at the station. “I tried to switch, if it’s any consolation. I talked to Myles yesterday.”

“You didn’t try hard enough.”

“He never gives me anything I want.”

“You never used to let him push you around like that.”

“He never used to be the boss.”

Nina’s voice was all business. “You’d better be nice to her, Ian.”

Ian’s voice was, too. “Nice doesn’t make you strong.”

Two seconds later, the door to my room pushed open.

“Time for PT, Maggie Jacobsen,” Ian said, not meeting my eye. He wheeled my chair close to the bed.

“It’s Margaret,” I said. When he didn’t respond, I said, “I go by Margaret.”

“You don’t look like a Margaret,” he said. He was dead serious.

“That’s not really your call, though, is it?”

“Okay, Maggie. Whatever you say.”

He grabbed the transfer board and lowered the bed, as well as the chair arm, and then he arranged the board as a little bridge between the two.

Then he turned and walked toward the door.

Wait—what? Where was he going? Had I made him mad with the Maggie thing? Was he really a time bomb? Was he about to self-destruct right now? “Aren’t you going to help me?”