She knew what the best course of action was. She should say patient. Should stay in the hospital where the insanities he provoked in her would be curbed, where she wouldn’t be able to act on them. She would say patient.
Then she opened her mouth. “As if you don’t already know.”
She barely held back a curse, almost took the sullen words back.
She didn’t. She was mesmerized by his watchfulness, by seeing it evaporate in a flare of…something. Triumph?
She had no idea. It was exhausting enough trying to read her own thoughts and reactions. She wasn’t up to fathoming his. She only hoped he’d say something superior and smirking. It might trip a fuse that would make her retreat from the abyss of stupidity and self-destructiveness, do what sense and survival were yelling for her to do. Remain here, remain a patient to him, nothing more.
“It’ll be an honor to have you as my guest, Cybele.” Distress brimmed as the intensity in his eyes drained, leaving them as gentle as his voice. It was almost spilling over when that arrogance she’d prayed for coated his face. “It’s a good thing you didn’t say ‘patient,’ though. I would have overruled you again.”
She bristled. “Now look here-”
He smoothly cut across her offense. “I would have, because I built this center to be a teaching hospital, and if you stay, there is no way I can fairly stop the doctors and students from having constant access to you, to study your intriguing neurological condition.”
Seemed not only did no one say no to him, no one ever won an argument with him, either. He’d given her the one reason that would send her rocketing out of this hospital like a cartoon character with a thick trail of white exhaust clouds in her wake.
No way would she be poked and prodded by med students and doctors-in-training. In the life that felt like a half-remembered documentary of someone else’s, she’d been both, then the boss of a bunch of the latter. She knew how nothing-starting with patients’ comfort, privacy, even basic human rights-stood in the way of acquiring their coveted-above-all experience.
She sighed. “You always get what you want, don’t you?”
“No. Not always.”
The tormented look that seized his face arrested her in midbreath. Was this about…her? Was she something he wanted and couldn’t get?
No. She just knew what she felt for him had always been only on her side. On his, there’d been nothing inappropriate. He’d never given her reason to believe the feelings were mutual.
This…despondency was probably about failing to save Mel. That had to be the one thing he’d wanted most. And he hadn’t gotten it.
She swallowed the ground glass that seemed to fill her throat. “I-I think I’ll take a nap now.”
He inhaled, nodded. “Yes, you do that.”
He started to turn away, stopped, his eyes focusing far in the distance. He seemed to be thinking terrible things.
A heart-thudding moment later, without looking back again, he muttered, “Mel’s funeral is this afternoon.” She gasped. She’d somehow never thought of that part. He looked back at her then, face gripped with urgency, eyes storming with entreaty. “You should know.”
She gave a difficult nod. “Thanks for telling me.”
“Don’t thank me. I’m not sure I should have.”
“Why? You don’t think I can handle it?”
“You seem to be handling everything so well, I’m wondering if this isn’t the calm before the storm.”
“You think I’ll collapse into a jibbering mess somewhere down the road?”
“You’ve been through so much. I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“I can’t predict the future. But I’m as stable as can be now. I-I want to go. I have to.”
“You don’t have to do anything, Cybele. Mel wouldn’t have wanted you to go through the added trauma.”
So Mel had cared for her? Wanted the best for her?
She inhaled, shook her head. “I’m coming. You’re not going to play the not-neurologically-stable-enough card, are you?”
His eyes almost drilled a crater of conflicted emotions between her own. “You should be okay. If you do everything I say.”
“And what is that?”
“Rest now. Attend the funeral in a wheelchair. And leave when I say. No arguments.”
She hadn’t the energy to do more than close her eyelids in consent. He hesitated, then walked back to her, took her elbow, guided her back to the bed. She sagged down on it.
He, too, dropped down, to his haunches. Heartbeats shook her frame as he took one numb foot after the other, slid off slippers that felt as if they were made of hot iron. He rose, touched her shoulder, didn’t need to apply force. She collapsed like water in a fountain with its pressure lost. He scooped up her legs, swung them over the bed, swept the cotton cover over her, stood back and murmured, “Rest.”
Without another look, he turned and crossed the room as if he’d been hit with a fast-forward button.
The moment the door clicked shut, shudders overtook her.
Rest? He really thought she could? After what he’d just done? Before she had to attend her dead husband’s funeral?
She ached. For him, because of him, because she breathed, with guilt, with lack of guilt.
She could only hope that the funeral, the closure ritual, might open up the locked, pitch-black cells in her mind.
Maybe then she’d get answers. And absolution.
Five
She didn’t rest.
Four hours of tossing in bed later, at the entry of a genial brunette bearing a black skirt suit and its accessories, Cybele staggered up feeling worse than when she’d woken from her coma.
She winced a smile of thanks at the woman and insisted she didn’t need help dressing. Her fiberglass arm cast was quite light and she could move her shoulder and elbow joints well enough to get into the front-fastening jacket and blouse.
After the woman left, she stood staring at the clothes Rodrigo had provided for her. To attend the funeral of the husband she didn’t remember. Didn’t want to remember.
She didn’t need help dressing. She needed help destressing.
No chance of that. Only thing to do was dress the part, walk in and out of this. Or rather, get wheeled in and out.
In minutes she was staring at her reflection in the full-wall mirror in the state-of-the-art, white and gray bathroom.
Black wool suit, white silk blouse, two-inch black leather shoes. All designer items. All made as if for her.