They open the door to room #14 and find it covered in darkness—
“Don’t let her come in here,” I call out to David from the bathroom.
David finds me on the tiled floor of the cramped bathroom, curled in the fetal position.
“What the fuck—what are you doing?…” he asks, smiling.
My eyes dart up with a look similar to that of a wounded animal.
The three bright white bulbs above the sink overwhelm the tiny room, and I get that awful ball in the pit of my stomach like I’m a helpless child stuck in a nightmare; the pain is unbearable and the rough smudge in my sight prevents my eyes from staying open; the blurry, angelic light when they do open, the world gone silent, my head heavy to lift; the poison coursing through my veins causes more and more quick, lucid hallucinations the faster my heart beats, and my heart was beating overtime now that Lizzy was in the hotel room. David hovers over me in an attempt to get a look in my eyes, his face distorting, his eyes shrinking to small black pebbles, his nose a nub and his mouth a thin black line – I wince and shove him away, unable to speak.
“Jesus—” he’s mortified, backing away.
“No…police,” I squeeze out. Breath. “Need…” breath, handing a crumpled piece of paper to David. He reads it:
“‘Adreno’-‘feenol’-‘barbitol’?”
I nod.
“Where do I get that?”
“Hos-hospital.”
“Good, here,” he leans in to help me up, his face passing through the blurry layers until it’s close enough to be clearly defined. There’s maggots falling out of his nose and roaches scurrying from hair. I shriek and cower; he backs away, equally as startled. The hallucinations cause my heart to beat faster, and my heart beating faster causes more hallucinations.
“No hospital…” my eyes roll up into the back of my skull, then fall back “...the police…someone poisoned…me…need you…to restart…heart will…” and my mind melts to mush, my thoughts unintelligible as I mutter my last word, “...stop.”
THIS COULD BE BAD
“Chris!”
David startles him by rushing against the door as soon as he’s through.
“What’d I do?” he asks, a modest yet guilty expression on his face.
“I called a cab,” David says, dazed; he’s more recalling his previous action to himself than informing Chris, who’s sufficiently confused. There’s a wild, unfamiliar look in David’s eyes and he can hear a tiny, murmuring voice coming from the bathroom floor; if he listened close, he would be able to tell that the voice was saying:
“I hope the people in the ground will understand.”
“What’s your brother doing in there?” he asks, concern slowly setting in.
“Um…this could be bad,” David tells himself; the others hear it.
Chris is worried; his thinking is often discernible just from his expression. He tucks his blonde hair behind his ear. Lizzy had been sitting silently on the bed, face covered by her hair, but she pushes it behind her ears in a motion identical to Chris’. She had been thinking Uncle Sandwich was acting like a spazy-schizo – something he did every so often.
“What’s wrong now?” she asks.
A moment absent all noise.
Chris just inside the door…
David beside Chris and next to Lizzy…
Lizzy on the bed, hands in her lap…
“This is what we do. Chris,” David is in gear and no longer lacking forward momentum; he turns to Chris, “you need to go to the hospital. A cab’s already on its way. I need to stay with my brother—I need to get a defibulator. I need to stay incase his heart…” he looks at Lizzy and decides not to say it. Back to Chris, “You go—hey, speak with that nurse you used to see—”
“Brenda?” Chris asks, shrugging as he tries to remember the name.
“Whatever. We need a very specific drug—we need it now.”
He checks his watch.
“Wait, wha—how?” Chris tries to ask.
“Find a way. And you,” he turns to Lizzy and meets her mournful gaze. “Oh sweetie, I’m sorry, sweetie,” he uses his soothing voice, hastily sitting next to her, sloppily caressing the back of her hair. She usually hates the patronizing manner of this but, unlike when he normally does it to make up for bad news, this time it’s off, too rapid and uncontrolled; for the first time, she can feel a lack of “heart in the touch” (something Sadie had been teaching her, dealing with massage). It’s vacant. “You can’t be here for this, sweetie. I need you…” he hates himself, “...to go with Chris. Your job—” David thinks a moment. “I need you to be brave, sweetie. Your job’s just to be brave.”
David hands Chris the crumpled piece of paper his brother had been clutching.
“The second you get this,” he tells Chris, pointing to the drug on the list, “you give it to Lizzy and,” he turns to Lizzy, “you take the cab back here as fast as you can. You don’t talk to anyone. You don’t stop, nothing. No one.”
David takes the money from his wallet, shoving the bills into Chris’ chest and letting them fall as he quickly bends to face Lizzy at her height.
“Sweetie, look at me.”
Lizzy’s eyes are focused but finding it hard to look into her father’s eyes.
“I love you. Okay?” She nods. “And everything will be just fine. Okay?” She nods. “But I need you to be super brave today. Okay?” She nods.
“Can you,” he shoots Chris a glance, “accomplish this for me?”
“Yes,” Chris nods, and David gets a level of sincerity from him that’s seldom (if ever) been used before.
“This is gonna work. We’re gonna be fine. Gimme kiss,” he kisses Lizzy as Chris pulls back the front curtain.
A cab is parked across four spots, waiting in front of their room.
MAN WITH THE PLAN
Chris gives the cab driver a $20 to use his cell phone for a quick internet search of the drug.
“Adreno-phenyl-barbitol,” he skims, “is a blocker of ‘nok’…a ‘nok-i’…a ‘no-ki’—”
“Nociceptor,” the cabbie corrects him without much distraction from driving.
Chris looks at him a moment, then returns to reading:
“It’s most commonly used…” and perks up with information, “...to prevent fatal poisoning by certain slower-acting psychotropic compounds that would otherwise result in cardiac arrest or the meltdown of central and peripheral nervous system functions.”
Lizzy looks at him.
“Wha’s that mean?” her brow is scrunched.
“I think it means…” and Chris thinks a moment, concerned, “...we should hurry.”
The cab pulls along the front of the hospital. Chris thanks the driver, handing over two hundred dollars. “You pull up over there,” Chris points behind them, “and keep it runnin’ until I come back out. You keep this child right here, safe. You do this until I come back and there’ll be another two hundred.”
The cab driver gives him a quizzical look and Chris quickly answers a question before it’s asked—“She’s my niece. Impor’int family business.”
The cabbie nods, not quite believing but not especially caring, either.
Before Chris enters the hospital, he turns and finds Lizzy following him.
“No pickle, you get back in that cab—”
“You’re gonna need my help, duh,” the resilient girl lets him know.
“Not a chance, pickle.”
“You don’t have a choice, I’m coming. Adreno-phenyl-barbitol – two is better than one.”
As he reaches for her, she slips from his grasp and runs into the hospital.
Chris tells the cabbie that the girl will be back out in a minute and the two hundred still stands if he just waits; then he enters the hospital.
“Is…Brenda?…working today?” Chris asks the large woman behind the information desk; it’s obvious he doesn’t know who he’s looking for.
“Do you have the last name, sir?” she respo
nds, unimpressed.
“I barely had the first,” Chris mumbles to himself, his back already toward the woman while his eyes frantically search the lobby for another option; he finds an answer (he’s not sure if it’s the answer) just as Lizzy tugs on his shirt. He looks down. She’s pointing up. He looks up.
“Cardiac – cardiology,” she reads. “Third floor.”
Chris pats Lizzy’s back, moving them both aside as the lobby flows with people.
“You are too smart, pickles. There or the emergency room?”
“Split up,” she demands rather than suggests.
“Not a chance, pickle.”
“Two is better than one,” she reminds him, watching Chris waver as she’s caught him off-guard with logic. As he realizes how obvious it is that he can’t let a ten year old child run around a hospital, stealing medicine, Lizzy’s out and ducking into a passing group of people before he can stop her.
“Wait—no, get back—fuck,” he curses; a nearby elderly woman rolling her wheelchair toward the exit aims a dirty, albeit fleeting and unsure, look at him.
Lizzy’s out of sight almost instantly.
EMERGENCY ROOM
Chris hits a button and the doors open to the chaos of a busy Emergency Room. Two nurses and a doctor rush a gurney past, on which lays a disheveled man, his lips blue, his frightened eyes staring up at the ceiling as his body shakes.
A third nurse follows behind reading from a chart.
“—found him on the shoreline two miles north.” And just as they round a corner, Chris catches the hint of two useful words: “—overdose—hallucinating—” He moves to round the corner behind the gurney when a nurse steps in front of him.
“Excuse me, sir, you can’t be in here,” she warns, stopping him from moving forward.
“No, he’s—they just took my…” she reads Chris’ face and recognizes the look of a lying male (she’s got a fourteen year old son and an ex-husband) “...son—friend, I mean, a friend of my son’s.” It’s obvious he’s not getting past her; he decides another route, checking her nametag. “Look, Miss…Walker-Stevens—what’s your first name?”
“My first name?” she gives him a surprised look of interest. “Well, around here people call by my nickname, which is ‘get-back-behind-those-fucking-doors-you-just-walked-through-and-stop-wasting-my-time.’” Her voice is stern and Chris finds himself simultaneously alarmed and attracted to her as he backs a step (“That’s an…) and backs a step (“...unnecessarily long…”) and backs a step (“...nickname, lots of hyphens…”) until he’s successfully against the closed doors; with a step forward, he takes his eyes off Bethany Walker-Stevens to hit the button to the door just in time to catch an idea through an open passageway.
She watches him until he’s gone.
THE DEATH OF MR. RIDLEY
David goes to the front desk of the motel but stops himself before entering as he needs to ask the clerk for a defibulator or the location of one.
If they ask why, he would just stand there staring dumbfounded.
He paces outside the motel lobby, rehearsing and planning a lie:
“I—we, my friends…we need a defibulator…because…he has heart trouble. One of them. And, we need to check and make sure it works—or, we need to keep it in our room. In case it happens suddenly. ‘Why doesn’t he go to the hospital?’ Good question, because…he’s…agoraphobic.”
David checks his watch and decides he doesn’t have time to do better. When he walks inside the small front office, a scruffy older man in a tight, dirty white tee-shirt stares at him through thick glasses, holding the backpack-like defibulator upright and balancing on the counter top.
“We don’t usually ask no questions ‘bout it,” he says.
David approaches with a confused look because of the statement; then realizes the man already has the defibulator in his hands; then realizes the man must have heard him rehearsing the lie outside; then, David blushes.
“You break it, you bought that expensive fucker, though,” the man says.
David doesn’t quite believe it and nods, carefully putting both hands on the plastic casing and removing it from under the grasp of the older man.
The older man’s turned his attention elsewhere before David’s even left.
His brother is dead when he returns to room #14.
“No-no-no Jesus Christ,” he’s at his side, opening the casing of the defibulator and bringing the paddles out. He hits several familiar buttons; as a teacher, he had to be certified in CPR and proper resuscitation – not by state law but because his brother told him so. The power level of the defibulator blinks yellow; the level has to raise seven bars to red, which should take precisely one minute, fourteen seconds.
David’s brother is crouched in the corner like a wounded animal, and David lays him flat, pulling off his shirt and checking the carotid artery before manually pumping his chest.
“One-two-three-come on, come on-seven-eight-nine,” David counts.
He plugs his brother’s nose and breathes into his mouth, into his mouth; checks for a pulse and does it all again. The defibulator beeps. He clutches the paddles so tight the plastic makes a crinkling noise. BOOOM-BOOM – his brother’s chest pumps up, then back down. David checks for a pulse. Nothing. He does it all again from the start. “One-two-three-come on, come on, come on,” then breaths in his mouth. The defibulator beeps. BOOOM-BOOM – his brother’s chest pumps up, then back down…
His brother comes back, first with a gasp and then short breaths.
His heart rate is low but beating steadily.
David falls back over his knees, his ass hitting the ground, and he backs a little until his head is against the sink. He wipes the tears from his terrified face.
His brother’s eyes open and he whispers, “Mans el-Ray Pasquale.”
Then he’s unconscious again.
CARDIOLOGY
Lizzy wanders the hallway, following it around each corner of the large rectangular floor. There’s a nurses’ station at the center and, even though she sticks to the outer edge, an older woman corners her.
Lizzy braces for a scolding.
“Hello, young lady,” the woman’s voice is kind. “Are you lost?”
“Uhhhhhh,” Lizzy’s shock is apparent only in that first second, “yes, ma’am. My daddy’s around here somewhere and I’m—I’m scared,” she says, shaking her head in an attempt to believe her own story, “and-and-and I was outside…playing and I scraped my knee,” she bends, rubbing her knee, “and it’s bleeding and I came up here to find my daddy but I don’t think he’s on this floor.”
“Aw, sweetie. Do you know what area he’s in?”
“No.”
The woman turns to head back to the station.
“We’ll find him, sugar. What’s his name?”
“His name?…” her eyes explore nearby details “...is daddy, that’s what I call him…but his real name is…Pot—I mean Pat. Pat…Ruffles…kin. Don’t leave me,” she runs to the side of the nurse.
“Oh deary, I’m just gon’ do a quick search on my little computer. What was his name?”
“Pat Ruffleskin.”
Lizzy peers over the counter to the nurses’ station.
“Come on now,” the woman huffs, scowling at the computer.
“Do you have any band-aids?” Lizzy asks in an attempt to distract her.
“Yeah sugar, we got plenty band-aids. Lemme find your daddy and then I’ll fix you up peachy keen—hey Cassandra,” she calls over to an approaching nurse, “this p.o.s. computer ain’t finding this poor lil’ girl’s daddy.”
“Ask her if he was just admitted?” Nurse Cassandra ignores Lizzy even as she stands directly opposite her at the counter.
“Sugar, was he just admitted or discharged or anything?”
The exchange goes on for a while, with Lizzy trying to give a successful reason as to why he might not be in the computer (“Yeah, he was just admitted.”) but finding each answer recei
ves the opposite result (“Oh, then he should definitely be in the computer.”); finally, the older woman announces Lizzy’s name on the loudspeaker (“Would the parents of Lucy Ruffleskin come to the third floor nurses’ station…”) and then she takes her to a back room that is tiny yet astonishingly tall – several feet taller than Lizzy can reach – and the shelves nearly touch the ceiling.
“Wow! There’s so much stuff in here. Super-cool!” she exclaims, ignoring how silly she sounds. “How do you find whatcha need?”
“We just know, sugar. Think each wall is alphabetized from bottom-to-top, least it used to be. Prolly all fudged up by know. Plop yerself in that seat.”
Lizzy sits on a rolly-chair, spinning in half-circles, her eyes squinting at the abundance of medical supplies; many of the labels involve far more consonants than any English word has the right to have.
“What kind of band-aid do you want, sugar?” the older woman asks, her back to Lizzy as she bends, huffing, stretching her entire left side towards a bottom shelf and boxes of children’s band-aids. “Looks like we got mermaids or princesses.”
“You don’t have any…plain purple?”
“Nope. Mermaids. Princesses.”
Lizzy tries as hard as she can to think of a way to get the woman to leave her in the back room alone. Maybe if she just waited long enough—except that the woman would find no scratch on her knee and, sooner or later, she’d wise up to the fact that no one named Pat Ruffleskin was in the hospital.
“Princess is fine. Can I put it on myself?” she asks, her hands clutching the bottom of the rolly chair, doofy smile plastered across her face, her knees swinging right and left as if she were barely able to contain her excitement.
Nervousness is overwhelming her, excitement.
I’m a fantastic liar, she realizes.
Why don’t I do it more often?
“Sure, sugar. Let me clean it first.”
“Ummmm…” she’s about to say her daddy doesn’t let strangers touch her when the woman puts a stop to it.
“Ain’t no excuses, darlin’. You don’t want it infected and I got some ointment over here.” She catches worry on Lizzy’s face. “Oh ha ha, don’t you worry, sugar. It won’t hurt, I promise.”
“Okay,” Lizzy whimpers nervously, the woman close enough for her scent (a potent combination of jasmine and mint) to overwhelm.