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Her dad looks worse today than yesterday. Asleep, his mouth slack, she can see the bruises coming up along his cheeks and forehead. Hewill be loopy from the drugs when he wakes. She backs out of the room, and the nurse on duty intercepts her.
“Good morning. You must be Halley.”
“I am.”
“Like the comet,” the nurse says. “I’m Tonia. The physical therapists were in to see him, so I gave him a shot from his pump. OT will come later today. You might want to be around for that.”
“OT?”
“Occupational therapy. They’ll talk about whether he can go home or if he needs inpatient rehab. Do you have stairs?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Well, they may decide to try IPR for a week, until he can get around without issue.”
“How long will he have the device on his leg?”
“Awhile. Six to eight weeks. But don’t worry, he’s not going anywhere until we get him loaded up with medicine. He needs IV antibiotics and painkillers. He’ll probably be here for a week, maybe ten days, before you’ll have to decide about taking him home or going to rehab.”
A small part of Halley breathes a sigh of relief. “I feel bad to say it, but good. I don’t know that I can handle him like this. He looks so ... hurt.”
“He is hurt. That was a bad fall. But he was chattering away this morning, telling me how he named you after Halley’s Comet.”
“Tell me he skipped the rest?”
“Nope.” She grins. “Halley for the comet, Leia for the princess inStar Wars. It’s funny, you look a little like Carrie Fisher.”
“I look like my mother,” she says, feeling that new spark of rage surge up in her body. She grew up with the inside-joke names and a face that belonged to a woman who is practically a stranger. That is how much Halley remembers of her mom.
The nurse must sense the change in her emotions, because she pats her on the arm.
“Don’t worry. The drugs can make people gregarious. It can also make them very distraught. So if he starts hallucinating, don’t be too shocked. It happens on these high doses of intravenous morphine. We’ll get him weaned off as quickly as possible. Any other questions?”
Halley shakes her head. “I’m sure I’ll have plenty the second you walk away. This is the first time we’ve had any sort of major hospitalizations, outside of me knocking out a tooth when I was eight.”
“Well, he adores you, so you being here is going to get him right as rain in no time.”
Yeah. He adores me so much he lied about how my mother died.
She doesn’t say that aloud.
He’s still out cold, so Halley busies herself with a group text with her friends back in DC. After running out of their town house like her hair was on fire yesterday, she owes them a little explanation. She met Stephanie and Arlo back in the days when she and Theo were an unshakable unit, and they did all the things two couples with lots in common did. They are worried about her, about how quickly she left, but there was a party last night at the Corcoran, and everyone’s dragging around feeling sick. Happily, it seems they did not find out about her fall from grace at work.
Which makes her wonder, albeit briefly, how Theo heard so quickly. Why was he on the website to see the press release, anyway? She’d been so shocked she hadn’t asked.
She assures Stephanie and Arlo things are fine with her, and that her dad is going to be okay soon. She doesn’t confide in them about anything else, not yet. This feels too big to share with anyone until she has a better idea of what’s actually going on.
Anyway, how do you tell a group text that your sister murdered your mother?
She does call Theo for the promised check-in, and is relieved when his voicemail comes on. She leaves a dutiful message and tells him she’ll be in touch when she knows more. That should suffice for a few days. She can’t deal with all this at once.
Then she stews. Frets. Probes her black-hole memory banks, frustrating herself that she can’t find the answers there.
Her dad comes to an hour later. He stares at her blankly before saying “You’re real, aren’t you?”
“Um ... yes? As real as I can be.”
He huffs out a relieved breath, eyes drifting to the ceiling. “I thought you were a ghost.”
