Beautiful Chaos

Visiting Hours

The next day, Aunt Grace figured out where Mercy was hiding her coffee ice cream in the icebox. The day after that, Aunt Mercy found out Grace had been eating it, and pitched a three-alarm fit. The day after the day after that, I played Scrabble with the Sisters’ nonsense words all afternoon, until I was so beaten down I didn’t challenge YOUBET as a single word, COTTON as a verb, SKUNKED as an adjective, and IFFEN as the long form of if.

I was done.

There was one person who wasn’t there, though. A person who smelled like copper and salt and red-eye gravy. A person who might have played the tiles to spell DURNED-FOOL— while she was the farthest thing from one. A person who could single-handedly map out most of the Caster Tunnels in the South.

A few days later, I couldn’t take it anymore. So when Lena insisted on going to see Aunt Prue, I didn’t refuse. The truth was, I wanted to see her. I wasn’t sure what Aunt Prue was going to be like. Would she look like she was sleeping—the way she did when she fell asleep on the sofa? Or would she look the way she had in the ambulance? There was no way to tell, and I felt guilty and scared.

More than anything, I didn’t want to feel alone.

County Care was a rehab facility—a cross between a nursing home and a place where you went after a hard-core ATV accident. Or when you flipped a dirt bike, crashed a truck, got sideswiped by a big rig. Some folks thought you were lucky if that happened, since you could make a lot of money if the right truck hit you. Or you could end up dead. Or both, as in the case of Deacon Harrigan, who ended up with the nicest headstone in town, while his wife and kids got all new siding and an in-ground trampoline, and started eating out at Applebee’s in Summerville five nights a week. Carlton Eaton told Mrs. Lincoln, who told Link, who told me. The checks came every month straight from the capitol building over in Columbia, rain or shine. That’s what you got when the trash truck ran you down, anyway.

Walking inside County Care didn’t make me feel like Aunt Prue was lucky, though. Even the strange, sudden quiet and the hospital-strength air conditioning didn’t make me feel better. The whole place smelled like something sickly sweet, almost powdery. Something bad trying to smell like something good. Even worse, the lobby, the hallways, and the bumpy cottage cheese ceiling were painted Gatlin peach. Sort of like a whole tub of Thousand Island dressing poured over a salad bar’s worth of cottage cheese and slapped up on the ceiling.

Maybe French dressing.

Lena was trying to cheer me up.

Yeah? Either way I feel like puking.

It’s okay, Ethan. Maybe it won’t be so bad once we see her.

What if it’s worse?

It was worse, about ten feet farther in. Bobby Murphy looked up from the desk. Last time I’d seen him, he’d been on the basketball team with me, hassling me for getting dumped at that dance by Ethan-Loving turned Ethan-Hating Emily Asher. I let him do it, too. He had been varsity point guard three years running, and nobody messed with him. Now Bobby was sitting behind the reception desk in a peach-colored orderly’s uniform, and he didn’t look so tough. He also didn’t look all that happy to see me. Probably didn’t help that his laminated nametag said BOOBY.

“Hey, Bobby. Thought you were over at Summerville Community College.”

“Ethan Wate. Here you are, an’ here I am. Don’t know which one a us I feel sorrier for.” His eyes flickered over to Lena, but he didn’t say hello. Talk was talk, and I was sure he was up on all the latest, even way out here at County Care, where half the folks couldn’t make a sound.

I tried to laugh, but it came out more like a cough, and the silence swept back in between us.

“Yeah. ’Bout time you showed up, anyway. Your Aunt Prudence has been askin’ for you.” He grinned, shoving a clipboard across the counter.

“Really?” I froze up for a minute, though I should have known better.

“Nah. Just pullin’ your leg. Here, give me your John Hancock and you can head on down to the garden.”

“Garden?” I handed him back the clipboard.

“Sure. Out back in the residential wing. Where we grow all the good vegetables.” He smiled, and I remembered him back in the locker room. Man up, Wate. Letting a freshman skirt push you around? You’re makin’ us all look bad.

Lena leaned over the counter. “That line ever get old, Booby?”

“Not as old as that one.” He stood up out of his chair. “How about, ‘I’ll show you mine, you show me yours’?” He stared at the place where Lena’s shirt dove into a V at her chest. My hand clenched into a fist.

I could see her hair curling around her shoulders as she leaned even closer to him. “I’m thinking now would be a great time for you to stop talking.”

Bobby opened and shut his mouth like he was a catfish stuck wriggling on the bottom of dried-up Lake Moultrie. He didn’t say a word.

“That’s more like it.” Lena smiled and picked up our visitor badges from the counter.

“So long, Bobby,” I said as we headed out back.

The farther we made it down the hall, the sweeter the air and the thicker the smell. I looked in the doors of the rooms we passed, each one like some kind of messed-up Norman Rockwell painting—where only crappy things were happening, frozen into little snapshots of pathetic life.

An old man sat in a hospital bed, his head wrapped in white bandages that made it appear gigantic and surreal. He looked like some kind of alien, flipping a little yo-yo on a metal track, back and forth. A woman sat in the chair across from him, stitching something inside a wood hoop. Probably part of some needlepoint he would never see. She didn’t look up, and I didn’t slow down.

A teenage boy lay in another bed, his hand moving across some paper on top of a fake wood-grain tray table. He was staring off into space, drooling, but his hand kept writing and writing, as if it couldn’t help itself. The pen didn’t seem to be moving across the paper; it was more like the letters were writing themselves. Maybe every word he’d ever written was in that one big pile of letters, each one stacked up on top of the next. Maybe it was his whole life story. Maybe it was his masterpiece. Who knew? Who cared? Not Bobby Murphy.

I resisted the urge to go take the paper and try to decode it.

Motorcycle accident?

Probably. I don’t want to think about it, L.

Lena squeezed my hand, and I tried not to remember her, barefoot and helmetless, on the back of John Breed’s Harley.

I know it was stupid.

I pulled her away from that door.

A little girl at the end of the hall had a roomful of folks, but it was the saddest birthday party I’d ever seen. She had a Stop & Steal cake and a table covered with cups of what looked like cranberry juice, covered with plastic wrap. That was about it. The cake had a number five on it, and the family was singing. The matches weren’t lit.

Probably can’t light them in here, Ethan.

What kind of crappy birthday is that?

The thick sweetness of the air grew worse, and I glanced through an open doorway that led into some kind of hallway kitchen. Cases of Ensure, liquid food, were piled from floor to ceiling. That was the smell—the food that wasn’t food. For these lives that weren’t lives.

For my Aunt Prue, who had slipped away into the vast unknown when she was supposed to be asleep in her bed. My Aunt Prue, who had charted unknown Caster Tunnels with the precision of Amma working on one of her crossword puzzles.

It was all too horrible to be real. But it was. All of it was happening, and not in some Tunnel where space and time was different than in the Mortal world. This was happening in Greater Gatlin County. It was happening in my own hometown, to my own family.

I didn’t know if I could face it. I didn’t want to see Aunt Prue this way. I didn’t want to remember her like this.

Sad doorways and an open can of Ensure, in a puke-peach hall.

I almost turned around, and I would have—but then I reached the other side of the doorway, and the smell of the air changed. We were there. I knew because the doorway was open, and the particular scent of the Sisters crept out. Rose water and lavender, from those little bundles the Sisters kept in their drawers. It was distinctive, that smell, the one I hadn’t paid much attention to all the times I listened to their stories.

“Ethan.” Lena stepped in front of me. I could hear the distant hum of machines beyond her, in the room.

“Come on.” I stepped toward her, but she put her hands on my shoulders.

“You know, she might not be—there.”

I tried to listen, but I was distracted by the sounds of the unknown machines, doing unknown things to my entirely known aunt.

“What are you talking about? Of course she’s there. It says her name, right there on the door.” Which it did, on the kind of whiteboard you’d find in a college dorm, in faded black dry-erase marker.

STATHAM, PRUDENCE.

“I know her body is there. But even if she’s there, your Aunt Prue, with all the things that make her your Aunt Prue—she might not be there.”

I knew what she was saying, even if I didn’t want to. Which, a thousand times more than anything, I didn’t.

I put my hand on the door. “Are you saying you can tell? The way Link could smell her blood and hear her heart? Would you be able to—find her?”

“Find what? Her soul?”

“Is that something a Natural can do?” I could hear the hope in my voice.

“I don’t know.” Lena looked like she was about to cry. “I’m not sure. I feel like there’s something I’m supposed to do. But I don’t know what.”

She looked away, down to the other end of the hall. I could see a watery streak work its way down the side of her jaw.

“You’re not supposed to know, L. It’s not your fault. This whole thing is my fault. Abraham came looking for me.”

“He didn’t come for you. He came for John.” She didn’t say it, but I heard the rest. Because of me. Because of my Claiming. She changed the subject before I had a chance to say anything. “I asked Uncle Macon what happens to people when they’re in a coma.”

I held my breath, in spite of all the things I did or didn’t believe. “And?”

She shrugged. “He wasn’t sure. But Casters believe the spirit can leave the body under certain circumstances, like Traveling. Uncle M described it as a kind of freedom, like being a Sheer.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad, I guess.” I thought back to the teenage boy, mindlessly writing, and the elderly man with the yo-yo. They weren’t Traveling. They weren’t Sheers. They were stuck in the most Mortal of all conditions. Trapped in broken-down bodies.

No matter what, I couldn’t handle that. Not for Aunt Prue. Especially not for my Aunt Prue.

Without another word, I stepped past Lena and into my aunt’s room.

My Aunt Prudence was the smallest person in the world. As she liked to put it, she bent with every passing year and shrunk with every passing husband—and so she barely came up to my chest, even if she could stand up straight in her thick-soled Red Cross shoes.

But lying there, smack in the middle of that big hospital bed, with every possible kind of tube snaking in and out of her, Aunt Prue looked even smaller. She barely made a dent in the mattress. Slits of light broke through the plastic blinds on one side of her room, painting bars across her motionless face and body. The combined effect looked like a prison hospital ward. I couldn’t look at her face. Not at first.

I took a step closer to her bed. I could see the monitors, even if I didn’t know what they were for. Things were beeping, lines were moving. There was only one chair in the room, peach-upholstered and hard as a rock, with a second, empty bed next to it. After what I’d seen in the other rooms, the bed looked like a waiting trap. I wondered which variety of broken-down person would be caught in there the next time I came to see Aunt Prue.

“She’s stable. You don’t need to worry. Her body’s comfortable. She’s just not with us right now.” A nurse was pulling shut the door behind her. I couldn’t see her face, but a shock of dark hair twisted out from beneath her ponytail. “I’ll leave you for a minute, if you’d like. Prudence hasn’t had a visitor since yesterday. I’m sure it would be good for her to spend some time with you.”

The nurse’s voice was comforting, even familiar, but before I could get a good look at her, the door clicked shut. I saw a vase of fresh flowers on the table next to my aunt’s bed. Verbena. They looked like the flowers Amma had resorted to growing inside. “Summer Blaze,” that’s what she called them. “Red as fire itself.”

On a hunch, I walked over to the window and pulled up the blinds. Light came flooding in, and the prison disappeared. There was a thick line of white salt lining the edge of the glass.

“Amma. She must have come yesterday while we were with Aunt Grace and Aunt Mercy.” I smiled to myself, shaking my head. “I’m surprised she only left salt.”

“Actually—” Lena pulled a mysterious-looking burlap bundle, tied with twine, from under Aunt Prue’s pillow. She smelled it and made a face. “Well, it’s not lavender.”

“I’m sure it’s for protection.”

Lena pulled the chair closer to the bed. “I’m glad. I’d be scared, lying here all by myself. It’s too quiet.” She reached for Aunt Prue’s hand, hesitating. The IV was taped across her knuckles.

Spotted roses, I thought. Those hands should be holding a hymnal, or a hand of gin rummy. A cat’s leash or a map.

I tried to shake the slow-sinking wrongness. “It’s okay.”

“I’m not sure—”

“I think you can hold her hand, L.”

Lena took Aunt Prue’s tiny hand in both of her own. “She looks peaceful, like she’s sleeping. Look at her face.”

I couldn’t. I reached out for her, awkwardly, and let my hand grab what I guess was her toe, where the lump of her foot poked the blanket up like a pup tent.

Ethan, you don’t have to be afraid.

I’m not afraid, L.

You think I don’t know how it feels?

How what feels?

To worry if someone I love is going to die.

I looked at her hovering over my aunt like some kind of Caster nurse.

I do worry, L. All the time.

I know, Ethan.

Marian. My dad. Amma. Who’s next?

I looked at Lena.

I worry about you.

Ethan don’t—

Let me worry about you.

“Ethan, please.” There it was. The talking. The talking that came when the Kelting became too personal. It was one step back from thinking, and one step away from changing the subject entirely.

I didn’t let it drop. “I do, L. From the second I wake up until I fall asleep, and then in my dreams every second in between.”

“Ethan. Look at her.”

Lena moved next to me and put her hand on mine, until both of us were touching the tiny bandaged hand that belonged to Aunt Prue. “Look at her eyes.”

I did.

She looked different. Not happy, not sad. Her eyes were milky, unfocused. She looked gone, like the nurse said.

“Aunt Prue isn’t like the others. I bet she’s far away exploring, like she always wanted to. Maybe she’s finishing her map of the Tunnels right now.” Lena kissed me on the cheek and stood up. “I’m going to see if there’s somewhere to get a drink. Do you want something? Maybe they have chocolate milk.”

I knew what she was really doing. Giving me time alone with my aunt. But I didn’t tell her that, or that I couldn’t stand the taste of chocolate milk anymore. “I’m okay.”

“Let me know if you need me.” She pulled the door closed behind her.

Once Lena left, I didn’t know what to do. I stared at Aunt Prue lying in the hospital bed with tubes threaded in and out of her skin. I lifted her hand gently in mine, careful not to disturb her IV. I didn’t want to hurt her. I was pretty sure she could still feel pain. I mean, she wasn’t dead—that’s what I kept reminding myself.

I remembered hearing somewhere that you’re supposed to talk to people in comas because they can hear you. I tried to think of something to tell her. But the same words kept playing over and over in my mind.

I’m sorry. It’s my fault.

Because it was true. And the weight of it—the guilt—was so heavy I could feel it bearing down on me all the time.

I hoped Lena was right. I hoped Aunt Prue was somewhere making maps or stirring up trouble. I wondered if she was with my mom. Could they find each other, wherever they were?

I was still thinking about it when I closed my eyes for a second….

I could feel Aunt Prue’s bandaged hand in mine. Only when I looked down at the bed, Aunt Prue was gone. I blinked, and the bed was gone, then the room. And I was nowhere, looking at nothing, hearing nothing.

Footsteps.

“Ethan Wate, that you?”

“Aunt Prue?”

She came shuffling out of the absolute nothingness. She was there and not there, flickering in and out of sight in her best housedress, the one with the loud flowers and the pearly-looking snaps. Her slippers were crocheted in the same rainbow of browns as Aunt Grace’s favorite afghan.

“Back so soon?” She waved the handkerchief in her curled hand. “Told you last night, I got things ta do while I’m out an’ about like this. Can’t keep runnin’ ta me every time you need the answer ta some durned question I don’t know.”

“What? I didn’t visit you last night, Aunt Prue.”

She frowned. “You tryin’ ta play tricks on a old woman?”

“What did you tell me?” I asked.

“What did you ask?” She scratched her head, and I realized with a rising panic that she was beginning to fade away.

“Are you coming back, Aunt Prue?”

“Can’t say just yet.”

“Can you come with me now?”

She shook her head. “Don’t you know? That’s up ta the Wheel a Fate.”

“What?”

“Sooner or later, it crushes us all. That’s what I told you, remember? When you asked ’bout comin’ over here. Why’re you askin’ so many questions today? I’m bone tired, an’ I need ta get me some rest.”

She was almost gone now.

“Leave me be, Ethan. Don’t ya be lookin’ ta come downside. The Wheel ain’t done with you.”

I watched as her brown crocheted slippers disappeared.

“Ethan?” I could hear Lena’s voice and feel her hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake.

My head felt heavy, and I opened my eyes slowly. Bright light poured in from the unblinded window. I had fallen asleep in the chair next to Aunt Prue, the way I used to fall asleep on my mom’s chair, waiting for her to finish up in the archive. I looked down, and Aunt Prue was lying on her bed, milky eyes open as if nothing had happened. I dropped her hand.

I must have looked spooked, because Lena looked worried. “Ethan, what is it?”

“I—I saw Aunt Prue. I talked to her.”

“While you were asleep?”

I nodded. “Yeah. But it didn’t feel like a dream. And she wasn’t surprised to see me. I had already been there.”

“What are you talking about?” Lena was watching me carefully now.

“Last night. She said I came to see her. Only I don’t remember.” It was becoming more common, and more frustrating. I was forgetting things all the time now.

Before Lena could say anything, the nurse rapped on the door, opening it just a crack.

“I’m sorry, but visiting hours are over. You’ll have to let your aunt have some rest now, Ethan.”

She sounded friendly, but the message was clear. We were out the door and into the empty hall before my heart had time to stop pounding.

On the way out, Lena realized she had left her bag in Aunt Prue’s room. While I waited for her to get it, I walked through the hallway slowly, stopping at a doorway. I couldn’t help it. The boy in the room was about my age, and for a minute I found myself wondering what it would be like to be in his place. He was still sitting up at the table, and his hand was still writing. I looked up and down the hall, then slipped into his room.

“Hey, man. Just passing through.”

I sat down on the edge of the chair in front of him. His eyes didn’t even flicker in my direction, and his hand didn’t stop moving. Over and over, he had written a hole into his paper, even into the sheet underneath.

I tugged on the paper, and it moved, an inch or so.

The hand stopped. I looked at his eyes.

Still nothing.

I tugged the paper again. “Come on. You write. I’ll read. I want to hear it, whatever you have to say. Your masterpiece.”

The hand began to move. I pulled the paper, a millimeter at a time, trying to match the speed of the writing.

this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends on the eighteenth moon the eighteenth moon the eighteenth moon this is the way the world

The hand stopped, a thin line of drool spilling across the pen and the paper.

“I got it. I hear you, man. The Eighteenth Moon. I’ll figure it out.”

The hand began to write again, and this time I let the words write over themselves until the message was lost once again.

“Thanks,” I said quietly. I looked past him, to where his name was written in dry-erase marker on the little whiteboard that was not and would never be on the door of anyone’s dorm room.

“Thanks, John.”