Somebody Else's Music(135)

The Venetian blinds on the windows were pulled all the way up. There was light coming through the glass, but not much. Emma thought it might still be raining. She could see herself drifting out to sea with the waves bobbing her gently among the dolphins and nothing to think about, never again. She’d always been of the opinion that thinking was highly overrated. Now she didn’t seem to be able to do anything but think, and it made her want to cry.

She fell asleep and came awake again and fell asleep again. She was aware of coming and going, and of George and the nurses and other people hovering right over her head. The nurses said soothing things. George promised that the girls would be coming in tonight to see her. The doctors wrote on the clipboard attached to the end of her bed. She wondered where Peggy was, if they had arrested her, if they even knew she was the one with that thing who was going around attacking people. How could that have happened? It wasn’t normal people who did things like that. It was oddballs, misfits, outcasts. It was people like Betsy. That was why you had to be so careful about them. They were dangerous. People like Peggy, who had been a cheerleader and student council president, were people you could count on.

She fell asleep again, and woke up again, and fell asleep again. This time, when she opened her eyes, she saw a nurse sitting in the chair where George had been, looking through a magazine. Emma tried to turn on her side and found that it was almost impossible. Her whole front was taped up and she was far too weak to move her bulk, which for the first time seemed to her to be embarrassingly large.

She turned her head in the nurse’s direction and said, “Are you there?”

The nurse looked up from what she was reading and frowned. She got out of her chair and walked over to the bed and looked down. “My God,” she said, “you’re up. I’ll get the doctor.”

“No,” Emma said. “Not yet. The doctor was just in here a little while ago.”

“Not in the last half hour.”

“I’m sorry. I must have fallen asleep.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” the nurse said. “You should have fallen asleep. You’re supposed to be getting some rest. Let me get the doctor.”

“No,” Emma said. “Not yet. Please. I want to—ask you things.”

“What things?”

“About—about Peggy. First Peggy Smith. Do they know—”

“The woman who tried to kill you? They arrested her maybe an hour ago. They found her with you in the store, sitting off on the side with something or other in her hand. A razor, I think. They brought her here because she seemed to be in shock. I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. I’m going to call the doctor.”

“I don’t want the doctor,” Emma said.

The nurse picked up the call buzzer and depressed the button three long times. “Dr. Bardrieau will kill me if I upset you.”

“Mark Bardrieau was in my class in high school.”

“Was he?”

“He was a geek, though, I remember that. He was small and short and looked a lot younger than the other kids and he wore big black glasses that were really thick and George and his friends used to steal them the year George was a senior and Mark must have been a freshman. Do you think it’s God? About the geeks, I mean. Do you think it’s God who makes it so the geeks all get rich and successful after high school and the rest of us don’t? Except some of us do, don’t we? Meg Ryan was a prom princess. I read about it.”

“You’re making yourself out of breath.”

A doctor came in, but only the resident, a young woman who looked raw. Emma lay still while she did what she was going to do—take her pulse, take her temperature, make a note on the chart. The resident was not anybody she knew. There was a time when Emma would have known almost everybody who worked at this hospital, but these days a lot of new people moved in all the time. They came from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Wilmington and even Rochester, New York. Everybody moved around restless. Nobody ever just stayed still. The resident came back to the head of the bed and said, “Do you want to sit up?”

“No,” Emma told her.

“Do you want some juice?”

“No,” Emma said again. Then she thought that she ought to have said “no, thank you.”

“I’ll have the nurse here get you some juice, just in case you want it later,” the resident said. “She’ll water it down a little. You ought to try to take fluids as soon as you can.”

She bustled out the way she had bustled in, and Emma shook her head. “Did I nearly die? Is that why everybody is acting so strangely?”