Free My Soul to Keep by Melanie Wells Page B

stood and slipped my feet into my flip-flops. The icebox chill in the room had purpled my toes. I wondered idly where I could score a pair of tube socks. I straightened Christine’s covers, tucking her feet under her blanket and making a mental note to myself to bring her a quilt from home if she had to stay another night.
    I checked my phone for messages. Normally I approach phone messages with a dread more appropriate for, say, facing a firing squad without a cigarette. But for once, I was crushed that there were none. I winced as I remembered the exchange I’d had with David a few hours before.
    I wanted to claim stress-induced psychosis, but I knew it wouldn’t fly. That unfortunate woman standing in front of David demanding that he justify his private behavior had been the real me—the worst me, to be sure, but the real one nonetheless. I keep thinking the other me, my better self, will wrestle the crummy one to the ground, hogtie her, and (quite literally) beat the hell out of her. But my better self, unfortunately, is a wimp and a sluggard. She’s far too lazy to be bothered and probably afraid of me to boot, familiar as she must be with my legendarily poor attitude and foul disposition. Coward.
    I wrapped myself in a thin cotton hospital blanket, sat back down in my chair, and began contemplating my future. The view from here was grim. I pictured myself living alone in some creaky house in a formerly middle-class neighborhood, one of those weird old women who smells vaguely of Avon products and talcum powder, wandering around in a sleeveless housecoat and ratty pink slippers. The scene was vivid and depressing: the lunchroom-lady arms, the wiry apricot hair flat on one side, an inch of gray at the roots. A weedy yard full of skinny cats and pet raccoons. I shut my eyes and tried not to sink completely into full-on despair.
    “Dylan?”
    I looked up. Maria stood there in pink hospital scrubs, name tag clipped to her shirt, stethoscope draped around her neck. She’d aged ten years since Saturday. She gripped a pen and hugged a clipboard to her chest like she needed something to hold.
    “Tell me you’re not working today,” I said.
    She shot me a look. “I can’t sit home and do nothing. I’ll lose my mind. What’s left of it.”
    She walked over to Christine’s bed and picked up the chart.
    “Did Liz call you?” I asked.
    “Martinez told me.”
    “How did he know?”
    She shrugged. “I didn’t ask.” She looked at Christine. “How’s she been?”
    “She slept through the night.”
    Maria put her clipboard down and flipped open Christine’s chart. “Asthma?” She looked up at me.
    “Liz said she doesn’t have asthma.”
    She paged through the chart. “Lindsay. He’s good.”
    “Who’s that?”
    “The pediatrician who admitted her. Lucky break he was on call last night. If there were a better answer, he would have found it.” She scanned the pages. “He hasn’t ordered any more tests. Albuterol and Singulair …”
    “What are those?”
    “Asthma drugs.” She slapped the chart shut and hooked it back on to the foot of the bed. She picked up her clipboard, crossed her arms again, and shivered. “Something’s just wrong.”
    “What do you think she has?”
    “I’m not talking about Christine.” She looked around the room. “It’s the whole thing. Everything’s off center.”
    I cringed and felt goose bumps come up on my arms as the chill in the room intensified. “Liz said the same thing last night.”
    She grimaced. “It’s like we fell into a wormhole or something. Like it all fell apart at once.”
    I thought maybe if I stayed real still and held my breath, Maria wouldn’t notice my constant proximity to the wormhole and dump me as a friend.
    “It’s like we stepped into some other universe. Someplace I don’t want to be.”
    I nodded. I didn’t want to be here either. “Any word from Enrique today?”
    She shook her head. “They’re canvassing, asking about