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ALISSA

Straight lines.

Everything in my life is a straight line.

The hallways at St. Charles General Hospital, where I work. The lines on the charts I read. The heart monitors on the sad occasion that we lose a patient.

Even my commute to the hospital is a straight shot down the Red Line. Five blocks east from my apartment in Uptown Chicago. Ten stops from Uptown to the Loop. Five more blocks west—away from Lake Michigan—and I’m there.

All straight lines. All right angles.

My mother would have loved it. She was obsessed with keeping everything in order. Her final descent into her eternal home was a straight shot down, six feet even. Her grave plot was thirty square feet, her coffin a perfect rectangle.

Straight lines, no curves.

Even the people I work with at St. Charles are straight lines. Not literally, of course, but in their personalities. They’re all perfectly nice people, for the most part, but they’re about as interesting as a bowl of paperclips.

And that’s an insult to the paperclips, if I’m being honest.

Today has been a pretty uneventful day. Time itself flows in a straight line, each tick of the clock a direct track toward our own perfectly crafted graves. The mundaneness should terrify me, but it doesn’t. Perhaps Heaven—or wherever we go once we’re done on Earth—has a little variety.

Then again, the pearly gates are always depicted as what? Straight lines. Bars of iron, perfectly vertical up and down to keep sinners from entering.

I have no one to blame but myself. I’ve conducted my own life in a straight line. Childhood to high school to university to grad school. I majored in music, to my mother’s chagrin. My instrument of choice? The flute, of course. The straightest line you can find in the orchestra.

Of course, from there, I assumed my life would continue on the straight path I envisioned. I’d audition for a few orchestras, get some callbacks, and eventually land a full-time position. Probably not with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—they’re one of the best orchestras in the country, even the world—but certainly with some regional orchestra somewhere. There are dozens of them in the US alone.

But one by one, each audition yielded a big fat nothing. The path I had laid in front of me was broken. And I panicked.

So I ditched my dream and decided to pursue nursing.

This time the line wasn’t broken.

I got my associate’s degree, passed the national exam, and became an RN. Got the job at St. Charles soon after, where I’ve worked for the last five years.

It’s…fine.

I don’t hate it.

I’m making a difference. Probably more of a difference than I’d be making as a flautist, where I’d be playing for the city elites who are only there because they’re expected to frequent places like the symphony and the opera, not because they actually enjoy the music.

And Chicago has all of the hoity-toity fine arts in spades.

I still gig on the weekends every so often. I’ll get a call from a local church for a service or even a wedding. I’m pretty good at the flute—I mean, I do have two degrees in it—and it’s nice to pick it up every so often, even if it’s just for a measly fifty bucks.

But those gigs are getting rarer and rarer. Every year the universities pump more music graduates into the talent pool, and the young ones are always willing to take a gig for less money. The classical music industry idolizes youth. The younger you are, the more likely you’ll be labeled as a prodigy, and people will take more of an interest in you.

I’m nearly thirty now. An old hag by their standards.

Of course, I threw away the dream of working full-time as a musician a long time ago. The path wasn’t straight enough for Alissa Maravilla, the woman who needs everything laid out nice and pretty before she’ll even consider dipping a toe in.

“You okay, Liss?”

I blink. Dinah, my best friend in the hospital, is poking my shoulder.

I look at her, paste a smile on my face. “Yeah, just lost in thought, I guess.”

Dinah furrows her brow. “Concerned about one of your patients?”

“No more concerned than normal.” I rub at the back of my neck. “Just… I guess I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night.”

That’s a lie. I got eight hours. The same I get every night. In bed by ten, wake up at six. Like clockwork. I don’t even have to set an alarm.

Dinah raises an eyebrow. “That’s a rarity for you, Liss. Something on your mind?”

I shake my head. “Nothing at all. I just zoned out.” I bite my lip. “You know how it can be here. It hasn’t been a particularly exciting day.”

Dinah smirks. “I’ll take that as a good thing. No one has died.”

“Well of course I’m happy about that , Di.” I roll my eyes. “But it’s just… Do you ever wonder if you chose the right path? If maybe you should have taken a risk, tried something that wasn’t a guarantee?”

“Nursing is hardly a guarantee,” Dinah says. “You know that just as well as I do. It’s a tough job on the best day. When someone comes here, it might be the worst day of their life. The worst day of their family’s life. And we do what we can to help them. It’s what we do.”

“The doctors help them,” I say. “We just fill out paperwork and give shots.”

Dinah cocks her head. “Nurses are the backbone of any hospital. Without us, the doctors wouldn’t be able to do their jobs.”

I look into Dinah’s eyes, really look into them. “When did you know that this was what you wanted to do? Like, did you receive some kind of sign, have some sort of experience?”

Dinah smiles. “You know I was born in Vietnam. Moved here with my parents when I was three.”

“Yes, I’m aware.”

“My dad picked up some bug on the journey over. It hit right as we got to the States. He ended up going to the doctor. He had to take me with him because Mom was out looking for a job. I remember seeing all the pretty ladies in nurse uniforms. They gave him medicine and made him better.”

“And you wanted to do that for other people.”

Dinah nods. “I wanted to heal. Breathe life back into people who are racked with pain. Figure out what was wrong with them and give them a magical pill to make them better, just like they did with my dad.”

“Why didn’t you become a doctor, then?”

She chuckles. “Like I said. The nurses do all the real work. When I went to the doctor with Dad, the nurses were the ones who talked to him, administered medication. The doctor just came by for two minutes and looked over all the work they did. Even at just three years old, I could tell who helped my dad the most.”

I close my eyes, take a deep breath in, and sigh it out. When I open my eyes, Dinah is still smiling. “I’m so glad you found your calling, Dinah.”

She grabs my hand, squeezes it. “And I’m glad you found yours, Liss.”

I smile at her, but I don’t mean it.

Because Dinah… She did find her calling. There’s no doubt about it.

But I’m not so sure I found mine.

* * *

Winters in Chicago are brutal. Especially when you’re close to the lake, which I am. A good blast of frosty wind will find its way through multiple layers of coats, sweaters, and scarves.

I walk five blocks east to the L, take the Red Line north to Uptown. Ten stops. I get off and start to head to my apartment.

And something stops me.

I’ve lived in this neighborhood for a few years now, and I’ve only ever seen what exists between the train stop and my apartment. A few restaurants, a coffee shop, and my hairdresser are all on the straight line I walk on the final stretch of my evening commute. There’s a CVS and a grocery store, too. Everything I need is in this small half-mile walk, and I’ve never seen fit to diverge from it.

But tonight of all nights, despite the chill of the wind and the patches of snow on the ground, I do something different.

A block before I hit the street I live on, I turn left. Then right. Another left. Another left. I zigzag for a mile or so, just seeing what’s in the area.

I pass an Indian restaurant. I love Indian, but I never have it delivered. How have I not noticed that this place is within walking distance of my apartment? I take a deep breath in and enjoy the enchanting aroma of spices coming from inside. If I didn’t already have a chicken breast thawing in my fridge for tonight’s dinner, I’d go in and order take-out.

Next I walk by a small theater, apparently about to mount a production of the musical Cabaret . Produced by a company called the Windy City Players. I love Cabaret —it’s one of my favorites. I stop by the box office and look at the show dates. I don’t buy a ticket, but I take a mental note to buy a ticket online once I get home.

And then I happen upon a shop that makes me squint.

Hathaway Haberdashery.

Haberdashery. I’ve heard that word before, but I never quite knew what it meant. I think it’s some kind of clothing store.

A blast of wind nearly knocks me off my feet. I really should go home.

But haberdashery is such a fun word. A good combination of syllables.

And I’m trying something new.

At the very least, I want to find out what a haberdashery is.

So on a whim, I walk inside.