Page 8

Penny

PENNY LOCKS THE CAFé’S FRONT DOOR AND FLIPS THE SIGN TO CLOSED. “Have you heard from Mom?” she calls to Ron. “It’s weird that she’s been gone all day.”

Ron is going through receipts at the cash register. “You know your mother. She’s probably off networking with coffee roasters. Or making out with a hot-air balloon pilot.”

Penny would laugh, except both of those things have actually happened. She checks her phone again, but there’s no text from her mom. Penny calls her, pressing the phone to her ear as it rings.

Voice mail.

She’ll call again in an hour.

Penny turns down Ron’s offer of a ride home, deciding she’ll walk instead. It’s the kind of summer day that makes you forget what winter feels like: late sunset, sprinklers running, the low hum of conversation as people sip drinks on their porches. The evening air is tinged with the day’s heat and the smell of milkweed, and Penny finally starts to relax. Maybe she’ll sit outside and read until her mom gets back. Or she’ll invite Naomi over, and they’ll watch the next episode of Amityville High .

But when Penny turns onto Clancy Street, all those thoughts disappear.

There’s a police car in her driveway.

Penny pauses for a moment, like a record skipping, and then her feet carry her forward. Maybe it’s not in her driveway. It could be in Mrs. Acre’s driveway next door. But as she gets closer, Penny spots two cops at her front door, knocking and ringing the doorbell.

Penny’s breathing becomes shallow. She stops at the end of her driveway, and she knows she should say something, but she can’t.

One of them finally notices her. “Penny Emberly?”

“Yes.” Penny’s voice cracks.

A petite woman with brown skin and close-cropped hair steps forward. “I’m Officer Washington, and this is Officer Erickson.”

All Penny can do is stand there. The officers glance at each other, and Officer Washington says, “Maybe you should sit down—”

“What happened?” Penny says. “Is my mom okay?”

Their silence is enough of an answer. Penny staggers back, and Officer Erickson rushes forward to grab her arm before she passes out. Penny doesn’t let him lead her to the porch. She can’t sit. She can’t stop moving.

“Where is she?” Penny asks.

“She’s alive,” Officer Washington says. “There was an accident, and she’s at the hospital. We can drive you.”

Penny shakes her head. She can’t be in a police car right now. Her limbs are moving wildly, hands running through her hair and feet shifting back and forth. She glances up at her house, their house, and all she can think about is living there by herself. No Dad, no Mom. Just Penny, alone.

Penny takes off running, leaving the officers shouting after her.

She should’ve stopped her mom from leaving the café. This is all her fault.

Time goes by in a blur. Penny runs into the street, and a car horn blares. She stumbles back, the car barely missing her. When she makes it to the hospital five minutes later, she runs through the revolving door and up to the information desk.

“Excuse me,” she says, her voice wavering, “I think my mom is here?”

“Penny Emberly,” the nurse says, and Penny’s last bit of hope that this was all a mistake disappears. “We’ve been calling your house for hours. Hold on, let me get a nurse to take you upstairs.”

Penny isn’t sure how much time passes before someone finally brings her to the fifth floor. They emerge into a hallway of off-white linoleum and blue walls, soundtracked by beeping machines and messages over intercoms. The signs on the walls read INTENSIVE CARE UNIT . Before long they’re at another desk, and the nurse is asking for Anita’s hospital room.

“Excuse me, are you Penny?”

A woman in a doctor’s coat hovers a few feet away. Her name tag reads DR. AMANDA NUSSBAUM.

Maybe Penny answers her, maybe she doesn’t. All she knows is that she’s following Dr. Nussbaum to room 505. There are more nurses running in and out, and two doctors talk in low whispers outside the room.

“I’d like to prepare you for what you’re about to see,” Dr. Nussbaum says.

Penny barely hears her. Her feet carry her over the threshold.

Her mom is in the hospital bed. She’s hooked up to a jungle of wires and tubes and plastic bags hanging from metal stands. Worst of all is the ventilator. It grinds and heaves, the mechanical lungs breathing for her. Her skin has gone pale everywhere except around the eyes, where it’s sunken and dark blue, like water at night.

If the heart monitor didn’t show peaks and valleys, Penny would be convinced she was dead.

“She’s in a coma,” Dr. Nussbaum says. “I’m so sorry, Penny.”

The gasps come on without warning. Penny can’t catch her breath; all she can do is look at her mom, waiting for her to open her eyes, to speak. Anita is never this quiet. In some weird, traumatized grasp at another possibility, Penny wonders if this isn’t her mom at all, if they’ve made a mistake. But there’s the beauty mark under her mom’s right eye, and there are the familiar smile lines around her mouth. How can a person look both familiar and strange? How can Penny’s mom be so close and yet too far away for anyone to reach her?

The nurses lead Penny out of the room. They sit her in a chair and get her a glass of water. Penny is slumped over, head between her knees. Someone produces a cool cloth, which is pressed to the back of Penny’s neck.

“My bag,” Penny manages to say, and Dr. Nussbaum understands immediately. She finds Penny’s anxiety medication, and Penny takes one, gulping water and trying to hold the pill down when her gag reflex kicks in.

After a few minutes, sedation spreads like warm water through her veins, and Penny starts breathing normally again. She still has that cracked-glass feeling in her chest, as if one wrong move will trigger another panic attack.

“What happened?” she manages to ask.

Dr. Nussbaum clears her throat. “Your mom had an accident at Elkie Lake. The end of the dock broke because apparently the planks were rotted all the way through.”

“So she fell?”

“And she hit her head on the way down. Thankfully she had a friend with her who called 911.”

Penny almost drops the cup of water. A friend? It must’ve been the person Anita was texting before she left the café. The one she was being cagey about.

“Who was it?” Penny asks, trying not to sound too desperate.

“The police said it was Helen Barrion.”

The name echoes, not making sense. Penny remembers her mom’s words from this morning:

You know how I feel about those families. They cause a lot of hurt, and they take other people down with them.

“Sorry,” Penny says, “did you say Helen Barrion ?”

“Yes. She rode with her in the ambulance, too, though your mother was already unconscious by then.”

Penny stares at the tile floor, because she’s not sure what expression is on her face. A few hours ago, her mom was giving an impassioned speech about why Penny should stay away from the Barrions. So why was Anita with Corey’s aunt?

And why wouldn’t she tell Penny?

The doctor keeps talking, saying they’re not sure what caused the coma, that the X-ray showed no signs of long-term damage to her lungs, that she could wake up any second. But Penny is only half listening. All she can see is Helen Barrion, all faded blond hair and sad eyes.

A nurse appears at Dr. Nussbaum’s side. “Doctor, we need you to sign off on some paperwork.”

“Sure thing,” Dr. Nussbaum says. “Penny, stay here, okay? I’ll be right back.”

Penny sits still for as long as she can bear it. Then she wanders back to room 505, where one nurse is typing something into the computer and the other is switching out a bag of fluids. Penny stares at the screen of the heart monitor, wishing she knew what a strong heartbeat looked like. Her mom’s seems faint. Slow.

“We put her jewelry in that dish, if you’d like to take it home,” a nurse says, pointing to a small plastic tray on the bedside table.

There’s her mom’s wedding ring, which she never takes off, as well as her favorite leather bracelet and at least six skinny bangles. And there, at the bottom of the tray, is the necklace. The black crescent moon. The charm is rough, its edges uneven, but Penny’s hand is drawn to it like a magnet.

The moment Penny touches the charm, something feels wrong. The necklace is heavier than it looks, and it’s so cold that the hairs on Penny’s arms stand straight up. She should take it home for safekeeping, but it slips through her fingers, landing on the table with a clatter.

“Are you okay, hon?” one of the nurses asks.

“I need a second,” Penny says, exiting the room as quickly as she can without running. She leans back against the wall outside her mom’s room, closing her eyes, trying desperately to make sense of all these details.

Her mom. The Barrions. The necklace. The dock “breaking” at Elkie Lake.

The Barrions cause chaos by proximity. That’s what Anita said. And then she ran off to spend the afternoon with one of them.

Penny opens her swollen eyes. Just as she’s about to go back into the hospital room, movement down the hall catches her attention.

The ICU is far from deserted. There are doctors and nurses dashing between rooms and typing notes into computers on wheeled desks. A tired elderly man pours a cup of coffee, and two people in Colts sweatshirts huddle together, speaking in low voices.

And there’s someone else, too. Someone watching Penny.

They’re standing at the other end of the long hallway. Even though Penny is sure they’re staring straight at her, she can’t quite make out their features. She blinks a few times, but the figure remains the same.

A blurred outline. A shadow of a person.

Someone says Penny’s name, and she whips around, her eyes strained and searching.

“Hey,” Naomi says, grabbing Penny’s shoulders to steady her. “I got a call from Ron, he’s on his way—”

“Naomi, there’s somebody—” Penny says, but when she turns around, the figure at the other end of the hallway is gone. Like it was never there in the first place.