The Graceview Patient By Caitlin Starling - 5

Adam offered me his arm; I didn’t take it. He might have meant it to be chivalrous, but it just made me feel more like an invalid than was warranted. I had him wait outside while I pulled on some leggings. I didn’t have an IV pole to drag around, and with the robe on top, I almost didn’t look like a patient.

(Who was I fooling? I didn’t look healthy, either. I was having a decent day, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t still in pain, and I hadn’t taken anything since I woke up, expecting I’d be taken care of.)

“We’re not going too far,” he assured me when I opened the door. He waved me through the small anteroom that linked my room to the hallway. Penelope was at the nurses’ station, and she glanced up as we walked by, not at me but at Adam. “We’ll be in seven-seven-two,” he said. “Come fetch Margaret if she’s needed.”

She nodded. Behind her was a bank of monitors, fully populated with heart and respiration rates.

“Who else is on this floor?” I asked.

“There’s a mix. The study doesn’t keep the floor at full census, so any available positive pressure room gets filled with transfers from other areas of the hospital that need them,” he said, steering me around a corner. The rooms were widely spaced, so mine couldn’t be the only cushy accommodations.

“People with compromised immune systems, naturally occurring or otherwise?” I glossed.

He nodded. “Exactly.”

There were a few other people in the hallway, all in scrubs. Voices came from the rooms with open doors. It was strange, to think of other patients, their lives contained in their own little cells in the hive.

“As for the other—what, five rooms?—Graceview fills them as they see fit. Usually with patients needing more specialized care. Here.” The room he took me to was only a few doors down, and had an antechamber like mine. The door to the hallway was open, and the inner door was marked with a colored flag, green with a bar across it. He didn’t reach for the handle, instead going over to a large monitor mounted on the wall above a row of paper gowns. It, like the monitors at the nurses’ station, glowed with somebody’s vital signs. He pressed a button beneath it.

A soft ringing sound filled the antechamber, and then the vital signs condensed to a window in the bottom right, and a woman’s face appeared on the screen.

“Good afternoon, Veronica,” Adam said, and her face lit up. She was maybe younger than me, propped up in her hospital bed.

From outside, that same voice from before: “Dr. Morgenstern, please page extension three-three-two. Dr. Morgenstern…”

“Adam,” said the woman. Her voice was a bare rasp. She was just this side of emaciated, the bones of her face sharp, but her skin for all its exhausted sallowness was clear. Her hair was as thin as mine, but long and braided. “And who’s that with you?”

“The newest SWAILer, ready to embark,” he said, and chuckled like the strained pun was funny. Veronica laughed, too. Then her gaze shifted—not to me, but to where I must have appeared on wherever her screen was.

“Welcome,” she said. “Is he giving you the grand tour?”

“Something like that,” I said. I still had no idea how to feel about any of this, but something about the way she looked back at us made me settle a little more. “Fayette-Gehret?” I asked, nonsensically, but it seemed wrong to assume.

She nodded. “The works,” she said. “With bonus liver damage to boot.”

Fayette-Gehret has a host of comorbidities. The way it had been explained to me, the cells in my body that already grow fast are in overdrive, as if trying to repair damage that doesn’t exist. And in the course of that repair, my body—breaks things. It can be difficult to anticipate what will break next.

My liver numbers weren’t looking so good, either.

Veronica was the first person I’d ever met in person who had FGS. My tiny world struggled against its forcible expansion. I shot Adam a look. But he was already moving toward the door. “Poke your head out when you’re through,” he said. “I imagine you two have a lot to talk about.”

And then he was gone. The antechamber grew quiet and still.

“He’s wonderful, isn’t he?” Veronica almost sighed. “Always knows what to say. How much space to give. It’s rare, finding people who get it, isn’t it?”

Sales guy , I reminded myself. But Veronica did have a point. Knowing what to say to people like us was rare, whether it was practiced or innate. My chest tightened with a tangled mix of negative reactions: anger that Adam had perfected that skill so well that he’d gotten my guard down, disgust with myself for being so desperate that I’d noticed that lack of a wedding band, and even an ugly, sharp spike of jealousy that Veronica was doing so much better than I was. Was so clearly used to being flattered and attended to by him.

“Yeah,” I heard myself say through the pounding in my ears. “Great guy.” Did he bring you imported yogurt when you were admitted? Or had he been telling the truth, that he’d been late to get to me? Maybe he’d taken her out to lunch, before she’d ever come to Graceview. Dinner, even. Somewhere to woo her, a softer touch than dangling money in front of her.

I was being an ass. I knew I was. I rubbed at my face, robe catching on my IV and reminding me that whatever I was feeling, Veronica was in the thick of it.

“Sorry,” I said. “First-day jitters, I guess. How—how is it? How has it been?”

Veronica had a hand settled against her throat. Her fingers worked at her collarbone, rolling the thin skin across it. “Bearable,” she said, after a moment’s thought. “They give you pain medication whenever you need it, which will probably be a lot at the start. Every symptom, they can help with. But then those medications have their own side effects … Eventually, it just got easier to learn how to manage.”

That sounded about right. No easy answers in life. “How long do you have left?”

“We’re just about to start rebuilding.” She smiled, but it was so tired. Briefly, I wanted nothing more than to stroke her hair, hold her hand. The jealousy fell away. It was a relief, to lose that snarling weight. Veronica wasn’t competition; she was my future. “They say maybe another month. A couple more weeks on total lockdown, though.”

I looked again at the paper gowns, the sign on the door, the monitor we were speaking through. I’d known, but it really clicked then. “Nobody but the nurses?”

“And the occasional technician, but they try to minimize that,” Veronica said. Her jaw quivered for a moment before she got hold of herself. She smiled again. This one was entirely false, but I wasn’t about to take it away from her.

I’d been a shut-in for a long time, but I still went out and got coffee sometimes. Some of my meds needed to be picked up at the pharmacy. I made regular attempts at getting out into the world. I thought I’d been ready for the isolation of this whole treatment, but now, looking at Veronica, I wasn’t so sure.

Again, I wished I could hold her hand. But I was poison to her. If I had even a hint of a cold, it could kill her.

And the same would go for me, soon enough.

“Reading anything good?” I asked, and I knew she could hear the pity and fear in my voice.

She looked away. “Not much,” she said. “On a good day I can manage a chapter. Maybe two. It can be hard to pay attention. Or remember.”

I frowned. She seemed entirely lucid, and we’d stopped by unannounced. What she was describing … it seemed impossible that both things could be true.

Maybe Adam checked on her before he came to get you. That was reasonable, wasn’t it? And there would have been no reason for him to mention it.

“Oh no,” Veronica said. “I’ve frightened you, haven’t I? It’s not so bad—I promise. And I’m already feeling so much better. I can eat whatever I want. My skin cleared up … maybe last week? It’s worth it.” This time, her smile was pleading, but true. “Stay. Please, stay. They’ll take such good care of you.”

She was so desperate. Did I notice back then? Is that why I stayed? Is that why I wrote off what came next?

“What’s going to happen to me?” I remember asking. “I—I know it’s going to hurt. I get that, and I guess some brain fog. But what’s it like ?”

Veronica thought about it, looking down at her hands. “It’s hard to describe,” she said, after a long pause. “Sometimes I—sometimes it’s simple. Easy. It’s just waiting, or sleeping, or watching the clock. They do all the hard work for you, and all you have to do is endure.”

“And other times?” I asked.

“Other times, you’re just going to want to run,” she said.

How many of us have there been?

How many people have been right where I am now? Because Veronica knew. I can see that clearly, now. She knew what was coming for me. I’m not special.

But we both tried to laugh it off. Me first, awkwardly, then her, as if to make me feel less alone. “Like a kid trying to duck out of the pediatrician’s office before her shots,” she added, trying to minimize. I latched on to that image. I was braver than a kid, wasn’t I?

I’d read somewhere that pain was where physical discomfort collided with your sense of control. The more in control, the less something would hurt.

I could be in control of this.

Except then, abruptly, she stopped laughing. Her eyes widened, then darted side to side. I couldn’t see her hands, but I thought I heard them clench in the sheets.

“Veronica?” I asked, confused, a little panic creeping into my own voice. She looked terrified, and with how gaunt she was, all her anxiety was magnified, turned grotesque.

What was she reacting to?

It was over as fast as it had come on. She shook her head, then smiled, sheepishly. “Sorry,” she said. “I thought I heard something.”

A knock, and the door behind me opened. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Adam said, stepping up to where the camera could capture him. “But your parents are here to see you, Veronica. Is now a good time?”

From the antechamber doorway, Veronica’s father waved, awkwardly. Her mother stood just beside him. They were both smiling.

That damn jealousy crashed right back over me, a wall stronger than the isolation door slamming down between me and Veronica. She’d begged me to stay, but she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t going through this solo. I stepped aside and watched as her parents crowded around the view screen, then stepped out into the hall and tried to breathe.

Adam was right behind me. His fingertips grazed my elbow, nudging me to turn and walk back to my room.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said, softly.

I was so weak. Prickly, reactive, myopic. Messy. I don’t know. I think I hated her then, and longed to be her, and only felt guilt, guilt, guilt about it all.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t mention her momentary terror.

Why I didn’t ask if hallucinations were an expected side effect.