Work Text:
Pull me out
She told him Sloan Kettering sounded like the name of some spoiled Upper East Side cunt--a girl who'd gone to Dalton, whose daddy still paid for her blonde highlights. "And don't get me started on 'Memorial.' It's fitting, really--a hospital with a name as morbid and loathsome as the place actually is."
She whipped her head back around before he could respond. Even for someone who was terminal, she made an unusual first impression.
He thought about his stupid name tag, the polite introduction he'd been planning to make. "I understand that you've seen the worst side of it," he said softly to her back. "But it's not really like that."
"Don't tell me what it's like. You don't live here."
She didn't turn around. Under the bedclothes, she looked insubstantial, like there was room for another person to lie beside her.
Can't you stop this all from happening?
He clocked in early, punched out late, took too keen an interest in her vital signs. He read her chart too closely, ignoring certain facts that grew less and less ignorable.
"If you'd only eat, when you could," he said, "if you'd only do what the doctors tell you to do--"
"Ha," she returned. It wasn't a laugh. "How dumb are you? Or how dumb do you think I am?"
What were the words to describe those eyes in that face? He didn't know them. The furrow in the brow meant pain. The set jaw meant she knew she was dying; the wicked curve of the mouth meant she was determined to wreak whatever havoc she could in the process.
But her eyes: there was something else in them entirely.
Close the doors and keep them out
She was in that liminal space where she spent most of her time, between asleep and awake, between alive and not alive, when he pressed it into her cold hand.
"What are you doing?" she muttered, and half opened her eyes to stare up at him. She relaxed her fist and the little silver ring lay there in her palm.
She closed her fingers over it again and glanced over at the clock, blinking steadily. "It's not even your shift."
Slowly he extended his arm toward her, brought his left hand up to where she could see that he was wearing one, too. She reached out and pulled his hand into her lap. She might have smiled then. She took hold of his ring and twisted it on his finger as she thought.
"It's fucked up," she said at last. "I know why I'm doing this. The question is, what are you getting out of it?"
He thought about how it felt to lie up against her, her thin body sucking the heat out of his.
How she wanted him there to watch her as she slept, how he could imagine then that she harbored something like tenderness for him.
How he believed he could trace the dreams she was having by the movements of her closed eyes.
How she was like a blade that was sharp along one edge and smooth on the other, and you never knew which side you'd catch against your palm.
He wondered how he could say it. She was still contemplating the fingers and the rings and starting to look angrier. The gleam in her eyes grew fierce. He withdrew his hand from hers, stepped backward from the bed.
"I said, what are you getting out of it?"
The telephone she lobbed at him went wide, a clumsy arc that barely cleared the edge of the mattress. The receiver cracked against the linoleum. She threw herself back against the bed, breathing heavily with the effort. She pressed the button to dispense the morphine and the button to call the nurse, gave the curtain a savage jerk to coil it around the bed.
Through a gap in the curtain she glowered at him in something like triumph. "Your presence here is not palliative."
She had finally hit her mark.
But later that morning, when he returned to check in on her in her drugged sleep, there it shone silver on her white finger.
Dig me out
She died. Her bed was empty; she would be sleeping somewhere else now.
Too late, he saw what she'd meant about the hospital's awful name.
Couldn't you have kept this all from happening?
It was foolish to imagine that it would be over for him when it was over for her. For one thing, her father had seen the ring on her finger. Questions were asked. He had not been permitted to attend the funeral.
The woman from Human Resources had used the phrase "I think we can all agree that it would be best if." The union rep seemed to be in collusion. In the end, the hospital admitted it was not in their interests to pursue the matter legally. Now he was free to sleep as much as she had, before she came to sleep all the time.
Sometimes she returned to watch him as he slept, to grant him dreams of being buried open-eyed next to her.
Dig me out from under our house
Afterward no one called. Why would they? Nobody understood. None of his friends had ever wanted to hear about it. Besides, she had taken up all the room there was inside him.
It became more and more difficult to keep track of time. How long had it been since she first scowled at him from that bed, how long since he had lost her for good? It was winter again, in any case. The severance pay was gone. A condo building was going up in the lot with the guard dogs. The old subway cars had been replaced by new ones that talked. The bedroom window stayed open in the cold because the radiator couldn't be shut off.
The guitar needed tuning. He lifted it by the neck and started to sing.