They Chose My Sister, Then Learned She Was Dying novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Across the Landing

Shanna can't get her key in the lock until her neighbor Cal, an ER nurse, steadies her wrist and feeds her toast. She tells him she isn't dying, and Maisie calls at one a.m. to say don't let them decide for you.

I got to my building at nine and couldn't make the key go into the lock.

My hand was shaking too hard.

I tried it three times and dropped the key ring on the landing.

"Need a locksmith, or a priest?"

The man from across the hall stood in his doorway in blue scrubs, holding a bag of takeout.

His name was Cal. I knew that from the mailboxes and nothing else.

"I'm fine," I said.

"Sure. You're doing a great job of looking fine."

He set the bag on the floor and picked up my keys.

He didn't hand them over.

"You're the voice," he said.

"I'm what?"

"Dispatch. County nine-one-one. You talked a drunk guy through a pressure bandage in March. I was the nurse who took him at the ER."

I stared at him.

"Left leg," I said. "Garden shears."

"Garden shears." He smiled with half his mouth. "You told him to stop apologizing to the paramedics and start squeezing."

It was the first time I'd laughed in four hours, and it came out cracked.

He heard it.

He stopped smiling and held the keys out across his palm.

When I took them, my hand was still shaking, and he put his fingers around my wrist and held it still.

His hand was warm and dry and rough at the knuckles.

"Pulse is fast," he said. "Breathe out for me. Slowly."

"You can't just take people's pulses."

"I can in my own hallway. Out."

I breathed out.

The shaking slowed.

He let go of my wrist and I felt the place where his fingers had been for a full minute after.

"Family dinner?" he asked.

I hadn't said anything about dinner.

"How did you know?"

"You're carrying your mother's casserole dish, and you look like you lost an argument you didn't start."

I looked down.

I had walked out with the dish.

It was glass, with a blue lid, and I had picked it up from the counter without thinking.

"My parents think I'm dying," I said.

I hadn't planned to say it.

Cal didn't move at all.

"Are you?" he asked.

"No."

"Does anyone know that?"

"The clinic and me."

He nodded slowly.

"Okay," he said. "I'm not going to ask you to explain it in a hallway. But my kettle works, and I have bread."

"I'm not hungry."

"I'm not offering you hunger. I'm offering you toast and a place that isn't your flat at nine at night with the lights off."

I wanted to say no.

I thought about the flat, and my mother's voice saying let us handle it.

"One slice," I said.

His kitchen was small and clean, and it smelled like cumin and coffee.

There was a framed photo on the fridge of a skinny boy in a hospital gown giving the camera a thumbs-up.

I looked at it for a second too long.

Cal was cutting bread with his back to me.

"My brother," he said. "He's nineteen in that one."

"He looks happy."

"He was good at looking happy."

He put a plate in front of me.

He didn't say more, and I didn't ask.

I ate the toast.

At the door he didn't touch me again, and I noticed that he didn't.

"If your family dinner turns out to need a witness," he said, "I'm across the hall."

"Why would you do that for a stranger?"

"You talked a man through his own blood in March and never once raised your voice. I figure I owe you one."

I went home and turned on every lamp.

At one in the morning I was still awake on my couch, the blue-lidded dish on the table, my phone in my hand.

I called Maisie.

She picked up on the first ring.

"Hi," she said, and she sounded wide awake.

"Hi. You said to call."

"I wanted to make sure you got home."

"I did."

There was a long pause, and I could hear her breathing, a little slow, a little hard.

"Shanna," she said. "Whatever Mom and Dad say, don't let them decide it for you."

"Decide what?"

"Anything."

"Maisie, are you sick?"

"I'm tired," she said. "It's been a long week. Go to sleep."

She hung up before I could say another word.

I sat with the phone against my chest.

My sister had told me not to let our parents decide.

In twenty-two years she had never said a word against them.

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