The Day My Family Left Me to Die novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Hattie's Badge

Millicent wakes in a mute cleaner's body and watches her family mourn her while Blythe takes the center of it; the red-haired intern believes her notes and says her mother has signed for cremation with no autopsy.

A nurse shone a penlight in my eyes and said, "Hattie, blink twice if you can hear me."

I blinked.

I tried to say Mom, and only air came out of my throat.

"Don't try," the nurse said gently. "You haven't talked in thirteen years, hon. You just went down in the stairwell and your heart stopped for four minutes."

I looked at my hands again.

They were small, with short nails and a burn scar across the left thumb.

They were not my hands, and they were alive.

Across the aisle my mother sat down on the floor beside the gurney, still in her white coat.

She did not cry.

She held the edge of the sheet in both fists and stared at the face under it.

"I said bay four was for Blythe," she said.

Nobody answered her.

My brother put his fist through the plaster beside the supply cabinet, then stood looking at the hole.

"They told us they'd send someone," he said. "I did exactly what the training says. I did the right thing."

"You did," Blythe said.

She was on her knees next to my mother, crying with her whole face, and she was good at it.

I had watched her cry since she was nine years old, when she came to us with one suitcase and a stuffed rabbit.

I had always been the one who got up and fetched the tissues.

"I knew something was wrong with her," Blythe said. "I felt it when I held her hand. I should have said."

My mother put a hand on her hair.

"You couldn't have known, baby."

My fiance stood behind them with Blythe's blanket in his arms and did not say anything.

He looked at the body once.

Then he looked at the clock over the door.

I lay there and counted what I was seeing.

My brother was sorry for himself.

My mother was sorry for the rule she had made.

Blythe had put herself at the center of my death within a minute of it, and no one had even noticed her do it.

The nurse moved on to the next bed.

A moment later the red-haired intern came through the curtain with her hands still stained to the wrists.

Her name tag said HEIDI.

She walked right past my gurney, then stopped and came back.

"You're awake," she said. "Good. You scared the whole floor."

I was looking at the body across the aisle, and she followed my eyes.

"Did you know her?" Heidi asked.

I shook my head.

Then I shook it the other way.

Heidi crouched down so we were level.

"Hattie, right? You do nights. You mop the third floor." Her voice dropped. "She told me her name before she died. Millicent Penfield. She told me where she'd been held, too, and I'm the only one who heard it."

My heart was beating fast and strange in a body that had run its whole life at a different speed.

I took the pen out of her breast pocket.

She let me.

The paper sheet on the gurney was the only thing to write on, so I wrote across it in Hattie's cramped little hand.

I'M MILLICENT.

Heidi read it.

She didn't move, and she didn't laugh.

I wrote again.

SMELL HER HAIR.

"Okay," Heidi said quietly. "Okay. A lot of people would've read that as a joke."

I tapped the pen on the paper and wrote one more line.

YOU SAID: OKAY. I'M LISTENING.

All the color went out of her face.

She sat down on the tiled floor in the middle of the ER with her back against the rail of my bed.

"I didn't tell anybody that," she said. "I said it to a dying woman, with nobody near."

She turned her head and looked at me properly, at a stranger's face with something behind it she must have been trying to find.

"You saw it from the ceiling," she said. "Is that it? Is that why you wrote it?"

I shook my head and wrote: I WAS THERE. I'M HERE. I DON'T KNOW HOW.

Heidi wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and left a pink smear on her cheek.

"I looked at Blythe's hair," she said. "After. Hotel soap, you were right. I checked her wrists too, when she wasn't watching. Two bands. Nothing else."

She breathed out.

"I'm going to believe you," she said. "I don't have a good reason. I just do."

Then her face changed, and she looked over her shoulder at the family.

"Millicent, there's something worse."

I held very still.

"Your mother signed the release an hour ago," she said. "She doesn't want anyone to cut you open."

I felt the pen go cold in my hand.

"No autopsy," Heidi said. "You go to the crematorium at nine tomorrow morning, and then there's nothing left to prove."

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