Page 21 of Sublimate
“Good for you. I could help,” he told me.
“How?”
“I could give you money.”
Really? But I hesitated. “I don’t know if I would pay it back. I would try, but I can’t make a promise.”
“That was why I said ‘give,’ not ‘loan,’” he said. “I’ve never gotten back a dime when I helped out my friends and I didn’t expect it.”
I thought about what I was going to do tonight and I realized that I was acting stupid. Why wasn’t I holding out my palm and telling him yeah, stack the bills right here? “If you don’t mind, I would like that,” I said. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to—” I stopped and rethought what I was admitting to him. “I was going to do something, but now I won’t have to. I would appreciate your help a lot.”
“It’s nothing,” he said. He took out his wallet and I saw that it was full of money. He removed a large stack of bills, everything in there, then slid it over to my side. This was really not a big deal for him, so I was acting stupid again to feel so embarrassed about it.
“Thank you.” I carefully picked up the money and put it in my bag. “I’m going to use this to leave town so I won’t see you again after today. Good luck with everything.”
“Thank you. Good luck to you, too,” he said.
I sat on the steps of the house after he dropped me off, wasting time that I should have spent getting my stuff together and getting out. I was hoping so much that he would be able to figure out his life and stay sober. But again, Nolan Whitaker was like a shooting star. This had been another blip, and now its glow had permanently faded to black.
Chapter 5
Isipped through the straw and I was careful, but it did still hurt my jaw. “Thank you,” I mumbled.
“This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” Cadence answered. She grabbed another tissue from the hospital-supplied box and wiped her eyes. “It’s horrific. You look like you were in a car crash.”
“No, it’s ok,” I told her but I also could tell that things weren’t great. I had been in an actual car crash when I was eleven, riding in the back seat with one of my mom’s boyfriends behind the wheel. We had rolled three times and then he’d crawled out of the driver’s side window and walked away—literally, he had taken off, running down the shoulder of Highway 93. Firefighters were able to get me out with the Jaws of Life and I had recovered. I could tell that there were parallels to my present condition, like how I was so stiff. And scared, too.
“You’ll get through this and be fine,” she told me firmly, but then she started crying again. “Your face is usually so pretty! I alwaysthought you looked like the star ofSabrinaexcept your hair is red and you have big blue eyes instead of brown, but you’re small like she is and you move gracefully in the same way, and—”
A nurse came in and interrupted her. “How are we doing?” he asked us. Clearly, Cadence was very upset. But she knew him a little because she’d gone to high school with his younger brother, and he got her to calm down. I was in pain but they had given me stuff for it, and those drugs might also have kept me calmer, too.
They discussed what I would do next. I knew that I should have been concerned about my future plans because Cadence was, but I just was glad to be safe for now and I was having trouble thinking too far ahead. The world seemed hazy and I was so tired that it was hard to pay good attention.
She was upset enough for both of us. She had straightened almost all the curls on her head by tugging on them so hard. “I don’t know where she’s going to go,” I heard her tell the nurse. “I think her boyfriend did this to her so she can’t live with him again.”
“What are the police saying?”
“I called and tried to talk to someone and I’m waiting to hear back, but if they act anything like the cops in the series that my mom watches, they won’t reveal much. It’s her favorite show and its fictional but it seems very accurate,” she told him. “She hasn’t missed an episode.”
“It wasn’t Kolter,” I said, but I couldn’t raise my voice very much, due to how tired I was and how I couldn’t draw in any huge breaths. I had some fractured ribs.
“But I don’t think that I can take her, either! My room is on the second floor and it’s an old house so the stairs are very steep. My mother is on the ground floor. I asked her if she would mind sharing the space for a little while. We could have put another bed in the living room but…Mom doesn’t adapt well to changes,” she continued. “I don’t know what to do. As far as I can tell, Vivi doesn’t have any family herself, at least, not in Michigan. She’s from the West Coast. I think Oregon.”
“Nevada. It’s not a coast and I’m not going to come stay with you,” I tried to assure her. She’d already explained why she was here, that someone in the ER had called her because they’d found the card for her portrait painting business in my bag. That was the only thing I’d had with a name on it. Cadence was such a nice person that she’d driven right over to the hospital even though it had been very late at night, and she’d also shown up today after working at the library. She’d cried when she’d first seen me and she had kept crying ever since.
It was so nice that she’d come but that didn’t make her responsible for my life, and I tried to tell her that as she and the nurse discussed me and where I would go. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Cadence, please listen.”
“I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” she said, sniffing.
“Is there anyone else we can call for you?” the nurse asked me. “A relative? Another friend?”
“No, but I don’t need anyone.” I wished that they hadn’t called Cadence, either, but only because she didn’t need to be involved in all this. I had been avoiding the library for the past few weeks, at least a month, because I hadn’t wanted her to know what was happening. The frost date had passed already and it felt like summer, and I bet that she had moved her delicate plants outside. “I don’t know other people here. But I’ll be ok on my own.”
“Oh!” We both looked over at Cadence, who then dropped her hair and put her hand over her mouth. “Nothing,” she told us. She walked toward the door and I saw her taking out her phone. Before, in the library, I had noticed her texting with her mom a lot but today as she’d been sitting in the chair next to my bed, I had really gotten to see how much they were in contact with each other. She was writing or calling several times an hour. Maybe it was because her mother was worried that Cadence was going to invite me home and they’d have to take me in like an unwanted stray cat.
The nurse talked to me a little more, but I was still floating on my meds and didn’t have much to say for myself. I did glean that I was going to be discharged shortly, and he did seem to want to know where I was going next because he was worried that my living situation wasn’t safe. “You have older injuries,” he said, and that was true. He told me that he would get the information for shelters and I agreed it was a good idea, mostly because he seemed to really want to do that and also, I wanted him to leave so that I could close my eyes again. It was so nice that Cadence had come but it was hard to stay awake and comfort her.
When I heard a noise, though, I forced my lids back open and thought that I might have been in the middle of a very realistic dream—hospital-grade drugs were powerful so I was unsure about what I was seeing. “Nolan?” I questioned.
