All the Major Constellations Read Online Free PDF Page B

heavily sedated and half-conscious in the waiting room. A few of her friends from work had come to sit with her and help fill out paperwork. Sara had no siblings, no father to speak of, no cousins or aunts or uncles. There was a grandmother, somewhere, but Janet and her mother had not spoken in years.
    Sara only has us,
Andrew thought, and it made him feel protective and scared all at once. He heard Janet moaning from the waiting area. He glanced at Marcia, who was frowning and crying and picking at a bleeding hangnail on her thumb.
    â€œStop that,” Andrew said. He pried her fingers off her thumb and found himself clutching her wrists as she tried to pull away.
    â€œMaybe you two should get something to eat.”
    Andrew looked up as one of the nurses entered the room. He noticed that she was carrying a diaper. Didn’t Sara have a tube forthat? Then it hit him, and he felt stupid and disgusted and mad at himself. He also didn’t want Marcia, who’d been to hysterics and back again three times that night, to see the diaper. Through some empathetic telepathy the nurse hid the diaper behind her back while Marcia wiped the dribbling tears from her cheeks.
    â€œYou’re right,” Andrew said to the nurse. He stood up. Marcia stayed on the floor, staring at Sara. He gave the nurse an embarrassed shrug and hoisted Marcia to her feet.
    With his arm around her shoulders, Andrew carefully guided Marcia through the ICU. The ICU was a large, white, U-shaped hallway with four rooms on each side and a nurse’s station in the center. There were no doors in the ICU. There was just an open frame through which a person could hurriedly pass in an emergency. There were curtains in the rooms, but the walls facing the nurse’s station consisted of large clear windows so the patients could be continuously observed. Television screens displayed the brainwaves and heart rhythms of those being monitored.
    The first thing Andrew had noticed about the ICU was that it wasn’t as bustling as he imagined it would be. It wasn’t like the TV shows he’d seen where people in hospitals were in constant motion and yelling orders at one another. In fact, many of the nurses and doctors seemed to speak in a deliberately quiet way. The machines that beeped and whirred had an almost muffled quality. Or was that just him? Andrew had a curious sense of drifting, as if the ICU were a spaceship and he were a humblepassenger. He was on the wrong deck and belonged somewhere else and was being told to go to his assigned area.
    When they walked past the waiting room, Andrew gently moved Marcia to the other side of his body so that he, not Marcia, was facing Janet and her friends. Before Janet had been sedated, she’d kept grabbing Marcia by the shoulders and saying “Marcia! Marcia!” in an insensible, questioning tone of voice. He looked in on the women, who were crying and holding hands. Janet was lying on her back on the couch. Her face looked sluggish, and her mouth curved down into a sickly and unnatural-looking frown.
    Janet was usually such a fun person. “You look like I need a drink,” she’d say to Andrew when she came home from a late shift and found him writing hopeless Laura poems in her living room, Sara and Marcia fast asleep on the couch and curled around each other like puppies. She’d make him a Pop-Tart and pour herself a glass of wine. They’d talk about her job and his college prospects. Janet was interested, unlike his own parents.
    When Andrew and Marcia reached the hallway, he released her and they walked toward the elevator. He pushed the button for the first floor and crossed his arms over his chest. The doors closed. They looked at each other.
    â€œI could kill that guy,” he said.
    â€œHe’s already dead,” Marcia said.
    â€œI know that. I’m just saying.”
    They didn’t know much. Sara had been speeding, but the guy who’d hit her