Once More With Feeling Read Online Free PDF Page A

hung over the ward. The doctor would find me there when he came out of surgery, they said, with that dispassionate briskness that, I supposed, made medical personnel capable of doing their jobs in the midst of so much human misery. I swallowed and turned, wincing as my shoes squeaked against the floor, as if that might disturb the patients hooked up to their machines in all the curtained cubicles.
    Obediently, I trudged down the hall to the room marked ICU Waiting Room, and walked inside.
    And then immediately wished I hadn’t.
    Carolyn slumped in one of the jarringly cheerful blue chairs near the door like some kind of opera heroine, one arm thrown over her eyes, her other hand clenched around our mother’s. Our mother who sat next to Carolyn as if she was personally holding her upright with her positive thoughts and boundless support. I couldn’t help staring at them, just as I couldn’t help the little bubble of anger and jealousy that seemed to pop inside my chest.
This
was my mother’s version of not choosing sides?
    I jumped slightly when a hand came down heavily on my shoulder, but I knew who it was almost in that same instant, and smiled slightly as I turned into my father’s hug.
    ‘Terrible night,’ he said in an undertone, his low rumble of a voice like a small streak of comfort, lighting its way through me, making me feel that slightest bit less frozen. ‘Just terrible.’
    Carolyn shifted in her seat just then, dropped her arm, and opened her eyes to look directly at me.
    It was the first time we’d seen each other since That Day, and I’d gone to a good deal of trouble to avoid thinking about That Day, thank you. But suddenly, right here in the waiting room, Tim already dead for all I knew, not that I could allow myself to dwell on that, I couldn’t seem to think of anything else.
    I concentrated on the blouse in the air, royal blue and frozen in flight. Better that than what lay behind it. Even now. Once again, I felt half-naked and exposed, dingy bra on display for all the world to see. My stomach twisted, then seemed to fold in on itself. Much like the rest of me wanted to do.
    ‘Sarah.’ She said my name and then seemed to think better of it. For the first time in my entire life, my sister looked like a complete stranger to me. I saw nothing I recognized in her familiar features – nothing I knew looking back at me from her eyes.
    Or maybe I just wanted her to be a complete, unknowable alien. It made it so much easier to hate her.
    I told myself she looked like Olive Oyl, that she looked out of place and absurd, but I suspected the real problem was that she made me feel so frumpy. Even in operaticupset, she still looked
interesting
. My still-untrimmed hair was definitely getting shaggy, and I hadn’t bothered to dress for dinner at Lianne’s, which meant I was in ratty jeans and a sweater which, I knew now, was far too staid and boring. I felt like someone’s sad-sack Aunt Ethel. I felt like the kind of woman who couldn’t hold on to her husband. Which, in fact, I was.
    ‘Well,’ I said, when I could no longer stand the uncomfortable silence, the surge of anxiety, the immediate and vicious dip into body hatred, ‘At least this time you have your clothes on.’
    Carolyn stared back at me for another long, tense moment. Like she didn’t know me, either. I noticed her eyes were rimmed with red, and her dark hair was scraped back into a makeshift ponytail. She was too bony, as always, but tonight she actually looked fragile rather than chic. She bit her lower lip, as if she were physically biting back words, and dropped her gaze to the floor. My heart pounded in my chest, and I realized then that I wanted her to fight. Maybe I wanted the distraction. Or maybe I wanted the excuse to scream at her the way I had That Day – more proof that she was the kind of terrible, awful, reprehensible person who could do something like this to her own sister.
    ‘The nurses told me he’s still in