of tag with her immune system. Whatever it was, it was in her.
Lucy opened her ghostly pale blue eyes—blood vessels creeping through the whites of them like a spiderweb—and knew she was in a hospital. She tried to go back to sleep, back to numb, but the whiz and buzz of medical equipment booting up along with the hallway chatter made it impossible as did the commingling vapors of ammonia, feces, drying blood, and puke that seemed to permeate the entire ER.
“I need to get out of here,” Lucy said, peeling her face off of the plastic pillow.
The nurse simply ignored her and began taking Lucy’s vitals before she retreated to paperwork. Lucy’s eyes were fixed on her Parisian weekender, the one that she got from her dad when they visited a flea market in France. It was made from an antique rug—hand-woven blooms of rich reds, bright magentas, royal blues, and peridots.
He took her to Paris when she was ten, right before her mother left them, saying that he wanted her first trip to Paris to be with a man who would always love her. Lucy’s mother left when she was young. She decided that she didn’t want to be tied down with a husband and a kid. She up and moved to L.A. Later, Lucy realized that those, too, were her initials. Los Angeles, the city of angels, among other things. Whether the abrupt move was some previously unfulfilled ambition or just a fight-or-flight response to a traditional lifestyle, she never really knew. For Lucy, it was both formative and informative, coloring her views of life and love with a decidedly unsentimental palette.
Whatever the reason, her dad was all that she had, and now she barely even talked to him. Unless there was a problem with her rent check. She held on to that bag and to what he said as it shifted from a sweet memory to a bitter lie. All that was left—baggage. When she did talk to him, she was always accused of being just like her mother, which to her father was unforgivable.
Lucy grabbed her clothing from the night before out of the bag. It was bad enough, she thought, that she’d wound up in the hospital, but without anything else to wear, a “walk of shame” was guaranteed. She wondered who might pay for such a shot and how much, and instantly reached for her cell phone, and as she did, something dropped to the floor.
She looked down and saw a bracelet made up of the most exquisite off-white beads with a peculiar, double-eyed gold charm.
Some Fifth Avenue version of the Kabbalah bracelet, Lucy thought, leaning over to pick it up. Probably some Holy Roller looking for a handout.
Before it even made it up to her eyes, she decided to incorporate it into her look. Barney’s New York was doing a whole SACRED line for next fall, and this little number would give her a jump on the season. Definitely fake, but I can make it work.
As she brought the piece closer to her face and studied it, she realized that it was anything but fake. The reflection from the fluorescent light above caused her to squint like a jeweler. She could usually tell cheap from a mile away, and this was the real thing. It was unbelievable. Looked as if it were antique. Heavy. Hand-carved. She fantasized for a moment that it had been passed down through the ages like estate jewelry or hidden like buried treasure only to be found centuries later.
Unearthed.
I’ll bet this cost a freakin’ fortune. Not like those gum-machine knockoffs for sale on the flying carpets along the sidewalks of Atlantic Avenue, she thought. She turned over onto her back and held it up in front of her face, fingering the golden charm. It was unlike anything she’d ever seen, not even at celebrity auctions, and it was certainly one of a kind. Strange and familiar to her all at the same time. Almost too much to look at. But she felt, in a way she could not describe even to herself, that it should belong to her. And now it did.
“Was my father here?” Lucy asked the nurse, hope in her voice as if she were a little girl at Christmas again, fondling the rare find. “Did he leave this for me?”
“No,” the nurse said, tamping down Lucy’s childlike eagerness.
“Yeah, he would never step foot in a Brooklyn hospital. He rarely leaves Manhattan.”