Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,13

was the rest Esme couldn’t get behind. Fellowship among strangers as antidote to a life’s worth of estrangement? As if when the romantic or familial valence of your secret self falls short, you can just entrust that secret self to the Helix and feel better?

She grabbed tweezers from her bedside table and stripped her cuticles. Examined her fingers, as she did almost every night. So strange not to have fingerprints. Growing up, she had let the condition ask of her questions most people spend their lives trying never to ask, among them: What the fuck is wrong with me? And: Do the affectations of my body—and doesn’t everyone have something? that dreadful mole? a sunspot?—proceed from a darker and more dire malady clutched to my heart? Phrenology and palm reading may have been fatuous, but they still derived from a basic impulse to solipsism and self-hatred: everything in the world is but evidence of my failure.

Esme had her problems: an ex-husband she still loved and a child who might not love her. She popped a finger in her mouth. The blood about her nail had gathered like pectin.

There was nothing to do but what she could. Assemble a team: Ned, Anne-Janet, Olgo, Bruce. Execute reconnaissance on Thurlow and the Helix House. Listen up, look hard, and if, in the crosshairs between hurt and sorrow, she felt the tremor of longing—Where are you? and, I miss you—then, yes, some part of her continued to do the right thing, despite all.

II. In which the Lynne Five-0 creeps her team out. In which stories begin to assert themselves like pebbles thrown up from the sea. Cloud seeding, speed dating, clogs. The language of back then. A joust.

II. In which the Lynne Five-0 creeps her team out. In which stories begin to assert themselves like pebbles thrown up from the sea. Cloud seeding, speed dating, clogs. The language of back then. A joust.

Alone with her problems: Anne-Janet Tabetha Riggs.

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Anne-Janet tarried. Outside her mother’s hospital room, gelling her hands clean. Next up, the mantras: Forty-five minutes are all I need to stay. Forty-five minutes look like love. Multiple attempts to visit the patient look like love. I will be kind. If not for her, then for the propitiation of God, in whose caprice illness comes and goes.

So far the news was bad. Her mother had a stent and a clogged lumen in her calf. Immobility can do that, they said, can increase the threat of embolism. So they’d plunged a tube in Marie’s leg. Her charge? Stay put or bleed out. For Anne-Janet, the sight had been dreadful, her mother’s lips collapsed for lack of teeth, the skin of her face pleated and wan. It was one thing to regard her own face and note the loss of its selling points—when was the last her eyes had spangled with the greens of mint and holly for which she was known?—but quite another to confront decay in her mother, who was timeless.

“You’re up,” Anne-Janet said. “How are you feeling?”

“You don’t want to be here,” Marie said. “Hospitals are where people come to get even sicker than they were before. You have a depressed immune system. I can tell you want to go home.”

“You’re up!” Anne-Janet said, and she sat in a chair next to the bed. “Sleep well?”

“Ech. I am on so many drugs. And I’m thirsty. You wouldn’t want to go get me some juice, would you?”

“I’ll have to ask the nurse. Be right back.”

She stood and made for the station. It was awful having to bother a nurse about kid stuff like juice. But then what if Marie was on blood thinners that turned evil with sugar? What if her liquids were being restricted for a reason? Anne-Janet would corner a nurse, who would refer her to another nurse, who would not be pleased—not at all—to answer Anne-Janet’s questions. Next would come anxiety about having pissed off the nurse, in whose disposition hung the balance of a good or bad stay at the hospital. Ring the bell at 3 a.m. and get help, or just lie there in your own vomit. Sometimes you had to enlist a roommate to get attention because the roommate was still on good terms with the staff, in which case the roommate did not always want to imperil those terms by helping you. Every patient in a hospital needed an advocate to raise hell on her behalf. Anne-Janet beelined for a woman pushing a cart of