Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,14

towels down the hall.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but my mom, in room thirty-four—”

“Marie, sure. And you must be Anne-Janet. She talks about you all the time.”

“She does? Well. We’re wondering if she can have some juice. Also, while I have you, do you know when the doctors are coming by? Or when they’re going to remove the stent? Is the stent permanent? Why haven’t they scheduled her surgery yet? She’s just getting the plate, right? Not a whole new hip or anything?”

The nurse said, “I’m Lynne. I don’t really know the answer to any of your questions, but you’re free to walk with me while I distribute these towels. I’ve sat with your mother a fair amount today. She’s a great lady.”

Anne-Janet stopped walking. People didn’t say these things about her mom. She looked the nurse over. Maybe if Lynne just stood up straight—but then maybe she couldn’t. Maybe that hunch was permanent. Or maybe it was just her uniform, which was oversized, even for her. Could be, though, it was just her face that gave Anne-Janet the heebie-jeebies. Imagine high school with a nose like that.

“Thanks,” Anne-Janet said. “But I’d better go.”

“Okeysmokey.”

The hallway spooled around reception, as it did on every floor. If Anne-Janet closed her eyes, she could be in oncology, awaiting results from one scan or another. After five years with metastasized colon cancer, you stopped caring about the names of the tests or what they were for. Your tumors have grown, they have shrunk—these were the words that mattered. For now, they were shrunk. All but gone. Anne-Janet was on a cancer furlough and wanted to make the best of it. She wanted, even, to date. To date with minimal exposure to men, which explained her plans for the night. A Helix event. Speed dating. Since she was twenty-five, cancer had given her ample excuses not to date, among them feeling too ill, too ugly, too pointless. But finally, this was not the inhibition that needed surmounting. She was, simply, afraid to be touched. Her memories of touch were steeped in terror. It was the thing she talked about most, not in its fraught detail but in general. She would not hide it; it was always there. And seemed to come up whenever she made a new acquaintance, people being unable to call her by her full name and wanting, immediately, to call her AJ instead. Could they call her AJ? Well, her father used to call her AJ and her father had touched her inappropriately. So no, they could not. Not unless they wanted to rouse in her memories so vile, she had not had intercourse since age eight.

She looked at her mom. Probably it had been worse for her. Not to know what evils were transacted in her own home.

“No juice?” Marie said. “Did you check every floor?”

“I’ll get it in a bit. Have some ice chips.”

“So how was work yesterday? Like the new job?”

“It’s where God has landed me, I guess.” She said this wistfully because she did, in fact, marvel at change. Yes, she was surprised to have landed anywhere—to be alive, really—but mostly she was surprised to have landed at the Department of the Interior when two weeks ago she was still hawking celebrity mouth guards on eBay.

“But what’s your title?” Marie said. “What do you do?”

“Are you asking so you can tell your girlfriends? Because if so, you can tell them I am head of Research and Development.”

“But is that true?”

“No. Hey, I met a strange-looking nurse just now. Says she’s been hanging out with you. I think her name is Lynne.”

“There are so many, I can’t keep track.”

“She’s got weird posture.”

“The one with the nose?”

“You got it.”

“She’s new. She showed up out of nowhere. Listen, my angel, you wouldn’t want to get me that apple juice now, would you?”

“I think you’re on a restricted diet. Because of the surgery.”

Marie sat up. “I’m having surgery? No one said I was having surgery. What? Oh my God.”

And with that, she tried to swing her legs over the edge of the bed, never mind the stent or that her hip was fractured in two places.

Anne-Janet dove at her mother. Yelled at her. “Get back in bed. You want to die? You could die. Just get back in bed.”

She rang for the nurse while struggling with Marie, afraid the struggle would make things worse and eyeing the heart monitor as if she knew what all the numbers meant but certain a spike