“I want to stay,” I said. “I want to make sure he’s all right.”
“He’s got his mom now.” Which was hardly any kind of consolation, and the expression on Sandra’s face suggested that she knew it, too.
“I want to stay,” I repeated. “I didn’t get to tell him the end of ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ”
“I’ll tell him,” Sandra said. “I’ll tell him that Hansel and Gretel killed the witch, and moved into the house made of candy, and they both lived happily ever after.”
That wasn’t the ending I remembered. “Don’t they go back to their parents?” I asked.
Sandra shook her head. “I think he’d like it better my way.”
•••
Upstairs, Alice’s door was still closed. Sandra walked me past it and into my room, where I adjusted my cannula under my nose and climbed into a bed made with Care Bears sheets, surrounded by my toys, my books, the lamp with the pink lampshade from my bedroom at home. My get-well-soon cards were lined up on the table, next to my Walkman, my Simon game, my tapes, and my books.
I closed my eyes, listening to the beeping of the heart monitor, the hiss of the oxygen compressor, the low murmur of people in the hallway, the PA system echoing as someone paged Dr. Blair. Normally, those sounds soothed me. That night, though, sleep took a long time to come. I thought about Andy, five floors down, having his broken arm set. I wondered if his mother knew my mom’s trick, of having me squeeze her hand as hard as I could whenever I got a needle, passing my pain along to her.
In the middle of the night, I woke up in the dark to a horrible howling sound. For a minute, I thought that I was Gretel, lost in the forest, with animals all around me and no mother or father to keep me safe. The sound went on and on, and I heard footsteps and voices, and then, finally, the noise stopped, like someone had ejected a tape from a player.
I woke up early the next morning, planning on telling Alice all about what had happened in the night. It would be, I decided, my best story yet. I’d describe everything—the nurse with the hairy chin and the girl with the Barbie shoe in her nose and the man who’d been cursing, and about Andy and how he was all alone. Our parents almost never left us alone. Alice would like that part.
When I got to her room, though, the new sign had been taken down, and nothing had been put up in its place. I pushed the door open. The room was empty. The bed was bare, with not even a sheet. Alice’s Duran Duran poster wasn’t on the wall, and her pink plastic bucket that held her toothbrush and her face towel and washcloths wasn’t on the table. The stack of books and puzzles had been removed. Everything except the Ouija board was gone.
I crossed the room and picked it up. A sticky note was attached to the box. For Rachel, it read, in handwriting I didn’t recognize. Someone had come in and mopped the floor, and the disinfectant smell was strong enough to sting my eyes, but I didn’t leave. I sat in the chair with the Ouija board box in my lap. She hadn’t said goodbye to me. She hadn’t told me enough about what it was like, when you knew you weren’t going to get better. She hadn’t told me if it had hurt.
“Alice?” I whispered. Maybe her spirit was still nearby. Maybe she was even watching me. But no answer came, and when I closed my eyes and then opened them again, everything in the room was exactly the same.
•••
On the day that I finally got to go home, my mom came early to pack up my things, deliver more treats, and tell the nurses goodbye until next time. She was hurrying around, making sure she’d retrieved my shampoo and conditioner from the shower, when Sandra knocked at the door with a letter in her hand. My name, Miss Rachel Blum, was printed on the front of a square pink envelope, in carefully formed letters that were almost too small to read. Bloom like flowers, not blum like plum, I thought. Inside was a single sheet of paper, and more of that cramped handwriting, as if my correspondent was being charged for each drop of ink.
Dear Rachel. Thank you for keeping me company the night I broke my arm. And also for Rudolph. I will never forget you. Your friend, Andrew Landis. Beneath his signature was a drawing of a boy with brown hair and something black—my bear, I guessed—under his arm. The other arm was wrapped in white. The cast, I figured. Next to him was a drawing of a girl with curly hair and a big pink smile and, when I looked carefully, a tiny, hash-marked scar on her chest. Around the boy and the girl was a red crayoned heart.
Andy
1987
Andrew!” Sister Henry’s voice echoed down the hallway, but Andy didn’t slow down. His eyes were on the door, and the street beyond it; the gray sidewalks and the gray winter sky.