Over the considerable noise, Mrs. Morino yelled, “Look who I brought!” She set an arm around my shoulders and smiled widely.
“Hi!” I shouted.
Sin-Jun did not look at either of us.
It seemed like maybe I ought to hug her, or maybe not. I stepped forward and set my hand against the mattress by her feet, and at last she looked up. “Hi, Lee.” She sounded tired but not at all emotional-not embarrassed or regretful or apologetic.
“I’m glad to see you,” I called. Sin-Jun hadn’t raised her voice, and I’d been able to hear her fine, but I could not check my own impulse to yell.
Apparently, Mrs. Morino felt the same way. “I’m running back to campus,” she hollered. She was now rubbing Clara’s back. “I need to put the kids to bed. But, Lee and Clara, when Mr. Morino brings me here to stay overnight with Sin-Jun, he’ll take you two home. Okay? Does that sound good?”
No one said anything.
“We’ll get you back to the dorm in time for curfew,” Mrs. Morino said. “And, Sin-Jun, we want you to feel much better. Can you do that for us?”
After Mrs. Morino had left, Clara actually stopped crying and heaved a little, as if catching her breath. I felt the same relief I felt around a shrieking baby who quieted, and also the same unpleasant hunch that this was not the conclusion of the outburst but only a hiatus from it.
“How long have you guys been in this room?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Clara said, and each word was shaky and elongated.
I wanted to ask, How long have you been crying? To be this dramatically upset seemed physically draining, and Clara was a heavy girl-surely she could not sustain such exertion indefinitely.
I glanced back at Sin-Jun. When our eyes met, I almost started. The way she looked at me was so hopeless, so exhausted, that it seemed scornful. I had an inkling then that perhaps I’d underestimated her. Perhaps in the past I hadn’t given her credit for having opinions or experiencing discontent-for being like me. Of course there was nothing I could do for her. I still did not believe she had meant to die, but, yes, she had taken the pills on purpose; she did, after all, possess the requisite will.
“I’m spending the night,” Clara announced. “You can’t stop me.”
Sin-Jun turned her head and addressed Clara for the first time since I’d arrived. “You are not staying in hospital.”
“You have to let me. I’m not leaving.”
“Mr. Morino is coming to get us for curfew,” I said.
“For curfew?” Clara glared at me. “Sin-Jun almost died tonight and all you care about is curfew?”
Even the explicit reference to death-astonishingly inappropriate, in my opinion-elicited no reaction from Sin-Jun.
“Sin-Jun, do you want us to stay?” I asked.
“I want to sleep,” Sin-Jun said. She glanced toward Clara. “Go back to school.”
“No! No. I’m not going. I’m calling the Morinos right now and telling them I’m staying. I’ll get a cot, just like Mrs. Morino. I’m staying. Do you hear me?” She’d stood and was edging toward the door but doing so tentatively, as if Sin-Jun might spring from the bed and tackle her. I was at the foot of the bed, still barely inside the room, and when Clara got close to me, I stepped back. I did not, as she lurched and burbled, want to make physical contact with her.
When she was gone, the room seemed peaceful. I was both relieved and afraid to be alone with Sin-Jun. I took Clara’s seat-I’d get up when she came back-and Sin-Jun and I didn’t talk. Finally, I said, “Sin-Jun, do you wish you didn’t go to Ault?”
She shrugged.
“You don’t have to, right? If you told your parents you don’t want to be here, they wouldn’t make you stay.”
“I not need to tell parents anything. Mrs. Morino is already call them, and my father, he comes tomorrow.”
Though I hadn’t thought about it before, it made sense that there would be parental intervention. In fact, it surprised me a little that Mrs. Morino had left us alone, without adults, even this briefly. How were we supposed to know how to act by ourselves?
“Clara is really upset, huh?” I said, then quickly added, “We all really care about you, Sin-Jun.” It sounded, I thought, like I was reading aloud from a get-well card. But I saw that tears were welling in Sin-Jun’s eyes. She blinked and they slid over her eyelids.
“Yikes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She shook her head.
“Sin-Jun?”
She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold-I wanted my life to start-but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.
“You don’t have to say anything,” I said. “But let me-at least let me get you some water.”
She wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“You’re probably thirsty,” I said and bolted from the room. By the time I found a plastic cup-someone down at the nurses’ station gave it to me-then filled it at a drinking fountain, Clara had returned to the room. I set the cup on the table next to Sin-Jun’s bed and saw that a cup of water already rested there, half-full, with a straw sticking out.
“Did Mr. Morino say it’s okay if you stay?” I asked Clara.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Clara seemed slightly more composed than she had before. At least her face was no longer actively leaking fluid, and Sin-Jun also was not crying.
I looked at my watch. It was eight-thirty, and curfew was at ten; the Morinos probably weren’t coming for at least an hour. “I should go downstairs,” I said. “I don’t want to keep them waiting.”
Neither Clara nor Sin-Jun appeared to be paying attention. “I’m not leaving you alone,” Clara was saying, and I could see that it was only a matter of time before the floodgates reopened.
“Sin-Jun, I hope you feel better,” I said. “Okay? Here, I’ll-” I stepped forward and leaned in to hug her. She did not reciprocate the hug at all, and in my arms she felt brittle and weightless. “Bye,” I said. “Okay? Bye.”
“Bye, Lee,” she finally said.
I had not told Clara good-bye, and as I left, Clara did not say good-bye to me.
I was so desperate to be gone from the hospital that back on the first floor, despite the wait in front of me, I walked outside and stood beneath the porte cochere with my arms folded, peering across the parking lot. Campus was about five miles away, but if it hadn’t been dark out, I’d have started off on foot.
It was dark, though, and it was cold, too. I lasted roughly a minute before I went back inside and sat by a soda machine in the waiting area. I wanted very badly to be in the dorm, wearing my nightgown, beneath my own clean sheet and blankets.
I had no wallet with me, no money at all. If I did have money, I’d get a root beer, I thought, and then I thought, but if Sin-Jun hadn’t wanted to die, was it plausible to believe she’d wanted to end up here? The pills had to have been an impulsive decision, a matter of not this; anything except this moment.
So Sin-Jun, too-I had never suspected. Not, probably, that it would have changed the outcome of events if I had. After all, these were not topics you could discuss with someone else; what was there to say to another person about how it felt? You could concoct things you wanted but in certain moments the light shifted or time slowed-on Sundays in particular, time slowed, and occasionally on Saturday afternoons, if you didn’t have a game-and you saw that it was all really nothing. It was just endlessness and what you got or didn’t get would hardly make a difference, and then what was there? The loathsomely familiar room where you lived, your horrible face and body, and the rebuke of other people, how they were unbothered, how you would seem, if you tried to explain, kind of weird and kind of boring and not even original. Why did their lives proceed so easily? Why was it that you needed to convince them and they needed to be convinced and not the other way around? Not, of course, that you would actually succeed if you tried.