Page 19 of The Glittering Edge

“What happened?” Penny says. “Is my mom okay?”

Their silence is enough of an answer. Penny staggers back, and Officer Erickson rushes forward to grab her arm before she passes out. Penny doesn’t let him lead her to the porch. She can’t sit. She can’t stop moving.

“Where is she?” Penny asks.

“She’s alive,” Officer Washington says. “There was an accident, and she’s at the hospital. We can drive you.”

Penny shakes her head. She can’t be in a police car right now. Her limbs are moving wildly, hands running through her hair and feet shifting back and forth. She glances up at her house,theirhouse, and all she can think about is living there by herself. No Dad, no Mom. Just Penny, alone.

Penny takes off running, leaving the officers shouting after her.

She should’ve stopped her mom from leaving the café. This is all her fault.

Time goes by in a blur. Penny runs into the street, and a car horn blares. She stumbles back, the car barely missing her. When she makes it to the hospital five minutes later, she runs through the revolving door and up to the information desk.

“Excuse me,” she says, her voice wavering, “I think my mom is here?”

“Penny Emberly,” the nurse says, and Penny’s last bit of hope that this was all a mistake disappears. “We’ve been calling your house for hours. Hold on, let me get a nurse to take you upstairs.”

Penny isn’t sure how much time passes before someone finally brings her to the fifth floor. They emerge into a hallway of off-white linoleum and blue walls, soundtracked by beeping machines and messages over intercoms. The signs on the walls readINTENSIVE CARE UNIT. Before long they’re at another desk, and the nurse is asking for Anita’s hospital room.

“Excuse me, are you Penny?”

A woman in a doctor’s coat hovers a few feet away. Her name tag readsDR. AMANDA NUSSBAUM.

Maybe Penny answers her, maybe she doesn’t. All she knows is that she’s following Dr. Nussbaum to room 505. There are more nurses running in and out, and two doctors talk in low whispers outside the room.

“I’d like to prepare you for what you’re about to see,” Dr. Nussbaum says.

Penny barely hears her. Her feet carry her over the threshold.

Her mom is in the hospital bed. She’s hooked up to a jungle of wires and tubes and plastic bags hanging from metal stands. Worst of all is the ventilator. It grinds and heaves, the mechanical lungs breathing for her. Her skin has gone pale everywhere except around the eyes, where it’s sunken and dark blue, like water at night.

If the heart monitor didn’t show peaks and valleys, Penny would be convinced she was dead.

“She’s in a coma,” Dr. Nussbaum says. “I’m so sorry, Penny.”

The gasps come on without warning. Penny can’t catch her breath; all she can do is look at her mom, waiting for her to open her eyes, to speak. Anita is never this quiet. In some weird, traumatized grasp at another possibility, Penny wonders if this isn’t her mom at all, if they’ve made a mistake. But there’s the beauty mark under her mom’s right eye, and there are the familiar smile lines around hermouth. How can a person look both familiar and strange? How can Penny’s mom be so close and yet too far away for anyone to reach her?

The nurses lead Penny out of the room. They sit her in a chair and get her a glass of water. Penny is slumped over, head between her knees. Someone produces a cool cloth, which is pressed to the back of Penny’s neck.

“My bag,” Penny manages to say, and Dr. Nussbaum understands immediately. She finds Penny’s anxiety medication, and Penny takes one, gulping water and trying to hold the pill down when her gag reflex kicks in.

After a few minutes, sedation spreads like warm water through her veins, and Penny starts breathing normally again. She still has that cracked-glass feeling in her chest, as if one wrong move will trigger another panic attack.

“What happened?” she manages to ask.

Dr. Nussbaum clears her throat. “Your mom had an accident at Elkie Lake. The end of the dock broke because apparently the planks were rotted all the way through.”

“So she fell?”

“And she hit her head on the way down. Thankfully she had a friend with her who called 911.”

Penny almost drops the cup of water. A friend? It must’ve been the person Anita was texting before she left the café. The one she was being cagey about.

“Who was it?” Penny asks, trying not to sound too desperate.

“The police said it was Helen Barrion.”

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