Page 1 of The Wrong Track

Chapter 1

I’m surrounded by turquoise water, clear and warm with colorful fish swimming lazily around my legs. Fan coral undulates in the gentle currents; a single, white cloud drifts slowly through the azure sky above me. I breathe in and out, filling my healthy lungs with clean air, filling my body with languid pleasure.

“Mrs. Rovina?”

I feel the sand beneath my toes and then I pick up my feet and float, buoyed by the salt and the waves. The ocean cradles me and I drift, content. Nothing is more perfect than this moment.

“Excuse me. Excuse me?”

But then, suddenly, I realize that there’s something here with me. There’s something on the beach—no, maybe it’s in the water—there’s something just beyond my field of vision—

“Mrs. Rovina? Remy?”

The sun is so warm on my face. I close my eyes against its brightness but I can still feel the heat. It’s all wonderful, yes, but by now I’m sure that something is close. It’s here lurking in the depths, concealed behind the coral, buried in the sand. There’s something, something dangerous, and if I don’t watch out—

A hand gently shook my arm and I opened my eyes, gasping. The woman who’d apparently been bending over me stood up straight and smiled. “You’re awake!” she announced. I turned my head and saw the other women in the room watching us. A fluorescent light in the ceiling blinked and wavered and I blinked, too. It had been right there, so close. Something—

“Don’t be embarrassed,” the nurse said. “People fall asleep in here all the time. We keep it too hot, I think, but your condition will wear you out wherever you are.”

I rubbed my eyes, very tired. “I wasn’t asleep,” I announced, but maybe I had been. The dry heat blowing on my face definitely hadn’t been the sun or a tropical breeze like I’d been imagining. I was sitting under a vent that cranked away because the world outside of the single, brown-tinted window was frozen. Everything here was icy and cold and dark in a winter prison, nothing like the turquoise water, the colorful fish…

“Mrs. Rovina?” Now the woman frowned a little. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. That’s not my name so I didn’t respond.” And I may have been asleep, and I definitely didn’t want to be here.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” She looked at my chart with her eyebrows drawn down, studying the information there, and then said, “We should correct this for you.” But I ignored that, because I was busy lumbering to my feet. I felt like a big, overfed bear ready for hibernation, except weren’t they already asleep? They were curled up in their warm caves, dozing away through the horrible winter. Cozy, alone but content. No one would come after a bear, asleep or not.

“Mrs….Remy? Are you ready to come back?”

I opened my eyes again. No, I wasn’t ready for this. But I followed her through the waiting room, and when I was done, I went down to the car and sat in the parking lot and cried. I’d held it together through the exam, with the doctor there and the nurse smiling at me, and I still had as I walked out past the other women waiting, but once I was alone I just couldn’t. This was a really nice car, though, so I was careful with where I put the pile of used tissues and napkins. I was lucky to have it and I didn’t want to mess it up in any way.

I cleaned myself up, too, after I drove home and parked again, before I walked in front of the row of condos because I had to go past…oh, yes. She was already on her porch and waiting for me, even though it was January and felt like we all lived in a walk-in freezer.

“Hi, Remy!”

I waved back at Hazel, my neighbor. She was a very, very nice person. I reminded myself of that as I prepared for the onslaught.

“Did you go to the doctor? Are you ok? Is everything ok? I saw you head out and I thought I’d leave you alone but then I had to come outside because you know I’m taking stuff to my car. It wasn’t like I was waiting for you, although I was, kind of, because I wanted to talk to you but I wasn’t just standing here in the snow to ambush you.”

Hazel ran out of gas and stopped speaking, and then she smiled at me. I could tell that I made her nervous, and it seemed that when she was nervous, she talked a lot. And now she was standing there in the icy wind, waiting for me to respond.

“I’m ok,” I said, and she walked off the steps to get closer. If she did that, though, she would see that I’d been crying, because Hazel was observant and smart. I stepped back and pretended to fix my hair, pushing it in front of my eyes to shield them. “I better go inside,” I commented.

“Do you want to come over here?” she offered, gesturing at the townhouse behind her, the one where she lived part of the time. “I’m just making lunch. Are you hungry?”

I kind of was. Also, I hated going into my own house, hated and despised and dreaded it. “Ok. Thank you,” I said, shaking the words loose from the recesses of my brain. I remembered that at one point, I’d been polite. Manners had been important.

“Of course,” Hazel said, and smiled at me again. She wasn’t putting on an act, she was actually happy to see me—which was very friendly if not a little overwhelming. I let her go first, hoping that the frigid air had erased my puffy eyes and she wouldn’t get worried and ask me how I was really doing.

Not very well, but Hazel didn’t need to know that.

She had the heat on high inside her house, which felt wonderful because I was keeping my own place quite cold and I was trying not to run the heat much in the car, either, to save on gas. And she had a little dog, Russell, who stretched lazily but then sprinted over on his short legs to greet me. I picked him up.

“Oh, be careful,” Hazel warned. “He gained a whole half-pound and you don’t want to lift anything too heavy.” Casually, she passed me a tissue, but she didn’t say anything about what must have remained of the tearstains on my face.

I blew my nose and held Russell under one arm. He still felt like a toy to me, a warm, wiggly toy. “Are you a bigger boy?” I asked him, and he snorted and huffed. He certainly wasn’t worried about weight gain like I was. I deliberately hadn’t read the numbers on the scale when I had stepped on it earlier, and the nurse had seen me averting my eyes.

“Looks great and you’re exactly where you should be,” she’d assured me, and then asked for the third time, “What surname should we use on your chart?”

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