Christmas karol, p.5
Christmas Karol, page 5
Karol made a break for it. She lunged forward, slipping through the crack in the door as it began to open, and careened out into the hall. The momentum sent her crashing into the wall opposite. Her arm brushed against textured, cream-colored wallpaper. Under her bare feet, the floor had changed from linoleum to wood laminate. She stared around wildly.
The hallway was completely empty. No bustling nurses, no patients trailing IV poles, no visitors with flowers or balloons. Just a long, wood-floored hallway, the anonymous cream wallpaper broken at intervals by doors like the one Karol had just come out of. Karol turned back to her own door in confusion. Opened her mouth to insist that Marley explain herself more fully. But Marley was gone. The door stood open, revealing the empty room—the rumpled bedsheets, the curtain pulled back slightly, the heart monitor screen still registering a heartrate though the room was deserted.
Karol wheeled around, certain Marley must have edged past her. But the hallway was empty too. She let out a wordless yell of frustration. It echoed down the empty hall and died away. In the ensuing silence, a baby began to cry.
Karol turned to face the sound. It was coming from somewhere down the hall to the left. Hope leapt up in her chest. Surely, if there was a baby, there were adults to care for it. And Karol needed an adult right now. Someone to explain all this. Or at least let her use a phone. She had no idea what time it was. Maybe Dworkin’s assistant and his family were still at the restaurant.
She started walking down the hall, following the sound. The baby was really wailing, long agonized cries punctuated by long silences as he filled his little lungs again to blast his distress out into the world. Karol had a fleeting memory of Annabel in the hospital just after she’d been born, her little face red, her eyes squeezed shut, and her mouth a gaping silent O as she geared up to scream. A smile flitted across Karol’s face, unnoticed, at the memory.
The cries got louder and louder as she approached the last door on the left at the end of the hallway. The door was standing ajar. A little further down, the hallway hit a wall, branching off to the left and right. Karol stepped to the door and pushed it open.
A plastic hospital bassinet stood in the center of the room. There was no other furniture. No bed for the mother, no monitors or carts or supplies. Just this plastic bassinet on its wheeled stand, sitting on the linoleum. The sound of crying was so loud in here. It made Karol’s chest constrict. Why did no one come? Why was this baby all alone? She stepped further into the room. Stepped right up to the bassinet and looked down into it.
The baby was a girl. She had on a little pink hospital cap with a bow at the front. Her onesie was white with little pink and purple hearts. She was clearly a newborn. Her little hands were balled up in fists and she was waving them around by her face as she wailed. Her little bare legs and feet kicked rhythmically. Karol looked around and froze. There were people here. Only they weren’t in the room. They were standing on the other side of a long window that spanned the wall to Karol’s right.
There must have been a hundred of them. Standing there, their faces pressed up to the glass. They were all women. Old women and young women and women in middle age. They were dressed in suits and pencil skirts and tailored slacks. Their hair was expertly done—in buns and soft curls and pin-straight bobs. Their makeup was impeccable, applied with the expertise of repetition. They were jostling with each other for places at the window. The ones at the front pressing their hands, their noses, their foreheads against the glass. All of them reaching out toward the baby. And all of them were crying.
Karol took a step back. The sense that something was deeply wrong here filled her whole body. Made her limbs tingle. She scanned the frantic women on the other side of the glass. The baby wailed in the bassinet beside her. A movement at the front of the crowd caught Karol’s eye and she watched as the women there were shoved aside and another woman came forward to press her face against the glass. Karol let her breath out in a rush. It was Marley. Marley pressing her face against the glass, crying silent anguished tears as she reached and reached for the baby.
“What are you doing?” Karol said, raising her voice over the baby’s yells. “You can just come in here!”
But Marley didn’t seem to hear her. Didn’t even seem to see her. She just jostled against the other women, keening and trying to break through the glass. Karol ran to the door. Ran out into the hallway and around the corner to the left, sure she would find all those women standing in the hall, looking into the baby’s room. She pulled up short. This hallway was empty too. Just another long, cream-colored corridor. An exit sign glowed dimly red at the far end.
“What . . .” Karol whispered.
She turned and ran back the way she’d come. The baby was still screaming. She followed the sound back into the room. She stood over the bassinet and looked toward the wall. There they all were. The women who were there but weren’t. Still shoving at each other for a place in front of the window. The window that didn’t exist. Was there some sort of hidden compartment? A secret door to a room that held a hundred crying businesswomen?
Karol swallowed. Her heart was beating loudly in her ears, a deep liquid thudding that she couldn’t shake. She realized she was still gripping the hospital socks so hard between her two hands that her knuckles had gone white. The baby continued to wail.
Karol looked at the door. She wanted to run. To run right out of the hospital onto the street. She didn’t care that she was barefoot and wearing only a hospital gown. She needed to get out of here. She took a step toward the door. The baby gave a little hiccupping sob and then another wail. Karol closed her eyes. She let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. She relaxed her grip on the socks, her finger joints unclenching with little pops and snaps. She turned back to the baby.
“Alright,” she muttered. “Alright, fine.”
She bent over, jammed the hospital socks onto her feet, stood up again and walked to the bassinet. She turned away from the women. The back of her neck tingled. She could feel their eyes on her. She reached into the bassinet and picked up the baby.
She half expected the baby to disappear the minute she reached for her. But she was solid and warm in her arms. She lifted her and raised her to her shoulder. The baby stopped crying immediately. She nestled her face against Karol’s neck, popped a thumb in her mouth, and fell immediately asleep. Something released inside Karol. She breathed out and shifted the baby so that she fit perfectly into the hollow between her shoulder and her chest. The baby’s breath was hitching and hiccupping as she calmed. Karol breathed in the soft baby scent of her head.
“Now what?” she murmured into the baby’s peach fuzz hair.
Karol turned around. The women were still standing at the window. But they were calmer now. They stood together, some with their arms around each other, some resting their heads on each other’s shoulders. They swayed and rocked back and forth. Marley stood in the middle. She had her arm wrapped around a plump woman wearing a cowl-necked silk camisole under a black jacket. The woman had her head on Marley’s shoulder. They were swaying softly. Marley’s eyes met Karol’s for a moment then slid away.
Karol patted the baby’s back absently. She opened her mouth to say something now that it was quiet. To ask Marley what was going on. Who all these women were. Where they all were. But before she could speak, the door to the room flew open with a bang. Karol spun around. Her heart leapt. A heavy-set nurse dressed in pink scrubs was bustling into the room pushing a computer on a cart. When she saw Karol she stopped, her eyes widening.
“Oh! Thank God!” Karol said. “Please, I . . .”
“You can’t be in here!” The nurse’s voice was high-pitched and edged with panic. “This area is restricted!”
“Oh, that’s . . . that’s fine. I . . . I’m just looking for a . . . a grown up.” That wasn’t exactly what she’d meant to say but it seemed right once she’d said it.
The nurse had abandoned her cart and was speed-walking into the room, her rubber clogs squeaking on the linoleum. She charged up to Karol and grasped the baby, yanking her out of Karol’s arms.
“Hey! Wait!” Without the baby’s warm breathing mass Karol felt suddenly empty. Suddenly cold.
“Out!” the nurse said, waving toward the door. “You can’t be here. Out! Out!”
“But . . .” Karol was backing away, ushered toward the door by the nurse’s frantic gesturing. The baby had opened her giant blue eyes and was gazing silently at Karol from around her thumb. Karol turned to appeal to the women at the window but found that there were no women. No window even. Just a smooth cream-papered wall. Karol’s breath caught in her throat.
The nurse, still holding the baby in one arm, reached out with the other and shoved Karol. Hard. Karol stumbled, the momentum carrying her back out into the hall.
“Wait! Please! Wait!”
The nurse slammed the door. Karol rushed forward, grasped the handle, and tugged. But the door was locked. She smacked it with her open palm.
“Let me in! Come on! Let me . . .” She peered in through the wire-reinforced window. There was no one there. Karol’s breath escaped her in a startled rush. The bassinet stood silent and empty in the middle of the room. Karol slammed her fist against the window but it held firm. Pushing herself away, she leaned back against the wall beside the door. Slowly, she slid down until she was sitting on the floor, her knees pulled up to her chest. With her head in her hands, she began to cry.
Karol ran the back of her hand across her nose. She snuffled and wiped the tears from under her eyes with her fingertips. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried like that. But she was coming to her senses now. Here, away from Marley and the strange keening women and the baby and the nurse, Karol was beginning to get a grip on herself. Clearly, someone was playing a prank on her. A horrible, misguided, potentially criminal prank. And, when she figured out who it was, she was going to sue them for everything they had. That thought cheered her up. Made her feel much more herself again. All she had to do was figure out how to get out of this hospital—or whatever it actually was—and then she could call Dworkin’s assistant and ask him to wait a little longer. It would probably make for a really great story. She could call Beau and the kids on the way downtown. Maybe Beau wouldn’t be so mad after he heard what someone had done to her. Maybe he’d forgive her for going in to work on Christmas Eve.
She pushed herself up to standing and looked around. She couldn’t see any cameras or anything but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. In fact, she hoped there were. If she subpoenaed the footage, whoever had planned this little stunt wouldn’t stand a chance. She looked up into the corner where the wall met the ceiling and waved. She didn’t actually see a camera there but, she figured, there probably was one. She hitched the wide neck of her hospital gown back into place and tightened the cloth belt. The socks Marley—or whoever that had been—had given her were, she had to admit, actually pretty comfortable. But they didn’t stop her from feeling practically naked in her baggy hospital gown.
She tucked her hair behind her ears and took a deep breath. The panic was still lurking but she shoved it down deep. There was a rational explanation for what was going on. The fact that she had absolutely no idea what it was didn’t change anything. She’d figure it out and everything would be fine.
“I just have to find an exit,” she said into the empty hallway. She grimaced. “Great, now I’m talking to myself. Okay, shut up.”
She’d seen an exit sign in the next hallway. It had been down at the end, when she’d been looking for all those women.
“The women who weren’t there,” she muttered, starting off down the hall. Her eyes widened. “Seriously, shut up.”
She came to the place where the hallway hit the wall and turned left. Another hallway stretched away from her, cream-papered and laminate-floored, punctuated by doors just like the other one. The exit sign glowed above a thick metal door with a push bar. Big red letters that Karol could read even from down at the other end spelled out: “Caution! Emergency exit only! Alarm will sound!”
“Good,” Karol muttered. “Sound the alarm. Can it set off flares too?” She started off toward the door. “Shut up.”
When she was about halfway down the hallway, the sound of voices made her stop short. They were low, murmuring voices. She couldn’t make out what they were saying. But there were at least two of them and they were coming from a room near the end of the hall. Karol’s breath hitched in her throat and she shook her head, willing the panic away. It was just people. Talking. People in a room, talking. She could handle people in a room talking. In fact, she could more than handle it. Whoever was in that room—whatever weird new situation had been devised to mess with her—she was going to march right in there and demand answers. She was going to threaten the biggest lawsuit in the history of lawsuits. She was going to yell, if she had to. Bar the door. Punch whoever it was in the face. She’d taken self-defense in college. She could do some face punching.
By the time she reached the door—padding down the hallway in her grippy socks—the fear had morphed into a much more satisfying righteous anger. She’d had enough and it didn’t matter if whoever was in there was Santa Claus himself; no one was leaving that room until she had some answers.
The door was standing ajar. A paper sign in a plastic holder on the wall next to it read “Family Waiting Room.” Karol smacked the door with her open palm and shoved it all the way open. It slammed into the wall with a satisfying thud. She strode into the room.
“Okay, listen, I don’t care who you are or what you think is supposed to happen next, your little game is over and I’m calling the shots. First of all . . .”
Karol pulled up short. Her mouth snapped shut. She looked around in confusion. The only person in the room was a little girl. She looked like she was maybe eight or so and she was sitting on a futon, her face in profile. She wore jeans and a My Little Pony T-shirt and purple sneakers with pink glitter laces. Her light brown hair was pulled up into two long pigtails tied with pink glitter bows. She turned as Karol barged into the room and stared up at her through purple-framed glasses.
“Um,” Karol said, all the fight going out of her.
The room was dark. It was obviously a private waiting room of some kind—the sort of place they put the families of patients undergoing life-threatening surgery or something like that. Uncomfortable-looking futons and padded wooden chairs were strewn about the room as if at random. A giant TV took up the wall to Karol’s right. Whatever was playing on it sent flickering blue light dancing over the floor and the girl where she sat, studying Karol.
“Hi!” the girl said brightly. “I’m watching TV. Do you want to watch with me?”
“Where are your parents?”
The little girl laughed. And, for a moment, Karol thought she’d been wrong—that this wasn’t a little girl at all. Because the girl was . . . different. Older. Graceful and self-possessed, her eyes filled with a kind of secret knowing. But she was also a little girl. Blinking up at Karol from behind her glasses. She was both, suddenly, all at once—a woman and a girl.
“I . . .” the panic was back, scrabbling around behind her sternum, trying to break out. She shook her head. It was the exhaustion, and the weirdness of the situation. She was just seeing things. Lots of really weird and inexplicable things. She looked back at the girl and took a deep breath. She seemed much more like a girl now. Much less like a woman.
“I want to speak to your parents,” she said. She was pleased to hear that her voice was firm, authoritative.
“Sorry.” The girl shrugged. “Can’t. You sure you don’t want to stay and watch TV?”
“No. I don’t. I don’t want to watch TV. And, while we’re at it, I don’t want to talk to dead people or hold disappearing babies or get yelled at by nurses or stared at by women with varying degrees of fashion sense. I just want to go home. But you can’t understand that because you’re just a child. Which is why I’d like to speak”—she enunciated the next words carefully, so there would be no mistake—“To. Your. Parents.”
“I’ve got popcorn,” the girl said. She turned away from Karol and picked up a large metal bowl from the futon next to her. She held it out in Karol’s direction.
“What? No! I don’t want popcorn!”
The girl shrugged. She put the bowl in her lap and plucked out a piece of popcorn with her thumb and forefinger. She tossed it into her mouth and crunched it.
“It’s the kind with butter,” she said. “It’s really good.”
“This is ridiculous,” Karol muttered. This was just a distraction. A weird, nonsensical distraction. She’d been headed for the exit. This girl was obviously fine. Maybe her mother was in surgery and she was waiting for her. A nurse would probably come soon to check on her. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t Karol’s problem. She turned to leave.
“Oh, could you hand me the remote?” the girl said from behind her. “It’s just there, on the wall?”
Karol looked automatically at the wall next to the door and saw one of those large hospital remotes resting in a plastic holder. She rolled her eyes.
“Here,” she said, handing it to the girl.
The girl smiled, her cheeks dimpling. “Thanks! Nice to meet you. Bye!”
Karol turned away. Behind her, the girl pressed a button on the remote and Bing Crosby’s crystalline voice soared into the room on the back of swelling violins.
“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” he sang. “Just like the ones I used to know.”
Karol walked to the door.
“Fran!” said a voice from the screen. Bing Crosby sang on in the background. “Fran! Come on! You’re going to miss it.”
Karol’s breath stopped completely. Her heart thudded so hard against her ribs it felt like maybe it was going to break free. She stood, frozen, her back to the TV, looking out into the hallway without seeing it.
