Prose Scene 16

The cabbie who drives her from the Amtrak station is nice, but a bit too interested in her situation for Lissa’s comfort. She asks way too many questions. The curiosity doesn’t bother her, but lying to a total stranger does. She wants to get away with this with as little lying as possible. Unfortunately, the cabbie isn’t making that easy.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right? Do you want me to wait until someone shows up for you?”

Lissa hates looking this young sometimes. She’s almost fourteen, for Pete’s sake! She made it this far on her own; she doesn’t need someone to hold her hand!

“I’ll be okay,” she assures the driver. “They know I’m coming.” She wishes she’d planned this better, asked to be dropped off at the mall or something and then just walked to where she needed to go. It’s not that far. But sadly, she didn’t think much beyond slipping out of the hospital, getting to the train station, and then getting back to San Diego.

She’s terrified the cabbie is going to stick around after she gets out, but thankfully she doesn’t. She drives away, leaving Lissa standing on her own on the residential street. She hadn’t actually given the driver Zoe’s address. She’d given her an address a few blocks away so that she has time to psych herself up for approaching the house.

Once the cab is out of sight, Lissa pulls Zoe’s most recent letter from her backpack and rereads the address she memorized ages ago. She starts walking up the street, watching the numbers on the houses get bigger, until there it is, just a few houses away.

That’s when the enormity of what she’s done hits her, and it’s like her legs won’t work. She’s frozen in place, and her breath catches in her throat. She sinks to the curb and presses her forehead into her knees, fighting back tears. She doesn’t have to do this. She can’t get back to Irvine — she spent all her Christmas money getting here. But she can walk back to the mall, catch the bus back to her house, call Dad, and leave Zoe out of it.

But — she doesn’t want to go back to her house, too dark and quiet and empty. And she doesn’t want to go back to the hospital, too bright and loud and sterile. She wants to go to Zoe’s, to her sister’s, to the person who told her, just a week ago, remember you aren’t doing any of this alone.

She doesn’t know how to tell Zoe that reading her letters is the only time she doesn’t feel alone. She doesn’t know how to tell Zoe that being in her house has become unbearable and being in a different hospital room every week is even worse, or how awful Christmas was with Mom and Dad and Grandma all pasting smiles on and acting like nothing has changed until Mom’s breathing got so bad they had to drive to the ER at three in the morning, or how she hasn’t talked to any of her school friends in ages because she has no idea how to explain everything that’s going on. She’s thirteen years old, and there are way too many things she doesn’t know how to say.

All she knows with any certainty is that Zoe, the sister she didn’t know she had three months ago, is the only person listening to her or talking to her right now. Dad and Grandma talk in anxious whispers in the corners of the room, thinking she doesn’t notice and not telling her anything because they want to protect her. Mom’s had a breathing tube down her throat for two days and hasn’t been conscious or coherent long enough to tell anybody anything. And the hospital chaplain just wants to talk about “things happening for a reason” and “God’s will at work in the world,” as if any of that crap means anything at all.

But Zoe, Zoe listens. And Zoe, who’s never met her, sees through the smile she pastes on, too, and knows that nothing is okay or fine right now. Zoe hears her, even when she doesn’t say anything, and asks, always, how she is and what’s wrong. Zoe, a stranger in so many ways, is better right now than everyone else in Lissa’s life, and Zoe is the person she wants to see. Zoe is the reason Lissa told her dad she was going back to the house with her grandma, and her grandma that she was staying at the hospital with her dad, and then slipped away to the Amtrak station and spent her Christmas money on a train ticket. Zoe is why Lissa is here.

With a deep breath, she looks up and wipes an errant tear off her cheek. She touches the woven bracelet Zoe gave her as a Christmas present and gets to her feet. Then she marches on, up the driveway and porch steps of number 892 and knocks on the door. When a huge, tall man with a smiling kind of face answers, she asks with purpose, “Is this where Zoe Ballard lives?”