Monday, Monday: A Novel by Elizabeth Crook

in the world in general, had made something vital go suddenly missing. She tried to struggle awake, but felt pinned to the bed. Lifting herself onto her elbow, she felt a crushing pain through her arm and remembered the cast. Her eyes opened to darkness, and the room seemed to be turning in circles around her. She tried to reason that this was from the medication, but still could not shake the feeling that something had gone terribly wrong. She lay sweating and listening, searching the dark, her heart pounding. The bandages on her breast squeezed at her breath as if a snake had tightened around her. “Mom?” she whispered, even knowing her mother was not there. “Mom? I need you.” Gathering courage, she forced herself up and out of the bed and groped her way to the door and pulled it open, facing the dim and deserted hallway. “Is there a nurse? Please?” she called, and started toward the nurses’ station, but there was no one there. The door to Jack’s room was ajar. She stumbled toward it, pushed it open, and saw Jack asleep in the bed and someone else in the chair. “Can I come in?” she asked in a desperate whisper.
    It was Wyatt who got up out of the chair. “Shelly?”
    “I’m sorry. I’m dizzy. Maybe it’s the medicine. I just feel … awful. I feel scared.”
    He put a hand on her forehead. “You’re sweating. You’re hot. I’ll get the nurse.”
    He settled her into the chair and then left to get the nurse. She curled her legs up under herself and tucked her gown around her feet. Tears ran down her cheeks. Wiping the sweat from her forehead, she watched Jack as he slept, his arm cocked over his head.
    Wyatt returned with a nurse, who flipped the lights on, and Jack sat up in the bed. The nurse put a thermometer into Shelly’s mouth. “A hundred and two,” she said when she checked it. “You probably have an infection. I’m going to talk to the doctor.”
    When the nurse had gone, Wyatt sat on the foot of the bed and looked at Shelly in the chair. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirttail and put them back on.
    “I’m okay,” she told him.
    “You’re sweating pretty bad.”
    “I feel horrible.”
    “I can take you back to your room and stay with you, if you want. Or you can stay here.”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong. I had this terrible feeling someone was in the room. Like someone was watching me. I’ve never felt that before.”
    “You’ve felt it,” Jack said from the bed. “That day. Stay here.”
    “Do you want the lights on, or off?” Wyatt asked her.
    “Off,” she said. She had started to shiver.
    “Take my blanket,” Jack told her, pushing it toward the foot of the bed.
    Wyatt covered her up, and switched the light off. “Try to sleep,” he said. She drifted, aware of the nurse returning and placing pills in her hand and giving her sips of water, and aware of Wyatt standing nearby, and Jack’s cigarette glowing.
    Before daylight Wyatt and the nurse walked her back to her room and tucked her into the bed. Later, she woke to the sun shining brightly through the windows and her parents standing over her. Wyatt had left his phone number scribbled on a napkin with a note that said “Call anytime.”
    During the day, the fever left her. She hoped Wyatt would stop by the room, or that Jack would come down in a wheelchair, but neither of them did. The following morning she returned to Jack’s room and found he had left the hospital.

 
    5
    LONG-DISTANCE
    When Shelly was allowed to leave after a week in the hospital, her parents took her home to Lockhart and settled her into the squat little frame bungalow where she had lived all her life until college. Neighbors and friends from childhood brought cards and flowers.
    At first Shelly liked having visitors, but after a couple of weeks she became impatient with so much small talk. Friends asked her a lot of questions about what happened that day. Other friends avoided the topic, as if