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He’s right. If I wait until five, then all Bruno has to do is stall—feign mental confusion or sudden pain—and I’ll lose my narrow window. No one, including me, is going to force him to stay longer just so I can get answers.
Dalton rises and gives Storm a shake. “Come on, girl. We’re getting another early start to our day.”
Dalton offers to wake April, but I’m not throwing him in front of that particular bus. I believe this is the right thing to do, and I’ll take the hit myself.
The door to Bruno’s clinic room is closed, and I won’t even peek in to see whether he’s awake. No end runs around my sister, however tempting that might be.
I leave Dalton and Storm outside and take the stairs to my sister’s apartment, while making a mental note to ask her to keep the outside door locked, please. We can install a bell for anyone who needs emergency assistance.
The clinic is bigger than our house, which leaves plenty of room upstairs for a decent apartment. The stairs open into a combination living room and kitchen. That leaves three doors—a closet, a bathroom, and a bedroom. The bathroom one is open. Of the other two, I make my guess—based on the layout of the building—and rap on the door.
“April?” I call. “It’s Casey.”
When she doesn’t answer, I try again, louder now. Still nothing.
Do I have the wrong door? I open it carefully. Moonlight shines through the window onto the foot of April’s bed. My heart leaps into my throat as I remember that unlocked door below and dash into the room to see—
April lies in bed, curled up on her side, and I tumble back to a childhood memory. Me, at five or six, in a chair in April’s room, watching her sleep as I shivered from a nightmare. A friend had told me that she actually liked having nightmares, because it meant she had an excuse to go sleep with her big sister.
I’d sat in that chair, watching April and dreaming of crawling in and having her arms go around me, hearing her tell me it was all right and I could stay if I wanted.
I never tried that. I knew better. But I’d dreamed. Oh, how I’d dreamed, imagining the day when I’d finally do something that would make her love me.
I could grieve for what we missed, but I only whisper a silent apology for not understanding why she couldn’t give me that. A silent curse, too, at my father for insisting his oldest daughter was fine, just fine. We were all fine, thank you very much. Except we weren’t, and I might have suffered for it, but April suffered so much more.
Yes, I missed out on having a big sister that I could curl up with after a nightmare. Yes, I blamed myself—my inadequacies—for her seeming lack of love. But I will be honest here and admit that I was not a child who suffered in silence. April didn’t want to be a “proper” big sister? Fine, then I wouldn’t be a properlittlesister. I’d be a brat, a troublemaker, a thorn in her side, and I would let her know that I didn’t need her. Didn’t need her one bit.
“I’m sorry, April,” I whisper. Someday, maybe I’ll be able to say that when she’s actually awake and listening. Someday, when I figure out a way to say it that won’t seem as if I’m trying to unburden my own guilt or, worse, expecting her to apologize back.
I don’t need to worry that she’ll hear me now. There’s a reason she didn’t wake up. April always had trouble sleeping, and she often uses earplugs and an eye mask. That does, however, pose the problem of how to wake her without scaring the shit out of her.
Shaking her shoulder is out of the question. Any kind of waking touch is. Instead, I move up beside her and say her name louder, then louder still, until she scrambles up, ripping off the mask.
I flip on the bedside lantern. She blinks at me, taking a moment to remember where she is. Then she frantically waves from the lit lantern to the open window blind. I close it as she removes her earplugs.
I explain the situation as succinctly as I can. By the end, she doesn’t seem to be listening anymore. She’s frowning at a box over her nightstand. It’s a small speaker. She flicks the volume dial, and then turns to me.
“Did you turn this off?” she says.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“The monitor. It’s hooked up to the patient monitor and will sound an alarm if there’s a problem. Even with my earplugs, I can hear the beep of the monitor.”
I stare at the silent box. “I didn’t shut—Shit!”
I’m at the stairs in a few running strides and then scrambling down them, calling “Eric!” He’s inside before I reach that closed door. I throw it open and run in. There’s the monitor, dark and silent. And there are the electrodes… dangling from an empty table.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
April stands at the clinic bed, holding those electrodes.
“Shouldn’t an alarm have sounded when they were disconnected?” I ask.
“It is programmed to sound an alarm if they are accidentally removed,” she says. “Someone turned off the machine.” Her head whips up, gaze on the door. “How did you get in here?”
“Through the back door.”
“It wasn’t locked?”
