Closure Read Online Free Page B

shrink-wrap, a banana, a single oatmeal cookie, a small bottle of apple juice and cup of coffee and still the woman at the till says “anything else?” I take my seat in a corner with a view of the exit. I stretch my legs under the table, lean back in the plastic chair and pull out my mobile from my front pocket of my jeans. I dial Katie back on the ward.
    â€œKatie, do me a favour. Have you seen Cheryl?”
    â€œNot at the moment, but I’m at the dispensary. What about her?”
    â€œShe’s on the ward, right?”
    â€œI couldn’t tell you. What is it? Should I find her?”
    â€œNo, I’ll head back. Thanks Katie.”
    â€œNot sure what I did, but you’re welcome, Zack.”
    I gulp my food. I drink the entire 300 mls of apple juice in one tilt. I inhale the banana – I mean divide it into three parts and each third I crush and swallow. I break the cookie into two and wash the halves down with my coffee cup.
    Cheryl cries for half the day and in just a few minutes she perks up as if she’d grazed her knee in a playground. That’s too much of a 180° turn even for my nursing skills. Or am I just so plugged into this place I’m unable to take a thing at face value?
    Cheryl has never thanked me for anything. She takes all that I have to offer and I leave her and never fail to feel like I could have done more for her, listened better, coined a more inviting observation to engender further disclosure from her. But she thanks me. That can’t be right.
    I drop the tray off at the counter section for dirty utensils, recycle my apple-juice plastic bottle, and toss my napkin, free-throw-style, into the wide dustbin beside the exit. I make a quick pit stop at the gents. Wash my hands and rejoin the corridor. It’s about a dozen sets of overhead lights from the canteen to Ward Three. I make two steps to cover each set of pairs and another two steps to close the gap between lights. I know this because Cheryl told me a while back that that was how she made it from the ward to occupational therapy. If she did not count her way along she would feel too much panic to make the short trip. The same mathematical logic powered her life around the ward. At the collapse of that system she took to her bed and her bones locked in foetal pose. She moved so well with her counting system, as I walked with her and talked, that I forgot that she could hold a conversation and still count her way along. I had been so keen to make up for not seeing her all day that I forgot to think about the fact that where we went to sit and talk must have been measured by her, and that as we talked she must have counted out those steps without variation. To break up her code we sometimes practised walking up and down and deliberately taking an extra step after she arrived, and rather than having to start the whole thing all over again I’d get her to talk to me about something – anything long enough for the anxiety to quell, hence our detailed and repetitive discussions about contact lenses.
    I take a right into the ward and Katie tells me she looked for but could not find Cheryl and she wonders if Cheryl might have gone to art, psychotherapy, or some other appointment. She is still saying something to me but I turn and run to the front desk at the hospital entrance. I jump to the front of the queue of three people, announce that it is an emergency and ask the porter if a patient fitting Cheryl’s 5' 5'', shoulder-length frizzy brown hair, thin with a prominent nose and slightly red blue eyes left here in the last quarter-hour or so. The porter scratches his head.
    â€œWas she wearing a red cardigan?” I ask.
    He nods.
    â€œAre you sure?”
    â€œOf course I’m sure.”
    I run to the station for the second time that day, but this time I hear sirens. I turn into the park. Pigeons flare up around my feet. I bolt for the north exit and meet people coming from the