Page 17 of The Lipstick Flip

No. It was too late.

But maybe in the morning.

I was tired. I was exhausted. I was going to sleep here and see how she was doing in the morning and talk to the doctor again and see when they could get her off the ventilator.

That was a plan.

Those were things I could do.

The darkness wasn’t really darkness; it was the red of the inside of my eyelids. And my heart beat in my chest like a trapped thrush.

7

The next morning, the doctor told me they weren’t ready to take Si off the ventilator. She had to stay in the medically induced coma a little longer. They were being cautious.

So, I drove home.

The day had an unrelenting grayness, like no matter how high the sun rose, it was going to stay wrapped up like this. The Denny’s sign dripped with snowmelt. A woman with all her possessions in a Piggly Wiggly cart was smoking on the berm outside a Dunkin’ Donuts. In the Walmart parking lot, a man and a woman were screaming at each other, and a torn package of diapers was spilled on the ground around them. It was nine o’clock in the morning.

What the fuck was I going to do?

Maybe that was a shitty thing to worry about, but I couldn’t shake it.

Si was in the hospital. Si was in a medically induced coma. And even if they got her off the ventilator today, even if they woke her up, and there were no complications, and she went home this afternoon, she wasn’t going to be in any condition to work. She’d need weeks to recover. Maybe months. She wasn’t going to be standing on a stool in my basement, shoulder squared to a joist while she mounted a brace.

I was screwed.

I was beyond screwed. I was totally, royally fucked.

Because even though I was good at what I did, and even though I knew a fair bit and could figure out a lot more, I wasn’t Si. I didn’t have her experience. I didn’t have her skills. Maybe I could finish the house on my own, with enough time. But I didn’t have time. I had—what? Thirteen days? Twelve?

I couldn’t do it. Not in twelve days. Probably not in a month.

When I got home, I parked. And I sat there for a while. The thin sunlight on my face did nothing to warm me. I closed my eyes. Maybe I’d stay there forever.

One pill would be like throwing a door open. An escape hatch. Not to feel so tense all the time. Not to feel so tight. Not to feel so fucked.

I went inside.

In the pale light that made its way through the windows, the house looked even worse somehow. All the shit we’d left piled everywhere—empty boxes, half-used buckets of mud, leftover bathroom tile that we’d decided to hang on to just in case, sample-sized cans of paint. Dusty footprints crisscrossed the floor. Bare wires hung overhead.

There was so much fucking work to do.

Time for a spot check.

How am I feeling? Very fucking overwhelmed.

So, accept it. Accept that you can’t do all of it. You can’t control things. You can’t make Si better. The world does what it does, and you just have to do your best to go along with it.

What could I do? Well, the easy stuff. Mount the light fixtures so there weren’t bare wires sticking out all over the place. Get rid of all this shit. Clean. I couldn’t do the fine-detail carpentry, but I could get the kitchen cabinets into place. Maybe. What I couldn’t do right, maybe I could make look good. After all, the house tour was just for people to walk through. They just had to see a good house.

Okay. Maybe. Maybe there was a chance.

Actually diving into any of the projects right then seemed like too much. What I wanted to do was take a handful of ibuprofen because my neck was fucking killing me and crawl into bed. Instead, I started doing what Si and I should have been doing from the beginning—I started straightening up. I hauled the tile down to the basement, where we’d keep it in case we needed to replace a piece, or maybe we’d come up with another use for it. Same thing went for any of the stuff we could still use—the bags of mortar, the buckets of mudding compound, pieces of drywall that Si and I had left leaning against the walls because we’d been too busy to take care of them. Then the trash—there was so much fucking plastic wrap, so many empty bags, so many pieces of scrap lumber Si wouldn’t let me pitch because I might need that. I carried it all outside. The day still only seemed half-awake, but it was a little brighter, and the cold made my eyes sting in a good way.

I was letting myself in the back when I heard the thumping at the front door—regular, insistent, and if I had to guess, annoyed.

When I opened the door, Noah stood there. He was dressed the way he’d been the night before: another oversized hoodie, another pair of fleece-lined leggings, another pair of Uggs. The heavy winter coat hung open, the fur-lined hood pushed back. In its place, he wore a bunny hat. The pearl choker had been replaced by a rainbow one. The lone earring had been swapped out for one that was even danglier. He raised his chin. He was wearing glitter again.