Between Here and Forever by Elizabeth Scott

Author:Elizabeth Scott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Young Adult, Fiction.Contemporary
ISBN: 9781416994848
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

twenty-seven

My family has breakfast together every Sunday morning. My father makes pancakes, and my mother makes bacon and usually scrambles a few eggs too.

When Tess was younger, she would get out cookie cutters and turn Dad’s pancakes into hearts and stars. Sometimes, if she was upset about something, she wouldn’t, and a few times, right after she stopped talking to Claire, and then again when she started worrying about college so much she’d basically stopped sleeping, she’d refuse to come down for breakfast at all.

She’d lie in splendid, solitary misery in her room, Mom trying to tempt her downstairs and my father eventually carrying a tray up to her. I’d pick it up later, the food untouched and Tess lying in bed watching the ceiling. She could be poisonous then, responding to my footsteps with icy glares or worse, acting like I wasn’t there at all. Looking through me like she looked through Claire.

We kept up the breakfasts after Tess went away to college, although Dad started experimenting with his pancake recipe (the gingerbread ones were a hit, the cornmeal ones—not so much) and Mom switched to turkey bacon and “egg product” after her last doctor’s visit.

We kept them up after the accident too, after we knew Tess wasn’t coming home right away, though the pancakes had bits of eggshells in them for the first few weeks and Mom tended to forget the bacon until it started to burn.

This morning, Dad’s made peanut butter pancakes, and I get out the strawberry jelly and smear it on one, watching it thin and ooze, trickling across my plate.

“You should come see Tess with us today,” Mom says, depositing two pieces of turkey bacon on my plate.

“Is this because of what happened last night?”

“What?” Mom says.

“Never mind,” I mutter, but it’s too late. Mom sits down across from me and says, “Abby,” in her tell-me-everything voice.

I tell her, and she glances at Dad as I finish talking, then looks back at me. “We know you want Tess to wake up, and we want that too. But there hasn’t been any indication—”

“I know what I saw.”

“We—” Dad says, and Mom looks at him, shaking her head slightly.

“She has a right to know, Katie,” he says, sitting down with his own plate of pancakes. “We sometimes see—sometimes we see things that look like movement too,” Dad says. “I—we saw them more before, back when—back when she was first hurt. But the doctor says she isn’t responding, not like you think. Her brain activity is … minimal.”

“Minimal,” I echo, my appetite gone. Tess has been in the hospital long enough for me to learn its language, and minimal brain function means the doctor thinks Tess—the Tess I know, the Tess whose books and clothes are waiting for her upstairs—is gone. The doctor thinks all that’s left is a shell.

“We thought you might go with us today because—well, your father and I have decided to transfer Tess to a …” Mom presses her hands together, knotting them so her knuckles meet in a straight, white-edged line.

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