The Truths Behind the Life of Maeve Sun Lively

106

I FEEL ALMOST AS IF I am living in the moments Maeve had once done as she waited for Cameron and Klarise in their surgery rooms; desperately trying to stay composed.

But no one is here next to me. No nurse, no family. Just some people wandering around in the halls, going about their night, their eyes exhausted and dark to show that they must've been here for a while, a family member of the sick.

I sit in a chair nearest to the blank white double doors on my left, two blocky windows that lead down into a further hall revealing another door at the end. I'm guessing that's the surgery room.

It's been maybe an hour since I last saw them rush Rosalie—with an oxygen mask covering her face, IVs in her arms already—urgently in with a bunch of other doctors in scrubs; preparing for surgery.

My hands are clasped together and dried sticky tears stick onto my cheeks, my snots drying below the bottom of my nose that is starting to take the toll of uncomfortableness. I stare at the gray marble floor of the hospital, losing my sights in it. I feel cold, in my bare t-shirt and shorts. The air conditioner turned on for the summer heat feels almost like winter. I feel so lost, no one here I know or can communicate efficiently with.

The scene of Rosalie on the floor when I found her kept flashing back into my mind. Her long red hair splattered across the carpet; a lifeless form. The white foamy substance near her mouth. The smell of the stuff I had little knowledge of. That prescription bottle that was grasped still tightly in her hand even as I peeled it out of her grip. Her pale skin, so yellow and almost...dead looking.

The realization hits me that she must've found Maeve in a similar manner. Overdose...

How could Maeve do that to her?

I try hard not to let the subject of Maeve get over my head. Because I'll get angry. Maybe angry enough where the nurses will have to come and hold me down.

Would I rather be angry right now? Over the worry and fear that is slowly starting to envelope me?

I don't get to decide. Because a loud commotion was being made outside the entryway to this quiet path that leads to the few surgery/patient rooms in process. I look up, seeing the five nurses working the nightshift trying to stop these intruders from barging in.

"We are her family!" Someone of a familiar voice—yet not a familiarity that I know in person, more like on TV of sorts—yells. Her words slur together, switching on and off between English and mandarin like she talked like that in two languages at the same time all the time.

The nurses murmur something to her but she erupts even louder.

"Oh! This is such bullshit! I need to see her!"

"Mom, calm down, this is the hospital." A woman with her long hip-length black hair, now a wild mess, tries to calm down the other slightly older woman with a bit of wrinkles around her smiling lines.

That's Carlise.

The nurses and the older woman, yet beautiful and almost as if she was around Carlise's age, are still fighting when I emerge quietly beside them.

The bewildered nurses, faces flushed red now from the arguing, looks at me through frustrated eyes. I don't know any mandarin or enough of it to say what I want, so I use hand gestures on and off between the three people that stood before us. Carlise, the older woman that has such a fit body which I'm assuming is her mom, and a man that's slim and handsome in an almost feminine and shy way. Jackson Kong.

It takes about ten minutes for the nurses to finally let them in, the people that were still around in this late timing casting glances at us as we take a seat on the cushioned benches in front of the white double doors.