[pirate witch]: 524.Novels.NaNoWriMo 2007 chapter 2

They went to the morgue the back way, so that they could be as quick as possible. “Time efficiency,” the nurse was telling Livia, “is the thing that we pride ourselves on most at the hospital.

The person who was animating Livia, making her walk and act like she wasn’t going to pass out, hoped very much that the thing the hospital prided themselves on the second most was not killing very many people. Not that it mattered now, though, since the only person who Livia gave a single care about right now was lying on the table, covered in
a sheet with cotton in his mouth.

Livia felt her throat start up as she started crying again. The mortician was lifting up the sheet to expose his face, so that she could identify the body. Livia blanched when she saw his face.

“Wait a minute!” she said suddenly, blinking back tears and turning her head to look at the dead man’s face from a different angle. “That’s not my father!”

“We know,” the nurse said, and she rolled her eyes in the direction of the mortician, who was drinking an iced coffee that he had pulled out of the refrigerator. “Did you think that we would just bring you down here to see your dead dad without saying the usual, ‘We’re so sorry for your loss,’ crap did you?” 

Livia had thought just that, but she was too surprised to say so. “Why did you bring me down here, then?” she demanded. It was quite rude of them to make her cry, to panic, and to start arranging the funeral in her head when she didn’t need too. Didn’t these people have any respect for human emotions? Probably not, she reasoned, because they dealt with dead people all the time.

The mortician answered this question because the nurse was too busy lighting a cigarette and taking a heavy drag on it to say anything. “We need you to identify the body. This guy knew your dad, so can you give us his name?”

Taking a close look at the body, it turned out that Livia actually did recognize the deceased police officer. He was Robert Gilligan, she had eaten dinner at his house a few times, and used to babysit for his daughter. What would she do when she found out that her dad had died?

“Why couldn’t my dad identify the body for you?” Livia asked after telling the nurse Robert’s name and the address where they could contact his family.

The mortician and the nurse exchanged a darkly significant look, and the nurse put out her cigarette with a stabbing motion before replying.

“He’s still in quite critical condition,” she said. “Now that we’ve got this taken care of, I suppose we aught to go see him, shouldn’t we.”

They walked back up to the rest of the hospital, where people lingered to life before going down the halls filled with artificial light to be prepared for the casket. It was a dreary place, and rain had started to smack against the windows in the night. Livia shivered under her father’s jacket, she didn’t want to go through the pain of thinking that her dad might be dead twice. She hoped that in this hospital, critical condition meant, “going to get better very soon.”

Anthony DiMaria was not awake when they walked into the dark room. A television set was showing the news, but it was silent. The subject had changed since Livia had left the apartment in such a hurry. A smiling woman was now interviewing a preteen girl and her mother who looked like they had prepared for months just for this moment. They didn’t know about the fatal car crash that had happened hours before.

“He shouldn’t be woken up right now,” The nurse whispered to Livia, checking the IV that was connected to his arm. A computer screen showed his vitals, and Livia heard the beeping of his heart rate. It was slow, but steady, and it made her relax a bit more. He looked peaceful too, which helped. Livia had heard stories from the police men who liked to brag about the criminals they shot about the looks of pain on people’s faces when they died violent deaths. 

“I’ll just let you stay here for a while,” the nurse said, and walked out the door. “Give us a call when he wakes up, ok?” 

Livia nodded and turned back to her sleeping father. The sheets that he lay on were a bit too white, which made her uneasy. Had someone just died on them, not hours before? Did the people in the laundry rooms far below her wash the blood and death off of them before sticking them over her father, clean and new? It was not a good thing for her to think about right then, and she shut her eyes.

The people on the television were beginning to annoy her, their smiles never dropped. Livia wanted to scream, but she kept it contained. In order to keep herself from pacing, which her legs itched to do, she took her fathers still warm but bruised hand and held onto it. She felt the blood racing beneath his slightly browned skin, and pressed her face to the lines on his palm. Soon enough, she drifted off to sleep, imagining that she was ten and sleeping in her parents bed during a thunderstorm. 


“What are you doing here?” Her father’s voice woke her up, and she saw him smile slightly as she wiped the dried tear stains off of her face. He looked drawn and tired, which made since, but she was just glad that he wasn’t on his way to the morgue right now. 

Livia got up and took off her jacket. The room was warmer now that the sun had come up and was streaming through the windows.

“I came last night,” she said, looking at the tree right outside her father’s room. Most of the leaves were gone, but a few brown and crumpled ones still clung to the gnarled branches. She would have liked to cut the damnable thing down, and replaced it with something more cheerful, but instead she just drew the curtain a little to cover the sight and returned to her chair beside her father’s bed. 

“How was the ballet?” he smiled again, but this time it looked more like a grimace. There were bruises all over his head, and a bandage wrapped around his middle, stained with blood on his left side. The medicine had made him speak slightly incoherently, and he couldn’t quite lift his head up. 

“It was fine,” It hadn’t been fine, but dancing was the last thing on Livia’s mind at that point. 

“That’s good honey,” he replied, and drifted off. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to go back to sleep now,” as soon as the words were out of his mouth, his eyes shut and started snoring slightly. Livia positioned the pillows under his head and covered him up with a warmer blanket that she found folded in the tiny closet that was on the opposite side of the room. 

Once she was sure he was alright, she went back to the closet and opened it up. There was a small plastic tray on a shelf there, like the ones people put their change and watches in when going through airport metal detectors. Lying in this tray were the things that had been in her father’s pockets on the day of the accident. 

“He will be fine,” A woman’s voice sounded from the doorway. Livia whirled about and saw, to her surprise, the lady in the long skirt who had been appearing everywhere lately.

“Who are you?” Livia asked, sounding rude to herself but brushing it off. It wasn’t exactly normal, she realized then, the amount of times that this person had appeared in her life for the past few days. Not normal at all, and with her father’s heart beat beeping in her hears, Livia wasn’t in the mood for more weird things.

The lady sniffed. “Well, how’s that for gratitude?” she said, dramatically examining her nails. “I tell you some good news and you just demand for me to introduce myself.” 

“Why have you been showing up everywhere lately?” 

She sighed and shut the door behind her. Through the window blinds, the shadow of the tree projected strangely onto the woman’s pale face. The sight of it made a chill go down Livia’s spine, although she wasn’t sure why.

“Why don’t I answer a better question?” The woman asked. She pulled the woolen hat that she had been wearing off of her bleached blonde hair. “Why don’t I answer the question that I doubt you will ever think to ask, ‘How can you be so certain that my dear father will end up fine?’ And I, because I’m not as rude as you are, will answer. Would you like me to answer?”

Livia nodded.

“It’s because I happen to be a psychic, a good one too, and I don’t see your father dying any time in the near future.”

“When is he going to die then?” Livia asked.

The woman shook a finger at her and smiled a smile that almost seemed mocking. “None of that now,” she said, “We can’t spill all the secrets of the world in one little conversation, can we?”

Livia sighed and sat back down in the chair next to her father, hoping that this “fortune teller” would take the hint and leave. She doubted very much that anyone could read the future, but didn’t want to say this out loud on the off chance that this woman, whatever her name was, was a psychic and could help her dad.

When she didn’t leave, Livia spoke again, “I don’t suppose you could tell me your name?”

“Of course I could, Livia,” the fortune teller seemed to enjoy impressing her audience by using a name that wasn’t given to her. Perhaps she was trying to convince Livia that she was the real deal, or maybe she was just overly proud of her unusual talent. It was really a toss up. “My name is Katrina Steel and I’m thirty four,” she said, adding the age for an unknown reason.

“Great,” Livia said. Katrina’s constant presence was beginning to become irksome, and Livia longed for some peace and quiet. She especially didn’t want her father to wake up to some strange woman predicting the future in his hospital room. “If you don’t mind, now, could you go home?”

“Go home?” Katrina asked, taken aback.

“Yes, go home. Not that I don’t appreciate the little update, I do, but I’m tired, my dad is injured, and I need to figure some stuff out.”

“Fine!” Katrina said, “I’ll go back, but when the earthquake comes tomorrow, don’t say that I didn’t warn you!” With these extremely startling words of farewell, Katrina slammed the door behind her. 

Livia heard her stomping down the hall, and pressed the palms of her hands to her temples. Among rude fortune tellers, injured parents, and bad ballet shows, she didn’t think she had room to worry about an earthquake the next day. Indeed, if Katrina really was a psychic, and it seemed that she was, maybe this earthquake would cause the city to come toppling down and kill everyone but Livia’s father. Livia realized that she wouldn’t mind so much. Something was dragging her down, and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what it was. 


An hour and a half later, Livia let herself back into her apartment. She put the keys down on the table and made herself a steaming cup of Italian coffee. It was one in the afternoon, but she hadn’t been sleeping well lately, and she very much doubted that one extra cup of cheerful caffeine wouldn’t disturb her REM cycle schedule that much. 

At the hospital, a friendly doctor with a voice that sounded like he was speaking around something had told her that her father would probably be fine, but that he had to be kept at the hospital for a few more days. Livia hadn’t challenged his decision. She had resigned herself to the notion of checking in on her dad for hours a day until he was better, so by the time she had stood on the door to her apartment building and watched two little girls drawing pictures on the sidewalk with chalk, her despair had turned to a dark but stable cloud resting right between her lungs. 

The TV that Livia had forgotten to turn off now had a show on where four impeccably styled people were giving a frazzled woman a make-over. Although Livia normally considered this sort of show a waste of time, she sat down to watch it as she went through the mail. There were four college applications that she had asked for online, two bills, and a letter to her father from his friend in the Bahamas.

While she opened and read the applications, wondering if she even wanted to go to college the next year at all, a commercial came on for some miracle pill that claimed to melt body fat faster than a cremation oven. Disgusted and slightly perturbed, she changed the channel quickly. 

It was the weather station, and seeing reports of her local forecast, Livia’s thoughts drifted to the prediction of Katrina, or whatever her name was. She wondered what she would do during the earthquake the next day, if she should try to get to shelter, of if she should just slap some sense into herself and remember that no one could really tell the future.

The final option was starting to seem like the best one when Livia remembered that Katrina had guessed her name without being told. Of course, the fortune teller could have been stalking her, figuring out her information through the people she spoke to or the letters she sent.

“What the hell am I talking about?” Livia demanded of herself. She was beginning to become paranoid, imagining conspiracies, and thinking that she was being followed. It was a good idea, she decided, to just make up her mind that Katrina was a rather sensitive psychic who happened to be in a the same places as Livia for the past few days. Seeing that in her head, it didn’t seem so odd, so she allowed her attention to return to the television. 

The phone rang. Livia kept her attention on the weather report. It rang again. She looked over to the hallway, where the telephone was, but she didn’t get up. The third time it rang, she threw the remote at it, knocking it out of the dock and letting it hang from the cord, brushing the ratty carpet on the floor. Whatever person was on the other line, asking if anyone was there, would have to wait.

Livia didn’t know why she did it, but ten minutes later, when she dragged herself off of the couch and hung up the phone, now emitting the angry noise of the dial tone, she wasn’t at all curious as to what the call was about.  The strain of the past day was starting to get to her now and in order to keep herself from crying she put one hand on the back of a kitchen chair and began doing tendues. 

Loud ringing filled the apartment for a second time. She finally padded over to the telephone and picked it up, feeling murderous for no reason at all. “What?” she demanded into the receiver.

“Livia?” It was her father’s voice and Livia almost slapped herself right there and then. What was she thinking, letting herself mope around while the phone rang? It could have been something important, she realized, and had to restrain herself from scolding herself out loud.

“Yeah, Dad?” 

“I just wasn’t sure if you were alright. I tried to call a few minutes ago, but I think we got disconnected. Did you hear the phone ring?”

“No, I didn’t. But that’s ok. How are you feeling?” she asked. She hadn’t intended to lie to her father, she hated lying to him, but she couldn’t find a good excuse as to why she hadn’t wanted to answer the phone. In face, she could not even remember why she had done it in the first place. It was probably the day though, and how stressed out she was, and the sound of the ringing on her headache. She nodded, it was probably all those things.

“I’m still in pretty bad shape,” he said, sighing. 

“Poor guy,” Livia’s dad hated not being fit. He would go to work when he had the flu or with a sprained ankle. The guys at the station only put up with so much self sacrifice on Anthony DiMaria’s part, so he had stopped telling them when he was sick or hurt. This time, though, it seemed that he would have to take some time off.