Neon Nights Chapter 6

Marc's anger grew on his drive to the hospital, his mind working overtime trying to understand why smart kids did dumb shit.

One night of feeling good, out of control, free. One night, and then no more nights.

Since the turn of the millennium, almost a million people had died from drug overdose. How many millions more had their lives upended by those deaths?

He pulled onto the East Bay Memorial Hospital campus and down an oak-lined drive as willows swayed in theafternoon breeze off the ocean. The property sat on a beautiful waterfront piece of land, gifted by the town's foremost real estate baron, Rex Stevens, who owned the largest chunk of the town that didn't have an owner with a county, city, or state government in the title.

Marc walked up to the information desk, where a fit-looking woman in her early eighties with short silver curls greetedhim. She glanced up from the book she was reading, which had a tan and white striped cat on the cover. The cat waswalking past a body lying on the floor with a broken wineglass within arm's reach.

"Can I help you, young man?" Marc returned the smile.

"I'm looking for Kerry Baker's room in the ICU."

"Oh yes, what a beautiful young girl. Such a shame. Her parents seem so nice."

"Yes, ma'am. They are, and she is too."

"She's in room 505. Elevators are straight ahead.” "Thank you."

He looked down the hallway to his left and saw a waiting area filled with people, nearly every seat taken up with bodies in various states of discomfort. Orderlies rolled carts and wheelchairs down the hallway, and exhausted looking administrative personnel snapped heavy metal clipboards on the check-in counter. With a population that had such wild fluctuations during the summer season, the number of beds needed was a constantly moving target; and on holiday weekends, when tens of thousands of tourists might be covering every inch of town, the hospital could run into issues with overcrowding.

Like any good beach community, if you needed to have something terrible happen to you, December or January was the optimal time to do it.

Marc knocked on Room 505, and a ghostly-looking version of his friend Jack Baker greeted him.

Hospital rooms always seemed to suck the energy out of a person when they walked in, the white floors withtheir uninteresting

configurations of drab-colored squares, the neutral-toned walls, and the best artwork that a machine in Asia couldprint off its presses. It was as if the designers decided that keeping the room ugly enough would incentivize people to either heal faster or die quicker. Either way, they could get them out and a fresh body in, preferably someone with top-tier insurance. Even the cafeteria trays and the serving dishes looked like they didn't want to be there.

"How's she doing?" Marc asked as they shook hands.

"Not good … I'm sorry, I shouldn't say it that way. Doctors don't know until all the testing comes back and we knowmore about what we are up against."

Kerry Baker was the type of kid that parents used as the gold standard for how they wanted their kid to behave, and it broke Marc's heart to see the cords running alongside her body. Jack's wife of twenty years, Anna, sat on the couch in front of the window and hugged her knees. When she finally spoke, the formerly energetic and gregarious woman sounded like only a sliver of her was still there.

"I asked her not to go, you know. I just read so much stuff about this festival and how many problems they had. She's so close to her dreams coming true. I … I don’t know what she was thinking."

Tears flowed from her eyes, and her husband walked over to comfort her.

They've got something special.

"I'm so sorry, guys. I don't want to be asking what I am asking, but was she having a problem with drugs or gettinginto taking stuff she shouldn't?"

"No!" Anna snapped, then tempered her voice down in equal measure. "I'm sorry, Marc." She dabbed a tissue to hereyes. "I'm so mad at her right now. She partied with Logan and her friends, but it was never over the top. She never had to be carried home or anything like that. She told me she had smoked some pot a handful of times and triedecstasy once at a concert, but I never believed she had a problem or anything."

"We always stressed one hundred percent communication, even if it wasn't something we wanted to hear. She felt safein telling us stuff, and we never held it against her," Jack added.

A nurse came in to check Kerry's vitals, and everyone grew quiet as if being caught talking in class.

"What about friends? Who was she spending a lot of time with?"

"She spent nearly every minute with Logan," her father said. "When I looked at the two of them, I saw Anna and I twenty years ago. I don't know that they'll make it all the way or anything, but I felt like they had a better chance than most."

Anna sat up straighter at the chance to talk about her daughter's world.

"She had a tight crew of three girlfriends, Jen, Callie, and Julie, but she made friends with people so easily that I couldn't tell you all of them. These were girls she was friends with from soccer in high

school. They stayed close when they went away to college. They pretty much lived at our house on the weekends for years."

"Who was her best friend out of the three?" Marc asked as he sat down in an empty chair across from them.

“Callie,” they said in unison.

“Was Callie involved in anything she shouldn't have been?"

"Doubtful, but it's always possible. She is laser-focused on going to work for NASA one day and is MENSA brilliant.She has wanted to do it since we have known her, and I doubt she would do anything to jeopardize it."

"What about the other two?" Marc asked.

"Jen is the wildest of the group and joined a sorority at USC. She's a great kid, but she can get carried away. Julie isright in the middle. She's more of a church girl. If we have something at our house, she has like one drink max."

Marc nodded and searched for the best way to ask the next question.

"Who was her black sheep friend? The girl you knew to keep an eye on because she would get Kerry into trouble at every turn?"

They both paused and looked at each other. "Blaire Porter," they said at the same time.

"If you saw this girl, you knew she was always out for a good time, and I don't think anyone wants their daughter winding up around someone like that. She brought out another side of Kerry in the little time they hung out," Jack said.

"I didn't like her one bit. She's a slut and parties way too much," Anna said, venom laced through every word.

"Do you know where she lives or works at all?" Marc asked, sidestepping the comment.

"Kerry told us that she works at the Dunes," Jack replied. "Any idea what she does over there for work?" Marcasked.

Jack scratched the back of his head as if he was digging into the recesses of his brain, searching for a piece of information he never thought he’d need to remember.

“It was just the usual summer jobs. Lifeguarding, tennis camps, stuff like that."

"That's super helpful. Do you have all their phone numbers? I want to talk to each of them today."

"Take her phone with you; the code is 1239," Anna said, handing him the phone from the table beside the bed.

Marc took the phone from her outstretched hand. He always felt like it was an intrusion into someone's privacy when he had to look through one, and in this case, it felt even worse for some reason. It was the equivalent of reading Kerry's diary, stepping into thoughts and feelings only meant for the medium where they were written, not for outside eyes looking in.

He pushed the thought out of his mind, rationalizing that the important thing here was finding out what had happened to Kerry so that it didn’t happen to others. Based on what he had just heard, he had a good feeling that Blaire would have some of the answers.

After Marc left the room, he walked to the elevator bank, pressed the down button, and got lost in thought as he waited for it to arrive. The bright lights of the hospital's corridors stood in stark contrast to the dark and unwelcoming rooms,as orderlies wheeled patients back and forth down the hall in stretchers and wheelchairs. In fact, the hallways seemedto be too welcoming, like a hyper dinner party host who needed attention and affection heaped on them.

He felt a tap on his right shoulder and turned to find himself standing before a tanned and toned woman in blue scrubs, with copper-colored curls just past her shoulder and a smile that disarmed him immediately.

Since the day he met Mary Wade last year, Marc felt a jolt of electricity every time he saw her. He didn't believe in love at first sight since a woman could be bat shit crazy when she opened her mouth, but from all indications so far, she was close to perfect.

Marc grinned at her and tried to subdue the awkward teenager inside him.

"You shouldn't sneak up on people, you know. You might give someone a heart attack."

"You're in a hospital. I could drag you down a few doors, and they'd have you taken care of in no time," Mary replied.

He laughed, and he liked the way the laugh felt.

"I haven't seen you in the water in a few weeks," he said. Mary sighed.

"It has been non-stop here over the last two weeks, and the worst part is that summer is just now kicking off." Shelooked down at her watch. "I'm done with my shift now. I saw you standing here, and I came over here to see if youwanted to join me and some friends for a quick session this afternoon."

Marc let out a groan of defeat, his body slumping at the question.

"There is nothing in the world I would enjoy more, but I am working on some things right now to help the Bakerfamily in 505."

Mary put her hand over her heart.

"I know. It killed me when she came in last night. Her parents seem like such a sweet couple, too."

"They're a great family."

Her smile was perfect, sparkling white with soft-looking lips like two small pillows.

"Well, it seems like a legitimate reason to skip surfing with me, so I won't be too hard on you. Not like the cat needs a haircut or you haven't cleaned the oven in a while."

Marc knew he couldn't pass up this opportunity. "Can I ask you something then?"

"Shoot."

"I want to take you to dinner …" She stopped him.

"That's not a question."

"False start. Can I try again?" "Please do," she said.

He tapped his foot on the ground and looked around the hallway, hoping the magic words were in one of the picture frames on the walls.

"Okay, here goes. Would you like to join me for a real-life date one night, where we go to the beach and then have dinner?"

"That took you a long time."

His smile was so wide his cheeks hurt.

"I'm a little slow at times. How is Monday night at five when the circus has left town? We can run down to the inlet for a surf and then head to The Mako for dinner?"

"You have a date," she said, beaming back.

She grabbed a piece of paper from the desk a few feet away and wrote down her phone number.

Marc watched her walk down the hallway and felt like the entire trajectory of his life might have just changed with thatone question.

And he couldn't have been happier about it.