Plastic tables and plastic chairs perched side by side in the hotel lobby—a bleak offering in dining choices within a mile of HeartCare Memorial, complete with cracked surfaces and unidentifiable goop smeared across the white-and-gray-speckled tabletops. Only the bar situated at the side of the lobby made it clear this was an adults-only space. Here, employees nodded with familiarity at every passing guest. Even the steadfast AA members were tempted to grab a stool and trade a soda or water for their sad tales of woe. That’s what the bartenders were there for in the first place, weren’t they? It was how they made their tips—acting as shrinks instead of waiters.

The Springhill Suites had been the only logical hotel for Victoria. What with daily visits to her brother’s wing, the need to run back to grab her charger or, god forbid, consume something that wasn’t stale hospital air. Still, the attempted intimacy from each person walking through the automatic front doors was wearing thin. This was, after all, a place reserved for long-timers. Those who knew they’d be bound to a hospital bed for the foreseeable future. From newly arrived visitors ready to see friends and family to return patients coming in for their next chemo treatment.
The hotel was a scrapbook of those going and those about to be left behind.

Victoria trudged to a quiet corner, refusing to indulge the customary rundown of how unfair or miraculous life was—depending on the content of today’s visit—as the waiter took down her drink order. What she needed was quiet, solitude. Odd since that was all she ever got when seated at her brother’s bedside. Nothing but his breathing and the beeping of instruments. The waiter hadn’t been gone five seconds before her yearned-for solitude was interrupted.

“Evening, Victoria. How’s your brother doing?”

She glanced up from her wobbly, off-kilter table. Trixie. The absolute last face she wanted to see.

The middle-aged woman stood beside her, blonde tangles held stiff with hairspray and jutting half a foot from her head. She smiled, probably trying to comfort Victoria, and was rewarded with Victoria’s own by-now-perfected, and probably worth-being- patented, fake one. “Still in a coma, Trixie. Nothing much we can do but wait and see.”

The same answer she’d given the last month. The answer people wanted to hear, positivity, an echo of a doctor’s sentiment that gave all pretense of wisdom and yet promised nothing effective. She was tired of feeling like the hospital’s parrot.

Trixie eyed her, the tip of her tongue sticking out between lips slathered with the wrong shade of lipstick for her leathery skin tone. “I know exactly what you need right now, Victoria,” she said. “We’re all meeting on the couches in ten minutes.”

The couches. AKA, church. AKA, therapy. AKA, a whole lotta nope.

“I appreciate it, but tonight isn’t the best.” Victoria looked past her, but there was no sign of her waiter or the regular bartender. All she wanted was a damn drink, even if it required that she play the nightly game of “guess which wine” since the hotel rarely carried half of what the list promised.

She glanced back at Trixie, who hadn’t moved an inch. The woman shifted her weight from one foot to the other, watery eyes flitting between her and the nearby guests, never quite making contact or connection. “Nonsense. Prayer circle is good for everyone. I won’t take no for an answer.” She leaned forward and clasped Victoria’s hand in her own. “I’ll come get you in a few, if you like. I won’t let you miss such an experience. We’re all here for you, hon.” With those parting words, she trotted away to the surrounding tables, spreading her nagging message of mandatory group grieving.

Victoria grit her teeth, wishing not for the first time that she’d ordered room service and skipped the lobby altogether. Just once, though, she’d hoped to decompress somewhere that wasn’t five feet from her bed or the suitcase with both dirty and clean clothes clumped together in a heap, the dresser ignored in hopes she wouldn’t be that guest who truly found use of it. She’d assumed tonight would be safe. Prayer group usually met in the mornings—sweaty hands clasped as stale, still-smelly overnight breath mingled together under the fluorescent lighting. Yet an emergency nighttime session was sometimes called. Most only attended because Trixie refused to cease her harassing, yet well-meant, reminders.

Trixie was a hotel guest who’d brought her children’s godmother to the hospital after a sudden heart attack during a family fishing trip. From her very first day in the hotel, she’d gathered everyone up and encouraged them to share their stories. As sympathetic as Trixie’s intentions were, stories had turned to prayer—and prayer was something Victoria had pretty much given up on. While others closed their eyes and lifted their voices, she watched, eyes open, head still lifted. Every single person here was fake, wearing a mask of concern throughout each member’s shared tragedy. Really, they eagerly waited to tell their own story—to have God’s Miracle Fairy Dust sprinkled on it.

The other guests were already congregating near the couches in the lobby, some with downcast eyes and silent nods while others made loud exclamations and exchanged hugs. Who believed and who was just folding to Trixie’s pestering?

Victoria’s glass of Riesling finally appeared. She lifted it to her lips, puckering at the taste of the cheap wine, but glad to have something to take the edge off. Every time she closed her eyes, there was her brother, Dustin—lying in his hospital bed, tube coming out of his throat, unable to move anything except his eyes.

The drink would at least blur the image for an hour or so.

There were quite a few others nursing their own grief glasses. She knew most of their stories, primarily from the damn prayer circle. The bald man two tables over had a wife who’d hit her head falling from a ladder, suffering some kind of brain injury. The family in the corner had a son in the trauma center who’d been shot three times.

She’d done her best to console them; she’d even shared a drink or two with some. As much as she hated to accept it, she was becoming a part of the hotel. A member of the Springhill Support Group each time she wished them healing thoughts and actually meant it. But sincerity faded a tiny bit each day they returned and nothing had changed.

The fairy dust turned out to be cheap glitter thrown from an apartment balcony.

“Victoria, come join!”

A sigh broke through her lips as she downed the last of her drink. No getting out of it.

The waiter recognized his cue, arriving swiftly to refill her glass. Just as she stood to join the crowd, the hotel’s front doors opened to admit two unfamiliar figures—a couple, wrapped in each other’s arms, oblivious to the world they had suddenly entered. They froze, glancing over at the prayer circle with confused and almost entertained expressions, before heading to the check-in desk.

Victoria kept her eyes fastened on the couple all the way from the front desk to the elevators, until they were swept up and out of sight. She wasn’t seeing them, though. They were a memory, a Boston apartment and a love she only talked to late at night, after the agony of the hospital was washed away with a scalding pre-bed shower. She envied those two, so unreachable, so innocent of the way this hotel swallowed all who entered.

“All right!” Trixie’s voice cut through the air, yanking Victoria back to the Florida heat and humidity, two of the many reasons she wished she could leave the godforsaken peninsula behind her. She turned to find the wannabe shepherd waving her arms at the stragglers. “Let’s group up and begin!”

A hand suddenly clasped onto Victoria’s. “How are you doing?” Patricia whispered. Her son, Michael, had been in the accident with Dustin—the driver who had fallen asleep, who had brought them to this sad conclusion. Patricia still wasn’t past the Xanax-and-one-glass-of-wine phase. She gave Patricia a silent shrug and focused back on Trixie, now accompanied by the bald man from the bar.

“Guests, the Lord has blessed us here today. The doctors told Reggie that his wife has been accepted to a brain injury recovery unit in Fort Lauderdale, and they will release her into capable hands tomorrow morning. Praise to Him that rescues, they are on their way to healing!” Trixie shouted, clasping Reggie’s hand to her chest.

The man’s head and cheeks turned a bright bubblegum pink as every eye turned to him, lips and teeth smiling yet eyes hollow with the jealousy of the desperate. Victoria couldn’t help but feel at one with them, awash with the longing of the Support Group. Reggie’s thank yous and earnest insistence of how he never could have made it through such a trying time without the prayer circle were barely audible over the applause following Trixie’s announcement.

A slow, steady ache beat just behind Victoria’s right eye. Reggie’s wife had been in the hospital a week and a half; Dustin was now going on a month. She fought to keep her smile tightly in place. What made their family so worthy of recovery? The morning rushed back to her with vicious clarity: If there are no reactions after thirty days, it’s likely he’ll have permanent brain damage.

All he’d done was sit in the passenger seat of a friend’s car. But there was no easy fix for him, no sudden, happy news. Not like Reggie and his wife.

Still, she clapped along with the others, people she knew were wishing the same double-edged kindnesses, falling into the human nature of wallowing in your own losses during another’s time of fortune. Trixie released her grip on Reggie, allowed him to merge back into the organism they’d created around her. Calm settled, and the normal routine of “sharing is caring” began.

When Trixie reached their depressing duo, Victoria had to fight down a hysterical laugh. Since the first prayer circle they’d been tricked into attending, the regulars had dubbed them “Winners of the Worst.” Tonight, Trixie paid them special attention by doling out an extra-long prayer.

“Victoria and Patricia,” Trixie said, sounding for all the world like a preacher winding up on her pulpit, looking down at the mortals who depended on her aid. “Godmomma Annette and I are praying every day for your two boys, Dustin and Matt. May they go on to full recoveries, and the Lord bless them from the crowns of their heads to the heels of their feet.”

Victoria shut her eyes and bit her tongue. Not again. She hadn’t dared to do it again. “Trixie, stop,” Victoria snapped.

Patricia tugged at her elbow, a silent plea in her gaze as she looked not at Victoria, but at the air just over her right ear. “It’s all right. Let it pass.”

But tonight, after a full day of begging Dustin to wiggle his finger—any finger, just one finger, please—Victoria couldn’t stay silent. “I’ve listened to this for an entire month, and if no one else will correct you, I will. Patricia’s son is Michael. Not Matt. Do you understand that? Michael. In all of our conversations, in all of your prayers given up to God, you never once picked up on his name? How about, just once, you send a real prayer into the universe, one that might actually have some results.”

Trixie’s lips pinched together. “I’m just trying to help,” she said.

I should stop. I should stop. I should stop but fuck I need this.

Her hand tightened around the stem of her wine glass. She watched her knuckles turn white, each fine line going from red to pink to pale. She wished the world worked like that, from anger to balance to numbness. That process made sense. But not here, not this alternate universe of well wishes and miracles disguised as a hotel. What if her family didn’t belong inside it? Maybe that universe was only open to the few, to the children with fingers still sticky with consumed sugar and corn syrup. With fairy dust clinging to the mess.

Nothing real could stay here.

“You can’t help,” Victoria muttered, her voice cracking. She met Trixie’s eyes and forced her to hold the stare. “Even after they leave, Reggie’s wife will never be the same. Michael will still be paralyzed, and my brother is still exactly the same as when I arrived, still being fed through a tube stuck in his side. He can’t eat on his own, can’t breathe. Their limited staff can only come by twice a week, so I’m the one stretching his arms and legs so he doesn’t stiffen up in one position. How can words help defeat that?”

The smell of the wine brought tears to her eyes, and she stared into the piss yellow color of it. She could have gone up to her hotel room; maybe she would have cried into her pillow or called up every favor she could think of. Hell, she might even have actually prayed. Anything besides this charade of a prayer circle. They were nothing but compatriots of grief, her fellow clingers to last hopes and final chances.

With a swift motion, she downed the rest of her Riesling and dropped the glass onto the nearest table with a loud, hollow clink.

“To God’s Miracle Fairy Dust.”

Kaitlyn Johnson is a literary agent for Belcastro Literary Agency, as well as a freelance editor at her own company, Strictly Textual. She started her literary journey as a copyeditor for academic publisher codeMantra, a YA editor for Accent Press, a conference assistant for GrubStreet, Boston, and has been agenting since 2016. She has written various articles for Writer’s Digest and has had a flash fiction story published in the anthology A Box of Stars Beneath the Bed. Find Kaitlyn on Twitter @RedPenKaitlyn, on her  website, strictlytextual.com, her agent website, belcastroagency.com, and on Instagram @kjbelcastro.