Текст книги "The Lost"
Автор книги: Sarah Beth Durst
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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 19 страниц)
Chapter Twenty-One
Beep, beep, beep...
I can’t breathe.
Oh, God, I can’t breathe! I try to inflate my lungs, but my throat feels stuffed shut. Whoosh, I hear. Air suddenly floods into me, and my chest expands. My eyes fly open.
I am lying on my back looking up at a tiled ceiling. One of the tiles has a water stain. The overhead light holds the shadows of a few dead bugs. Beep, beep, beep. I can’t breathe again. I try to gasp for air. My hands fly to my mouth. I hear a ripping sound and feel a sharp pain in my arm. An alarm wails. My hand touches my mouth. A tube runs into it, filling it. Whoosh, again, and my ribs expand as oxygen is forced into my lungs.
I hear doors fly open, slam against the wall. Footsteps. Faces press over me. Men and women in scrubs. “She’s awake,” one says.
“Calm down,” another says. Her voice is even, a faint hint of a Mexican accent. It’s a musical voice, soothing, as if it has practice calming wild horses. “You’re in a hospital. You’re all right. We’re taking care of you. Steady. That’s it. Steady.”
A hospital. It smells like a hospital. I know this smell—antiseptic. But I’m not supposed to be in a hospital bed. I hear the whirr of equipment around me and the beep...my heart rate, faster than it was. Air again pushes into my lungs with a whoosh.
“You have a breathing tube in you.” The same woman speaks calmly. She holds down my hands so I won’t claw at the tube. “If you try to tear it out, you’ll hurt yourself. Do you understand me?”
There are tears in my eyes, blurring my vision, but I nod. I can’t talk. I feel as though I am gagging. I want to vomit. Whoosh. And then the sound of a bag deflating. I feel air sucking around my mouth as a nurse prods me with what looks like a dentist’s tool. “We’re suctioning the excess secretions so we can remove the tube,” the doctor explains in her soothing voice. “This will pinch.”
It feels like my lungs and intestines are being yanked out my throat. I want to scream but I can’t. Pain radiates through my entire body, blanking out every thought. I inhale a ragged, shaking breath on my own, and I cough so hard that my entire body shakes. The alarms sound again as the IVs shake in my arms. Someone places an oxygen mask over my mouth. I breathe. My lungs hurt. My ribs hurt. I ache everywhere. But I can breathe. I open and shut my mouth, and then I gesture at the oxygen mask. It’s lifted from my face. I breathe again, and I don’t cough this time. My tongue feels thick and dry and swollen. I swish it around in my mouth. I know I should say thank you—but I don’t.
Beside me, a doctor with bouncy auburn hair and green scrubs pats my hand. “How do you feel?” She’s the one with the soothing accent. She checks the monitors and feels my neck for my pulse.
“What happened?” I try to say, except my mouth feels dry and gummy. It comes out as a garbled, “Whaaa...ed?”
“You had an accident, but don’t worry. We’re taking care of you.” She beams at me with a megawatt smile.
I don’t remember an accident. All I remember is Peter and the barn fading around me... I must have reappeared somewhere dangerous, like in the middle of a highway. I remember the Missing Man saying Claire would reappear where she was lost. I’d been on a road.
“You’re very lucky,” the doctor says. “Do you remember the car accident?” I shake my head, and pain shoots down my neck. I wince. She checks one of the IV bags. There are three hanging from hooks beside my bed. “Probably just as well. Your ribs were broken, but they’ve healed now. You’ll feel some residual soreness in your chest, and your legs will feel stiff for a while. We kept your muscles active, but you’ll feel unsteady on your feet at first. Does anything hurt now?”
I feel achy, but not hurt. “M’okay. Want to get up.” It feels as though my mouth is remembering how to talk. My jaw feels wooden.
She laughs but it’s not an unkind laugh. “Not just yet.”
“How long asleep?”
“Let’s check you over, okay?” She doesn’t wait for my response. I feel myself poked and prodded. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Lauren Chase.” I’m here anonymously?
“That’s right.”
Not anonymously. That’s good. “What happened?”
“What do you remember?” she asks.
Peter and the barn, fading. I open my mouth and close it. I can’t say that. She’ll think there’s more wrong with me. “Don’t remember car accident.”
“Your memory may return in time, or it may not. Often traumatic events are lost to our short-term memory. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything serious.” She proceeds to ask me a series of basic questions. Where I live. Where I work. What’s five times five and other basic math and trivia. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
I think I can tell the truth but omit the impossible details. “I was in a little town with...some friends. Visiting them. My car broke down, ran out of gas, but the town was so small that it didn’t have a gas station. And lousy cell phone reception. And...” I didn’t sound any more believable that way.
Her smile disappears for an instant but then it’s back. She looks so cheery that I think she’s about to burst into song. They must teach that in medical school. Perkily, she says, “Your car was found upside down on Route 10. You’d driven off the side of the road, hit a ditch, and flipped it. A trucker found you. Saved your life.”
I frowned. That couldn’t be right. I hadn’t been in my car since it ran out of gas. It was still sitting outside Lost. It hadn’t flipped. “I was in Lost. The town was called Lost. I left home on March 23 and was stuck there for weeks. Months!” My voice is shrill. I struggle to sit up. She puts her hand on my shoulder. I flop back down. Wince. The hospital light is glaring in my eyes. I look down at myself. I see wires running to blue stickers stuck to my chest, and more wires running down my faded blue hospital gown. An IV is stuck in my right arm. The nurses and doctors are murmuring to each other, but the auburn-haired doctor stays by my side.
“You were in an accident on March 23.” The doctor’s voice is gentle, kind. “You have been in a coma for the past three months.”
Poem
Things I lost:
my clothes (I hate hospital gowns)
use of my bladder (though I’m told it will return)
the potential for true love (even if it was all in my head)
the little sister I never had
my wallet
my car
my sanity
Chapter Twenty-Two
I sit by the hospital window in a padded faux-leather chair. I still have one IV and various monitors attached, but they’ve removed a few of the more serious tubes: breathing tube, feeding tube, and catheter. My throat feels as though I’ve swallowed nails, and the two times I’ve tried to pee, it burned like a hot glue gun between my legs. A nurse with wrinkles and a thick accent told me not to worry. My insides need to remember how to work. And once they do, I’ll be able to go home.
Home.
It won’t feel like home. Mom’s not there. She’s here, in this hospital, three floors down. The auburn-haired doctor whose name I can’t remember promised that she’d have Mom’s doctor stop by to update me. In the meantime, I am to concentrate on getting better. My mother won’t want to see me weak. The doctor actually wagged her finger at me as she said that, as if I were an errant toddler.
Outside, the palm trees sway in a light breeze. Cars wait at a red light to enter the hospital parking lot. My car isn’t in that parking lot. It’s either outside an impossible town or it’s totaled in a junkyard somewhere. Or maybe it’s totaled and in Lost because I’ve lost it. Except that Lost doesn’t exist.
The auburn-haired doctor showed me photos of when I’d arrived, the X-rays from my initial examination, and the daily nurse reports. I had been here three months, which meant I couldn’t have been in Lost. I’d imagined it, like Dorothy and Oz. How cute. How quaint. I want to put my face in my hands and cry, but I don’t want another conversation with the nurses or the extra cheerful doctor.
At their insistence, I have eaten a little, liquids only. I didn’t have much appetite. A few spoonfuls of soup before I felt as if I was going to vomit. I pushed it away before I did. I’ve also walked around the room. Felt as weak as a baby and had to rest. They wanted me back in bed; I pleaded for the chair.
A man knocks on the open door. “Hello, Ms. Chase? I’m Dr. Barrett.” He carries a clipboard, and he has a koala bear clipped to his stethoscope. He’s young, early thirties I’d guess, and handsome, like a doctor in a soap opera. He has killer blue eyes and a lopsided smile to accompany his calm, baritone voice. In short, he’s exactly the kind of doctor that a coma patient is supposed to open her eyes and see and fall madly in love with.
Unfortunately, I’m already awake and don’t feel at all like Sleeping Beauty with my hair matted and my limbs shaking and bruises up and down my arms from all the needles that have been jabbed into me over the past few hours. Or three months.
“Are you the psychiatrist?” I ask. They promised one will come talk with me about my feelings regarding my lost three months. They said this completely oblivious to the appropriateness of the phrasing. My “lost” three months.
“I’m your mother’s primary oncologist,” he says.
“Oh.” I sit up straighter.
He lays out the diagnosis in plain terms in his soft, calming voice. Stage four ovarian cancer. It’s spread to the lymph nodes in the abdomen and to the liver. They suspect it may also be in her lungs and bladder. Her body is essentially riddled with cancer. As he tells me this, his blue eyes are full of compassion. I nod in all the appropriate places. And then I ask as calmly as I can, “Can I see her?”
He nods. “Of course. I’ll ask one of the nurses for a wheelchair...”
“I can walk.”
He looks at me dubiously but he doesn’t contradict me, which I appreciate. Pushing on the arms of the chair, I grit my teeth as I stand. My legs feel shaky, and my head spins. I wait for it to pass. Maybe my mom shouldn’t see me like this. I need real clothes. And a brush through my hair. Makeup wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. But handsome-doctor-guy whose name I have already forgotten has one hand under my elbow. “One step at a time,” he says. “You can change your mind whenever you want. It’s not as if it’s hard to find a wheelchair around here, being a hospital.”
I crack a smile since that’s obviously what he wants.
“Your mother is a very brave woman, you know. She’s a fighter. That’s why she’s held on as long as she has. She’s talking about what plants she’s going to put in her garden and how no one has weeded.”
“She’s beaten this before,” I say through gritted teeth.
“Yes, she has,” he agrees. But he doesn’t say she will again. He also doesn’t say she won’t, and human bodies are so complex with all sorts of factors. He can’t know for certain that she...
Stop it, I tell myself. Stop denying. Stop making excuses. Stop running away. My entire coma-induced hallucination had an obvious point. It was clearly my subconscious helping my conscious come to grips with my mom’s death.
I won’t let leaving Peter and Claire be pointless.
Even if they weren’t real.
Hobbling, I follow Dr. Handsome into the elevator. I sag against the wall. He watches me. “She’s rallied quite a bit since she heard you woke,” he says. “But I need to caution you...sometimes it’s a shock to see someone you love here.”
“I’ve seen her in the hospital before.”
“She’s weak.”
“I’ll be strong for her.”
He nods approvingly. “Good. She needs that.”
“That’s why I came back.”
I don’t know whether I mean back from Lost or back from the coma. I don’t think it matters. He seems satisfied, at any rate. I watch him out of the corner of my eye. His hands are clasped on his clipboard, and he’s watching the numbers tick down on the elevator. It’s a slow elevator, and it rattles a fair amount for what should be a smooth ride for patients. It’s also twice as large as a normal elevator with railings on all sides for handicapped. I’m clinging to one of the railings and trying to act as if I’m leaning casually against the cool metal wall. Half the other walls are filled with posters describing what to do in a medical emergency. “I’d really hope that here of all places those posters wouldn’t be necessary.” I’m trying to joke. I don’t really succeed.
“Emergencies happen.”
“But aren’t you guys supposed to be trained?”
His lips curve up into a smile, and I notice he has nice lips. I don’t know why I’m noticing this now, when I’m on my way to see my mother. My brain’s way of distracting me. Even my subconscious has avoidance issues.
I think of Peter’s kisses, and I have to turn away from Dr. Barrett.
See, I did remember his name. Funny that. I hadn’t realized that I’d committed it to memory. “How long have you been Mom’s doctor?”
“Three years.”
“Oh.” I’d never met him before. “I thought it was that man with the white hair...”
“Dr. Scola? He retired a year and a half ago. I inherited his practice. Your mother has been coming to see me regularly for a while.” He looked at me. “Don’t feel bad. You aren’t expected to know her doctors. I don’t think she wanted you so involved.”
“She did. I didn’t want to be. I wasn’t ready.”
The elevator dings and the doors slide open. “Are you ready now?”
It’s a genuine question, and I wonder how many deaths a doctor has to see to stop caring, how many until the soul scabs over, how many until the losses stop hurting. “Yes.”
He holds open the door for me.
I don’t move. “Honestly, no, I’m not ready. I should be. But I’m not. Is anyone?”
He considers it. “Sometimes. But usually, no. If you’d like to talk afterward, have the nurses page me.”
I dismiss this as politeness. He’ll be too busy afterward.
“I mean it, Ms. Chase. I hope you’ll take me up on my offer.” He leads the way out of the elevator and then pauses as I hobble out. He holds out his arm.
I wonder at the fact that he’s taking the time to do this at all, to escort an obviously slow walker all the way over here. In my experience, this isn’t how people act in hospitals. They’re nice enough, they care, but they’re harried. He must have other patients, appointments, things to do. “Why are you being so nice?” I know I’m being blunt, but I can’t help it.
“It’s my job.”
“Seems above and beyond. Not that I don’t appreciate it.”
“As I said, your mother is an extraordinary person,” he says. “When my father died, she went out of her way to be kind to me. I owe her.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that.” I guess I didn’t know a lot of what my mother did while I was at work, including her friendships. I feel an unpleasant flash of anger, then jealousy... But I wanted her to hide this from me, all the details of her dying. She was only doing what she thought I wanted. “I think I have a lot to talk about with her.”
“She tires easily,” he warns me.
I flash him a wan smile. “So do I.”
We’re walking very slowly now. He’s holding on to my arm, and I’m leaning against him more than is polite, but if I didn’t, I think I would melt into the linoleum floor and not be able to rise. I see him glance at a wheelchair.
“I don’t want her to see me in that,” I say. “I want to be strong for her.”
He nods, and he doesn’t look at a wheelchair again.
“In retrospect, I should have used one until here and then ditched it.”
At last, we’re outside her room. He knocks on the door. “Mrs. Chase? I have someone here to see you!” His voice is cheerful again. I wonder if he practices that, the cheerful voice. It’s not quite as singsong as my doctor’s, but the tone is the same. Maybe they have group cheerfulness training. “Brace yourself,” he says to me softly, very softly. I’m not quite sure if he said it, or if it’s my own inner voice telling me to be strong.
I walk into the room.
Mom lies in the hospital bed. She looks as if half of her has melted away. Her skin sags against her bones, and she looks ashen-yellow. She has multiple IV needles puckering the skin on the back of her hand and tubes taped to her arms. Her body is under the thin sheet, but her face is so very thin. Still, she brightens as I hobble into the room.
“I look terrible, don’t I?” she says.
Clearly, I haven’t done a good job at hiding my expression. I consider lying. “You look like how I feel.”
She points imperiously to the chair by the window, a twin to the one I was sitting in when Dr. Barrett came to fetch me. “William, you should have wheeled her here. She didn’t need to walk.”
“She insisted,” he says. “She has your stubborn streak.”
“Stupid streak, you mean.” Mom glares at me. “You had me terrified, you know. Aged me at least twenty years.”
“Barely shows at all.”
“You mean beneath the emaciated ill look?”
“Right. That kind of overshadows everything else.”
“Dying is a helluva diet. I don’t recommend it.” She points again at the chair. Dr. Barrett, William, guides me over to it. His hands are warm and strong, and I think of Peter’s hands. They’re similar. Hands that are used often. In Peter’s case, it was to climb onto roofs. In William’s, I suspect it’s saving lives. Or maybe golf. It occurs to me that I have done such an excellent job of avoiding talking to any doctors in the past few years that I don’t know if golf is still the standard cliché.
“Do you golf?” I ask him.
If he’s startled by this change of subject, he doesn’t show it. “Not regularly.”
“He plays basketball with friends,” Mom says.
“Sometimes. There’s a league in the hospital. We meet at lunch whenever we can.”
“Lauren likes to swim,” Mom says. “Or did. She used to be a fish.”
“Still am,” I say without thinking.
Mom snorts. “You haven’t been in the water since...well, she used to be an excellent swimmer. I’m sure she still would be if she’d make time for it.”
“I have. I mean, I will.” I feel myself flushing red. “Mom, are you trying to set us up?”
“I’m compressing three months of mothering into three minutes,” she says. “Now, give your phone number to the nice doctor, sit up straight, and don’t let your mouth gape open. You’ll catch flies that way, and while they are high on protein, it’s not attractive in front of a potential mate.”
I am blushing furiously now. “You’re right,” I say to Dr. Barrett. “She is extraordinary.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lauren.” Mom snaps her fingers. “Hand me a pen, William.”
Bemused, the doctor obeys. Mom scrawls on a napkin on the side of her lunch tray. I notice that she’s barely touched the food. I also notice that her hand is shaking as she writes. Her hands were always so steady. A few months ago, she could thread the tiniest needle in a half-lit room and then sew a button without even looking at it, much less piercing herself. If I attempted that, I’d bleed all over the button. She shoves the napkin at him. “Now give us some privacy, and call my daughter later.”
Wordlessly, he accepts the napkin. I suppose they didn’t cover this in medical school.
“You really don’t have to,” I tell him.
“I’d never dream of disobeying your mother.” He tucks the napkin into his clipboard, and then he leaves. Mom is chuckling. She then sobers and looks at me.
“Have a nice nap?” she asks.
“Tolerable,” I say. “Weird dreams, though. And terrible morning breath.”
“Don’t scare me like that again. Whole upside of cancer is supposed to be that there’s no chance that your children die first.” She looks at me as if expecting me to tell her not to talk like that, to tell her she’s not going to die. But I don’t say anything. Softly, she says, “I really look that bad.”
I don’t want to answer that, neither with a lie nor with the truth. “Want me to tell you about my weird dream?”
“Does it have someone attractive of the male persuasion?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, it does.”
She folds her hands across her chest. “Then I’m listening.”
I tell her everything.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mom doesn’t interrupt once. She listens to every detail and then after I finish, she contemplates me. I watch the display on the heart monitor. The line jolts in rhythm to the beeps.
“You disappoint me, Lauren. Three months of dreaming about a hot, half-nude wild man, and you only kissed?” Mom clucks her tongue. “Or are you sanitizing the story for your mother’s ears? On second thought, don’t tell me. I don’t want the mental picture in my head.”
“He slept in my closet most of the time.”
“That wasn’t a metaphor, was it?”
“Nope. Literally in my closet. To protect me.”
“From dangerous hangers?”
“From attackers. I think he planned to surprise them.”
She coughs, and I have to grip the sides of my chair to keep myself from going to her. Her entire body quakes from the coughs as if every muscle were spasming. When it subsides, she continues as if nothing happened, “A conventional guard would guard the doorway and stop the attacker before he enters the room.”
I make myself smile. Her logic is sound, of course. “Peter was anything but conventional.”
She squints hard at me. “Now, Lauren, don’t you fall for an imaginary boyfriend after I went through all the trouble of getting sick in order to find you a nice, handsome doctor to marry.”
“Aha, I knew there was an explanation for all of this.”
“Take it from me, imaginary boyfriends will only break your heart.” Her smile fades, and her eyes flutter closed. I listen again to the beep-beep of her monitor. I used to hate that sound, but today I find it soothing. She’s still here, it says. I lean my head back on the chair. My limbs feel heavy, and they throb. I know I should try to pee, but I don’t think I can face the burning. I ignore it. Her breathing is slow and even, and I think she’s fallen asleep. But then her eyes flutter open. She turns her head to look at me. “Oh, good. You’re still here. Unless I’m hallucinating?”
I pry myself off the chair and try not to wince. Shuffling the few steps to the bed, I take her hand in mine. It feels so fragile, like holding a baby bird. “Real.”
Her fingers close around my hand. “You should rest.”
“I can rest here.” I point to the chair. “It reclines. Besides, it’s not like there aren’t doctors and nurses on this floor, too. In fact, they’re kind of in abundance. I’ll stay until they kick me out.”
Mom pats the bed next to her. “Come on, Laurie-kitten. Let me hug you.”
It’s the nickname that gets me. She hasn’t called me that in years. I feel my eyes heat, and to hide that, I sit on the edge of the bed. It takes some maneuvering to squeeze me in beside her without disturbing any of her wires or tubes. Some get caught in my hair, and we laugh as we untangle them, occasionally setting off the IV alarm. It’s either laugh or cry, I realize. After a while, though, I manage it. We lie side by side on our backs. I’m panting from the effort of climbing onto the bed with limbs that haven’t worked much in three months. She’s breathing shallowly, too, and I wonder if this was a good idea. But then she slides her hand into mine, and she sighs softly and it’s all okay.
“Tell me what I don’t know about you,” I say.
She’s silent for so long that I think she must have fallen asleep again or not heard me or both. I think about repeating the question, but if she is asleep, I don’t want to wake her.
“You’ve finally accepted this,” she says softly.
I don’t answer.
“Really was some dream you had.”
“Really was,” I agree. “Funny thing is, I keep feeling guilty because I promised to go back.”
She squeezes my hand. “Please, don’t go back. I don’t want you in a coma again. Stay in this world. Please stay where I can see you and touch you and know you’re okay. Promise me you’ll stay.”
She’s so intense that I hesitate. It reminds me so strongly of Peter begging me to stay. But he’s not real, and Mom is. “I’ll stay with you.”
She relaxes, either not noticing or not caring how I phrased my promise. I don’t even know why I said it that way. I can’t go back to a place that doesn’t exist.
“I’d wanted to be an actress,” Mom says.
I turn my head to look at her. She was always mocking the wannabe celebrities that clog Los Angeles, the bottle blondes and the overbuilt pretty boys. “You?”
“You asked what you don’t know about me. In fifth grade, I was certain that I was going to be an actress. We had a school play, and I was cast as Mrs. Rabbit. I still remember the song, ‘Oh, I am Mrs. Rabbit and I say hello to you...’ And then two years later, I auditioned for the town community theater and won the part of the White Rabbit. I was destined to play rabbits. I couldn’t see that as my future. So I gave it up before I could ever be the Velveteen Rabbit, Peter Rabbit, or... I can’t think of any others.”
“Rabbit from A.A. Milne.”
“Yes.”
“Harvey, the six-foot invisible rabbit. I think that was a movie.”
“With Jimmy Stewart. Black-and-white. I remember it.”
“Br’er Rabbit. Bugs Bunny. Uncle Wiggily. Thumper. Thumper’s girlfriend. Edward Tulane. Bunnicula.”
“See, I had a whole career ahead of me that I simply abandoned because I didn’t have the imagination to think of what could be. On the other hand, I suppose all the hopping would have been hard on my knees.”
“Probably,” I say. “But good exercise.”
A nurse comes in to check Mom’s monitors. She changes one of the IVs, as well as the catheter bag, and she pats Mom on the shoulder. “Nice you have a visitor. Must perk you up.” To me, she says, “Visiting hours are over in a half hour.”
“Oh, I’m not a visitor. I’m a patient.” I hold up my wrist to display the plastic band identifying me by name and number as an inpatient.
“She’s my daughter,” Mom says.
“Ahh, the one in the coma?”
“She woke up,” Mom says, as if this weren’t obvious.
The nurse smiles at me. “Visiting hours are over in a half hour. You both need your rest.”
Mom snorts. “You lot come in and poke and prod me every hour and then remind me to sleep. I’ll rest better if she’s here. Please, Mary. Turn a blind eye?”
The nurse Mary scowls, though I can sense she doesn’t really mean it. Mom must have charmed everyone in the entire hospital.
“Dr. Barrett brought her in,” Mom says. “You could always blame him.”
“Oh, did he now?” Mary’s scowl shifts into a smile. “He’s a good one. Works too hard, but they all do. Everyone does. Sometimes I think the whole world has its priorities out of whack. Yes, stay. I’ll let the next shift know.”
“Thank you, Mary,” Mom says. I echo her.
She waggles her finger at both of us. “Get your mother to eat.”
Mom makes a face.
After pricking Mom’s finger with a needle and then checking her temperature, Mary leaves. She pulls her nurse’s cart with her, and she sticks a clipboard in a holder by the door. She pulls the door mostly shut.
“Everyone makes exceptions when you’re dying,” Mom says with satisfaction. “It’s as if every statement I utter is a last request that has to be honored. I’m thinking of asking for something completely ludicrous, like for the entire staff to dress in medieval garb.”
“There might be rules against that.”
“Who would think to make a rule about not wearing medieval garb? I’m betting that it hasn’t come up before. After me, they might make a rule about it. Maybe they’ll name it after me. I’d be immortalized in the hospital employee handbook.”
“I wish you weren’t dying,” I say. I don’t know why I say the words out loud or so plainly. They float in the air like bubbles. Mom doesn’t say anything. There isn’t much to say back. She knows I don’t want to hear a platitude, and I doubt she’ll say one anyway. She has never been one for platitudes, unless they’re ironic or clever twists on clichés. Truthfully, I’m relieved she hasn’t said anything. I sneak a look at her. She looks serene. “How do you feel?” I ask. It isn’t really a question I ask much, I realize. I haven’t wanted to hear the answer.
“Sometimes sad. Sometimes angry. Usually tired. Mostly, though, I just feel like me, only with the inconvenience of this body that won’t cooperate with me. I forget occasionally, like when I wake up, that I’m too weak to walk, and I think I need to go to the bathroom to pee or brush my teeth. I miss being home.”
“Will they let you go home? I’m here. I can take care of you.” As I say it, there’s a part of me that cringes inside. I don’t want the responsibility. I’m not trained as a nurse. What if I do something wrong? What if I can’t take care of her? But I don’t take the words back.
“No, Lauren. No one wants to be a burden.”
I know she can’t be happy here, without her things, her plants, her home, her privacy. “Let me look into it. In the meantime, maybe we can make this room more homelike. Real plants. A few photos for the wall...” I trail off. I have the seed of an idea for what I can do to make it better here. Maybe I can ask Dr. Barrett to help me with the supplies I’ll need.
“Sounds nice.”
She sounds tired. I decide to stop talking. I listen to the beep of the monitor. It’s steady, reassuring. I feel my own tiredness in my bones.
Eventually, we both sleep.
I wake suddenly and stop myself from shooting upright in bed. I listen to the beep-beep of the monitor, and I exhale slowly. She’s still here. I twist in bed to look at her face. Her brow is furrowed, and I think she’s not having a good dream. I consider waking her, but I know she needs the rest. Maybe the dream will shift soon.
I slither out of bed as best I can without touching her or her wires or tubes. It isn’t easy because the bed is narrow, plus there’s a railing on the side. But I slip out. My knees shake as my legs remember that they’re supposed to support my weight. I wobble over to the chair. I have a crick in my neck, and my back feels sweaty from lying next to another person. It’s dark outside, but I can see the silhouette of the palm trees and the endless stream of car headlights and taillights. Always traffic in L.A.
The hospital isn’t asleep. Hospitals never sleep. Through the door, I hear the hushed voices of the staff. Carts roll past outside, everything in them clattering together as if a chef were tossing all his knives and pots and pans into a steel sink. My eyes feel gummy, and I feel sticky. I don’t think Mom would mind if I use her shower. I raid the supply of hospital gowns in one of the drawers and slip into the bathroom.
Stepping into the shower, I turn on the water. The water falls over me, and I feel as though I’m sloughing off my skin. It feels glorious, and I remember my first shower in Lost. And then I try not to remember it. I don’t want to cry. I’ve cried enough in showers to last me a lifetime. I let the water flow as hot as I can stand, and I feel my muscles begin to unknot.
