Eleven
Dave
I couldn’t remember what precisely happened between getting hit and waking up in a hospital bed. I assumed all the usual stuff. If I found out in a year that they had removed all my internal organs and sold them on the black market, that would qualify as a pretty big surprise, for example. But I knew that I needed to get the hell out of the bed, and I needed to get back on my feet post-haste.
Of course, as with everything, there are pluses and minuses. Problems, solutions, and benefits, for every situation. On one hand, I don’t have to think too hard about how I’m going to get treated for being in a car accident. Try getting hit by a car in the middle of the Sahara and then wonder where you’re going to get medical treatment. Here’s the answer: you aren’t. It’s going to be a very slow, very hot death for you.
On the other hand, I needed to get out of there for reasons other than just that I need to get back to my life, back to reality, and out of this hospital. For example, I need to find my mother. For example, I need to get to my father’s funeral. For example, I wouldn’t mind seeing Laura again.
So when I pushed myself out of the bed, my hip hurt so bad I thought that I might lose my footing entirely and slide down on the floor, hip first. Bad hip first, incidentally, in case that wasn’t clear.
That would be a problem, and not the kind that I solve super easily by just ignoring it. I’ve had a lot of problems like that in my life, and most of them were easily solved by pretending I hadn’t noticed the problem in the first place. A broken hip wouldn’t be one of them.
But I stayed up, and the pain diminished to a dull ache. The surprise was more worrying than the pain itself, but I just hadn’t realized it hurt until I stood. Then I forced myself to take another step. And another. There was a chair on the other side of the room and I heaved my weight down on it, forcing myself to stay upright.
If this was what I had to look forward to… well, I didn’t know what I could do. I probably should stay in the hospital. I should probably stay in the room, too, and just lay down and think about whatever else is going on in my life.
Eventually, someone would let me go, and I’d be able to get back to whatever remained after my leg healed. But I’ve had worse than this, and the truth was that I could keep walking. I would get tired eventually, but not before I managed to get a little walk in. Isn’t that what they always tell you to do anyways? Get some practice walking and make sure that you don’t just stay in bed? So really, I was just getting a jump-start on rehabilitation.
I forced myself out through the door and waited for someone to stop me. They didn’t. Someone walked right past, wearing a suit of scrubs. They gave me a sidelong glance for a moment before continuing onward.
For my part, I walked over to the nurse’s station. I didn’t recognize the woman behind it, but there had already been three nurses in my room that morning, and I don’t know any of them. This was just number four. Or number five, depending on whether or not I counted the woman who passed me a moment ago.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah,” I said. I put on my most winning smile and waited a beat before I continued, “I wanted to check on my mother? Diana Collins. She hit her head I guess?”
The woman’s eyes darted down, slid over a list somewhere out of sight, and then told me a room number. 415, on the other side of the building. But it was only the other side the short way, and I could make the walk. At least, I hoped I could.
A stream of people passed me by as I walked through the hall. Some of them were moving the same direction. Others were moving the other way. I touched my hip. It hurt to touch, so I yanked my hand away. And then I just kept leaning on the walls and making sure that I kept enough energy to keep moving.
Someone passing by, one of the dozens or hundreds of people who could actually walk properly, without a limp and without taking breaks, stopped. I stopped, too, and realized that I should have been looking at their faces, just in case I missed someone.
“What are you doing out here?”
I smiled at Laura. Always worrying about me, it seemed. Now more than ever.
“Hey. I was just thinking about you.”
She looked at me and at my smile and took a deep breath. “You don’t want to go over there.”
“Like hell, I don’t,” I said. “I have to. That’s my mom.”
“I’m serious.” Linda’s hand touched my side. Touched a few inches above the epicenter of the extreme pain in my hip. I flinched, and then had to catch myself on the railing that extended through the whole hallway.
“I’m serious, too. I don’t have a choice.”
“You didn’t come back for your dad.”
I flinched again. “That was… different.”
“I know,” she said. “But trust me. You don’t want to see her like this. Give her a few days to recover, okay? She knows you were in a car accident. Let her think that it was worse than it was if you have to, but don’t go see her until she’s better.”
I looked in Laura’s eyes. She looked tired, like she’d had all the energy wrung out of her. She’d spent ten minutes complaining to me about her bad day, last night, and she didn’t look half this tired.
“If you insist,” I agreed. “If you’d escort me back to my room, though…” I shifted my weight and took a limp back in the direction I’d come from.
“You think you need help?”
“I know I need help,” I groused. “I think I have to accept it. And besides, I want to make the nurses jealous.”
I winked at her and she touched my hip, gently, but she made sure that it was somewhere it would hurt. I yanked away from her and she reached and wrapped her arms around me, preventing me from falling.
“What’d you do that for?”
“The nurses will be extra-jealous if they see that you’re really hurt, won’t they? Sympathetic.”
I leaned hard on her shoulder. “You better be extra-sympathetic yourself after a stunt like that.”
She switched sides so that her hip was pressed against mine. My good hip, that is, thankfully.
“I’ll be as sympathetic as you want, once you’re in bed. I’ll be even more sympathetic when I’m alone, at home, and there’s nobody to keep me company. But for now, let’s get you back to bed.”