When I wake up things are missing: the branch from my ribs, the hair on the right side of my head, my sister’s voice. There are things to take their places: a chest tube, catheter, stitches, and the serious face of a woman sitting by the side of my bed. She doesn’t know I’m awake yet, and she’s reading a yellow file that’s resting on her crossed legs, her nose crunched in concentration and her eyebrows stuck in a permanent worried position.
I’m not wearing the neck brace anymore but I quickly find out that moving my head isn’t the best option. My scalp feels stretched tight, as if there wasn’t enough skin to make ends meet but they sewed it together anyway. The music of my body is silent, but I can see a heart monitor by my bed, the sonic waves it makes erratic in places.
“Sasha?”
I turn back toward the woman, amending my earlier assessment down to girl when I hear her voice. It’s hesitant and unsure, with none of the conviction of an adult.
“Yes?” I ask, ignoring the feel of the pillowcase against my bare scalp, shockingly cool.
“I’m Amanda Cargrove, with family services,” she explains.
“Oh,” I say, closing my eyes. “That’s nice and everything but my parents have jobs. I’ve got insurance. The hospital doesn’t need to worry about how all this will be paid for.”
I make a small circle with my hand to indicate “all this,” an IV trailing in its wake. But even if I could make a big gesture it wouldn’t be able to cover everything, the squad, the helicopter, all the worried faces hovering over me that need to be compensated for their time.
I’m probably in a lot of trouble.
Amanda clears her throat. “I’m actually with mental health services,” she says.
“Oh,” I say again, but nothing else follows.
“Would you like to tell me about what was going on right before your accident?”
No, I would not like to tell her about the boy I was meeting who is not the boy I am dating, or the friends who called me a bad word. I would not like to tell her about the panic in my chest at the thought of Isaac leaving, angry with me, or the sound of glass breaking when it connected with my skull. I would not like to tell her about losing first chair and who knows what else in the small period of time it took for me to fall twenty feet.
I would not like to tell her these things, so I say nothing and stare at the blank gray screen of the TV mounted directly across from my bed. I can see myself reflected there, badly. I’m amorphous, a vague lump with no clear outlines of where I begin and end. I don’t know how much of that is because of the surface, or because that’s what I really look like right now.
Amanda flips over a piece of paper. “Your first responders said that you fell out a window. Can you tell me if that’s true?”
“Are you even supposed to be talking to me?” I ask her, the first synapses waking up inside my head to fire in irritation. “I’m a minor.”
“I have permission from your parents to be here,” Amanda says. “They’re very worried about you, Sasha.”
“Where is here?” I ask, glancing around the room again. I appear to have it to myself, which is a blessing. I don’t think I could stand listening to someone else’s noises with only a length of curtain in between us.
“You’re in the trauma ward at Stillwell Hospital,” she says. “Life flight brought you here from county. They didn’t have the necessary equipment to—”
“Put me back together again?”
Amanda only looks away from me, back down at the file balanced on her knee. She’s even blushing a little, like maybe she shouldn’t have said that.
“How old are you?” I ask her.
“Twenty-two,” she says, as if the gulf between seventeen and twenty-two is a vast thing I can’t possibly comprehend.
“Did you always want to be a social worker?” I ask.
“We really should be talking about you instead,” she says, eyes still on the papers as if they might provide a question for her to blurt before I come up with another one.
“What kind of a degree do you have? Where did you go to school? How long does it take to get certified in what you do?”
I know the answers because it’s something Lilly considered. They are: associate’s, community college, and not long. Someone with that kind of pedigree is not going to sit upright while I’m on my back and grill me about my personal choices.
Amanda clears her throat, going for a do-over. “Your parents know I’m speaking with you, and they’re very concerned about your fall.”
She says fall like I’m supposed to correct her.
Someone who is being evasive would concoct a story of how it happened, impossibly, while brushing their hair, tripping on piled clothes, or while performing some complicated dance move that built up speed right before meeting resistance. But I’m not a liar, and I’m not ashamed of what I did.
Because I didn’t do it.
“I didn’t fall out the window; I jumped,” I say, watching as her pen scratches across the file still on her knee, the writing a sloppy mess she’ll have to type up later. I could offer her the little table on wheels by my bedside, meant to hold nothing more substantial than cups of Jell-O. But I don’t.
There’s a knock on the door so tentative it has to be a nurse and not a doctor. Amanda looks to me for approval before giving permission for her to enter. This nurse is wearing scrubs with superheroes all over them, a mix of DC and Marvel that would have Heath declaring blasphemy if I didn’t shoot him a death glare first. He and his friends have been banned from geek philosophy in my presence.
There’s a second stab in my middle, like the tree branch might have scraped across organs before they took it out, microscopic cells rebuilding what Mother Nature damaged in my fall from grace.
“Are you sure that I’m okay?” I ask the nurse, her mouth opening in no doubt what was going to be an obvious statement like, “Look who’s awake,” as if she or Amanda have narcolepsy and were surprised to find themselves conscious.
Instead of answering, the nurse glances to Amanda for guidance. To her credit there’s no good way to handle that question. I have more things inside of me right now than the last time Isaac came over, and by the feel of it, my right ear is about half an inch higher than my left. Also the only person who has entered my room so far is a mental health worker so the safe answer probably is that no, she’s not sure I’m okay. But you don’t just say that to someone.
You also don’t just call people female dogs, but I’ll bring that up with the interested parties later.
“How do you mean, Sasha?” Amanda asks, sparing the nurse.
I wave the question away, suddenly tired. My head feels like a half-full water balloon, the kind you can squeeze really hard on one side but the other bulges out, ready to burst. I can open only one eye, the other swollen and heavy, my pulse a distinct beat coursing through puffy flesh. The nurse smiles at me and hooks a bag of something clear into my IV.
“For the pain,” she says.
Pain. It was an echo when I woke up, a voice already spent in an empty room. But it’s been growing while I talked to Amanda. I settle into my pillow as my vision grows fuzzy, noticing the tiny professional frown on her face when the nurse glances at my heart monitor.
“What—” I begin.
“I need you to rate your pain on a scale of zero to ten,” she says, pulling a rectangle of cardboard from the plastic holder at the foot of my bed.
The diagram she’s holding shows a series of faces, the one on the far left the ubiquitous happy face seen on everything from denim jackets to bumper stickers. His smile flattens as the faces evolve on their journey to the right, heating from a mellow orange to a burning red, mouth a wide O of pain, eyes squeezed shut like bird tracks in the snow. I can’t help but notice that the red face with the number ten underneath it has a worn spot on its cheek from years of people touching it, maybe mistaking it for a cherry scratch and sniff.
“Five,” I say blithely, settling on the one that seems as if it would smell like peaches. That face is mildly concerned, but it could be distracted from its pain by decent conversation or maybe some chamber music. It has no bearing whatsoever on how I actually feel. Zero is Isaac under the trees and ten is a bad name from my friends, in stereo. But they don’t have that diagram here.
The nurse makes a note in her chart, and Amanda in hers. “We’ll do this again in about ten minutes to see how you’re reacting to your pain meds and adjust accordingly,” the nurse says.
But I’m already reacting, sliding down the irritation scale of red to the sunny haze of yellow, ten to zero in sixty seconds, a C minor scale even though it only has eight notes and this is definitely a double-digit process. I’m at a negative two on the pain scale and sliding into the black when I remember Amanda is still in the room, and maybe she’s okay.
“I’m high as fuck,” I tell her.
I smile and falter on the last step into unconsciousness, until I wonder why I haven’t seen my parents yet.
Or Heath.
Or Isaac.
Or Brooke.
Or Lilly.
Or if there’s anybody left who gives a shit.
A crack of light in the darkness, the creak of hinges.
I’m awake, what should be the monotonous tones of my heart monitor nearly on tempo but not quite. It will never be fully black in this room, I realize. Too many machines, shiny with reflective surfaces. Too many lights blinking. Red. Green. Orange. Stop. Go. Slow. The light widens, a form slipping through.
“Mom?”
Funny that I know this from her shadow, a less dark patch in the room, vague yet familiar.
“Shh . . . ,” she whispers, moving toward my bed. “I thought you’d still be asleep.”
It feels like I might be. My tongue is as heavy as my eyelids, but they’re all pulling toward a central point—it stuck to the roof of my mouth, then sliding inexorably down.
“Slept enough,” I say, managing to flick one finger toward the windows. It’ll never be dark out there either, I suppose. Headlights. Lamplights. Streetlights. Halogen. Fluorescent. Radiating.
“How are you feeling?” Mom asks, flipping on the lights. She drags a chair to my bedside, its legs scraping on the floor. I close my eyes against the sound, and my head tilts to the side, tiny pinpricks of hair already growing back in.
I want my hair back. I want my scalp in the right place and my eyes both able to open all the way. I want there to be something in my middle instead of nothing, a blank cavity that only negative things swell from. I want there to be an easy answer like when I was a kid: a Band-Aid, some ice cream. I want to cry.
That’s how I’m feeling.
So I just do, because I can now. My mom is here, and somehow that makes me feel safe and terrified at the same time. Safe enough to cry but terrified I won’t be able to stop. Tears slide out from under my swollen eyelid, the pressure of more liquid adding a new vibration to the constant thumping in my head, the barometer of the pressure inside of Sasha Stone rising even higher.
“Honey, honey, honey,” Mom says, pressing as close as she can to me without getting hands and arms and fingers tangled in all my cords. I cry into the crook of her arm, my pulse a hot thing in my face, pressed against the coolness of her skin.
I finally pull back, dried out, lips cracked and tongue still sticking to everything inside my mouth as if it were flypaper. As I do, there’s a new sound, like packing tape being peeled off the roll.
This new sound came from me.
“Whoops,” Mom says as one of my machines begins to beep hysterically. She reaches down the front of my shirt as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and presses a sticky pad back in place, covering an irritated patch of skin where it had been before.
“What?” I look down at my chest, fascinated. I’m dotted with them, pale gray pads with wires that spool down my front to crawl out from under my gown, winding their way around each other back up to the heart monitor.
“And Dad always says I’m disconnected,” I joke, and it’s Mom’s turn to cry. She does it quietly, holding my hand while I take inventory now that I’m fully conscious.
There’s a tube in my nose, an IV in the top of my left hand, and while the heart monitors on my chest aren’t exactly in me, they’re definitely violating my privacy.
“Can I have a mirror?” I ask Mom. She wipes away her last tear using my hospital gown, and shakes her head.
“Not yet.”
“That bad?”
“Yeah it’s . . . it’s pretty bad, Sasha.”
“The nurse said she’d be back in ten minutes to check my reaction to the pain meds,” I tell Mom.
“You had a reaction, all right,” Mom says, smiling a little. “I didn’t think you knew some of those words.”
“Oh . . . was it . . .” I try to remember, but those moments must be kept somewhere else, stored away for Shanna. “Was I bad?”
Mom waves away whatever potty mouth I grew while medicated. “It doesn’t matter, honey. You were out cold by the time the nurse got back. Dad and I were here, and that girl from the county . . .” She fades out, like someone popped a mute in her horn.
“The social worker,” I finish for her. “Amanda.”
“The medics called her in because they thought you . . .” She doesn’t finish, eyes searching my face like maybe I’ll volunteer a word that isn’t suicide, something much closer to the sane, well-adjusted daughter she thought she had.
I don’t say anything.
“We’ll get you a real therapist, honey. Someone older, with more experience.”
I think about Amanda and her ink-stained pants, the little sore in the corner of her mouth where she poked her tongue while she was thinking. Then I think of a lined face, a wood-paneled office with rubber plants and leather-bound books. A place where I’m not in charge and can’t outwit anyone.
“I want Amanda,” I say.
“But, Sasha, she’s barely an adult herself. She’s not qualified to—to—”
“To fix me?” Mom drops her gaze, her thumbnail sliding under mine as if I were still a child needing someone to clean them.
“I thought you believed me about Shanna,” I say, watching as she rolls a bit of dirt out from under the nail, a piece of our yard that I managed to bring with me here to this forever-lit, sterile place. “I don’t need fixing. There’s nothing wrong with me, Mom,” I say, my voice rising.
“Sasha, please,” Mom shushes, glancing toward the door. “If the nurses think I’m upsetting you they won’t let me stay.”
“She’s here, Mom,” I say, pulling my hand away from her and reaching for the heart monitor. “I’ll show you.”
I find the time stamp, figure out the controls and scroll backward to where I was talking with Amanda.
“There,” I say, stabbing a finger at the blip on the screen, a valley out of concert with the rest of the terrain. “Shanna’s right there.”
Mom takes a deep breath, eyes closed. “No, honey,” she says finally, letting the words out with the exhale. “The doctor said it’s called dilated cardiomyopathy.”