Gentle fingers stroke my cheek, and my eyes flicker open.
My body is all crunched up, bent around like a jelly bean. Mom is looking down on me, smiling. She presses something spongy against my mouth, and my lips latch on to it, suck water from it until the thing is bone dry.
‘Go easy,’ she says in tones softer than silk. ‘Too much too soon will make you sick.’
I don’t focus on anything but her face. Still, dread circles overhead like a flock of starving vultures.
‘Where are we?’ I ask, but we both know I already know the answer to that. The smell of industrial-strength disinfectant is corroding my nasal passages. The sheets covering me feel like fibreglass. I’m in hospital.
‘Baby, try not to panic.’
Panic. Right. That would make sense given my current situation, but my body seems to be behaving. I can feel the flutter of something in my chest, maybe fear. Not the same kind of fear I’ve been sharing headspace with for the past four years. This is different. Weaker. It stays hidden. I’m not sure it has the drive to push through to the surface.
I lift my eyes, spot my hand wrapped tightly in white bandages, a yellow IV line poking out of the top. I follow the tubes attached to it, up and up, until I find two bags of fluid, half-empty. One is clear, the other milky. Safe to assume that explains the sudden change in anxiety levels.
‘Mom?’
‘It’s just a painkiller and some sedative.’
‘No.’ I shake my head, reach for the needle, but my other hand is bound in dressings too. It’s refusing to go in the direction I tell it to. At first I think the extra padding is responsible for restricting my movement. Then I realize it’s not the bandages at all. My body is ignoring me.
A drunk whimper flops from my lips. I focus hard on my fingers, try to psychically beam my instructions straight to the source, but they refuse to acknowledge me. It’s the medicine. It’s circulating in my system, killing off my control like an evil little nanobot. My breathing hitches.
‘Sweetie.’ Mom restrains my hand with the slightest of touches. ‘Listen to me: you’ve been hooked up to this thing for almost two days. Two days and nothing horrible has happened. It’s helping.’
‘I can’t . . . I . . .’ My head goes foggy and some monitor starts beeping a single obscene note. It sounds like a microwave when it’s finished a cycle and wants your attention. Is that my heartbeat? Should it be beating that fast? Should it . . . I can’t finish my thought; I don’t remember what it was.
The beep works like a Bat-Signal, brings a nurse thundering through the swinging door. Her hair is bright orange, dreadlocked, and she’s wearing scrubs covered in superhero cartoons.
‘Good morning, sunshine.’ She flashes her pearly whites at me and all I want to do is ask her what’s good about it. I give it a second’s thought but can’t find the energy to rouse my inner ass.
Mom scoots back, and the nurse takes her place, hovering over me. The badge fixed to her ample bosom says Carmen. There’s a bottle of green sanitizer attached to the side of my bed. I watch her pump it several times until a string of clear liquid squirts from the nozzle. It goes white and turns to foam when it settles on her palms. She rubs it all over, just like I do, making sure to get all the hidden spots between her fingers. You’d be surprised at how much of your hand doesn’t get washed if you don’t spread your fingers. Then, to my horror, the nurse, a complete stranger, touches me. Without blinking, she reaches down the front of my hospital-issue gown and pulls something sticky off my chest.
‘Don’t think you’re going to be needing these any more,’ she says, her knuckle clipping the edge of my breast on the way back up. She saunters over to the trash can, drops the sticky things in it, and hits her hands with another squirt of sanitizer from a bottle hung by the door.
I look at Mom and know my face is pulled in all different directions when she winces.
‘Just take a deep breath,’ she whispers to me. The nurse comes back. Takes what looks like a pen from her pocket.
‘Look straight at that back wall for me, sweetheart,’ she says. Turns out the pen is not a pen but a flashlight. She illuminates the end and shines it in my eyes.
‘Okay. Well, that all looks good.’ Her nose wrinkles when she smiles at me. ‘I’ll go and chase down that prescription. And then hopefully we can get you back home before the day is out.’
‘Home,’ I repeat. The one place in the world where scary things couldn’t get me is no more. Home is a word that should conjure images of thatched cottages, flower beds, and white picket fences. All I see now is skeletons and shards of glass bejewelling my bleeding skin.
‘That’s right,’ the nurse replies. ‘There’s nothing like your own bed.’ She chuckles to herself as she exits the way she entered, in an emergency-type rush.
‘They caught him,’ Mom says, doing that thing where she reads my mind. ‘Luke called the police, and they managed to catch him while he was making a run for it. Is it okay that I’m telling you this?’
I think no, but say yes.
‘Ours wasn’t the first house he hit. The guy used his job to scout locations and seek out vulnerable people. He’s going to prison for a long time.’
I think she means for this to make me feel better, but I feel nothing.
Almost nothing.
‘Is Luke okay?’
‘Worried sick about you. He hasn’t stopped calling.’ She turns, points to a table in the corner of the room. It’s adorned with two big bunches of yellow and purple flowers. ‘And he keeps sending you daisies and carnations.’
The flowers are beautiful. I close my eyes, remember how tight he held me when I fell into him. I wish he were here.
‘I told him you’d call him as soon as you could.’ And I will.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking about,’ Mom says when the silence starts to stretch. She perches on my bed, reaches over and rubs circles on my hip.
‘I don’t even know.’ My brain feels like it’s trapped in a vice and every time I try to figure something out, it squeezes tighter and tighter around it.
The intruder. My injuries. Leaving the house. Having to stay in hospital. Taking sedatives. Strangers touching me. My plate is too full. I have mental indigestion. My life is on its ass. It’s a face in full shadow, a stranger at a bar, a reflection I don’t even recognize any more.
I’m being forced to challenge ideas that have kept me safe for so long. There’s an entire library of information in my head, and suddenly I can’t decide if any of it is worth reading.
‘Get some rest,’ Mom says, leaning forward and kissing my forehead. ‘We’ll get you through this. It’ll all be over soon. I promise.’