The grocery-bag debacle and an overabundance of human contact has straight up sucked out all my energy. It takes a lot of battery power to keep your mind and muscles on high alert like that, so I drag my burnt-out body to bed. I collapse on my mattress, and, like a cotton cloud, it swallows me.
The hours roll on by as I watch soap opera reruns. I don’t sleep. Oh no. That would be way too simple.
Instead my brain turns to porridge. My eyes mindlessly follow the characters moving around the TV screen, even after they’ve lost definition and morphed into brightly coloured blobs.
The moon crashes back to earth, and the sun assails the sky.
I’m watching threads of bright yellow light forcing their way through the cracks in my curtains when my phone rings. Through gritty eyes I see Mom’s ID flashing on the screen. It’s 6.00 a.m.
‘Norah, honey?’ Mom’s voice, soft and sweet, comes over the other end of the phone. I’m barely conscious, but my brain, always firing on full, catches the faint wail of a foghorn buried beneath the sound of calm.
Something is wrong. This is the same tone she used when I came home from my first day in second grade and she told me Thumper, my poor pet rabbit, had succumbed to a stroke.
‘Mom, what’s wrong?’
‘Did you get any sleep?’ Small talk. That’s it. All the signs point to tragedy.
‘No. You?’
‘Some.’
I count out the following fifteen seconds of silence in my head.
‘Mom. Is something wrong?’
‘Don’t freak out,’ she says, and my heart charges. Like someone just zapped a million volts through my body, I sit upright. My free hand grips my sheets. A vocal tic rolls up my chest, pushed by pressure, until it flops from my mouth and I moan like Frankenstein’s monster.
‘Hey. Come on,’ Mom says, her tinkling-bell tone now reinforced with sheets of steel. ‘Take some deep breaths or you’re going to pass out.’
‘Tell me what’s happened.’
‘Remember perspective? You’re talking to me right now so it can’t be that bad, right?’ she says.
‘Mom.’
‘Everything is okay, baby, I promise.’
‘Mom!’
‘There was a small collision.’
My mind morphs into those giant, foamy waves you see in disaster movies smashing hard against rocks.
‘Norah, listen to me.’
I can’t.
She’s saying things, but I can only hear the sound of squealing brakes and crunching metal. ‘Are you—’ I cut her off while she’s mid-rant about some dick driver who ran a red light and ploughed straight into the side of her ancient Ford Capri. ‘Are you okay?’
I stumble out of bed. Like I’m trapped in the middle of a tornado, spinning, trying to find a glass of water, trying to find a paper bag, trying to find my bearings, which I’m pretty sure are whizzing around my room independently of my body.
‘A little scratched up. But the doctors are taking great care of me.’
‘You’re in hospital?’
That’s bad. Hospitals are for sick people. This is bad.
My brain shuts down; my muscles stop working. My legs crumble beneath me, and my knees slam into the floor.
‘Norah. Norah, what was that bang? Talk to me.’
I crawl along the carpet, all breathless and sweating like the chick trying to escape a psycho in a horror movie. I squeeze myself into the small space between my bed and dresser where I turtle up, put my head in my lap, and try to space my breathing. My fingers find an old, flaking scab on my knee and pick it until it bleeds. I need the sting to bring me back, force me to relax, but it doesn’t.
‘Sweetie, listen to me. I’m fine. I. Am. Fine.’
I cannot compute ‘I’m fine’. Hospitals are for sick people.
‘Mom,’ I say through bursts of sobs. Tears roll over my lips. I get splash-back every time I blow out a breath.
‘Have I ever lied to you?’ she asks.
I don’t answer. She’s trying to overthrow the anxiety with facts.
‘Norah. Have. I. Ever. Lied. To. You? Answer me.’
‘No.’ I have to listen now. It’s been said. It’s out there. An alternative thread of logic that I can’t ignore. Sometimes I imagine my mind is an arena, and there’s a droid in there, stomping around, looking all high and mighty, fending off anything logical that tries to invade its space. But then, every now and again, common sense sneaks in. It too is a droid. It carries a sword to cut things down.
‘Trust me now, okay? It’s nothing serious,’ Mom says, overenunciating every word. ‘I’m all right. You’re all right. We’re all right. Say it with me.’ She begins the reassurance spiel again, but my lips aren’t quite ready to make real sentences.
She chants the words three times before I find my voice and join in. The heel of my hand drums against the side of my head, trying to make the words stick.
‘I’m all right. You’re all right. We’re all right.’ I sound like I’ve been swigging liquor for a solid week.
‘Baby, it’s going to be okay. I’m going to be home soon. The doctors just want to keep me for a few days, a week, tops.’ A small collision. They don’t keep you in the hospital for a whole week following a small collision. They turned my gran out after only six days, and she’d had a fricking heart attack. There’s more to this.
‘Are you hurt bad? You can be honest with me. I can handle it,’ I lie.
‘Nah, baby. I promise. They’re just being thorough, probably taking advantage of my insurance.’
She’s not going to tell me why they want her to stay in so long. She’s trying to protect me. I may never know the full extent of her injuries, and while I’m 100 per cent certain this will save my sanity in the long term, right now it sends me into a spin.
My breath hitches. This can’t be happening.
I wince and let my body sink lower. Pressing my back against the drawers, I bring my knees up to my chest and hug them tight. I like how sturdy the wood feels against my back. I like how small I feel squashed against the floor.
‘Norah,’ she snaps; it feels like a sharp slap. ‘Listen to me. We’re not freaking out about this, right?’ I nod. Pointless because she can’t see me. ‘I’m safe here. You’re safe there, like always. You don’t have to leave the house. You don’t have to do anything but sit tight and make believe this conference is lasting a little longer than expected. You’re all right. Say it back to me?’
Mom refuses to hang up the phone until she can hear steadiness in my voice. I’m not so selfish that I can’t fake it and let her get back to her sickbed. She’s tired. I can tell by the croak that starts to punctuate her words.
‘Dr Reeves is going to come over today, okay?’ she says. ‘Just to make sure you’re all right. You’re not alone, Norah. We wouldn’t leave you alone, okay?’ I hum, let her know I’m listening, but between me and myself, I can barely understand a word she’s saying. She tells me she loves me and that we’ll talk later.
My cell goes dead and I am plunged into silence. It’s so quiet, I can’t hear anything, like when you’re submerged in the sea.
I’m not all right. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell myself I am; I’m not. My common-sense droid has put up an amazing fight, but he is defeated, lying in pieces on the arena floor.
I’m shutting down. My mouth is numb. A black frost creeps in around the edges of my vision.