Stephanie
From the second the hospital doors shut behind me, it’s like my body decides that now is the time for me to realize just what a wringer I’ve been through ever since I came back to Arroyo Falls.
Holy shit, I feel awful.
Bruises and broken bones and cuts and scars — emotional and physical — suddenly spring to life and become these real things. Things that my body can afford to feel now that I don’t have to worry about being shot or raped or sold off.
I feel pain and I must’ve cried out, because all of a sudden one of the nurses is putting something incredible into my arm and I’m pretty sure if I could focus my thoughts I’d tell her ‘thank you, that feels amazing’, but it’s all I can do to keep my eyes open.
Eventually, even that is too much.
I shut down. My eyes close and I drift away.
I wake up after a while.
I’m in a little white room, with bandages all over me and an IV drip in my arm. There’s an extravagant bouquet of flowers in the little bedside table. Bright, beautiful orchids that smell like coconut and citrus.
Even though there’s no note, I know they have to be from Luca.
That makes me smile, even though smiling makes me hurt enough that I think I might throw up.
An hour passes, maybe two, and I spend the whole time laying there, reflecting.
I never thought I’d be here — and I don’t mean at the hospital with broken ribs and feeling like I was put through a meat grinder.
I might actually be free.
Soon enough, we might actually be free.
It might be the drugs, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around just how that’s going to work. It seems like just another lie — too big to even be believed.
How are we going to start over?
What are our lives going to look like?
Try as I might, I just can’t picture it.
The usual things, like going back to the hardware store, or taking boxing lessons, or even going back to Baltimore, they all seem tied up with too much baggage.
I burned a lot of bridges coming home. I abandoned a job and coworkers and it’s not like I can just saunter back like nothing happened.
Besides, what would I tell them?
And the hardware store? I doubt I’ll be able to go back there for a while without thinking of all the misery that place brought into my life.
This whole experience has left me feeling so drained. I need something to make me feel meaning again. Something to make me excited to get up in the morning.
Correction, I remind myself. We’ll both need something. I doubt Luca’s just going to go back to the gym after all this.
It’s confounding. Trying to find purpose and figure out a way forward when we now have our whole lives open in front of us.
So when a nurse comes in to check on me, I’m happy for the break, even though she’s carrying a tray of what I’m sure is awful food and some flavorless red jello.
There’s always jello.
She moves my bouquet aside, taking a second for a long, appreciative sniff of the orchids — they really do smell lovely, even from this far away — and then plops the tray down in front of me.
“Time to eat. You’ve been out for a long time and you need to get your strength back,” she says as she lifts the lid.
Sure enough: Jello.
It wiggles like it’s alive.
I’m not even shaking the plate, and it’s wiggling.
There’s a little meatloaf, too. And a bread roll, some steamed broccoli, and a lump of mashed potatoes with one pathetic little piece of chive in it. The potatoes have a weird sheen to them, like they’re artificial. It’s the kind of sheen you only see on hospital food or during the cleanup of an industrial spill.
I pick at the food while she checks my vitals.
“How long was I out?”
The meatloaf tastes like crap twice defrosted and warmed in the microwave. But I eat it anyways because I am suddenly starving.
The nurse checks her watch.
“About twenty, twenty-one hours. Give or take.”
Really?
I blink. I still feel exhausted. And in pain. It’s the dull, background kind of pain you feel when you’re on a the right-sized dose of some very effective painkillers — you’re aware that you should be hurting, there’s this impression that you might hurt because you got the crap kicked out of you, but you don’t really feel it other than this weird tugging sensation when you move something that shouldn’t be moved.
The nurse sees me testing out my body, trying to find out what bits are broken, and she gently pushes me back flat against the bed.
“You really shouldn’t be moving right now. Trust me, when the pain meds start to fade, you’ll understand why. Speaking of which…”
She checks over my IV and then hits a small button on my night stand and beautiful warmth flows in through my arm and my whole body feels like I’m floating on some cloud.
“Thanks,” I say. Though with how doped up I am, it sounds like I’m saying ‘tanks’, only with an exaggerated German accent, like I’m the head of some Panzer division.
Hearing my own voice like that makes me giggle.
“Here,” she says, picking up the TV remote and flipping it on. “There’s no better excuse to catch up on your TV than bed confinement. Just relax for a while, dear. And if you feel pain coming back, just hit the button here, alright?”
I nod, then stare at the TV.
I’m watching some reality cooking show, where professional chefs have to cook recipes based on real-time audience suggestions over twitter. It’s weird as heck, but works, mainly because Gordon Ramsay is hosting and lacing both the audience suggestions and his critiques of the chef’s food with his usual over-the-top soul-crushing profanity.
Actually, high as I am, it’s brilliant.
I zone out for a bit while, listening to the dulcet sounds of Gordon Ramsay’s screams.
Sometime after one of the chefs starts to cry over Ramsay’s critique of his Japanese-Turkish fusion spam roast, the bumper for the late-night news comes on.
Violence today at the county jail. Inter-gang conflict claims the life of several high-profile prisoners including two from yesterday’s major organized crime bust.
The bumper cuts to show a couple guys being wheeled out on gurneys and body bags being zipped closed around them and I swear one of them looks like Luca.
I fixate on it. I can’t get it out of my head.
He’s in that jail, he’s betrayed his Family for me, there’s no one in there on his side. It’s him.
I sit up. Fast.
It hurts. Even through the painkillers, it’s enough to make me gasp.
I have to find out what happened. I can’t wait two hours for some newscaster with a name like Damon Wood or Mark Stone or Lester Steele to tell me the man I love is dead, just before he segues into a piece about the latest dangerous teen craze that every parent should know about.
I stand up.
It’s a bad idea, but I do it.
I grab hold of the IV drip and I smack the button a couple times because my body is crying out that standing isn’t just a regular bad idea, it’s a very bad idea.
One foot in front of the other, putting extra care into every step, I start moving forward.
I have to find a phone. Something.
I’ll call my dad. Or Bryan. Or the police.
I get outside my room and grab ahold of the first nurse I see.
“Where is the telephone,” I try to mumble, but it comes out sounding like ‘warbles the tall bone” so I just start miming with my free hand like I’m using a phone and hope that she figures it out.
The nurse gives me a look of such surprise and pity that I’m taken aback for a second.
“What are you doing out of bed?” is all she says, completely ignoring my slurred mumbling and my miming.
“Telephone,” I say again, but she doesn’t listen and she takes hold of me by the shoulder and leads me back to my room.
It’s then I’m aware of just how weak I am.
I try and struggle against her, because I need to know what happened to Luca, but I might as well be trying to move a brick wall.
“Let me get you a sedative, something to help you sleep. You really need your rest.”
The nurse pops out of the room for what seems like a second and returns with a syringe, which she sticks into my IV port.
Sleep takes over, and I slip into it with my mind and my heart certain that I’ve lost my chance to know Luca as the kind of man I know he could be.