SOMETIMES WHEN I woke up, I was alone with the beeping machines and the awful fluorescent lighting and the voices paging doctors and nurses over the hospital’s intercom system, unable to move a muscle or speak. I sometimes tried to speak, but I couldn’t make much sound—barely more than a squeak—and no one was there to hear me anyway, even if I could have called out at the top of my lungs.
Other times, a nurse would be in the room with me, changing out the IV bag or checking my vital signs. “You’re looking a lot better. You’re getting your color back,” they’d invariably say, but that only made me wonder, better than what? Because I felt like death, and not even the warmed-over variety. Or an orderly might say, “Why don’t you try sitting up in the chair for a while? Or we could at least raise your bed to a sitting position. You’re going to have to start moving around on your own soon, you know.”
But I didn’t know anything of the sort.
Dead people didn’t move, as far as I was aware. And wasn’t I at least halfway to dead? I had to be. Except, every time they said something like that to me, I felt a little less dead than I had the time before, which frustrated me every bit as much as it gave them encouragement.
Then there were the times that I came to and small groupings of women and sometimes children surrounded me. They were familiar to me, even though I couldn’t place them at first. But gradually their names started coming back to me, and I could match them up with their faces.
There was Dana Zellinger and her passel of kids and the understanding smile she always bore whenever she’d speak to me. She had a calming, soothing presence, even amidst the chaos that was now my life.
And then, there was Viktoriya Chambers, the ballerina who brought me delicate, homemade Russian desserts. “Svetka taught me,” she’d say, her accent heavy, and she’d pass them out to the nurses, as well, because this Svetka, whoever that was, had also taught Viktoriya the importance of feeding everyone she came into contact with, and particularly those who were caring for others.
Ravyn Nash was unforgettable because of her head full of lavender dreadlocks as well as the bright tattoos covering her body. She spent most of her visits quietly sketching in a chair by the window, using pens and markers and pastels. Occasionally she asked if I needed anything, to which I could only shake my head. Sometimes, she would show me the sketches. One was a butterfly perched on a flower. Another was a stained-glass window with a naked woman stepping under a waterfall. They were tattoos she was designing for her clients, she told me. But there was one she wouldn’t show me at all. I yearned to know what it was at the same time as I dreaded it—because she kept glancing over at me while she worked, and I was afraid she was drawing me.
London Nazarenko tended to sit next to my bed in her wheelchair, talking my ear off about how we were going to have races once they let me out of the bed and put me in a wheelchair of my own. The thought of wheelchair races only made me wonder if I would never be able to walk again. I tried wiggling my toes every time she talked about those things, and it seemed as if they all moved, but I couldn’t see them to be sure. My left ankle wouldn’t move at all, though. My knee wouldn’t move either, actually. And since no one could understand anything I said—my voice was completely gone, and I didn’t have any idea when it would return, if ever—worst of all, I couldn’t ask anyone to explain it to me. She usually had her son with her, a toddler named Erik, who liked to eat the scrambled eggs they brought me every morning but I couldn’t choke down. I was happy to let him have them.
But more often when I woke, Ethan Higgins was by my bed.
Somehow, I could breathe more freely when he was with me. I didn’t feel strangled or suffocated. I didn’t feel as if my pulse would slow to a crawl and then gradually die off; instead, it thumped strong enough I could count off every beat, almost so loud I could hear it.
With everyone else, I felt frustrated because I couldn’t tell them what I needed to tell them. I got annoyed if they hovered too much, or if they didn’t hover enough, and I could vacillate between the two in an instant because I couldn’t do anything for myself, not even something as simple as opening the container of orange juice they brought daily with my breakfast, or wrangling my fork out of the plastic packaging surrounding my utensils and napkin.
But with Ethan in my hospital room, I didn’t suffer the same frustrations.
He would fold his huge body into one of the too-small chairs in the room, which had to be horribly uncomfortable, and sit by my side.
Most of the time, he didn’t say anything. I often opened my eyes after a nap and found him staring at me. Not in a creepy way, though. He stared as if trying to catalog everything about me.
When the nurses came in, he recited a long list of my vital signs and any tiny changes he might have observed in me, whether it was a rattle in my breathing, or the fact that my pulse slowed every time I drifted off to sleep and he wondered if that was normal or if they needed to do something about it, or even the tiny pink bump he’d noticed on the back of my hand that he wanted them to check out, in case it posed a concern.
How had he noticed the bump on my hand? I could barely even feel it if I dragged the pad of the thumb from my other hand across it, so why would he notice such a thing?
I was a mess of cuts, bruises, broken bones, and tubes running through my body until I couldn’t tell where the machines ended and I began, but Ethan somehow saw everything.
He saw me.
It was enough to make me cry for wishing he were with me during all the times he wasn’t, while at the same time wishing he would stay away because I didn’t want to be noticed.
Being noticed could only bring me danger. With Hayes, any time I’d somehow gone without him noticing me, I also went without him hitting me.
But Ethan’s attention was different, somehow. He made me feel precious and cared for. I was terrified of getting too accustomed to the ways he made me feel, because it couldn’t last. It was only a façade, something that would fade away with time, much like the cuts and bruises were already starting to fade.
I tried to guard myself against the loss of him, because it was coming. Nothing good in my life ever lasted. The only things that stuck around were the bad things, the ones I wanted to be free from, like Hayes.
Hayes. He hadn’t been here, not once, at least not when I’d been awake. I wanted to ask about him, but I couldn’t make anyone understand me.
Slowly but surely, my voice was growing stronger, but I still wasn’t ready to ask this question. Because I didn’t want to know the answer. I feared the answer.
Sometime soon, though, I’d have to ask. I wouldn’t be able to put it off much longer.
If not for the small window on the other side of my room, I wouldn’t know whether it was day or night. Everything ran together for me, with nurses coming in around the clock and waking me up in order to check my vital signs or change the bag of IV fluids or to give me another dose of some medication or another.
“You’re starting to seem more like yourself,” Dana Zellinger said to me one time.
More like myself? What did that mean? I shook my head, confused.
“You seem like you’re starting to understand what’s going on,” she said. “At first, every time you woke up, you were in another world, almost. We couldn’t tell if you knew who we were or what was happening.”
“I just want to go home,” I said, almost sobbing the words, but at least they came out as something more than a whisper. But where was home? I didn’t want to go back to Hayes. I didn’t have anywhere to go. Not unless Hayes dragged me back once they let me leave the hospital. Would he do that? He might.
I couldn’t go home with him. Not ever again. Not unless he was finally going to end it.
Dana’s little boy patted her on the knee and said, “Up!” so she bent to pick him up and settle him on her lap.
“I don’t know how soon they’re going to let you leave,” Dana said. “They’re supposed to be moving you to the rehab unit later today, though, which is great news. It means you’re that much closer to being allowed to go home.”
And it also meant I was that much closer to having to figure out where I’d go and what I’d do with myself once I got there.
But still, no one mentioned Hayes.
I supposed I could try calling my parents and seeing if they would allow me to come back to their house. And what if they refused? When I’d first gotten involved with Hayes, they’d essentially cut me off. Besides, how would I get to Michigan in this kind of shape and with no money?
Thinking about these things only made my head hurt, so I decided not to focus on them too hard. I couldn’t leave the hospital yet, anyway, so there was no point worrying about things I couldn’t control.
Which, to be honest, was everything. I couldn’t even control my bladder.
At some point, they’d taken out the catheter, but I was still receiving IV fluids and therefore needed to pee constantly. By the time I realized I needed to go, it was already too late, never mind the fact that I had to press my call button, wait for a nurse to arrive, which didn’t always happen very soon, and gingerly make my way from the bed to the bathroom, which was awkward since I couldn’t bend my left knee.
I started to wish they’d give me adult diapers, because that would be easier, even if I’d be mortified for anyone to see me that way.
But then again, how would being caught wearing diapers be worse than being seen in a puddle of my own urine? Or having everyone know all the things Hayes and his friends had done to me?
If I kept everything in perspective, the mortification level went down by a degree or so each time the nurses had to change my bedding.
Usually.
It depended entirely on who else happened to be in the room with me.
If it was one of the WAGs, I didn’t mind too much. Especially not when it was London, because she followed it up by telling me horror stories about learning to live with a urine-collection bag taped to her leg, laughing through the memories.
If she could laugh about it, I could, too, right? Maybe someday, at least.
When it happened and I had a room full of detectives asking me questions I couldn’t answer, because I still couldn’t speak very well even though I didn’t have machines breathing for me any longer, and because I didn’t want to be forced to think about all the things I’d been through, I wished I could crawl under my bed and not have to come back out for a month. But at least in those instances, the nurses shooed all the detectives out of my room and wouldn’t let them come back for a while.
It hadn’t happened yet when Ethan was with me, but I knew it was coming. And no matter how well I braced myself against the indignity, I knew there was no way to truly prepare for it.
I’d just have to deal with it when it happened.
And it might very well happen soon, because he was due to arrive any minute if what London told me was true.
I reached for the remote control. They’d looped the cord around my bed rails so I wouldn’t lose it and to keep it from getting tangled with all the various and sundry tubes still connected to my body. But once I had the thing in my hand, I couldn’t remember which button called the nurse and which turned on the television, so I stared at it for a long time, trying but failing to make my brain work.
“You want to call the nurse?” London finally asked.
I nodded. “I need to pee.” The words were so soft I could barely hear them myself, so there was no way the nurse would be able to make out my request on the intercom.
London nodded, though, calm and collected and completely unfazed by my memory lapse. “It’s the red button. The big one at the top.”
I pressed the button she’d indicated, even though in my foggy brain, I thought the red button was the one that controlled the television.
Apparently she was right, though, because the TV didn’t come on.
The nurse didn’t respond over the intercom, either, though. Not for a long time. So long that, whether I’d needed to pee before or not, I really needed to go now, since I was thinking about it.
I pressed the button again, hoping they’d answer soon, because I was sick to death of wetting myself, and even if some of my guests could possibly help me, I didn’t think London could. She was in a wheelchair, herself, so how could she get me into one, wheel me into the bathroom, get my clothes off, and help me onto the toilet?
Short answer: she couldn’t.
I jammed my finger against the red button so hard that I thought I might break it. It was going to happen. I knew it. My eyes filled with tears of frustration.
London took the remote from me and set it just out of my reach. “I’ll go find someone, okay? It’ll be all right.”
But it wouldn’t be all right. That was the problem. Nothing was all right, and I didn’t think it ever would be again.
I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself from crying and forced a nod. Then she wheeled herself out into the hall.
A couple of minutes later, my door opened again.
I looked over, hoping to see London and a nurse coming to my rescue, but I completely deflated when Ethan’s tall, powerful frame filled the open doorway.
I wanted to see him.
I wanted it more than I should, because I had no business relying on him the way I had been lately.
I just didn’t want him to see me. Not like this.
It was such a contradiction, but I couldn’t control the randomness of my thoughts and emotions. They were as much of a mess as the rest of me.
Then I did the worst thing I could possibly have done. The one thing I hadn’t allowed myself to do throughout all my time in the hospital.
I burst into tears.
And as soon as I did that, I wet myself again, which only made me cry harder.