Dark Application: TWO

by Brian Krogstad

  The voice was talking and Sabrina was no longer listening. She lost her bearing and with one unconscious yank, pulled the wand from the machine, breaking it completely off, sending shards of copper shrapnel flying through the room and steam rolling.

  That was the end of the espresso machine, and The Drip.

  ***

  She awoke and saw blurs of color, mostly white. One eye was sealed shut and she blinked hard, trying to open it. The veins in the back of her eyelids were red in her vision. Her mind was fuzzy and everything felt soft. A swirl of faces swarmed above her. She saw Gabriela, and vaguely felt the pressure of a hand. Her eyes closed and she felt sleep come over her again like a hot down comforter.

  ***

  When she woke again, there were more faces. Her right eye again was sealed shut and she blinked, this time sending surges of pain through her body. She winced and gagged as a wave of nausea overtook her. Pain stabbed all throughout her face and shoulders. The right side of her body was on fire. She tried to cry out for her mother, who she could see floating in her peripheral vision, but her voice was just a croak.

  Gabriela was there anyway, rubbing Sabrina’s palm, stroking her hair. Everything hurt. Again Sabrina felt unconsciousness overcoming her. She gladly gave in.

  ***

  She woke to voices and hands turning her onto her side. She didn’t move but lay there, distantly aware of what they were doing. They moved the IV drip out of the way and Sabrina felt the tug in her hand. They were unwrapping her head bandages. Cold air struck her face and a sensation she had never felt, like being touched on a new nerve ending that had never been touched before, startled her, and tears welled in her eyes. The hands were applying cold wet liquid, copper in color, that dripped and itched. They re-wrapped her face tightly in gauze.

  Sabrina assumed they were done, but they were not. They lifted the blanket, and only then did Sabrina realize that there was an enormous bandage on her right side. The pain ripped through her raw nerves and exposed dermis as they cleaned and re-wrapped her side. They laid her back down. A syringe was stabbed into the IV bag that hung beside the bed. Sabrina tried to concentrate on the drip, hearing her monitor beeping and instinctively understanding that it was her heart beat, and willed the pain to go away.

  Unconsciousness relieved her.

  ***

  After being in and out of sleep over the next few weeks, Sabrina awoke to random sound bites of conversation and faces blurring past. At one point she thought she heard Kevin, and lifted her hand. A hand was there to take hers, and she recognized her mother’s soft touch.

  Another time she woke up and this time stayed awake much longer than expected. The room was quiet, and no one was there but her. She realized that the entire right side of her face was bandaged including her eye, and wondered if she would be blind in that eye. She rolled her eyes around in their sockets to make sure the eyeball was still there and felt the lens shifting around.

  The beeping of the monitors was the only thing to be heard. She focused on the sound, wanting to fall asleep again, hoping to wake up and be in her bed, dreaming. The beeps were random. A little too random, actually… too sporadic. She opened her eyes, realizing that there were two sets of beeps overlapping. She shifted her focus, listening for that other beep, slightly softer, over to the far right of the room where she couldn’t see.

  There was another bed there, and with the realization, she could suddenly hear another person breathing. Turning her head ever so carefully to the right a few inches, she saw a sheet curtain hanging, separating her from the other noises she heard.

  A nurse came in, a tall graceful woman with long arms and blonde feathered hair.

  “Hey, you’re awake,” she cooed. Sabrina grunted in response.

  The nurse came to the side of the bed and began to check cords and monitors and IV drips. Then she looked into Sabrina’s eye, stooping over, and asked her how she felt. She made her follow her finger with her eye. She made her rate her pain on a scale of one to ten and Sabrina chose six.

  As she was caring for Sabrina’s heart monitor, a doctor and a nurse came in with a clip board and walked past Sabrina’s bed to the other bed, farther from the door. She somewhat guiltily listened to them talk about the other patient. Traumatic neck injury. Paralyzation. Second surgery restored nerve responses in arms.

  Their voices trailed off and Sabrina shuddered for the person’s fate.

  When the doctor came to her side of the bed, she listened with even more horror. Third surgery. Skin graft harvest from torso. Cosmetic surgeries scheduled for the next three months. Insurance approval for fourth cosmetic surgery if needed.

  Sabrina gagged, unaware that her stomach had begun to cramp. The nurse quickly grabbed a pink plastic tub and placed it in front of her, propping her up on one arm just as thick, bright yellow bile spurted from Sabrina’s mouth. It burned her sinuses, gagging her again, this time a painful dry gag, her stomach empty and withered. Her head spun in confusion and grief. Surgeries. She’d had three surgeries already. She fell back onto the pillows and willed herself to sleep again.

  The time slipped away in the fog of pain and depression.

  ***

  Sabrina was awake the following week when the doctor came in again to prep her for cosmetic surgery. No one had been to visit her except her parents and Kevin, who had come every day. Get well cards and a balloon hung, and gathering dust, around her bed.

  He checked her vitals and ordered her not to eat or drink after eight PM. Not that she had eaten much anyway. Her incredible metabolism had eaten her muscle away. She could feel her bones beneath her skin. She was becoming emaciated.

  When the doctor left, he nodded politely to another man who was coming in as he was leaving. He carried a bouquet of daisies and a card. Sabrina had never seen him before.

  He passed her bed and stopped in front of the other.

  The curtain was pulled back, and Sabrina saw the man in the bed for the first time. A heavy realization hit her, a pang of recognition, and she gasped. The man with the flowers looked over and she shut her eye, pretending to be asleep.

  “Howdy, Deputy Conner,” said the man standing.

  “Hey there, boss,” said the paralyzed man, a cheerfulness in his voice that sounded heroically forced.

  “The ladies at the office got you these,” he said, and set the flowers beside the deputy. “So, how fares thee?”

  “Oh, you know. I get to shit in a little pan and have pretty ladies wipe my ass. And the hospital food sucks. But other than that, I’m alive,” he joked.

  There was a long silence. Sabrina strained to see without moving her head too much. The man standing was the county Sherriff. She remembered his extraordinary height and his thick silver hair because her father had voted for him and dragged her to a campaign party where he drank too much wine and she’d had to drive. The man he was talking to, the paralyzed man in the hospital bed beside her, was his deputy.

  “Well, I would ask what the hell you were doing in a dark alley at five in the morning, but I’m afraid you’ll tell me you were working off your hours on a case that didn’t belong to you. So I won’t ask.”

  The man in the bed lay silent, and Sabrina willed her heart to beat quieter in her chest.

  The Sherriff spoke again. “So, you think you found Gorski’s killer, do you?”

  “By God, I think so,” said the deputy. “And it’s a woman.”

  “I won’t tell anyone you got beat up by a girl,” the Sherriff joked, and the deputy laughed.

  “Interestingly enough, the girl in the bed there? She worked right around the corner from where I got jumped,” said the deputy. “The guy that managed the place got a shard of metal in his eye, lodged in his brain, and it killed him. She hasn’t heard about that yet.”

  Now I have, she thought grimly.

  Sabrina’s heart surged again when she knew they must be looking at her. She zoned out, trying to hide her fluttering eyelid. She could faintly see the ma
n’s face, bruises yellowing, a scab that had long since flaked off. Subconsciously she could feel her knuckles burn.

  The Sherriff grunted. He wasn’t interested in Sabrina.

  “Say boss, why don’t you take those flowers there and give them to that girl? She’s gonna need those more than me when she wakes up and gets a look at her face,” he said.

  The Sherriff walked toward her bed, and stepped around, and she heard a shuffle of tissue paper as the flowers were propped on her bedside table. She rolled over, painfully, her eye still shut, in an attempt to hide her face from him. The recognizable side, anyway. She could not wait for him to leave. She groaned in pain, muffling her voice, trying desperately not to draw attention to herself.

  “I should probably go now,” said the Sherriff. “Your company is about to wake up,” he said. The men awkwardly said goodbye to each other and he parted.

  When he was gone she sat silently, staring at the daisies and carnations.

  ***

  Utter bleakness characterized her days in the hospital. She ate little and took in fluids through the IV. Her mother was there, and her father, and still she had not dared look in the mirror to see her new face. The nurses sponge-cleaned her and brushed her hair, but the weeks of lying in the bed had withered her body down to a skeleton.

  Finally, the doctor came with a mirror to talk to her about her plastic surgeries.

  She sat blankly staring at the wall behind him as he explained that the skin would look very red and raw, and that it could take a year or more for the graft to fully heal and look the way it would for the rest of her life.

  Gabriela sat silently, holding Sabrina’s left hand.

  The nurses unwrapped the bandages methodically, and again the cold air touched her new skin with a bizarre, sensitive feeling. The doctor held up the mirror and Sabrina saw her scar staring back at her. Gabriela quickly gave the sign of the cross and squeezed her hand.

  The cheekbone, being lean, had taken the graft beautifully, he said. It turned out to be a quick and easy surgery, he said. It might have been his best plastic surgery yet, he said.

  She took in the scar with boldness, refusing to cry out of her red, raw eye. The skin looked like red dough stretched over her face, stringy and knobby. Her eyebrow was still there, barely growing, the hairs melted off. It itched and throbbed. Her lip was distorted and looked more like an ugly grimace. There was no nostril, just a blob of shapeless flesh that melded into her cheek. The tears she had been holding back slid out and dripped at erratic angles down her crooked cheek.

  Gabriela also wiped tears from her eyes. She leaned over and kissed her daughter, on the good side of her face.

  The nurses carefully wrapped the wound again, and then began to remove the dressing from her side. A square red, raw, bloody patch of epithelium was there, covered by a sheet of plastic wrap. She winced in horror at the sight, and seeing it made the cleaning all the more painful. They soaked and rewrapped it, and Sabrina was given another dose of pain medicine in her IV bag.

  It was a relief to drift off again.

  ***

  In her dream, she was punching the bags, hypnotized by her heart beat, her lungs pumping in and out like a drum beat. She could feel the pain and the burn, and she felt alive. The sweat dripped over her face in a broken crooked pattern because of the scar. She could hear Antonio chanting, bring it girl, bring it.

  When she woke up, she could still hear his voice, and she jumped in alarm when she looked through the haze of the dream and saw that Antonio was sitting over her, looking down at her face.

  “Hey, Sabrina,” he said gently, his voice a pitch higher than usual.

  She looked into his face and the last three years of her life flashed before her eyes. The obstacles she’d encountered, not out in the world, but there inside herself, and the way he had coached her through it all. The fear she’d had of being seen, and of seeing, and how he’d helped her into her skin, and allowed her to feel proud of her accomplishments. He’d been there for her without taking her glory. He’d let her have every bit of the satisfaction of achieving.

  And here he was again, about to see her ugliness, her beauty and youth shriveled and dripping through her hands.

  Tears streamed down her cheeks. She could feel the cloth beneath the dressing soaking with tears. He put a hand to her face and cupped her jaw tenderly. He came to say goodbye, she thought. A new round of tears started.

  He leaned into her face and kissed her. She felt his lips, soft, on her scar, wrinkled and hard. He didn’t hurt her, and he didn’t try to avoid touching the scar, either. He just kissed it, kissed her. Kissed her lips, her cheek, her eyelid.

  This is it. Good bye Antonio, my friend, my first love.

  “Sabrina,” he said, his voice still soft and high. “Come with me.”

  She opened her mouth to speak and her voice faltered.

  “You can stay with me and my cousin, and fight again. You could compete. I could train you.”

  His voice got faster and more urgent as he spoke. She appeared to shake her head, and he became more serious.

  “You can go to college there Sabrina, and you can make money competing. I’ll train you.” He was looking longingly into her eyes. She imagined her mother, alone in Virginia, one of the only Hispanics in her town, with no friends and a husband working full-time. She imagined her mother lonely and scared.

  Then her father’s voice echoed from somewhere in her memory. Parents take care of their kids. That’s their job. Not the other way around.

  It vaguely occurred to Sabrina, as she lay there and cry in the hospital bed in Antonio’s arms, that she might be the lonely, scared one.

  Sabrina was speechless, and instead she pulled him close to her, scooting aside on the bed, and he swung his legs up beside her and placed his head on the pillow. She began to sob out her grief, her fear, and her loneliness, and she cried for Leah, and for Sean. Antonio held her. He moved the IV tube aside and stroked her arm, which bore some fresh pink scars from the steam blast. She was hurt everywhere, it seemed.

  Sabrina, you are so beautiful, he said. They held each other and he told her she was beautiful.

  CAPTER EIGHT: Deliverance

  Gabriela wiped her eyes as Sabrina stepped into the van. Doug had left for work early that morning after waking Sabrina up to give her ample hugs and kisses in bed, and he had stayed up late the night before playing Gin Rummy with her. The suitcases were full of her things, and the van was packed with her and Antonio’s stuff. Her cap and gown were slung over the center console of the van. Because of the accident, she had missed her graduation ceremony. Antonio took her graduation tassel and draped it over the rear view mirror.

  Sabrina still wore a bandage over the injured half of her face, and she planned to take it off when she had gotten more used to seeing herself that way.

  Antonio fired up the van and pulled out of the driveway, headed toward the highway. It would take about five days, he guessed, with them taking turns driving. She settled back in the seat and watched the trees.

  She rubbed the square edge of the phone in her pocket. The long cord of the bluetooth attachment was wrapped in a ball next to it. She rubbed the hard plastic with her thumb. Looking over at Antonio, his handsome profile against the wall of trees passing outside, she felt an immense feeling of satisfaction. Even the itch and pain of the skin graft couldn’t shake the feeling of acceptance and affection she felt in that moment. She looked at her face in the outside mirror. The reflection was blurry. Her profile was a faceless shape, a dark smudge on the glass.

  Suddenly the phone vibrated in her pocket. She leapt in her seat with an exaggerated gasp, the hair prickling all over her neck and arms. An intense rage came over her, toward the phone, and toward the fear itself. She gripped the phone in her pocket, squeezing it hard, trying to break it. An image of Luke Jeffers flitted briefly through her mind, an innocent man in jail. She knew it. She’d known it the day she’d gone with Kevin, she could see it i
n his eyes. She hadn’t needed to know what he was saying to know what he meant. She saw him posing with his girlfriend, their arms tight around each other, their lips pressed together. They were really in love.

  The phone buzzed again. For a moment, as though from habit, she almost took it out and looked at it.

  It was Antonio that stopped her from giving in. He looked over at her, a concerned expression darkening his eyes. His tenderness touched her. She felt more than lucky, she felt blessed to have found a love so deep, and so built upon trust. So unexpected, and so absolute. It seemed obvious that she should love him, now that she had allowed herself.

  She contemplated that word for a moment: blessed. It was a word that she had recycled from her mother’s vocabulary. A word that she supposed meant she had been given something. Some people believed that God gave them things, directly, after hearing them mumble into their hands and ask for things. A blessing, though, was a thing that was not asked for. It was something that you took whether you wanted it or not. It was a “gift” of sorts. The phone in her pocket felt very heavy.

  They approached the city line. The sign ahead was a large stone monument that said “Now Leaving Fort Christanna”.

  “Pull over,” she said abruptly.

  He immediately veered off the road and onto the shoulder. “Sabrina?” he asked as she ripped off her shoes.

  She ignored him, knowing that it was now or never. If she crossed the line with the baggage, she might be stuck with it forever. With deliberate, angry movements, she tied the ends of the shoes together. Antonio watched her walk in her socks down the side of the road on the edge of the woods, the sneakers dangling in her hand. He didn’t follow her, but observed, letting her have this moment to herself.

  She dug the phone out of her pocket, and the Bluetooth device, and jammed them deep into one of the shoes. She was about to heave the shoes into the air, when another thought struck her. She took out the string of maroon rosary beads, and stuffed them down into the other shoes. With a sense of finality in her movements, she flung the shoes high up, where they landed dangling over a telephone line just inside the city boundary. She stopped and stared a moment, watching them swing, and then slow, and then stop. Certain that they were staying there, she slowly walked back to the van.