Black Water

by Ninie Hammon

  The soft swish-swish of nurse’s shoes came closer, and other footsteps, too. She could hear conversation. They were talking about her and she didn’t like being discussed as if she were a tuna in the fish market.

  She opened her eyes and found four people surrounding her bed. The two from before — the doctor who looked like Pancho Villa had told her his name but she couldn’t remember it. And the Eeyore nurse, only today her smock featured characters from The Little Mermaid. Did she work in pediatrics? Or did she wear idiotic cartoon figures because she thought they would soothe and reassure the adults she treated?

  They were not reassuring. They were annoying. Any minute, she might look up and Barney the Purple Dinosaur would be standing in the doorway.

  “Where’s Barney?” she asked, hadn’t meant to say the words aloud but they popped out.

  The four people exchanged looks. Dr. Villa and Eeyore had been joined by a woman so thin she would need to be outlined in magic marker to keep from disappearing when she turned sideways. A doctor, obviously, a stethoscope dangling around her neck being the badge of doctor-dom. That and the white lab coat she wore instead of a Disney movie poster.

  “Who’s Barney?” Dr. Villa asked.

  She caught herself before she answered. A woman with a head injury inquiring about purple dinosaurs was likely a one-way ticket to the funny farm.

  “Nobody. I was still half asleep, must have been dreaming.”

  The four seemed more than a little surprised that she was carrying on a coherent conversation. Good thing she hadn’t dropped the purple dinosaur bomb on them.

  After they introduced themselves and she promptly forgot their names — not brain injury, she never had been able to remember names, and she couldn’t keep up with a pair of sunglasses for more than three days either, even before…

  Before she shot herself in the head.

  The thought process untangled itself from the jumbled pile.

  That’s what happened. That’s why her head hurt. She had shot herself in the head…

  And survived.

  “How do you feel, Miss Donahue?”

  She almost asked who Miss Donahue was but caught herself. Again, just in time.

  “Please, call me—” She dug through the pile of crayons frantically, trying to find the name. “Bailey.” She was Bailey. Not Jessie, Bailey. The trick was to think of herself as Bailey Donahue, become Bailey Donahue. And she knew the trick. Oh my, yes, she knew the trick. “And I feel … okay. My head hurts and—” She pulled at the restraints binding her wrists to the bed railings. “The cause of death written on my toe tag is going to be ‘terminal nose itch’ if you don’t untie me so I can scratch it.”

  The level of their surprise at her little speech was evident on their shocked faces. And displayed in the sideways glances they gave each other. Did they think she was blind as well as brain-fried, that she couldn’t see the “knowing looks” that passed among them? Clearly, they were accustomed to dealing with patients with only a handful of firing synapses and were astonished she was able to put more than a couple of words together, let alone make a funny about her itching nose.

  By mutual unspoken agreement, they began to interrogate her, or so it felt, asking her questions about what year it was and who was president and how many fingers they were holding up. They noted things on their metal-bound legal pads at her responses, passing looks back and forth that seemed to be more and more approving as the process continued. After she accomplished the miraculous feat of multiplying five times seven and identifying the largest city in England, followed by a stunning performance explaining the difference between the two objects they held up to her, a car key and a paper clip, they seemed to reach another unspoken agreement, closed their metal legal pads and smiled at her benignly.

  “Miss Donahue—”

  “Bailey,” she corrected.

  “Very well, Bailey,” said the new doctor whose name she’d already forgotten. “You do know why you’re here, don’t you?”

  “Gunshot wound to the head.” Somehow it made her queasy to say, I shot myself in the head. She had, though. She had wanted to die and tried to kill herself. She knew why that was, but right now she could not bear to pull those knife-slicing thoughts out of the pile. That could wait. The pile wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head,” Eeyore corrected.

  “Busted. I tried to kill myself. If you need me to admit it, there it is.”

  Her thinking had become oiled with reason enough for her to grasp that she needed to convince these people that it had been some kind of mistake, she hadn’t meant to do it. If they knew the truth, they might be unwilling to let her leave to finish the job she’d obviously botched. And finish the job she would!

  “I was depressed … lonely…” She’d tell them she’d been drunk or on drugs but surely they had blood tests that would dispute that. “I threw myself a massive pity party and was the only guest. I was an idiot.”

  They didn’t buy all she was selling, but they were willing to go along with her as if they did.

  “It’s good to know you feel that way about it,” Dr. Villa of the bulging forehead said.

  She almost demanded they take off the restraints … since she “felt that way about it,” but bit her tongue.

  “If you think you’re up to it, we need to talk to you about your condition.”

  “What ‘condition’?”

  There was an awkward pause, as if they hadn’t sufficiently worked it out in advance who was going to say what and nobody wanted to go first. She primed the pump.

  “Why am I not dead?”

  Another pregnant pause.

  “Because the round that should have killed you … didn’t. You are a very, very fortunate young lady.”

  Well, see, that depended on your perspective. It was all about perspective.

  He took a deep breath and launched into an anatomy lesson. Frontal lobe. Occipital lobe. Parietal lobe. Temporal lobe.

  Finally, she waved her hands for him to stop.

  “I couldn’t understand all that even if I didn’t have a very recent hole in my head. Could you please drop the rub-a-dub-dub words!” Before they had a chance to ask, she explained. “The old man who lived next door to me when I was a kid refused to talk with anyone who used words with more syllables in them than rub-a-dub-dub. Just tell me, simple. Small words. Straight out.”

  No Name Doctor straightened, cast sideways looks at the others, and said, “The bullet you shot into your brain should have killed you…”

  “But you took it out, so—”

  “No, we didn’t take it out.”

  “Didn’t take it out? You mean … it’s still in there?”

  Bailey didn’t hear any of the rest of what Drs. No Name and Villa said because she was trying to process the preposterous concept that there was a bullet in her brain. She tuned back in, though, in time to hear the words, “… kill you instantly.”

  “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

  “I said we couldn’t remove the bullet because to do so would almost certainly have been fatal,” Dr. No Name said.

  “Okay, I get that, but what’s the ‘kill you instantly’ part?”

  “The bullet in your brain is a foreign object. As long as it remains where it is…” She let that sentence dangle. Bailey wished she could recall her name. You should know the name of someone you were yearning to punch in the face. “But there is no guarantee it will remain in place, and movement in a particular direction would kill you instantly.”

  “What would cause the bullet to move?”

  Another exchange of looks.

  “Just about anything…” Dr. Villa said.

  Jessie — Bailey! She was Bailey! — must have looked as stunned as she felt.

  “…or nothing at all. Really, there is absolutely no way to predict what will happen. You might live another seventy years with that bullet in your brain and suffer no ill effects whatsoever. A
fter all, it should have killed you to begin with. Since it didn’t, perhaps it never will.”

  No Name Doctor took the hand-off. It was clear to Bailey that the woman liked being the bearer of such dire tidings. She was enjoying herself. A power thing.

  “Or it could shift and cause all manner of … damage.”

  “Define ‘damage.’”

  “Blindness. Deafness. Paralysis.”

  “So you’re saying I could go blind, or deaf or be paralyzed … or die if I — what? Get hit in the head with a baseball bat?”

  “Or bump your head getting into your car.”

  The rest grayed out. Ugly thoughts on customized Harleys chased each other around and around in her head. She wanted to be dead. Not blind or deaf or unable to move. Dead.

  “You need to rest now, Miss Donahue,” said Pancho Villa.

  The Little Mermaid nurse reached up toward the plastic tubing above Bailey’s head. Bailey realized instantly what she intended to do.

  “No, don’t. Please, I don’t want to sleep. Don’t knock me out.”

  But even as she spoke the last words she felt the mellowing of reality, the gauzy quality of the air, the release of some spring somewhere inside that kept her tight. When it went limp, so did Bailey.

  The foursome filed out as Bailey began to blur out. As she nodded off, she looked up and spoke to the white ceiling tile that had become her new best friend. “Guess I better get a bigger shower cap.”

  Bailey came instantly awake. No gradual passage through ever-brightening levels of consciousness until she finally broke the surface with sparkling bubbles into reality.

  She was insensate and then she was wide awake and acutely aware. One beat and then two.

  The room was dark. Night had folded wings of shadow around the hospital while she lay in drug-induced slumber and the hush of soft voices made her feel like her ears were stopped up, like she had gone up in an airplane or down in an elevator and her ears had clogged.

  She reached for the call button. Except she couldn’t reach anything. Her arms were still bound to the metal sides of the bed with what looked like the ties from a fleece bathrobe.

  How was she supposed to call the nurse if she needed help when they had her tied to the bed? She didn’t need help, she needed information, but had no way to summon anyone to get it.

  One of the questions the idiot foursome had asked her when they were measuring the level of her lunacy was “What year is this?” She had told them correctly, 2015.

  They hadn’t asked what month. If they had, it would have brought the thought — the bright red, candy-apple red crayon — out of the pile. It had to be June. Had to be. HAD TO BE. She hadn’t been out that long.

  But what day in June?

  She didn’t want to call out for help, ever mindful that if Eeyore or Grumpy/Sneezy/Doc judged her overwrought, they could flip the switch on her plastic tubing and send her sailing off into LaLa Land on the Good Ship IV Drip.

  She had to know.

  A nurse glided softly past her door on shoes that must have had soles of cotton candy.

  “Nurse!” she called out, trying to produce only sufficient volume to be heard and not enough to elicit alarm.

  Nothing. The nurse hadn’t heard—

  The nurse appeared in her doorway.

  “Do you need something?”

  Yeah, I need for you to untie my arms and let me reach up and pick my own nose. I need you to put the idiot call button within reach so if I really did need help, say I chanced to be choking or fell out of bed on my head, you could help me.

  “What’s today?”

  “Wednesday.”

  She tried to sift through all the crayons, looking for the one that told her when she had sat down at the kitchen table with the gun. But it was too much trouble.

  “The date? What’s the date?”

  “June 24.”

  Bailey had been straining upward as best she could, trussed up in somebody’s old bathrobe, but now she sank back on the pillow and stared up at her dear friend the ceiling tile.

  “Do you need anything else?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  The nurse left and Bailey began resolutely digging through her crayons, trying to put it together accurately. She shot herself. She didn’t like thinking of it that way. Somehow that seemed so … barbaric.

  Concentrate.

  She’d shot herself on June 19 because she couldn’t bear to miss another one of Bethany’s birthdays, better to be dead than absent. June 19 had been when it began, of course, when Napoleon Dynamite’s wimpy brother’s buxom girlfriend stepped off the bus.

  But Bethany wasn’t actually born until June 25, six days later.

  June 25. Tomorrow.

  Bethany’s birthday, her real birth-day, the day she left her mother’s body and breathed and cried and lit up every dark, shadowed corner of Bailey’s existence — was tomorrow.

  What time—?

  Her eyes fell on the big round, industrial-size clock that hung above the door.

  It was five minutes to twelve. Couldn’t be noon, had to be midnight on June 24. In five minutes, Bailey would live through another of her child’s birthdays — absent. Excluded. Exiled.

  No, not again.

  No!

  She’d tried! She’d done everything she could. She had tried to die, but woke up here instead, still breathing, with a bullet—

  A bullet in her brain.

  If the bullet moves, it could kill you instantly.

  If the bullet moves…

  Bailey strained upwards on the bathrobe ties, yanked with all her strength, but they held fast.

  Any little thing. A bump on the head. Anything.

  Bailey lifted her head up off the pillow and banged it back down with all her strength. Waves of pain, nauseating, undulating ripples spread out from somewhere in the middle of her head and crashed with brutal fury on the insides of her skull.

  It hurt so bad she couldn’t get her breath for a moment.

  Then she gasped.

  It didn’t work.

  Gritting her teeth against the agony, she lifted her head and banged it back down violently, again and again and again until the pain grayed out the world and darkness came clawing at her from the corners and she had to stop or pass out.

  She blinked back tears, fighting the nausea, turned toward the clock. Two minutes.

  She had two minutes to make it happen. Two minutes to leave this world as she had intended to do when she pulled the trigger of the gun and launched a bullet into her brain. She whipped her head from side to side on the pillow, lifted it up and banged it back down again and again, and then the agony-filled world downshifted through shades of gray to black.

  Darkness.

  Bailey blinked. Opened her eyes. Her friend the ceiling tile was waiting for her, still smiling. Slowly, reluctantly, she turned her eyes to the clock. Eleven minutes after twelve. June 25. Bethany’s birthday.

  A party and cake and streamers and ice cream and presents and happy birthday and blowing out the candles and…

  Bailey began to cry softly, total defeat sitting in somber disquiet on her shoulders. The hot tears slid slowly down the sides of her head and pooled in her ears.

  Chapter Eight

  T.J. heard the horn on Dobbs’s truck, the one he drove when he wasn’t in his Jeep.

  Beep-beep.

  Seriously?

  The beep-beep sounded like a tricycle horn. The sound was so effeminate T.J. had trouble associating it with the big rig with the double-wide cab and the oversized tires and the whatever else Dobbs found to put on the vehicle.

  The man had a thing for anything with wheels, which T.J. saw as nothing more than conveyances to haul you from point A to point B. Dobbs, on the other hand, could get misty-eyed over a 1965 Mustang. He had always loved cars. As a kid, he’d spent hours playing with the Matchbox collection he had accumulated through birthdays and Christmases until he had a whole herd of ‘em. No, herd wasn�
��t likely the collective noun for cars. Well, it wasn’t gaggle or … fleet, it was fleet. Dobbs had a fleet of—

  Beep beep.

  The horn sounded irritated and insistent. No, it wasn’t the horn that was irritated. It was T.J. How was it that he always ‘lowed himself to get talked into things like this? He flat out, one hundred percent did not want to go to the hospital to visit Jessie Cunningham … or Bailey Donahue … or whoever in the Sam Hill she really was.

  T.J. hadn’t heard her wrong that afternoon on her porch when Sparky’d licked her face while T.J.’d stood dumbstruck, staring at the triangle of moles on her neck. Wasn’t no way she’d said “Bailey Donahue” and then later he’d decided what she’d really said was “Jessie Cunningham.” Either she’d given T.J. a phony name or the name on her driver’s license was bogus.

  And danged if Dobbs didn’t grab hold of that as one of the reasons they needed to pay her a visit today!

  More mystery to unravel, he’d said, as if the painting itself weren’t mystery enough. What Dobbs failed to see was that them visiting her wasn’t gonna solve no mysteries. Or accomplish anything else that mattered. Dobbs hadn’t been there to see the look on her face and hear the rage in her voice when she’d thrown T.J. out of her house. Dobbs had no real appreciation for how angry she probably still was with T.J., so it was easy for him to say they ought to go pay her a visit, try to get to know her, try to be her friends — since she sure as Jackson didn’t know anybody else in town. Then they could try to edge her back from the black abyss of oblivion.

  T.J. thought Dobbs was full of it.

  Sliding into the truck cab beside the big man, T.J. glanced at the Krispy Kreme doughnut box in the floorboard.

  Dobbs saw his glance.

  “Don’t start. If I needed somebody to grouse at me about my cholesterol, I could find somebody a whole lot better looking than you are to do it.”

  “This is dumb.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “And pointless. We go there. She throws us out. She goes home. Bang, game over for good this time. What part of that scenario ain’t dumb?”