Eggs sounded like absolute heaven, and I sat carefully back on the couch and let her wait on me. Let me offer up a piece of advice: never bruise a rib if you can help it. You’d be shocked how important an uninjured torso is when it comes to doing things like, oh, I don’t know. Moving and sitting?
I ate. Slowly, but I ate. I had to give my stomach a little time to adjust to actual food. Plus, the medications I was on didn’t always sit well. But the eggs tasted divine, and I ate every last bite. Well, not every last bite. The last bite was for Leo, and I gave it to him right off my fork. Mary would’ve been proud of me.
I tend to do a lot of my deepest thinking in the shower, but such was not the case that night, and that was a good thing. I needed my mother’s help in a big way; it made me feel like a kid again, which was simultaneously heartwarming and mortifying.
She must have seen it on my face because she made an expression that read Really? and said, “I pushed you out of my vagina, fed you from my own breast, and changed your poopy diapers, Lacey.”
“I know,” I whined, “but it’s still weird to have you seeing my boobs.”
She shook her head with a grin.
We put a garbage bag over my leg and did our best to keep it out of the spray altogether. Unwrapping my ribs wasn’t hard, but washing my torso without putting any kind of pressure on them was, and tears sprang into my eyes more than once. My biggest reasons for showering, though, were to wash my hair—which had become stringy and flat—and to shave my armpits.
“You’ve started to look like Scott,” my mother joked when I lifted one arm.
“You’re hilarious,” I told her. She shaved while I used my other hand to balance and keep myself from dropping into a heap in the tub.
“Wait until you’ve had your cast on for a few weeks. Then you’ll really look like him.”
“Mom!” When I said it, it had three syllables. My mother laughed.
None of it was easy, but we did it, and by the time I was out of the tub and standing on the small rug with a towel wrapped around me, we were both out of breath.
“Well. That was fun.” I leaned against the vanity while my mother took a seat on the lid of the toilet. “But I feel so much better. Thanks, Mom.”
My mom smiled. “Welcome.”
By early evening, I was beat. Going to bed before nine seemed ridiculous and made me feel old, but my body had had enough. My leg throbbed, my ribs ached, my head was pounding. Mom shook out the pills I needed—mostly pain meds at this point—and helped me into my pajamas. I couldn’t get the bottoms over my cast, so I had to settle for bikinis and my favorite, super-worn Temple T-shirt that I’d stolen from Leanne a couple years back. Once I was in bed, my leg propped on a pillow, Leo curled up near my good foot. I smiled; it was like he knew to be careful, not to bump my bad leg.
“Okay?” Mom asked.
“I think so.”
“All right. I’m putting your phone right here. Can you reach it?”
I stretched my arm out to the nightstand easily. “Yup.”
“I’ll have mine right with me and my volume is turned up loud, so if you need anything, text me. I’ll be right next door.” She bent down and kissed my forehead before heading to the guest room, and again, I felt like a child being taken care of. This time, instead of mortifying me, it warmed me from the inside.
“Thanks, Mom.” I wondered how many more times I’d say that. A lot, I suspected.
“Try to get some sleep.” As she reached the doorway, she stopped with her hand on the light switch. “I’ll pop back by in two hours just to poke you awake, okay?”
“Ha ha. Don’t you dare.”
Her chuckle followed her down the hall.
And then I was left alone with my thoughts. I’d waited ever since I’d spoken with Gisele to be able to analyze the things she’d told me, but I also knew I was going to be fighting with the meds. I was utterly exhausted—I couldn’t remember ever being so tired, and I’d pulled all-nighters more than once during tax season—and my eyes didn’t want to stay open.
“Alicia. She was here while you were unconscious. Like, a lot. She stayed through the night. She stayed through all three nights.”
Gisele’s words rolled around in my head, and I realized I’d forgotten to ask my mother whether she’d seen Alicia. I actually toyed with the idea of texting her the question, but it was as if my body rebelled against my brain, not allowing me to lift my arm and reach for my phone. I released a long sigh, knowing I wasn’t going to be able to fight sleep and also knowing I probably shouldn’t. It’s not like any of this was going anywhere. All these thoughts would still be there when I woke up.
Leo let out one of those doggie sighs, the ones they release when they’ve settled in for the night. The ones that are a combination of “My day was so hard” and “I’m so happy to be next to my person.” It made me smile, and I decided to take a page from his playbook and just let myself fall into relaxation.
Didn’t take long.
* * *
“…this is your body’s way of protecting itself while your head heals. So, I decided I’m just going to talk to you whenever I can…”
“…you’d have loved my mom, Lacey. You really would have. And my God, she would have adored you…”
“…I miss my family, Lacey. I miss them every day, every moment of my life…”
“…I thought driving you away, keeping you at a distance was the best way to handle it, and I know that was wrong. So, so wrong, and I’m sorry. Please give me another chance, Lacey. Please…”
Unlike a TV movie, where the heroine has a significant dream that jolts her awake, pops her eyes open, makes her gasp, my rise to wakefulness was gentle. I simply opened my eyes and lay there, playing the words over and over in my head.
Memories. They had to be. Right?
I was still on my back, my leg still on the pillow, Leo snuffling softly in his sleep against my thigh. I ached, a combination of my injuries and the fact that I’d been lying in the same position for—I turned to look at the digital clock on my nightstand—nearly six hours. While I realized it was the first time in a while I’d gotten a stretch of sleep longer than a couple of hours, I really needed to move. I wanted desperately to roll onto my side but knew my bruised ribs would have none of that. When I did try to move, my breath hitched as every muscle in my body seemed to seize up. I’d grown stiff as I’d slept, and moving at all was going to take some effort.
I knew I should call my mom for help, but it wasn’t even three in the morning, and I wanted her to sleep. The struggle was slow, frustrating, and painful, but I somehow managed to get myself upright, maneuver to the bathroom to relieve myself, take more meds, and head back to my room. I liked the idea of sitting on my couch and watching bad, middle-of-the-night television, but the stairs seemed a bit too daunting to attempt on my own, especially in the dark. I settled for getting myself somewhat comfortable sitting up in my bed and clicking on the small TV on my dresser.
Confession: I love to channel surf. It doesn’t really fit my personality of liking everything just so, because when you channel surf, nothing stays. Things constantly change. You’d think that would drive me nuts, but it doesn’t. Instead, I find it somewhat mesmerizing to continually change the picture I’m seeing. That being said, there isn’t much to settle on at 3:00 a.m., so I just kept hitting the channel up button. As I did so, I dug back into my brain to the lines I’d remembered in my sleep. I replayed them, rolled them around, examined them from different angles. Gisele had said Alicia was at the hospital, that she’d stayed through three nights, and it only made sense that the things I was remembering were things she’d said to me. It’s not like my mind would invent that kind of thing, right? The fact that I could only hear her in my memories, that I didn’t actually see her at all, sort of confirmed that for me.
Alicia had talked to me while I lay unconscious.
Not only had she talked to me, she’d apparently shared with me. She’d talked
about her family, something she’d never done before. Something I got the impression she hardly ever did.
I let it swirl around and around. Alicia had opened up to me. Granted, I was unconscious at the time, but I’d take it. It meant a lot. It meant everything.
All the swirling must have exhausted me because the next thing I knew, the sun was streaming in through my window. The TV was off and the remote was on the nightstand. Leo was gone and my bedroom door was open.
And I smelled food.
My mouth filled immediately, letting me know just exactly how hungry I was. Before I could utter a word, Leo came rushing in and jumped onto the bed—I held my breath, expecting him to run over my cast, but he didn’t—shockingly—and I could hear footsteps on the stairs. My mom came in with a tray loaded down with breakfast. French toast, coffee, and orange juice.
“Good morning, sunshine,” she said, her voice full of cheer. She set everything down and helped me to sit up higher. “What time did you get up?”
I regaled her with my middle-of-the-night adventures.
“Lacey,” she said.
“Uh-oh. Stern Mom Voice.”
“I don’t like that you did all of that by yourself. What if you’d fallen?”
“I didn’t.”
“But you could have.”
“But I didn’t.” We had a stare-down for a couple of beats until we both burst into laughter. I then had to hold my stomach as pain seared through my torso. “Ow, ow, ow.”
“See what happens when you try to outsmart your mother? God punishes you.”
She sat with me while I ate—her French toast is one of the most joyous foods on the planet, I swear—and then she helped me change out of my pajamas. I picked out an old pair of yoga pants I didn’t care about and she cut the right leg up to knee length so I could wear them over my cast. I pulled my hair back into a ponytail, as I was in no mood to deal with styling it. I stood in front of the full-length mirror, balanced on my crutches.
“Stunning,” I said as I checked out my reflection, let my eyes take in the butchered pants, the long-sleeved Nike T-shirt that had to be ten years old, the dark circles under my eyes, and the slight gray pallor of my skin. “I am absolutely stunning.”
“Yes, you are,” Mom said and kissed me on my temple.
I spent the next two days on the couch as visitors came and went. Flowers arrived. Candy appeared. People brought pizza and casseroles, and I smiled and said thank you while I wondered how many people they thought lived here. But my dad came by to hang, and between him and Scott, they did a good job of paring down the ever-growing food supply.
Leanne stopped by on Thursday and watched two episodes of Friends with me, sitting next to me on the couch, quoting the lines along with me. She looked like she wanted to say something the entire time she was there, but she left with the same expression, so whatever it was went unsaid.
My phone dinged constantly, texts flying in fast and furious. Even Amy sent me a sweet note and well wishes, and not long after that, an Edible Arrangement showed up from her. Again, my dad and brother went to town, shoving chocolate-dipped fruit in their faces like they hadn’t eaten in days. I smiled and shook my head.
It was weird, though, because the whole time my family was there, surrounding me with their love and their jokes and their overstaying, I thought about Alicia. I thought about how she’d had this same thing: two parents and a brother. And how she simply didn’t have them anymore. It put a lump in my throat, and all I wanted to do was wrap my arms around her and keep her safe from any more hurt.
After dinner on Friday—or dinner time, as my family had been stuffing their faces all day—my dad headed home. Scott left about twenty minutes later and it was just me and Mom again. We watched TV in silence together for a while before she turned to me.
“How’s your bladder?”
“Very, very full,” I told her, dreading the simple task of using the facilities. Not for the first time, I wished my small house had a powder room on the first floor.
Mom stood up and held out her hand. “Let’s do this.”
Once I was as settled as I could get on the toilet, given my cast, my wrapped torso, my crutches, and every other obstacle I had, I waved her away. “Okay. I got this. Go.”
“Call me if you need help.”
“I will wipe my own ass if it kills me, thank you very much.”
That cracked her up for some reason, and her laughter followed her down the stairs as I shook my head and grinned.
I was just finishing up my business when the doorbell rang. My first thought was, Oh, my God, please no more. I can’t force any more smiles. I’m too tired. But I strained to listen and heard nothing but hushed voices. Curious, I got myself to my feet and hobbled slowly down the hall to the top of the steps.
“I’m not sure she’s up for any more company,” my mother was saying. I couldn’t see anybody, so they must be standing at the door. Mom’s tone was an odd mixture of sympathy and uncertainty.
“I understand that. I don’t blame her.”
Alicia! My eyes flew open wide, and I had no idea what to do. Part of me wanted to launch myself down the stairs just to lay eyes on her. Another just wanted to cry. With relief. With joy. With missing her.
There was a long moment of silence, and I pictured my mother debating whether or not I could handle seeing her. I assumed Scott must have given her details but made a mental note to check on that later. If she didn’t know, she needed to. And I could already hear her words, had an immediate vision of her comforting me, telling me it would be okay, that she understood my pain, that maybe I could try…just try to see things from Alicia’s perspective, how opening her heart to somebody might be intensely difficult for her, given what she’d gone through. My mom is that person, the one with the gentle soul, the one who can feel the pain of others, who would take it on for them if she could. It suddenly occurred to me just how much Alicia could probably benefit from talking to Mom rather than me, and it tugged up one corner of my mouth.
“Mom,” I called down the stairs. “I’m okay. Let her in.”
There was a beat of silence before anybody started moving. My mother appeared at the bottom of the stairs, followed by Alicia.
Goddamn her, she looked gorgeous. I assumed she’d gone home after work, as she wore a light-colored pair of jeans and a navy blue T-shirt with a V-neck, subdued colors for her, but she was beautiful. Even from the top of the stairs, I couldn’t keep myself from letting that blue gaze snag mine, and we held it for a long moment as my mother climbed the staircase to help me down.
“You sure you’re up for this?” she whispered as she took one crutch from me so I could use the railing.
“Mm-hmm.” I nodded, and we descended slowly.
Alicia looked a little lost, and I felt the sudden urge to keep her safe. She moved out of our way and scooped up Leo as Mom helped me hobble to the couch, then slowly lower myself. She slid the ottoman over and helped me prop my casted leg up on it.
I looked up at Alicia as she absently scratched my dog under his chin and looked exactly like the proverbial deer in headlights. “Hey,” I said. “I’m really glad to see you.”
“Yeah?” she asked, and gave me an uncertain smile. “How are you doing?”
I took a deep breath and blew it out. “Well, aside from the broken leg, aching ribs, and constant headache, I’m great. You?” I chuckled and waved at the couch next to me. “Sit. Please.”
“Can I get either of you anything?” Mom asked. We both shook our heads. “All right. Let me know if you change your mind. I’ll be in the kitchen.”
She squeezed my shoulder as I softly thanked her. When she was out of sight, I turned back to Alicia.
“It’s so good to see you,” she whispered, and I watched as her eyes filled with tears. Her smile lit up the room. I swear to God, it did. And then she gave a small chuckle and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I was so happy to have her sitting next to me.
“
You know,” I said, pulling at a string on the chopped-up leg of my yoga pants, “if I knew all it would take to get you to open up to me was for me to jump in front of a car, I’d have done it sooner.”
Her laugh was like music, and it grabbed me, shook me, made me listen. Made me feel. I had such a mix of joy and relief in that moment.
She sobered. “You heard me? In the hospital?” She seemed surprised. Wary. Uncertain.
“I must have. I remembered some of it last night, but it’s choppy. Bits and pieces. Out of order. You told me about your family.”
“I did.” Alicia looked down at Leo, who hadn’t left her side since her arrival.
I nodded, doing my best to absorb it all.
“Look, Lacey, I need to tell you that I’m sorry.” It looked like her search for words was actually painful, and my heart ached for her. I held up a hand, stopping her.
“There’s no need. I understand.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I do.” God, it felt good to tell her that. I smiled at her and held her gaze for what felt like a long time. Then I pushed myself up a bit so I sat taller. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “You and I? We’re going to get to know each other.”
“Okay.” She looked slightly confused, but to her credit, went with it.
“My meds kick my ass, and I don’t last long. I’ve had a hundred and fifty visitors today and I’m exhausted and need to rest. Can you come back tomorrow for dinner? Can you do that?”
“Absolutely.”
“Six thirty?”
“Okay.”
“Bring Chinese.”
A smile snaked across her face. “I will.”
“We’ll talk.”
“We’ll talk.” Her nod was vigorous. She stood, Leo in her arms, and looked down at me for a moment like she wasn’t quite sure what to do next. Finally, she gave one more nod, handed me my dog, and smiled. “Tomorrow.”
Chapter Nineteen
I didn’t think it was possible to have too many well-wishing visitors when you were under the weather—or, you know, recovering from being run over by a moving vehicle. But it was Saturday, so friends and family who didn’t have to work decided to come by en masse and say hi, bring flowers, candy, and yes, more food. I actually toyed with texting Alicia and telling her to forget about the Chinese, but changed my mind. Sharing Chinese food was something I now associated with her, and I didn’t want to give it up.
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