by Amy Faye
I sucked in a deep breath and closed my eyes and for the first time in almost twenty years, I prayed to God. And then, as I drove down the street, I saw a vision pass before my eyes of a car slamming into my side as I followed behind the ambulance a ways.
It didn’t hurt, but the rental car spun in the street and slammed the other side hard into a light pole, and my vision went dim as the only thought that I could feel clearly in my mind repeated softly:
I should have gotten the rental insurance.
Then the world went quiet, and I stopped having any awareness of what was happening at all.
Ten
Laura
I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. Whatever it was, it wasn’t nice. It wasn’t anything, if I’m being really honest. I looked through the door into the hospital room as I passed, and I saw nothing but the foot of a bed. There was nothing to see, not without going inside. That’s how it’s designed. For privacy.
One day after I’d slept with Dave for the second time in my life, this happened. More than that, one hour after. And some time during the night, Diana, too? I twisted up my stomach and thought about trying to go in. They said at the nurse’s station that they thought he was awake.
It was a long time ago, when we’d done it the first time. A long time, and a lot of things had been going through my head. From the way that he’d been acting, not much was going through his. At least, not much that I could tell. Not much related to me, that was for sure.
Presumably that had been intentional, given the smell on his breath, but I didn’t want to stop myself. So I did what I could, and took what I could get, and I didn’t talk to him about it afterward.
Now here we were, almost a decade later, and I have to wonder. Do I talk to him about it this time, either? It’s a tempting idea, not talking. I could just walk away from the whole thing again. And then he would walk away, too, and we’d both be whatever we were before he came back.
I took a deep breath, and then I walked away. There was always going to be another chance to figure this stuff out. And besides, I had to check on Diana at some point. She was the one in worse condition, either way.
She was propped up on the bed when I came in. She eyed me sidelong as I came in, as if I’d done something to her. Or as if she were thinking about what I might have done to her, at least. But I hadn’t done anything.
When I came in, though, I realized that it wasn’t sidelong. Her eyes just followed me as I moved, but her head didn’t. My lips pressed together to hide whatever pain was showing on my face, because I didn’t have any right to be taking things personally. It wasn’t as if she were my mother, and it wasn’t as if it were me who was the one injured.
“You okay?”
Her head inclined slightly, and then straightened. If I weren’t in a hospital, worrying about whether or not she’s going to be alright at all, I might not have noticed the movement. But I did.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t be here. I should be with Dave, talking about what we’d done. But instead I was in here, and I had already made my decision. I just hadn’t realized when I did it that I was choosing between two situations that would hurt, and I wouldn’t be able to bear either of them.
“Um…” I screwed up my eyebrows in thought, hoping I could find something to talk about. Something to think about, even, other than the constant questions of whether or not she was going to recover from something like this. “Charlie, uh… He’s got a test today. Math, I think. I was never that good at math. But he’s smart, you know? I go through the homework with him, and it’s not like I can’t, uh, manage, but when I was his age? Doing that kind of stuff?”
I managed a shaky smile, but I can tell that I wouldn’t convince anyone. Her expression moves slowly, and worse than that, it only moves on one side. A halfway smile. She manages to make it almost, on the right side of her face, to being a neutral expression. Then she holds it there.
“You feeling alright? Do you need anything? I can go get a nurse, or…”
She doesn’t respond, not in any visible way. I suck in a breath. Every second that passes here is another second that I don’t want to think about. I hate hospitals. I have always hated them, as long as I remember them. But I can’t leave someone behind in one, either. Not if I can avoid it.
So I sat down and reached into my bag. “Do you mind if I read to you?”
No response to that, either, but I didn’t know if I was seeing all that well any more. My head hurt, and my eyes hurt, and I just kind of wanted to leave. But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t bring myself to, for a dozen different very good reasons.
For one thing, I would have to decide again whether or not I’m going to speak to Dave. He would leave, eventually. That was practically engraved in stone: “Dave Collins shall not around here.”
But I’d run away from enough things in my life. I couldn’t keep running away. If I ran far enough, if I ran long enough, I could probably figure out a way to live with myself. The way that Dave had. Whatever he’d done, he’d apparently settled down. The wild kid had cooled way down since he left. Like staying away from Woodbridge was a cure for him. Staying away from me, too.
I turned the page and kept reading aloud, my mind only halfway on the words. It was something to keep my mind off of things, and eventually, if I was lucky, I wouldn’t have to find something else. At least, I told myself that.
Eleven
Dave
I couldn’t remember what precisely happened between getting hit and waking up in a hospital bed. I assumed all the usual stuff. If I found out in a year that they had removed all my internal organs and sold them on the black market, that would qualify as a pretty big surprise, for example. But I knew that I needed to get the hell out of the bed, and I needed to get back on my feet post-haste.
Of course, as with everything, there are pluses and minuses. Problems, solutions, and benefits, for every situation. On one hand, I don’t have to think too hard about how I’m going to get treated for being in a car accident. Try getting hit by a car in the middle of the Sahara and then wonder where you’re going to get medical treatment. Here’s the answer: you aren’t. It’s going to be a very slow, very hot death for you.
On the other hand, I needed to get out of there for reasons other than just that I need to get back to my life, back to reality, and out of this hospital. For example, I need to find my mother. For example, I need to get to my father’s funeral. For example, I wouldn’t mind seeing Laura again.
So when I pushed myself out of the bed, my hip hurt so bad I thought that I might lose my footing entirely and slide down on the floor, hip first. Bad hip first, incidentally, in case that wasn’t clear.
That would be a problem, and not the kind that I solve super easily by just ignoring it. I’ve had a lot of problems like that in my life, and most of them were easily solved by pretending I hadn’t noticed the problem in the first place. A broken hip wouldn’t be one of them.
But I stayed up, and the pain diminished to a dull ache. The surprise was more worrying than the pain itself, but I just hadn’t realized it hurt until I stood. Then I forced myself to take another step. And another. There was a chair on the other side of the room and I heaved my weight down on it, forcing myself to stay upright.
If this was what I had to look forward to… well, I didn’t know what I could do. I probably should stay in the hospital. I should probably stay in the room, too, and just lay down and think about whatever else is going on in my life.
Eventually, someone would let me go, and I’d be able to get back to whatever remained after my leg healed. But I’ve had worse than this, and the truth was that I could keep walking. I would get tired eventually, but not before I managed to get a little walk in. Isn’t that what they always tell you to do anyways? Get some practice walking and make sure that you don’t just stay in bed? So really, I was just getting a jump-start on rehabilitation.
I forced myself ou
t through the door and waited for someone to stop me. They didn’t. Someone walked right past, wearing a suit of scrubs. They gave me a sidelong glance for a moment before continuing onward.
For my part, I walked over to the nurse’s station. I didn’t recognize the woman behind it, but there had already been three nurses in my room that morning, and I don’t know any of them. This was just number four. Or number five, depending on whether or not I counted the woman who passed me a moment ago.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah,” I said. I put on my most winning smile and waited a beat before I continued, “I wanted to check on my mother? Diana Collins. She hit her head I guess?”
The woman’s eyes darted down, slid over a list somewhere out of sight, and then told me a room number. 415, on the other side of the building. But it was only the other side the short way, and I could make the walk. At least, I hoped I could.
A stream of people passed me by as I walked through the hall. Some of them were moving the same direction. Others were moving the other way. I touched my hip. It hurt to touch, so I yanked my hand away. And then I just kept leaning on the walls and making sure that I kept enough energy to keep moving.
Someone passing by, one of the dozens or hundreds of people who could actually walk properly, without a limp and without taking breaks, stopped. I stopped, too, and realized that I should have been looking at their faces, just in case I missed someone.
“What are you doing out here?”
I smiled at Laura. Always worrying about me, it seemed. Now more than ever.
“Hey. I was just thinking about you.”
She looked at me and at my smile and took a deep breath. “You don’t want to go over there.”
“Like hell, I don’t,” I said. “I have to. That’s my mom.”
“I’m serious.” Linda’s hand touched my side. Touched a few inches above the epicenter of the extreme pain in my hip. I flinched, and then had to catch myself on the railing that extended through the whole hallway.
“I’m serious, too. I don’t have a choice.”
“You didn’t come back for your dad.”
I flinched again. “That was… different.”
“I know,” she said. “But trust me. You don’t want to see her like this. Give her a few days to recover, okay? She knows you were in a car accident. Let her think that it was worse than it was if you have to, but don’t go see her until she’s better.”
I looked in Laura’s eyes. She looked tired, like she’d had all the energy wrung out of her. She’d spent ten minutes complaining to me about her bad day, last night, and she didn’t look half this tired.
“If you insist,” I agreed. “If you’d escort me back to my room, though…” I shifted my weight and took a limp back in the direction I’d come from.
“You think you need help?”
“I know I need help,” I groused. “I think I have to accept it. And besides, I want to make the nurses jealous.”
I winked at her and she touched my hip, gently, but she made sure that it was somewhere it would hurt. I yanked away from her and she reached and wrapped her arms around me, preventing me from falling.
“What’d you do that for?”
“The nurses will be extra-jealous if they see that you’re really hurt, won’t they? Sympathetic.”
I leaned hard on her shoulder. “You better be extra-sympathetic yourself after a stunt like that.”
She switched sides so that her hip was pressed against mine. My good hip, that is, thankfully.
“I’ll be as sympathetic as you want, once you’re in bed. I’ll be even more sympathetic when I’m alone, at home, and there’s nobody to keep me company. But for now, let’s get you back to bed.”
Twelve
Laura
I expected to find the room looking like any other room in the hospital. When I discovered that I was right, though, somehow it felt like I’d been wrong. Like I’d expected something else, in ways that I didn’t realize. Like I was expecting the place to look trashed like some kind of rock star had stayed there. Something. Anything.
Instead, there was a bag full of personal belongings on the little table by the bed, which was zip-locked shut. It contained a stack of clothes and other assorted knick knacks. The only thing that he seemed to have removed from it was his cell phone, and he had left that sitting out.
“You should get some rest,” I said softly, as he lifted himself back into the bed. “I’ll see you later.”
“Stay a minute,” he said. I wanted to leave. I wanted to get the hell out of there, because I was getting a very funny feeling. A very bad feeling.
“Stay for what?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Okay?”
“I’m serious.”
I took a deep breath and settled into the chair by the bed. “What’s the problem?”
“I kept asking you what had changed since I left, you know?”
“I remember.”
“You never mentioned that you had a kid.”
“I don’t see why that’s relevant.”
“You’re not in a relationship or something, are you?”
“No.” The line of questions led into a territory that I didn’t remotely want to approach, but I couldn’t bring myself to lie to him about it, either. That wouldn’t be fair to him. Or Charlie. Or me, for that matter.
“So what’s the story?”
I sucked in a breath. “His father’s not in the picture any more, I guess.”
“Not at all?”
I weighed the response. Was it a trap? Was he trying to hint that he’d realized that it was him, or was he still just pushing without realizing the mistake?
“I don’t know. But he’s got no strings on me, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He took a deep breath. “Cause I saw you weren’t wearing a ring.”
“No, I’m not,” I agreed.
“Good.” He laid his head back. “I was worried.”
“Worried about what?”
“Worried that I’d made a mistake last night. A bigger mistake than usual, I mean.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Why don’t you try to explain?”
“I’m not ready to explain,” he said. “I could explain but I don’t think it would be very helpful, I guess.”
“You don’t say? And you think that it helps more to play the secrecy card?”
“I don’t know, Laura. Don’t try to pull that with me. Just let me think, will you?”
“Do you really want me gone that bad?”
“I’ve been on the move for a long time. I’ve been doing this so long that I don’t know if I could stop if I wanted to. It’s been my whole life. I spent so long getting ready to go, like a coiled-up spring.”
“And now that you’re back, you miss the road?”
“Now that I’m back, I’m thinking about whether or not I made the right choice. And maybe I decide I did. So I don’t want to talk about it, because I don’t know which way it’s going to fall yet, and I don’t want to do something stupid just because I’m thinking.”
I chewed on that a minute. That was a minefield. One that I hadn’t really expected. I heard something about myself in it, the commentary that he wanted me. But I’ve been wanting him to say that to me for so long that I have to be sure that’s what he means. And the truth is, I don’t want to ask him.
“Alright, well… I’ll be back tomorrow to check on your mom. If you want me to check in on you, then…”
He nodded without looking at me. “I’d appreciate that, even if it’s just a minute.”
“Take care of yourself, okay?”
“I’ll do my best,” he said. There was a hint of sadness in his voice.
I gave him one last look, wanting to say something. Anything that would make him feel better. But I guessed that wasn’t likely to happen.
So instead I started h
eading out of the hospital and let myself mope all the way to the car. In a little while, Charlie would be getting out of school. I had about enough time to get groceries before I picked him up. I could let the bus handle it, of course. No reason that I couldn’t. But I preferred not to if I could help it.
I played the conversation back in my head as I waited outside the school. It was the only thing to do. I had a thousand things to think about. For example, there was the fact that I had to give very serious consideration to the realities of being a single parent going to school and working at the same time.
Then I had to give a second consideration to the fact that I was a well-educated woman and working nights at a convenience store, and not in my chosen field of study, and I was coming up on thirty faster than I would have liked for a woman in that position.
Then there were the slim pickings here in Woodbridge for partners. It wasn’t going to get better from here. Nobody scrapes the bottom of the barrel and then finds exactly what they were looking for. But I had been scraping for the past year and was getting exactly who I expected to find at the bottom of the barrel, really. People who weren’t worth my time or my consideration.
What were my alternatives? Just don’t do any of that? Start thinking about taking up a cat collection? Wait for Charlie to get old enough to move out and then rot away?
Never mind any of those things, though. I had to think hard about how I was even going to make it that far. My options weren’t exactly lining up, and I was going to have to give it some very serious consideration. Like… yesterday.
The way that I piled everything on, though, made it sound as if I wasn’t doing all of that already. But it’s not like I haven’t been thinking about solutions to all those problems. The real trouble wasn’t that I needed to come up with solutions to problems that I was avoiding, though I certainly was doing that.
The problem was that I had been searching for solutions for a long time, and the only answers that I’d been finding for all that time were bad. Food stamps were out of the question, for example. I wasn’t even sure where I could spend them if I wanted to. I didn’t know where to apply for them if I wanted them. And I didn’t know whether or not I’d be accepted, with my situation.