Survivor's Guilt

by Michelle Arnold

  “No, I’m in Illinois, looking for her.” Abi’s voice wavered as she spoke.

  “She’s here at Peoria Memorial, but she’s in critical condition. We need next of kin here to give permission for some things.”

  “That’s me. I have power of attorney. I can contact her regular hospital, get you anything you need. I’m on my way there now.” She began speeding through country lanes, desperate to reach Greta’s side. She was alive! She was the survivor they’d found in the wreckage! But she was critical, and clearly not up to making any decisions. Abi wasn’t sure what that meant. She called her mother as she drove.

  “Mum, she’s alive, but she’s in critical condition. I’m on my way to the hospital now.”

  “Oh, thank the Lord! I’ve been praying for hours—”

  “Mum, listen to me. I need you to go to her house and look on her desk in the study. She’s got a little leather address book. I need you to look in there and find her lawyer’s emergency number. Call her and tell her to fax Greta’s power of attorney forms to Peoria Memorial right away. We need that so I can sign off on any care she needs.”

  “Okay.” Lola sounded crestfallen. “So she must be in pretty bad shape.”

  “I’ll update you more when I know more, okay? I just need to get to her right now, and we need those forms.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  Abi hung up and followed the GPS instructions to the hospital. Once there, she pulled into the first parking spot she saw and dashed into the building, demanding to know where Greta was. After a lot of arguing with hospital staff, she finally found herself at the Critical Care Unit, sitting in a waiting room while someone was supposedly “looking into it.” Abi got up and paced around the room, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the woman who had called her saying that Greta was “critical” and that they needed “next of kin.” If she was that bad off, shouldn’t they be getting her to sign something immediately? She decided this must be a mistake, and she charged back down the hallway until she located a nurses’ station.

  “Look,” she said. “I need to talk to whoever is treating Greta Lang right now. The papers from her attorney should be here by now, you should know I’m the one who can sign whatever you need signed to take care of her, and if she dies because you people are fucking around taking too long to get everything in order, I am going to sue this hospital for every damn penny it’s worth.”

  “Are you Abidemi Okafor?” said a serene voice to her right. She turned to see a woman in her fifties with clear blue eyes and a tranquil smile. She looked like the leader of a cult that encouraged people to meditate all day.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” Abi said.

  “Great! I’m Sue; I’m a nurse here in the Critical Care Unit. We got the forms from Greta’s attorney, and we just have some general paperwork we need you to fill out.”

  “Please,” Abi pleaded, “where is Greta?”

  “She’s getting settled into a room right now, and you’ll be able to see her once the doctor has had a chance to come out and talk to you. She’s already getting the most urgent treatment she needs, and we have you here to give consent if she ends up needing any kind of procedure, but all we need you to do right now is fill out her admissions paperwork for her since she can’t do it herself. Can you do that?”

  Abi might just be ready to sign up for that meditation cult after all, because Sue’s serene voice was actually making her feel calmer. What mattered most, though, was the knowledge that Greta was alive, that she was getting what she needed for the moment, and that Abi was being given a task. There was something Abi could do to help Greta right now.

  Abi cleared her throat, holding back tears. “Can you tell me what’s wrong with Greta?”

  “The doctor will be out very soon to talk to you, and she can explain everything. You just work on the paperwork for now.” She turned as if to go and then turned back, hesitating. “But I will say one thing. When we heard there had been a plane crash nearby, we prepared ourselves for an influx of patients. We’re the only Level One trauma center in the area, so we knew the survivors would all be brought here.” For just a moment, her serene smile wavered. “But it’s been hours since the crash, and we’ve only gotten one patient. All the other passengers they’ve located are deceased. Greta is our miracle. We will do everything in our power to keep her alive.”

  “Greta has always been a miracle,” Abi whispered. “You’ll understand when you get to know her.”

  “I look forward to getting to know her.”

  Sue left, and Abi got busy with the paperwork. As she did so, she thought about what little she knew of the situation. Greta was possibly the only survivor of the crash, and she was unconscious, in critical condition. Abi realized she needed to prepare herself for a lot of grim possibilities. Greta could have severe burns, horrible cuts, limb loss, paralysis, serious brain trauma. She had no idea what she was going to be faced with when she finally saw the woman she loved, so she had to be ready for anything.

  No matter what she looks like, I’m going to tell her she’s beautiful, she decided. She’s Greta. She could never not be beautiful.

  No matter how long it takes for her to get better, I will stay by her side the entire time, even if I have to quit my job.

  If there are some things that never get better – if she never walks again, or is left with some other disability – then I will adapt and take care of her in whatever way she needs me to.

  And if she has brain damage and is no longer the Greta I knew, then I will learn to love whoever she is now.

  Turning her back was not an option, not after all the time she’d allowed Greta to walk around believing she didn’t love her. If it took the rest of her life to make it up to her, she would do it, whatever it took.

  “Ms. Okafor?”

  Abi looked up to see a young woman in a white coat looking down at her with a kind smile.

  “Yeah,” she said, clearing her throat. “Um, Abi. You can call me Abi. I filled out the forms.”

  “I’m Dr. Khan.” She shook Abi’s hand and then sat down, taking the forms from her. “I’m treating Greta Lang. And you’re her...?”

  “I’m her…” Abi hesitated. She knew what she was to Greta, but she had been poised to become so much more before this crash. She knew Greta wanted her to be more. Would it be lying to say they were together, even though they weren’t quite yet?

  “We don’t judge here,” Dr Khan said gently, resting a hand on Abi’s.

  Abi let out her breath. “I’m her best friend. But…I love her, and she doesn’t know it yet. I just found out that she loves me, and I was going to tell her when she got home, but…she didn’t make it home.” She closed her eyes. “She sent me a text while the plane was going down that said she loved me. And I didn’t say it back.”

  Dr. Khan squeezed her hand. “Well Greta is the only survivor we’ve gotten from this crash, so she must have something worth fighting to stay alive for.”

  “How is she?”

  “She has some pretty serious injuries. She’s in a coma at the moment, completely unresponsive. The reason for this is a hairline skull fracture with a subdural hematoma and some brain swelling, which we are monitoring. We are hoping the hematoma will get better on its own, and if it does, she’ll slowly come out of the coma as the hematoma gets smaller. If it gets any worse, we can do surgery to remove it. She also has several broken bones, including some of her ribs, and her left lung has a puncture. She will need surgery to put in hardware to hold together the bones in her right arm, hip, and leg, but we will wait about that until she’s out of her coma, so we have temporary splints on for now. She has some internal bleeding we’re keeping an eye on as well. It could end up requiring surgery, but we prefer to avoid that if possible. She has several lacerations, a few of which required stitching or gluing. The worst one is on the left side of her neck. That one came within a few millimeters of severing her carotid artery, which would have caused her to bleed out before help could a
rrive, so she was extremely lucky there.”

  Tears slipped down Abi’s face. “Is she going to live?” she asked quietly.

  Dr. Khan hesitated. “It’ll be easier to make a prognosis once we’ve had a chance to see what happens with the swelling in her brain. By this time tomorrow, I might be able to give you a better answer to that question. Even then, I can’t make any promises. I want to make that clear. Sometimes trauma patients show improvement and then develop potentially lethal complications. But I can tell you that this is survivable, and that we are doing all we can, and that she has already made it clear that she wants very much to live just by hanging on this long.”

  “She deserves to live,” said Abi. “Can I see her now?”

  “Yes, but let me prepare you a little for what you’re going to see.”

  Abi held her breath.

  “She has a lot of things connected to her right now, and that can be hard for loved ones to see, so I just want you to know what to expect and what the purpose of everything is. The most obvious thing will be that she’s on a ventilator. Breathing can be very difficult for people in comas, so this is just to make sure she gets enough oxygen right now. There’s also a needle in her brain to monitor swelling—”

  Abi started. “In her brain?”

  “Yes, but don’t worry, it’s not hurting her, and we should be able to remove it before she wakes up. She has an IV central line in her neck to deliver medicine and nourishment, and a tube in her chest to drain air from her pneumothorax. If you want to hold her hand, her left hand is not hurt, but I’d stay away from the right side of her body. You will notice that she looks very bruised-up, and her face is swollen. You may feel like she doesn’t look like herself at all right now. It’s okay if you don’t feel like you can be around her much tonight.”

  “No,” said Abi. “I’m going to stay, no matter what.”

  “Okay. I’ll get someone to walk you to her room.”

  A moment later, Sue reappeared and led Abi down the hall, around a few turns, and into a room with a wall of windows facing the hallway. No privacy here.

  Greta lay in the bed, with all the crazy tubes and wires Abi had been warned about. The ventilator was wheezing rhythmically, pumping air in and out of Greta’s lungs for her. Her face was puffy and discolored, but she was still Greta, and she was alive.

  “We have what we could salvage of her things in this bag,” Sue informed her. “She had her driver’s license and phone in her pockets, and she was wearing a necklace that we were able to clean.”

  Abi looked into the bag. It was the necklace she had given Greta for Christmas. Wiping tears away, she turned to Sue.

  “It’s going to take a long time for her to get better, isn’t it?”

  Sue nodded. “It is. People with this much trauma need a lot of time and therapy to get back to their lives, and often their lives aren’t the same as they were before. But with a lot of love and support, they still lead happy, fulfilling lives.”

  “What will she be like, when she wakes up?”

  “In my experience, most people with head injuries are a bit confused and disoriented when they first wake up. She won’t be able to remember the crash, so we’ll have to explain why she’s here. She may remember events from earlier in the day, or the whole day might be gone. Some memories could come back later, but anything from within an hour or two of the crash will mostly likely be gone for good. But in situations like this, you just have to take it one day at a time. Right now, she just needs you to be here.”

  “Can she hear me if I talk to her?”

  Sue let out a small sigh. “That’s something medical science can’t really answer yet, but it’s certainly possible, so I would encourage you to talk to her if you want to.”

  Abi nodded and sat down at Greta’s bedside. Sue left the two of them alone.

  Abi sat looking at Greta, listening to the rhythmic sound of the ventilator. She took Greta’s hand and looked at the bruised, swollen face. Greta was in there, and hopefully she would reemerge. It was hard to see her like this, but she would not turn away. She owed Greta this much.

  Finally, she drew in her breath and began to speak. “We all do stupid things,” she began, “but this has to be the stupidest, for me. I should have been the one to figure it out. I'm one who’s good with people. You always struggle to read people, to know who to trust and who not to. How could you know someone's secretly in love with you? That's not really your area. And I knew that. I was counting on that.”

  She paused to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye. The ventilator continued its rhythmic wheeze.

  “I'm still not being completely honest,” she admitted at last. “I did have an inkling about how you felt. I wasn't sure, but I wondered. The way you looked at me sometimes, the way you always wanted me around, the way you hesitated to go out with Jeff – until I told you to do it. I had my suspicions, but I didn't do anything. I told myself I couldn't, I might be wrong, it would ruin our friendship. And it's true, I was afraid of being wrong, and maybe I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want to hear you say that you didn't want me. I wanted to keep believing you felt something and that someday it would all come out. But I was never scared I would lose your friendship if I told you how I felt. You're not like that. You would have been completely understanding. I'm not sure you would even realize that the situation was supposed to be awkward. You would probably have been more fascinated than disturbed.”

  Abi swallowed around the lump in her throat. Greta didn't stir. There was no eyelid flutter, no twitch of her fingers.

  “I guess the truth is, I was scared,” Abi said hoarsely. “I wasn't just scared that you wouldn't feel the same way. I was scared of how I felt for you, how strong this feeling is, how vulnerable it makes me. The way I love you, Greta, it's not the kind of thing you get over. It's not some fleeting thing. The way I feel, it made me understand why they call it falling in love. It does feel like falling, like falling off a cliff. It makes me feel like I have no control, and you know I’m the kind of person who always wants to be in control of my life. It's absolutely terrifying to me, Greta, and I felt like if you loved me back, if we jumped into a relationship, the thing I wanted most, that it would be like going over a waterfall, that I would lose control forever. Not only that, but I would lose the person I was before, the person who didn't need anyone. I wanted you so much, but I was still so scared of being with you. I kept telling myself, ‘later. Maybe later, when I'm stronger. I'm not ready for that yet.’”

  Abi paused to get a tissue. The ventilator kept pumping air in and out of Greta's lungs. Abi really wasn't sure Greta could hear her at all, but she needed to say this.

  “Well it's over,” she said, sitting back down. “I'm done now. I don't even care about the person I was before, because she was a coward, and I don't want to be her anymore. I'm ready to go over that waterfall. I'm yours to do whatever you want with, for as long as you want to. I'm not fighting it anymore. I surrender.”

  Abi felt a weight lifted from her as she said the words, and she almost expected Greta's eyes to flutter open in response. But the redhead continued to lie motionless, the machine breathing for her. So telling someone you loved them didn't make miracles happen after all.

  11

  Waiting

  Abi dozed off and on overnight in her chair by Greta’s bed. It wasn’t a very restful environment. They were right across from a nurses’ station, where the night staff were enjoying lively conversations, their worlds clearly still intact while Abi’s was lying here, shattered. The room felt like a fishbowl, as one wall was almost nothing but glass, making it easy for the hospital staff to keep an eye on Greta. And every hour, someone would come in to check Greta’s vitals and do a little neurological test. Abi watched as a nurse lifted each of Greta’s eyelids in turn, shining a light into her unresponsive pupils. She spoke to Greta, who of course did not respond. Then she lifted Greta’s left hand and began pressing on her nail beds with a pen.

 
“What are you doing?” Abi asked hoarsely. “You’re going to hurt her.”

  “I’m checking for a pain response. We do this to see how deeply in a coma a patient is, and to see if anything’s changing.”

  “So you’re hurting her on purpose?”

  “It’s necessary to check her response. But she’s not responding, so that means she doesn’t feel it.”

  Abi digested that. “So she doesn’t feel it when I touch her?”

  “Not right now, but that can change at any time,” she said, rolling Greta into a new position. “That’s why we keep checking, to look for signs that she’s starting to come back.”

  After she left, Abi stared at Greta, trying to process how she could be here physically, but not in any other sense. So she couldn’t hear Abi saying she loved her.

  She got out of her chair, knelt by the bed, and took Greta’s hand, holding it to her face as she bowed her head and began to pray. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that. She grew up going to church, but she hadn’t been religious as an adult, and she tended to feel that it was more sensible to try and do things yourself than to sit around begging God to do it for you. But she was completely helpless in this situation, and that left her with only one thing to do.

  “Please,” she whispered. “If you bring her back, I’ll stop being stupid. I’ll give her everything she deserves. I’ll give my whole life to her; I’ll do anything. She deserves this, to live and be happy and have someone who treasures her. I can give that to her, just please, give us another chance.”

  She prayed until her knees ached and she had to get up. Then she returned to her chair and dozed a little more.

  ***

  In the morning, they took Greta away for a CT scan to check the size of her subdural hematoma. Abi went downstairs looking for a place to buy some supplies. She found a drug store on the first floor and picked up a few basic necessities, then passed by the gift shop. She saw some little Christmas trees with battery-operated lights on clearance. Well, Christmas was over, but a light-up tree would brighten the drab hospital room a bit. There was no point in buying flowers, since she didn’t know when Greta would be awake to see them. They might be dead by then.