While the doctor taps my leg to see if I can feel it, I close my eyes and start to cry.
I wake to darkness.
It’s not total. Light from the hallway spills through the open door of the room. The curtain that surrounds the bed has been drawn to one side so I can see into the hallway to the nurses station beyond. Three people sit at the desk, an older woman in pink scrubs who’s typing on a computer keyboard and two younger women doing paperwork.
The only light inside my room comes from the hallway and the moonlight spilling through the window.
It must be very late, but I don’t know the time. If there’s a clock in this room, it’s not within sight.
I turn my head on the pillow and see my mother sleeping on the small sofa under the window, her legs drawn up and her arms wrapped around herself. She’s pale and too thin. Dark smudges under her eyes belie her exhaustion.
In the moonlight, she doesn’t look like she’s sleeping.
She looks like she’s dead.
But then she inhales and mumbles something incoherently, and the band of pain around my chest eases.
It tightens again when I think of Cole.
I have to know how he is. I have to know what happened to him. I barely remember anything about the accident that put me here, only that quick glimpse of the oncoming truck and a few snatches of the collision, but I know it must’ve been devastating.
Lifting my head feels like being hit with a sledgehammer.
Sitting upright leaves me gasping in pain.
Dizzy and nauseated, I squeeze my eyes shut and stay still for a while, gathering the strength to swing my legs over the side of the bed. At some point, someone lowered the guard rails, so I’m not trapped anymore.
When I feel more steady, I slide one leg at a time around, then gingerly scoot to the edge of the mattress until I can set my feet on the floor. It’s icy cold, even through the ugly blue hospital socks I’m wearing.
I try not to think of how I got into those socks or this pale blue gown either. I don’t wonder who had to take me out of my other clothes, or about how they must’ve been cut off my body. I push all thoughts out of my head and concentrate on standing up.
The effort it takes leaves me panting and covered in sweat.
I grab onto the metal pole that holds the bag of liquid I’m hooked up to. It’s got wheels, thank God. As carefully and quietly as I can, I shuffle around the end of the bed toward the open door, praying my mother doesn’t wake up and stop me.
She doesn’t.
When I reach the door, the nurses are still occupied with their work.
Weak, shaking, and in pain, I slink past the nurses station, slowly making my way down the hallway. The doors to the patient rooms don’t have windows, so I can’t see inside, but as I’m passing a room with a door painted bright yellow and numbered nine, the door opens suddenly and a doctor stands there.
He’s startled to see me, but I don’t pay attention to him.
I’m looking at the person lying on the bed in the room beyond.
It’s Cole.
I only recognize him because of his hands, lying still on the bed, and his father, who’s seated in a chair beside him.
Cole’s head has been shaved. A ragged black line of stitches snakes down the left side of his face, temple to jaw. A tube is stuck down his throat and held in place by wide strips of white tape that stand out vividly against the mottled purple-and-blue bruising on his skin.
A machine is breathing for him.
I must make a cry of distress, because Konrad glances up and sees me standing out in the hallway staring in.
Our eyes meet.
His are hopeless and shining with tears.
My legs give out, but the doctor catches me before I fall. The last thing I see as the door swings closed behind him is Cole’s father as he drops his head into his hands and starts to cry.
Shay
The next morning, after my doctor has a quiet conversation with my parents outside in the hall, I’m moved out of critical care to a regular room on a different floor. I hold my mother’s hand as a nurse wheels my bed down the hallway and onto the elevator.
No one will tell me anything about Cole.
Not the doctor who came out of his room last night, not Dr. Dayan or the nurses, and not my parents, who take turns sitting with me while the other goes on a break.
My father’s wife, Chloe, stayed in Oregon to look after their two dogs. He seems lost without her. My mother, on the other hand, is doing remarkably well.
“Don’t you think that nurse is cute?” she says to me once I’m settled in the new room and the nurse in question is gone. “I’ve never seen such big muscles on a man. I suppose his job takes a lot of strength, though, lifting unconscious people and whatnot.”