PAMELA
Tallahassee, 2021
Day 15,826
Eileen once told me it felt like getting a tooth pulled. Pressure where there should be pain, adrenaline the body’s natural novocaine. That is the danger zone that few come back from, doctors told her later. Pain is your body’s way of saying something is wrong and you still have time to do something about it. But pressure. That is palliative care.
I wake with inhuman strength, clawing blindly until I feel skin scrape and curl beneath my short fingernails. The pressure sweeps open like a stage curtain, revealing pain. I open my eyes with the profound gratitude that follows a hyperrealistic nightmare. If I am in pain, I still have a chance.
The room makes complete sense at first and then none at all. I am reminded of the nurse’s office at my daughter’s old middle school. The little cot against the wall, the apple juices next to the stacks of clean gauze, the filing cabinet with the glass jar containing an assortment of lollipops in an array of primary colors. It is a place to administer medical attention but not the lifesaving kind.
There is a whistling intake of breath through teeth, and I look over to see a woman in her early seventies with cascades of silver waves swabbing dampened cotton pads over what look like cat scratches all up and down her arms.
“Hi,” the woman says, continuing to tend to her injuries.
“I am—” So sorry, I am about to say, but something iron-from-the-fire-hot jabs at me. I run my tongue over my bottom lip and feel the telltale ridge of stitches.
“I can wear sleeves,” the woman says, assuming I was about to apologize. She smiles quickly at me and touches her own lip, indicating. “It’s only two stitches. I was able to do it here. But I do want to get you to Tallahassee Memorial for a more thorough checkup.”
“He came after me,” I say slowly, remembering not so much Carl’s face but the cut of his figure in the khaki safari hat as he came toward me, the way that ridiculous hat stayed on his head even as we fell to our knees in the grass. I plant my hands on either side of my thighs and draw myself up to a seated position with a sore-sounding groan. My neck feels tender and tight. He had his hands around my throat, but I remember thinking that I could still breathe, that it takes several minutes to kill someone by strangling, and that help would arrive soon enough, so there was no need to panic. I was calm when I passed out from lack of oxygen.
“There was no fecal incontinence, which means the injuries are likely surface.”
I raise my eyebrows. “I like giving the good news last too.”
Dr. Linda Donnelly sincerely laughs at that. We have never met in person, but it has to be her. She is the right age, and she’s wearing a gold charm bracelet on her slashed-up arm that features a ruby-eyed owl, the most flaunted of our sorority’s symbols.
“Do I have to go to the hospital?” I ask.
“I’d feel a whole lot better if you did.”
“Will you allow me to talk to him again tomorrow if I go?” Somewhere in the room, a cell phone begins to rattle.
“You must understand how difficult this was for me,” Dr. Donnelly says as she goes over to the infirmary door, where my purse hangs from a coat hook. “To write to you. I could be accused of breaking my HIPAA oath—credibly.” Dr. Donnelly hands me my trilling, seizing phone. “You put your husband as your emergency contact, but his assistant couldn’t get ahold of him, so she gave me your daughter’s number.”
I hurry to hit the green button with the pad of my thumb. “Hi, sweetheart,” I say soothingly, for her.
“Mom? Are you okay? You’re in Florida?” Allison sounds hurt that she didn’t know this, and my chest swells with a little bit of warmth and a lot of guilt. I tell my daughter most things, the boomerang effect of having a mother who shut me out. But I know that I made just as many mistakes. I raised a worrier, and while I have a lot of remorse over that, I also have compassion for my own mother in a way I didn’t before I became one myself, so there is a strange fairness, an empathetic balancing of the scales, that comes out in other ways, and that is good for the world at large. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.
“It was very last-minute,” I tell her.
“Did something happen?” Allison asks in a smushed voice. She has her phone balanced against her shoulder, and I can hear the smattering of her keyboard. Allison designs graphic props for film and television, often hand-making objects for productions so they are accurate to the time period in which the story is set. She is fascinated with period pieces—she doesn’t like to work in anything contemporary, and sometimes I feel bad about this too, especially when she refers to herself as an old soul. Old souls are just people who had to fend for themselves ahead of their time. I’ve spent most of my life fuming over the Colorado officials who, had they just done their jobs, could have prevented The Defendant’s last murderous spree. But who am I to point the finger when I had a job to do too?