Chapter 16
Auggie
The hospital looked the same as always. By this point, I could walk the path to the John Doe’s—I really needed to remember to start calling him Mia—room.
I knew every cracked floor tile, every piece of inoffensively modern wall art, and could even recognize that the maintenance staff had been through recently to replace the old lightbulbs.
That being said, the atmosphere was completely different from normal as I approached Mia’s room.
The nursing staff, who usually bustled around with calm authority, now seemed to be walking on the very tips of their comfortable shoes.
They gave Mia’s room a wide berth, and a few even avoided looking toward the closed door.
I didn’t even have to ask. The moment one of the nurses saw me, they immediately waved me on into the room. Clutching tighter to the bag of books that I’d brought mostly out of habit, I sucked in a deep breath before carefully inching the door open.
Something struck the wall just inches from my face with a metal clang.
“Don’t want it!”
I froze, ready to dodge the next missile, but when I looked over at Mia I found him also frozen on the hospital bed.
A significant portion of his face was wrapped in bandages, but his eyes were clearly visible, and they were wide with shock as he stared at me.
He was curled up in a ball at the top of the bed, arms around his knees like a little pill bug trying to protect his vulnerable underbelly.
It was a sad sight, especially with so many bandages wrapped around his limbs and torso.
I’d been told that his burns had healed enough that they were no longer open wounds, but newly grafted skin was still delicate and needed to be protected, so the bandages stayed on.
The thick layers of white cloth practically suffocated him, and made him look even smaller and more pathetic, like a doll that was about to unravel.
Yet, before my very eyes he gradually uncurled himself, as though the sight of me was calming enough for him to let down his guard just a bit.
Whoever he’d been expecting to walk through the door, it obviously wasn’t me.
“Hi, Mia,” I said, holding up both hands in a universal ‘I mean no harm’ gesture. “I’m not sure if you remember me.”
“You…” Mia started but then had to pause to wet his lips with his tongue. “Told stories.”
His words were overly simple, but each one sounded like it took him a lot of effort to say.
Still moving slowly, I sat down in the chair next to the bed.
“That’s right. I visited you many times to read stories to you while you were asleep.
And I was here when you woke up. The nurses said that you’ve been really upset since waking up, and that you asked for me.
Is there anything I can do to help… whatever’s upsetting you? ”
A look of deep concentration descended upon Mia’s face. He tried to speak several times, but no intelligible sounds would come out, like the words were stones lodged in his throat.
It was surprisingly similar to interviewing an uncooperative witness. Without even realizing, I snapped into detective mode, looking over Mia with a more critical eye, and several details became instantly clear.
Mia’s eyes were sharp. He was focused and could clearly follow everything I said. His inability to speak wasn’t a cognitive issue. The mind inside the body was functioning. Rather, it seemed he was physically struggling to form his mouth into the words he wanted.
Growling in frustration, Mia eventually waved a wild hand at the door.
“They! Drugs!” Then with that same hand he slapped himself in the chest. “Me! Bad!”
The combination of gestures and broken words reminded me of my time serving overseas.
More often than not, I didn’t speak the native language of the country I was stationed in, and translators were not as readily available as they should have been.
I frequently ended up playing a very similar game of charades with the locals whenever I needed information about an area, and I’d gotten rather good at piecing whole sentences together from very few words.
“The nurses gave you drugs,” I summed up. “And you don’t like that.”
Mia’s wild gesture with his arm also drew my attention to several new spots of red staining the bandages along his forearm.
I’d spent enough time staring at his unconscious form that I knew the exact condition of his injuries.
These bandages were fresh, and this blood was even fresher.
He’d been injured recently, probably sometime after he’d woken up.
Without thinking, I reached for his arm.
The moment he saw my hand coming toward him, he flinched back as if I’d struck him, clutching his arm close to his chest.
Realizing my mistake, I immediately froze.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you. I just realized you are inured. Can I see? I promise, I won’t do anything. I won’t even touch you if you don’t want.”
Sharp eyes regarded me for several moments, but then Mia relaxed and held out his arm toward me. He even let me pull the bandages back enough to see the skin underneath.
There were several small but angry looking wounds on his arm, clustered near the crook of his elbow. I’d seen these kinds of wounds before, and another piece of the puzzle clicked into place in my mind.
“You tore your IV out. Several times, by the looks of it. Is it because you didn’t like the drugs they were giving you?”
Pulling his arm back toward his chest, Mia pressed a hand over the wounds near his elbow, then nodded.
I leaned back in my chair, waiting to see if the other man would manage to wrangle up any more words. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, but even that seemed to take effort, and in the end, he just huffed in frustration and scowled at the IV drip that was still hanging near the bed.
It looked like I was going to have to do all the talking for him.
“In my experience, there are only two types of people who oppose doctor recommended medication that strongly.”
I spoke slowly to make sure Mia was following me. He still looked frustrated, but his eyes remained sharp and stared at my mouth like he was reading the words directly from my lips.
“The first are insufferable know-it-alls who think they know better than the doctors after a few minutes of Google searching. The second are people who already have a bad history with certain drugs.”
I regarded him for a moment, and he seemed to sense my scrutiny because he sat up straighter.
“You don’t seem like a know-it-all. So, what drugs were you on?”
Mia swallowed a few times and I could almost hear the sound of his throat muscles working.
“Pain,” he eventually managed to say.
“Painkillers?” I summarized.
He nodded.
My eyes drifted toward the IV drip again.
“Which is exactly what they’re trying to give you here, I’m guessing. So now that you’re clean you don’t want to take them. Were you ever on any of the harder stuff?”
In the quickest movement I’d seen him make yet, he immediately nodded his head.
“Didn’t. Want. High. But… Escape. Forced.” Although his words were still extremely simple, he spoke each with great care to make sure I understood. “Just. Wanted. No. Pain.”
“You wanted no pain, to escape,” I repeated his words, mulling them over. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re in pain now, but does that mean you were in pain even before?”
This time, Mia didn’t answer me right away. His expression turned distant as a memory I couldn’t see played out behind his eyes.
A solid minute passed before he spoke again, carefully prodding at his own chest like he had no ribs, and he feared he would jab right through his own heart.
“People hurt me. The drugs… helped. But I… clean… don’t want anymore.”
It was an improvement. His words were still very broken and stilted, but he was almost talking in sentences.
He’d been found in the remains of an abandoned warehouse that was apparently known as a common shelter for the homeless population of the city.
There were many reasons a person could become homeless.
It didn’t have to be anything nefarious but combined with his statement ‘People hurt me’ I couldn’t come to any good conclusions.
Mia didn’t owe me his life story. He wasn’t a criminal I was interrogating, or a witness I needed to interview for information about a case. I should have just left it alone and let whatever demons lurked behind the man’s eyes stay silent and unspoken.
But I couldn’t.
I knew myself well enough to not even try to stay out of it. I was the kind of person who, once committed to something, saw it through, no matter what. Somehow, without meaning to, Mia had become one of my commitments.
Moving very slowly, so that he could easily pull away if he wanted, I reached out and grabbed his hand, stopping him from jabbing at his chest. “You said people hurt you,” I reiterated. “So, I have to ask, are you in danger now?”
At first, Mia started to shake his head, but then he stopped.
“I don’t think… I… I can’t remember.”
I wanted to demand what he meant, but I didn’t have to. Mia let me keep his one hand in my grasp, but the other flitted through the air like a butterfly looking for a place to land. He seemed to be trying to snatch the right words right out of empty space.
“Not sure if… memories or dreams. It’s… fuzzy. I think… there were bad people, but… gone now.”
Those three sentences were the most words he’d spoken all at once. It taxed the limit of his throat and he started coughing. The sound was painfully dry, each cough practically shaking his whole body.
I fetched him water from the tray sitting near the bed, but his hands trembled so much he couldn’t hold the cup.
Instead, I had to press it to his lips for him and tip it just enough for small amounts of liquid to pour into his mouth at a time.
His throat bobbed with each swallow, until finally he managed to stop coughing.
“Thanks,” he said as he lay back against the propped-up bed.
Being thanked so earnestly for such a small amount of help made me feel unbalanced, like another weight had been added to the debt I already owed the world. Clearing my own throat, I turned away to place the cup safely back on the tray.
“It’s nothing. So, you can’t remember anything?”
When I turned back, I found him watching me with his surprisingly clear eyes. His expression was somber, but not unhappy. It was more like the gaze of someone just beginning to understand the secrets of the universe and they were still processing the depths of their new realizations.
“Bits and pieces,” he eventually said. “It’s all jumbled, like… broken puzzle. I’m not sure what’s real.”
“Well, you said your name is Mia. I’ve tried looking it up, but without a full name, I couldn’t find any information about your identity. Can you remember your surname?”
Mia visibly thought for a second, his brow wrinkling under the bandages that partially covered his temple, but then he shook his head.
“Then, is there anything you can remember?”
Thankfully, Mia didn’t ask why I’d been looking him up.
I couldn’t explain why I felt so invested in his story and helping him figure out his identity.
Maybe it was simply because I’d spent so much time in the room with him that I’d developed a responsibility to him through osmosis.
Like a positive version of Stockholm Syndrome.
However, if I tried to put this into words, I’d probably just sound like a stalker, so I was glad Mia accepted my involvement in the mystery of his identity without question.
“I remember…” Mia trailed off as he thought. “Green hills.”
“Green hills? That sounds like a good memory.”
Good, but not helpful. There were so many places even just near this one city that would fit the definition of green hills that he might as well not have said anything at all, and there was no guarantee that he even came from Baton Rouge originally.
However, a moment later I had to retract my statement about it being a “good” memory when Mia shook his head.
“No. Not good. It was… It was a bad place. Painful place. Not good.”
Okay, okay,” I quickly agreed as it seemed he was getting worked up again. “It wasn’t a good place. So, let’s not think about it anymore. Are there any good things you remember?”
Without realizing, I grabbed Mia’s hand again, but he didn’t pull away. Rather, he returned my grip and held on even tighter.
“Eli. Eli was good. He helped me.”
Well, it was a name at least. Such a simple name probably wouldn’t turn up anything, but any good detective knew that the simplest bit of information could solve a case.
After a bit more poking and prodding, I couldn’t get many more specifics out of him, but I had a general idea of his situation.
A troubled home life, and some nameless abuse he couldn’t seem to put into words, he’d ended up on the streets at a fairly young age.
He’d survived, thanks to the help of this Eli person, but eventually the two of them had been separated.
Mia couldn’t say why they’d separated and grew distressed whenever he tried to think about it too much, but he was certain that it had been his choice for some reason.
That had led him to setting up camp in the abandoned warehouse where the fire had broken out.
He also didn’t remember anything about the fire, but at that point the many burns and injuries on his body spelled out the rest of the story for him.
I stayed until visiting hours ended and I had no choice but to leave. Mia grew distressed as soon as he realized he would be alone again and didn’t calm down until I promised to return as soon as possible.
After that, I made sure to explain to the nurses about Mia’s issue with drugs and impressed upon them the importance that they do not give him any painkillers or sedatives unless absolutely necessary.
The first nurse I talked to didn’t seem to take me seriously, not even writing anything down, but then I spotted Newt and hurried to repeat myself to the little redhead.
From what I knew of him, he took his job very seriously.
So, I wasn’t surprised when he immediately opened Mia’s medical file to write down instructions about Mia’s medication, and even put a reminder note on the door to Mia’s room.
Only then did I feel confident enough to leave. As promised, I would be back the next day after I got off work, and I had a feeling that I would be visiting every day for the foreseeable future.