Chapter 17
Mia
It took two weeks before the nurses finally stopped asking me the same questions over and over.
I still couldn’t tell them who I was, other than the fact that my name was Mia.
I still barely remembered what had happened to me, other than the fact that there had been a fire.
I still couldn’t explain why I didn’t want any drugs, other than a deep instinct that they were bad for me and had brought me bad things in the past.
The reading voice, Augustine Conway, or Auggie as I learned he preferred to be called, asked better questions.
He visited almost every day and had a particular talent for picking out the smallest detail from my jumbled, fractured memories.
I could only remember living in the abandoned warehouse.
However, the warehouse hadn’t been abandoned and taken over by the homeless population until two years ago.
Based on that, Auggie figured that I probably hadn’t lived in Baton Rouge very long.
A couple years at most, and maybe not even that long.
It was more than I’d known about myself before, but it still didn’t help identify me. Knowing that I hadn’t always lived in this city still left an entire country worth of land where I could have come from.
Auggie focused on my hints of unpleasant memories.
According to him, pleasant events rarely created much of an impact on the rest of the world, but unpleasant events were more likely to leave a trace.
Like a surgeon picking at the scab of an infected wound, little by little, he opened up the few painful memories I could still recall and drew out the rot waiting there.
Yet, with his guidance, I found the memories weren’t as painful as when I recalled them alone.
It turned out that Green Hills was the name of a place and not a description of a landscape.
I still didn’t know what the place was, but just the sound of the name made my stomach roil and sent icy cold shivers of fear racing up my spine.
I was certain that it was a very bad place, and that I’d lived there for what felt like a long time.
I also managed to recall another name. Tony Smith. The memory of that name didn’t inspire as much instinctual fear as the name Green Hills, but it was close. In a competition for the worst thing hiding in my brain, I was certain that name would take the silver medal.
After two weeks, that was all we’d managed to figure out. It was better than nothing, and Auggie assured me that we’d eventually figure out my identity, but it still felt pointless. I was no one.
What was even the point of figuring out my identity?
Before the fire, I’d apparently been living homeless on the street, and I didn’t expect that to have changed after being stuck in a coma for a while.
A homeless man with an identity was no different than a homeless man without an identity.
Knowing my full name would change nothing about my circumstances.
Over the course of those two weeks, I was so intent on paying attention only to Auggie and ignoring the nurses that I barely noticed the time passing or the state of my own injuries.
The nurses mentioned things about burns and skin grafts and told me cheerfully that I didn’t need so many bandages anymore.
However, I didn’t realize what that meant until someone mentioned the word discharged.
“What?” I asked as I stared down at the stack of forms that had been pushed in front of me.
“These are your discharge papers,” the nurse repeated. “It has all the info you’ll need for your continued home recovery.”
“Home recovery?”
I was basically a human echo, repeating everything I heard. It didn’t make sense.
How could the homeless have something like a ‘home recovery’?
There were still bandages wrapped around my forearms, but my hands were free. The skin on my hands was mostly free of injury, and the fresh burn scars peeking out from the bandages were sturdy enough for me to move without issue. I pulled the discharge papers closer and started reading.
Line by line, it all started to make a little more sense, until reality hit me like a rush of cold water dumped right on my head.
Now that I was awake and reasonably healed, there was no reason for me to stay at the hospital anymore.
The medical staff had deemed me stable enough to leave and recover at home.
Never mind that I had no home, and that recovery would likely be impossible on the street.
My time at the hospital was done and I would be kicked out, whether I liked it or not.
Something itched at the back of my mind. A memory, maybe. I couldn’t quite recall, something about this situation felt familiar.
Perhaps this wasn’t the first hospital I’d been kicked out of.
“But where will I go?” I asked, though I already knew the nurse wouldn’t care.
Surprisingly, however, the nurse actually had an answer for me.
“Don’t worry. Your caretaker has promised to be here on time for your discharge, and he’s already been given your recovery instructions as well.”
“My caretaker?” I echoed once again.
“Yes,” the nurse said, a big smile on her face as she tied up the room. “Your friend. He’ll be here soon.”
There was only one person she could be talking about, because there was only one person I knew well enough to call a friend.
Auggie?
He was going to take care of me?
I couldn’t bring myself to actually ask that question for fear of being told I was wrong. However, I got my answer a few hours later.
Auggie arrived just as he had every day since I woke up, but this time he came bearing a new set of clothes and wheelchair.
“Ready to go?” he asked as he held out the clothes to me.
I was too dumbfounded to do anything but nod and accept the clothes.
Auggie was taking me in?
That’s what this had to mean, right?
He wasn’t the kind of person who would take me out of the hospital just to dump me on the street.
Asking would be pointless. If it turned out I was wrong about Auggie, and he actually was that kind of person, then he wouldn’t tell me ahead of time. With no better choice, I went along with him and waited to see what my fate would hold.
The clothing felt strange on my skin. Until now, I’d only worn a thin cotton hospital gown that was so loose I could barely feel it and may as well have been naked.
The pants and shirt that Auggie also gave me, although soft, were much more restrictive than anything I’d worn in conscious memory.
It felt like there was something wrong with them, and I moved stiffly, especially when the clothing rubbed against the bandages and newly healed burns hidden under the cloth.
Once dressed, I was wheeled out of the building in a wheelchair and loaded into an unfamiliar car. Before I could fully comprehend what was happening, the hospital disappeared in the car’s side mirror and only the open road lay ahead of me.
It was a surprisingly short car ride. The hospital was centrally located, and so was Auggie’s apartment.
He seemed to sense that I was overwhelmed by my change of surroundings and didn’t talk very much during the trip.
The sight of so many buildings going by outside the window, and the open sky above, was a complete visual overload.
For as long as I could consciously remember, I’d stayed in the same hospital room, with only the brief glance out of a window for variation. I’d almost forgotten that the rest of the world existed, and to suddenly be bombarded by so many new sights made me feel very small in my own skin.
My very scarred, beat-up skin.
Until now, I’d avoided looking in mirrors for too long, but while getting dressed earlier, I couldn’t help taking a peek in the bathroom mirror.
The sight was even worse than I feared. A bandage still encircled my head, as the grafted skin on my scalp was still particularly tender, and what little hair I had stuck out between the strips of cloth like straw poking out of a scarecrow.
It was theorized that I must have covered my face with my hands when I was caught in the fire, because the burns, thankfully, didn’t touch this area, but they came close, and one particularly daring scar crept near the corner of my eye.
Overall, it was a ghastly appearance, and that wasn’t even taking into account the rest of my body.
It was honestly a miracle Auggie could stand to look at me at all, let alone show up so often to read to me and take care of me. I could barely stop staring at myself in horror, and I didn’t know how he could stomach the sight of me enough to sit so close to me.
We eventually pulled into an apartment complex that was…
probably the same as every other apartment complex.
I honestly couldn’t tell. The few memories I could recall all involved living on the street.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever been inside an apartment, let alone lived inside one.
I had a vague understanding that Green Hills was a place that I had once lived, but I was also certain that it was not a home, and probably not a place I wanted to remember, anyway.
So, Auggie’s apartment looked nice, as far as I could tell.
It was clean, and more spacious than my hospital room had been, which was a relief.
There were two bedrooms, so Auggie would have a chance to get away from me and not have to look at me constantly.
That meant I might have more time before he got tired of me.
“Here, sit down,” Auggie said as he guided me toward the couch in the middle of the main room. “That was a longer walk that you’re used to, so you must be tired. Do you need anything to drink?”