Chapter Forty-One
FORTY-ONE
The pain is rich and seething, rolling like an undertow. Something is broken inside me. I feel it as I flex my fingers; the roar behind my ribs, lungs crackling like a torn paper bag. My tongue is so swollen that I can’t swallow. There is a hospital smell, bleach and cleaning fluid. It’s clinical, as am I. The needle, the cannula. I sleep. When I wake, there is a hand on my arm, and a voice I recognize says quietly, “Hullo, Mina.”
“Am I dead?” I croak.
She laughs.
“What do you remember?”
“Nothing.”
I have burned a hole in my memories so vast that light has not been able to get in. For a long time the memory of Eddie has been hidden down there, not dormant but growing and swelling like mushrooms in the dark. Fern gives me a tentative smile.