Chapter Twenty-Five
San Juan, Puerto Rico
2023
Daisy can’t move or speak or communicate in any way, yet she notes a new feeling that her soul has been loosely stitched back into her body. It doesn’t feel as though the stitch will hold if anything happens along to test the strength of the seam. But neither does it feel, any longer, as if her soul is in danger of flitting away on each passing gust.
She hears the word stable in her hospital room, but just as often she hears the word critical , and she knows that these words are about her, about her condition. Daisy presses herself into the reassurance of her soul being united to her body, of that body being confined to a relatively comfortable hospital bed in the physical world. She tells herself to focus on that security, and knows instinctively that this is the way to heal herself, to focus all her energy on strengthening that reborn bond with the earthly world.
Daisy cannot differentiate between day and night, or between Spanish and English. She can’t tell if the storm has passed or if it’s still rocking the wet world outside the window. But she does learn to differentiate, vaguely, between her caregivers, and she develops a favorite. A woman whose name she does not know, but who smells faintly of lavender, and whose hand feels dry and cool against Daisy’s forehead, a woman who hums sweetly when she comes in to check Daisy’s vitals or change her position in the bed or refill whatever is dripping into her body from various hanging bags.
At some moment, during what could be Daisy’s one thousandth year or second hour in the hanging Babylon of that bed, the nurse begins to speak, and Daisy is briefly able to latch on to the human sound of her words. The woman’s voice is like a flotation device, her words, Spanish.
“Your mama’s coming, Daisy girl, you hang in there.”
She can feel a sort of fastening at the mention of her mother. Daisy’s presence feels more… present. Suddenly she can feel something catch, as if she’s swinging through space on the flying trapeze and just there, the dependable slap of skin on skin as the catcher grabs the flyer’s wrists, and the flyer grabs the catcher’s wrists, and suddenly they are locked and swinging, arcing. Just like that, Daisy’s brain engages, her thoughts engage. She kicks in, and there she is. In that room. In that bed.
“Your mama’s on her way, just you hang tight.”
Daisy grips on with all her strength and this is the moment when she remembers everything, all at once, with the same startling speed and blur and whoosh as the crash. There is a click or a pop or a bang, and Daisy remembers the phone call from the obnoxious guest, the storm. She remembers the scooter, the rain, the cat. The car, oh God, the dark and terrifying speed of the car. And before all that, the mail, the steps, Mrs. Fernández, Daisy’s own cozy apartment, her home. And something else, something nebulous. What was it?
Before she can grasp the thing that eludes her, the unreliable arena of her brain warps and lurches and deposits her elsewhere, a different sensation. Everything’s changed. A memory then, sharp and tactile: She is six years old in the backyard, and the light is sweet, golden with bees. Her father is chasing her with the garden hose, the water warm and metallic. Daisy squeals and shrieks and squeezes her eyes against the spray. She launches herself at her dad, a wet cannonball into his softening belly. Her brain lurches and spins again, and delivers her into another recollection. Hide-and-seek in the house after dark, the sound of her mother doing dishes while Daisy searches for her dad and brothers. She checks the pantry, the laundry room, under her bed. When she can’t find them, small Daisy feels lonely and melancholy, and just when she’s about to report her failure to Mom in the kitchen, she spies them: six sock-feet sticking out beneath the trembling blue drapes in her parents’ bedroom. She approaches with stealth, stretches a dimpled hand toward the edge of the curtain.
Her brain lurches again and again, and each new scene restored to her is a like a hint, a reminder that she might find her way home. This is who she is, she remembers, Daisy Hayes, daughter of Thomas, daughter of Ruth. Spin . Daisy Hayes, college mutineer, spin , explorer of Puerto Rico, spin , purveyor of curiosities, spin . She gains traction, and speed, and although the lurching and dropping now has the terrifying quality of a whirling gun barrel, although Daisy herself has no agency in this game, is not herself choosing when to spin, when to stop, when to pull the trigger, the gathering breadcrumbs of self are exhilarating nonetheless. And then.
The next lurch drops her down a lightless tunnel, a repository of nothing but blackness. Daisy staggers and gropes and finds no purchase. In the room around her, the beeping machinery increases in tempo.