Chapter Thirty-Five
Thirty-Five
“Jess?”
There was a pounding in my head, and something wasn’t right.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like something was choking me, and when I went to push it away I couldn’t move my hands.
They were strapped down or restrained somehow, and I thrashed my head, trying to get away from whatever it was.
A nightmare. This had to be another nightmare, like the one I’d had in the car.
I heard Mari’s voice, just like I had in that one.
“Jess?” she said. “Oh, honey. Oh my god. She’s awake! She’s waking up. Somebody come get—”
There were hands on me, touching me, and whatever she said, I wasn’t awake.
I desperately wanted to be, wanted to open my eyes and see Eamonn still asleep beside me, see that patch of sun he’d talked about coming through the skylight.
There were pinpricks of light behind my eyelids now, and I tried to open them but they felt sandpaper dry, impossible, until—
“Calm down,” another voice said, this one brusque but warm. Another woman’s voice. Not Eamonn’s—where was he? “You’re all right. Take it easy.”
Jess, he’d said to me in that soft voice. It’s okay. You’re safe. I wanted him to tell me that now.
I tried to speak, but that thing was still suffocating me.
I managed to crack my eyes open a sliver, just enough to see a blurry Mari standing over me, her hands on her cheeks, before I closed them again.
There was a twinge of pain and more voices, none of them the one I wanted, and then the glow of light behind my eyelids dimmed until I was drifting back under.
When I finally woke back up again an indeterminate number of hours later, somehow I already knew I was in a hospital.
I opened my eyes to see a whiteboard chart on the wall, my name written at the top of it, the names of my doctor and my nurse and my tech.
A television in the corner had been turned on to some home-improvement show.
And there was Mari, sitting on a chair beside my bed.
“Oh my god,” she said, springing up when she saw I was awake. “Oh my god, Jess.”
She squeezed me in as tight a hug as she could manage, with me still reclined on the hospital bed, tubes and wires connecting me to various equipment. I could move my hands now, I realized, and I automatically reached one up to weakly pat her back.
“Mari,” I said. My voice came out a croak, my throat raw and painful.
“Bitch, I thought you were going to die on me,” she said, that same wisecracking best friend I remembered, but then she spoiled the effect by breaking into very un-Mari-like tears, cradling my head closer against her chest.
“Mari,” I said again. “I—that hurts.”
“Oh my god,” she said, springing back to wipe the tears from her eyes. “Of course it does. I’m so sorry. Your head—how are you feeling?”
I’d been better. I didn’t even know how to answer the question. It was so jarring, to have fallen asleep cozy in a bed, my body healthy and whole, a man’s arm around me. And then to be here now.
“What happened?” I asked, because that seemed as good a place to start as any, and I still didn’t feel up to saying more than a few words.
She sat down in the chair beside my bed again, taking my hand in hers.
“You were mugged in a parking lot. After a date—do you remember anything about that? It was your birthday. They took your purse and your phone, and pushed you down. You hit your head and you’ve been in a coma for…
well, it’s been over forty-eight hours by now.
I’m just glad they brought you to my hospital, or we might still not know who you were, I wouldn’t have known what happened to you. ”
I closed my eyes. My head really did feel awful. This dull, throbbing pain that radiated from behind one eye. “I’ve been here the whole time?”
“Of course,” she said. “I wouldn’t let you out of my sight. I don’t work this floor, but I’ve made sure you have the best—”
“Eamonn,” I said. “Where’s Eamonn?”
She adjusted the thin blanket over my hospital gown, giving me a puzzled look. “Eamonn? I don’t know anyone by that name who works here, but I can always—”
“He was right here,” I said, the vehemence shredding my throat a little. “He was sleeping next to me.”
A doctor had already come in, rubbing her hand sanitizer on as she glanced at my whiteboard. Mari waggled her eyebrows, dropping her voice to avoid being heard. “Sounds like you had some banger coma dreams,” she said. “You can tell me about them later.”
I shook my head, closing my eyes again as a tear streaked down my cheek. When I opened them, I couldn’t help but focus on the green shamrock that had been stuck to the whiteboard with a magnet.
“It’s Saint Patrick’s Day,” the doctor said, catching the direction of my stare and giving me a kind smile. “And you are one very lucky lady.”
I didn’t get a moment to myself until it was almost midnight, visiting hours were long over, even Mari having been convinced that I’d be okay to spend a night alone in the hospital.
She’d been at my side the whole time I’d been in the coma, which I appreciated so much.
It felt good, to know I was that loved and cared for.
“And your parents were here over the weekend,” she assured me. “They just had a deposition today.”
Her tone betrayed what she thought of that—I saw my parents as benignly neglectful, Mari wasn’t so sure about the benign part—but it really didn’t bother me.
That was my parents. In a way, it was comforting to know that even a coma couldn’t shake them from their routines.
It weirdly felt like it was their way of telling me that everything would be okay.
I’d almost expected to see flowers from my own workplace, felt silly for even being hurt that there weren’t any, another repeat of the birthday card slight from last week that felt like it had happened to a different person.
But then I realized that it was only Monday, and they probably didn’t even know that I was in the hospital.
I called in, resulting in an awkward conversation that got routed through a clearly pissed-off legal assistant who’d been roped into receptionist duty for that hour, and then on to the office manager, who was quite chilly until I finally got a word in edgewise that when I said I was sick, I meant I was in the hospital, I’d been in a coma.
I spared a brief moment to relish her overly concerned backpedaling, told her I was preemptively using up all my sick days, and then I hung up.
Mari filled me in on everything that had happened over the last couple of days.
How scared and worried she’d been when she saw that it was me who’d been brought to the hospital.
How she’d yelled at a doctor who’d come in with pamphlets about how a vegan diet was the secret to good health, and would solve all my problems. She’s had a traumatic brain injury, you fucking quack.
How they’d had to put in a feeding tube and restrain my hands so I wouldn’t try to rip it out if I woke up, a panic response that was apparently common.
It sounded terrifying to me, but Mari said she’d actually seen it as a good sign, that they believed so strongly that I would wake up.
When I touched the back of my head, there was a patch of hair that had been shaved there, and Mari said they hadn’t done any surgery based on what they saw in my scans, but they’d been preparing just in case.
Mari had also braided my hair and kept my face clean, although I was shocked the first time I looked into a mirror how much bruising there was around my temple and one eye.
I didn’t fill Mari in on anything about my experience of the last couple days.
I didn’t even know where to start, was still trying to process it all myself.
It had felt so real to me—as real as the hospital, as real as Mari sitting next to my bed and making fun of the couple on TV who needed five bedrooms so he could have a man cave and she could have a craft room.
When I closed my eyes, I could see Eamonn and his dimpled smile, could still feel the phantom weight of his arm around me as I drifted off to sleep.
At one point when I was alone, I lifted my hospital gown to find a small bruise on the inside of my thigh, exactly where I’d asked Eamonn to leave it.
Mark me, I’d said, and I wondered if on some level I’d been thinking of this very moment, when I’d need some proof that it had all really happened.
But then there were also bruises all over my body—around my eye, on my shoulder, down my arms and on the backs of my hands where nurses had poked and prodded me so many times.
I didn’t know that I could take any meaning from this one.
The clock read three minutes past midnight, and I realized that was it. I was officially in my first brand-new day, one where I’d never spent a single second in a foreign country I’d never been to before with a man who apparently didn’t exist.