6
They let me sit in the ICU because I told them Si was my mom.
She didn’t have anyone I could call, not unless you counted some people from NA. So it was just me and Si.
It was sometime past midnight. I couldn’t really add up all the hours between when I’d found Si and now, sitting here.
There’d been the ambulance. The wait in the ER.
Conversations that were recorded in my brain like they’d been shot under bright lights, the volume turned all the way up so I could barely hear what everyone was saying.
And now this. Quiet hours. The hum of machinery.
Occasionally, a footstep, a low voice, the sound of a drawer on a bent runner.
The overhead lights weren’t off completely, but they were turned low so that patients could sleep, and the papery curtains provided the illusion of privacy.
There was a little nightstand kind of thing next to the hospital bed, and on it, somebody had put a plastic flower in a plastic vase.
It was blue, the only spot of color against all the browns and beiges and creams. Si said blue was calming.
She painted her bedroom blue. For a weekend.
And then she said it made the room feel small, and so we painted the whole thing white again, and it took three coats.
I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them again, I was staring at the vinyl flooring. It was clean, no dust bunnies, nothing to make you think this place had problems. But little divots marked it, showing where things had fallen, where people had dropped things, where someone had fucked up.
Si’s eyes were all the way closed now. Her short hair stuck up on one side; that was the side where she’d been lying when I’d found her.
It was like a kid’s hair, like she’d fallen asleep on the sofa and someone had carried her to bed.
Her lips weren’t blue anymore, but they’d shaved the side of her head, and her face was the color of fresh plaster.
We’re hoping the ventilator will be short term, the doctor had said.
We’re going to try a medically induced coma, the doctor had said.
It was a heart attack, the doctor had said. But the real problem was that Si had hit her head. The words were traumatic brain injury and intracranial pressure and standard practice. And she’d asked me if I needed to talk to someone.
I slouched lower in my chair. I leaned my head back. I closed my eyes. The need to get…out. For a way out of this feeling. For a door I could throw open so I’d stop feeling like this.
I settled more firmly into the chair. I wrapped my hands around the arms.
Call Ed.
No. It was too late.
But maybe in the morning.
I was tired. I was exhausted. I was going to sleep here and see how she was doing in the morning and talk to the doctor again and see when they could get her off the ventilator.
That was a plan.
Those were things I could do.
The darkness wasn’t really darkness; it was the red of the inside of my eyelids. And my heart beat in my chest like a trapped thrush.