While You Were Gone: A Thought I Knew You Novella (5 page)

Chapter 4

T
he police visit is short. A single detective takes Greg’s statement. Greg hands him his license. The cop writes down the information and hands it back. I can barely focus on the conversation. Never mind that my visions swims, a thrumming pulses behind my eyes and around my ears, and it’s all I can do not to fall asleep, my heavy head bobbing my chin into my chest.

I’m stunned at Greg’s heroics. He pulled me from a car? Turns out, he pulled the cabbie out too. A hero times two. Greg rushes through the description of events, and the officer nods and takes appropriate notes. The car caught on fire under the hood a minute or so after impact. Greg was able to get me out through the passenger-side back door. He pulled the cabbie, who was conscious but pretty shaken up, through the driver’s-side door. He thought I was dead, he tells the officer, and when he says this, he looks over at me.

The officer clamps him on the shoulder like an old fraternity brother, an American good ole boy, and then it occurs to me that Greg is American. Hits me like the proverbial ton of bricks. You can tell in his accent, his soft but elongated
oo
’s and
ea
’s. Something slightly Long Island-ish yet less gum snapping than in the movies. He’s here on business, and he’s surely going home for his lucky underwear. I remember the conversation at the bar. He was here to give a training. For a week? What day is it? I can’t ask again; they’d wheel me straight down to neuro. I was in Faraday’s on Friday. I was out for about a day. Saturday, possibly Sunday.

The detective asks him about where he lives, and he fumbles and says his license isn’t correct. He’s moved. He waves his arm around, like it’s no big deal, and the detective hands it back. He pockets his wallet, and they talk a bit about the States, California mostly, and I can feel my eyelids drooping. I wonder if Greg is from California, which might as well be another planet. My knowledge of the Golden State comes from Beach Boys songs and
90210
reruns on cable.

The door clicks open, and I hear Greg say, “Thanks,” and “good-bye,”
and my eyelids drift shut of their own volition. I feel my head bob, and I think, although I can’t be sure, that Greg kisses my forehead. It might be my imagination. Or a dream. “
I’m glad you’re safe.”
The whisper comes to me through that tunnel of half reality between sleeping and waking. Right before I fall off the deep cliff of sleep, I wonder if I’ll ever see him again. He has no reason to come back. I’m fine. I can’t lie: my heart cracks, just a little.

When I wake up again, it’s dark out. The only light in the hospital room comes from above my head, a fluorescent thing that fritzes in and out. My mouth is dry and cottony, and my back aches from sleeping in a half-sitting position. When I move, pain sears up my midsection, and I touch my ribs tenderly. I inspect my sling, a Velcroed contraption that keeps my arm slightly elevated. When I wiggle my fingertips, pain shoots up my forearm and tingles all the way to my shoulder. My bow hand. I curl my fingertips to my thumb. Reflexively, my pinkie arcs up, like a Brit at a tea party, the imaginary bow poised mid-air by the dark-blue canvas sling.

Only the forearm is casted, and I swing my arm in a slow arc, a low, deep G. I could do it. It would be possible. I couldn’t be quick. I would be heavy, clunky. I can hear Nikolai now:
lighter touches, my dear.
The whole idea was ridiculous. This break was a real
break.
No more nine a.m. rehearsal. No more Nikolai breathing down my neck,
hit this note harder, longer, don’t play
so much
to spec. Take a small solo. Play as a team. Be a leader.
Be a team player.
I shift in my bed. My phone has been carefully placed on the nightstand, plugged in to the charger from my purse. I pick it up. No missed calls.

“K-bear! Are you all right?” Pete is hanging in the doorway, lanky as a living clothes hanger.

“Hi, Pete.”

He lopes across the room in three long strides and folds himself into the brown pleather visitor’s chair. He scoots it back. It was positioned for Greg, and I remember the intimacy of my hand in his. I wish he were there in Pete’s place. I wish I hadn’t fallen asleep.

“What happened?” Worry creases his forehead.

“What time is it?” I ask, even though I could pick my phone up and look.

“Seven-ish?” Pete grins, almost sheepishly. “I would have come sooner. I got home from racquetball, Mindy told me what happened, and I tried to rush right out, but the kids wanted my attention. You know how it is…” Even though I have no idea how it is, I take it as a personal slight. I think he says these things on purpose.

“What time did the nurse call you?” I ask, dumbly feeling like maybe I should know the answer.

He rubs his left eye. A face touch was always his biggest tell. “I think she left a message with Mindy around three-thirty?” He says this like he’s not sure. Even through the Percocet, I realize that four hours is quite a long time to know that your sister is in the hospital and not try to get there.

“Didn’t Mindy call you right away?” I ask, incredulous.

“Don’t start, please, Karen.” He gives me a warning look, and all I can think is,
I’m
in the hospital, and
I’m
not supposed to start? “Tell me what happened? Are you okay? What are your injuries?”

“Two broken ribs, a broken forearm, and a fractured ankle. It could be a lot worse.”

“But what
happened
?” Pete asks. “I should have just stayed with you.”

I shrug and don’t let him off the hook. I don’t say, “Don’t be silly. It would have happened anyway
.
” He wants me to; I can tell. I let him hang there, suspended by his own guilt, and think,
good.

“I took a cab home. A car ran a red light,” I say, like these things happen. “A man saved my life, pulled me from the car after it caught on fire.”

His eyes grow wide as saucers. “What man? It caught on fire?”

“A man I met at Faraday’s.” A reminder that he should have stayed. This is how we do, Pete and me: a small, circular slow dance with the facade of gentility, all the while throwing well-hidden jabs punctuated by the periodic sharp, stinging uppercut. “Did you call Mom?”

He nods, rubs his chin, and looks toward the door. “I left a message. She didn’t pick up.”

“Sleeping off last night, I bet.” I harrumph out a strangled laugh.

“Kare…” He lets his voice trail off, and I shoot him a glare. He sighs and holds his hands out plaintively. “Give her a break, okay?”

“What about me?” I whine. I know it’s a whine, and I wince. I hold up my hand, palm out, to cut him off. I know Pete. A joke was coming, something maybe about a broken arm, whatever. It was my brother’s classic role: if a joke can be made, make it. If a responsibility can be ducked or pawned, duck it. But smile big so no one gets mad. Big dimples. I was the only one it didn’t work on.

“Aw, Karen. Maybe this is your break. You’ve been….” He looks around the hospital room, wanly searching for the right words. “Not yourself. Angrier. Distracted. Something. Now you’re benched.”

“In the championship,” I grumble, advancing the sports analogy because it’s Pete’s language.

“Nah, are you kidding me? This is your rookie year.” He means it to be nice. Encouraging.

I bang my good heel against the bed, and it smacks down on a metal rod pushing dangerously close to the mattress’s surface, and a sharp throb travels up from my ankle. Awesome. I’ve injured my good leg.

“What happens to hockey players who get injured in their rookie year?” I challenge.

“Er, not usually anything good.” Pete twists his mouth, realizing I’ve talked him into a trap. Not hard, generally speaking.

I sigh and lean back against my pillows. “Exactly.”

When Paula finally blows in, it’s with an air of authority she has no right to have. For almost two days, it was nothing but beeps and silence, and then, suddenly, she’s here every day with her too-tight-for-her-age jeans and too-strong-for-a-hospital perfume. She’s sitting next to my bed, holding my hand when the nurses come in to take my blood pressure or administer pain medication,
tsking
and patting my arm, clucking around the room, pretending to straighten up. She apologizes for being “late” as if we simply had a brunch date and makes an excuse about being out of town for a few days.

“Out of town? In what car?” I ask her. “Where out of town?”

I can’t tell if I’m pinning her down out of a true concern. After all, her car rambles along with more than two hundred thousand miles, and her cell phone is perpetually lost. I often think that Paula could just wander off the face of the earth, and who would know? Who, besides Pete and I, would care? I think, mostly, I’m trying to catch her in her lie, but she’s always slippery, and even if I did, I’m not sure she’d care. She’s been here for two days in a row, and it feels like a year.

“How is the pain?” She changes the subject, her brows knitted in concern that could be real.

“I’m fine, Mom. I’m going home tomorrow, anyway.” I’ve been here four days, and my concussion is better, and my ankle is healing. I hobble around on a walking cast to and from the bathroom. My arm has been set and air-casted, and I’m impatient with the nurses and doctors, confined to one room with a growing stack of gossip magazines that Paula brings me next to the bed. I’ve never read celebrity magazines in my life. I can’t imagine who cares about this stuff. But I’m bored, and the glossy pages beg to be flicked through.

Abbie, the day nurse, watches us out of the corner of her eye, and I’d love to know what she makes of Paula. My mother’s blond hair is curled around her heavily made-up face as though she goes right from here to a club, which probably isn’t far from the truth. Her cleavage is lined with folds of loose skin, and she wears a slinky turquoise see-through top tucked into low-slung jeans with a wide, flashy belt. High-heeled boots tap the bedframe, an irritating
ding, ding, ding
that reverberates through the mattress and buzzes my ankle.

“Did you bring my clothes?” I ask her. I’d asked her yesterday to please bring me wide-leg black yoga pants that I could fit around my walking cast, a few tank tops, and a sweatshirt. The temperature in the hospital swings from the upper eighties back down to the sixties in a matter of hours, and it seems like, no matter what, I’m perpetually uncomfortable.

She swings a grocery bag onto the bed from the floor, and it lands with a thump an inch from my bad leg. I inhale sharply and shoot her a look. I open it with my good hand. It contains a pair of black leggings and a few haphazard T-shirts, one of which I don’t even recognize.

“Mom. This isn’t what I asked for.” I huff, and Abbie busies herself with the tower of monitors next to my bed.

“Sure it is. You said black pants and a T-shirt. I brought you what I could find.” Paula bends over and pulls a bottle of lime-green nail polish out of her purse. I watch her uncap it, touch up her index fingernail, and blow on it. She splays her hand in front of my face. “Am I too old for this color?”

“Mom.” My voice is sharp, but I can’t help it. I have so little control in this room. I don’t control when I sleep or what the temperature is. I can’t get my own water or my food. If I want a snack, I have to buzz someone and wait a half hour. Without the right clothes, I’m resigned to wearing a thin, freezing-cold hospital gown. I can’t ask this of Pete. I’m stuck with Paula and her hopeless incompetence. I hold up the leggings. “Do these look like they will go over a walking cast? And what is this T-shirt?”

She sits up and grins proudly. “It’s one of mine!” She shrugs. “It might not fit you. You’ve always been so broad across the shoulders.” I must make a face because she giggles, a high-pitched childlike gurgle, and she waves her hand around. Her rings and bracelets jingle together. “Oh, don’t look like that. It’s not a bad thing.”

“But I wanted tank tops. And sweatshirts. Layers I can take on and off.”

“You know, you should let me paint your toenails now that you can’t wear shoes.” She stands up and fishes around in her purse, producing a bottle of blue glitter polish. She positions herself at the end of the bed before I can stop her. She plops her purse on the mattress, and from the corner pocket of her bag glints a flash of metal. A flask? I poke it with my good toe. “A little color never hurt anyone.” She
tsks
at me, shaking her head.

“Mom. Paula. You’re not listening to me. I don’t want my toenails painted. I want to be comfortable, here in this room.” My voice is rising to a panicky pitch, and yes, that’s definitely a flask. The woman brought a flask. To a hospital. “I don’t know why this is too much to ask of you. Black pants. Tank tops. A sweatshirt jacket. Why is what
I want
never ever enough? Why—”