Postcards from a Dead Girl (11 page)

“Do you know where you are?” the voice asked. I could hear intercoms above me and clattering wheels below me. I was strapped to the gurney. The controlled urgency of a woman's voice felt like the way a nurse speaks, and I was putting it all together when she said it: “You're at a hospital.” Judging by the speed of the passing lights above, I guessed this was also an emergency. I was right. “There's been an accident. You're being taken down to trauma right now. It's important that you lie still.”

Square after square of ceiling tile passed above me, every few beats a flash of blinding white light. All I could think about was where the dog went. I must have kicked or flinched at one of the flashes because the nurse reached around to tighten down the straps across my legs. I wanted her to tie down my arms and my torso too, so I could never leave the gravity of the cart. I was afraid I might fly off and float into the sky. And I couldn't stop wondering where my dog went, which was strange because I knew neither Zoe nor I owned one. I wondered if Zoe was around, but somehow knew she wasn't, so I didn't ask.

A vague block of time passed, with various fussing and explanations. Most of it happened under bright lights. Strangers'
heads floated in and out of my field of vision. Flashes of hot and cold and relief and pressure happened at unannounced intervals, and finally I made it to my resting room. It was quiet there, and dark—such a relief, the lack of light—like a cool bath after a day in the desert. They'd wrapped my head in gauze, so I could only see from my left eye, and something must have gone wrong with my mouth because I had a rubber piece across my teeth and packing under my lips.

My shift nurse arrived. A sturdy blond woman in her forties, she had especially meaty forearms. Her motions felt rehearsed: she draped an extra blanket across my body, tutored me on the emergency call button, pointed out the location of the bathroom. She spoke in a singsong way that she might have assumed was soothing and carefree, but was actually difficult to follow. It quickly became aggravating.

As she rolled the Venetian blinds open, slats of pink sliced across her uniform. She looked like a giant candy cane. “What a wonderful sunset,” she sang, and gestured for me to take a look. But my one good eye was blind with pink and all I could do was shut it tight to keep out the burning. “So wonderful, sunsets,” she hummed to herself. “Would you like this kept open?”

“No,” I grunted through the packing and the dried blood and the rubber, then thought, Close the damn blinds.

“I'll leave them open for you,” she whispered, and exited the room.

Days later, my good eye worsened and the doctor rolled gauze across that too.

Natalie eventually came to visit. I could hear her voice in the room, but through the bandages she was only a vague form with blurry appendages moving around as she spoke. “We'll make it through this,” the blob said, “just like we always do.”

She was right; we did make it through. Ten days later, we drove home and continued to breathe and eat and sleep and work. But I think part of both of us also didn't make it through. A couple of months after my accident, Natalie moved out to live with her boyfriend Jake, and I was left to live in our childhood home by myself. She abandoned the part of her that didn't make it through and started a new life as a hardworking physician, wife, and soon-to-be mother. And the part of me that didn't make it through, well, I guess I was still looking for that.

The four bars on my phone are holding steady, finally, while my hands are anything but. I push speed-dial, but accidentally hit the wrong number. I slap it shut and open it again. The coverage bars flicker. I dial the half-house shape.

“Thank you for calling Oak Valley Medical,” the recording says. “All of our lines are busy right now, but we will get to you as soon as we can.”

Linda once pointed out that their office phone system doesn't allow them to see incoming numbers. So now I know the lines really are busy. I'm not being ignored, I'm just in line with everyone else who's trying to get hold of Natalie or one of the other eight physicians who share the office with her. So I should be feeling patient. All I need is thirty seconds. I just want to know what the CAT-scan results say. I just want a reason for the lilacs in my head—even though deep down, under the pink car-wash foam, the black-and-white cat, the visions of orange sunsets, and my blue Zoe bliss, I'm pretty sure I know the reason.

“There are four calls ahead of you,” the recording says.

The lilac swell is back; I have to lie down. I walk to my bedroom and stretch out on the bed, and listen to the orchestral Muzak pipe through the phone. The music reminds me of old-time silent movies, the kind my mom used to watch.

The lilac bushes were in the back, a long line of them that made up the property boundary. They'd grown high, about seven or eight feet, and those two weeks in May when they bloomed, it was really something. The air was heady with sweetness. You couldn't help but breathe deeper and more often to keep that scent in your head.

Mom and I were out cutting off clumps of lilac to put inside the house and we were doing this deep breathing to smell everything, and we both got a little light-headed, I think, because we weren't talking as much and she started laughing, which made me start to laugh, and soon we were laughing at our laughing, which led to more, and I remember reading somewhere that what the devil hates most is when families laugh together because that means they are full of love and hope and joy. And I thought, boy, Satan must be pissed right now, which made me laugh even harder. Finally we wound down and kept clipping lilacs, and I remember feeling a little dizzy. Once I got my head back, I looked over and saw Mom lying in the grass. “Mom?” I asked, and leaned down to her. “Mom, are you all right?” I asked as she lay still in the grass, staring up at the sky.

Rivulets of blood. That's what I remember thinking. A spy novel I read once described the heroine's gunshot wound this way, as it bled across her alabaster skin: tiny rivulets of blood. It was almost magical. But in real life, it just looked like a straight line of bright red color, plain and simple, from her nose to her cheek to the ground. I was afraid to touch her.

“Mom?” I asked again.

The orchestra music stops abruptly, followed by a few seconds of silence. I stand up to more actively wait for Linda or Natalie or anybody to answer. The coverage bars teeter and sway.

“There are two callers ahead of you,” the recording tells me in a cheery voice. The violins and cellos continue.

“Damn it,” I mutter, and kick the air. I come to my senses and realize I could've used the house phone line and avoided all this hassle, which only makes me more upset. But there is no way I'm hanging up now. “No way,” I say to myself in the dresser mirror, and give the dresser a little push with my foot.

I remember being in the hospital with Natalie when we found out Mom was never coming back. The two of us sat at a waiting-room table adjacent a window. Nat had just verbalized the reality of our new life without Mom, said something like “She's not coming back” or something more obvious, like “Mom is dead.” I don't remember the exact words because as she was saying them, the sun rose above the horizon, and that awkward first light of day filled the room with a heavy, yellow haze. Like something out of the movies. It bothered me when it happened like that, like a
manufactured scene. The new light as our old lives had passed. On to the next chapter in the book of life. That kind of shit. I just wanted to go home and sleep. We'd been there for hours and I knew she was dead the moment she dropped in front of the lilac bushes. All of this waiting around was for nothing.

“You are the next caller,” the recording cheers. “Someone should be with you shortly. Thank you for calling Oak Valley Medical.” The music drops out, followed by a series of queer electronic noises. I imagine an old-school switchboard operator weeding her way through a wall of impossibly tangled cords, searching for mine with one hand, unplugging someone else's with another. I stare into space, waiting for my connection. The odd sounds continue, and then something more familiar.

Click.

Ksssh
.

Dial tone.

“No,” I mutter, and start to smile. The absurdity of this is funny. But I'm not feeling funny, and I look up at the dresser mirror and find a way to express how I am feeling. My fist lights up in a blossom of pain. The shattering sound is exactly what I need.

I watch the tanks to keep my mind off the needle in my hand. Memorial Hospital was a good choice because it offers a wonderful distraction with its cable television, but round-the-clock coverage of the war is not helping my woozy stomach. Not to mention that the intern working me over can't be more than twelve years old. I know he needs to learn suturing sometime, but I'd prefer that it wasn't on my hand on this morning. The pressure of the needle is quickly replaced with a painless, tingling sensation, for which I'm grateful.

The doctor never told me his name, so I'll call him Chip. Chip is busy preparing instruments on his surgical tray: bright, metallic objects that smell of steel and alcohol. I can't watch.

I'm at Memorial instead of Oak Valley because showing up at Oak Valley with my hand bleeding would've been the perfect reason for Natalie to call a Section Eight on me. “I don't get it, so you were mad at your phone?” she would've asked. Linda would've rolled her eyes. Better that Natalie not know about it, so here I am.

Channel 42 is doing its best to entertain with highlights of a recent desert battle. Angry men in robes launch a makeshift artillery round from one mountain to another. It explodes out of
the barrel with ferocious velocity, screaming through the hot air. Moments later a puff of smoke flashes in the distance, a disappointing finish to them, as it inflicts no damage to the unseen enemy. The rebels seem tired with their latest attack. They rest behind a sandbag bunker and smoke cigarettes.

Chip tugs on my hand. He must be confusing the fine art of sutures with the yarn-loop picture he got from Grandma last Christmas.

“Easy, tiger,” I say.

Peripherally, I see him stealing glances to monitor my agitation level. He takes a deep breath and goes back in, just as a soldier on TV swings a metal detector across a sandy road. He gingerly steps forward and swings again. He does this swinging and stepping in all directions, his dog by his side.

“One more to go,” the boy-doctor ventures.

I hear the snip of his scissors. My face blanches. I try to swallow. My mouth is an arid wasteland. The mountain soldier drops another mortar round, steps back, and plugs his ears.

“Quite a fall you took,” Chip says.

Shut up and stitch, I say, but realize I'm only thinking it. He does the agitation check again and I feel the last tug, which is good timing because the battle is over and now there is only footage of anchor-desk reporters laughing at their own jokes, cracking themselves up, filling time until the producers say enough.

The Vicodin I've been prescribed has left me feeling soft and fuzzy. I've taken to napping on the living room couch. A voice breaks through my happy haze, distant and harsh, a police cruiser radio in miniature. “Sid,” it says, “I heard a rumor you're hitting mirrors again. Over.” I lift my head off the cushion, and half-wait for a tiny squad car to shoot across the living room like the chuck wagon in those old dog-food commercials. “Call me back to confirm. It's your sister.” I scramble off the couch and grab the receiver.

“Hey.”

“Oh you are there,” she says. “I was just leaving a message.”

“Yeah, I'm here.”

“So? What's this about hospital treatment? Are you all right?”

“Who told you that?” I ask, and look at my freshly bandaged hand. It still hurts if I clench my fist tight enough. “That's crazy talk.”

“I have my connections.”

“Hypothetically, if I did get hospital care, wouldn't that be a violation of patient privacy rights to share that information?”

 

“My old secretary Estelle told me she saw you in the waiting room. I put the rest together on my own.”

“Estelle, huh? You sure she's not your old office manager?”

“What?”

“Big difference between secretaries and office managers. Ask Linda.”

“So you did it again,” she says, expertly dodging my dodge.

Zero stands by the picture window, staring out at something in a tree.

“Animal attack,” I say.

“Mm-hm.”

“Rabid squirrels. It happens.”

“More jokes. That's good. Listen, I know you don't want to hear this, but I think you should see someone about your anger problem.”

“You think I'm angry?” I couldn't be feeling more relaxed and content. Maybe it's the pills.

“People don't punch mirrors because they feel breezy.”

“Who said I punched a mirror?”

“I'm not saying you need a shrink, Sid. I just think you need to relax. My friend Myna has a yoga class. You should check it out.”

“Is she a bird?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“They meet on Saturday afternoons at the top of Cherry Hill, overlooking the lake. You breathe, stretch, relax. How about I tell her you might be coming?”

I really don't have an excuse to avoid this one. I think I will take up her offer. How hard can breathing and sitting be? “Sure,” I say.

“I really think you should do this,” she argues. “I don't know what else to say.”

“I said yes. I'll go.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, why not.”

“I'm so glad to hear you say that.”

I can tell she is consciously keeping her scolding tone at bay for now. I have made a breakthrough and Dr. Nat is pleased.

“I think you'll like it,” she continues to coax. “Let me know how it goes.”

“You bet,” I say, and hang up before I can take it back. I'm so tempted to write this off as Nat's last-ditch effort before she decides to call an interventionist, but I actually feel pleased with the idea now that I've committed to it. Maybe some oxygen and Cherry Hill breathing is just what I need. If the mud and the car washes don't work, maybe there's something better up on the hill waiting for me. Or maybe it's the pain killers talking.