For a single moment, it all shifted into slow motion.
I noticed the two city women had never left the wildflower stand. One clutched the other, and they stood with their hands over their mouths. I noticed the family talking to the cops over by the willow tree.
I reached up and felt the blood seeping out of my head.
The blood from my head gash felt sticky, more like Jell-O than juice. The paramedic pulled out my ponytail holder and released a matted knot of hair. They covered me with a thin white blanket, and I fell in and out of sleep.
“Sadie, I’m going to need you to wake up.” The words floated somewhere beyond the deep, pulsing pain in my head and my back. I looked up, only for a second, and saw a woman’s face, blue eyes with deep half-moon bags underneath.
“What’s up?” My mouth tasted like metal and dried leaves.
Every time I fell asleep, somebody bothered me awake.
“Sunshine, it’s Daddy.” I opened my eyes, strained hard to keep them open. Dad’s face hovered above mine, his gray eyes ringed in red. He forced a smile.
“What’s wrong, Dad?” The pain tore through my side. “Ow. My back.”
Mom appeared from behind Dad and took my hand. Her hand was freezing.
“Sadie, you’ve got some injuries from the incident back at the farm stand. I don’t know how much you remember, but it doesn’t matter. You’re okay, sweetie.” Mom’s voice sounded like it was echoing through a tunnel.
“Can you turn the lights off?” I said as they wheeled me toward the CT scanner. My head hurt more than anything else, like a terrible, unrelenting, migrating toothache.
A guy in green scrubs tried to talk about normal things as he searched for a vein plump enough to stick a needle into.
“Do you know what happened to the baby? In the car?” I asked him.
“No, dear, I don’t. I’ll try to find out.”
“I need to use the bathroom,” I said.
I had a concussion and a deep monster of a gash on the side of my head. A doctor with the voice of a radio DJ talked to my parents behind the curtain. “Sadie has two fractured ribs, displaced inward. There’s some blood around the spleen, but I don’t think we’re going to need to intervene surgically. We’ll keep her here for observation.”
I fell asleep again.
A nurse shined a bright light into my face.
“Hi, Sadie. I’m blah, blah, blah.” I didn’t hear what the nurse was saying.
“I can’t breathe.”
The panic rose up toward my throat. “I can’t breathe!” I yelled.
“You can breathe, Sadie. It’s just uncomfortable.” She held up a plastic thing with a thick tube hanging out of it. “I need you to suck air through this tube every few minutes. It’s going to hurt. But just breathe through the pain. This will prevent you from getting pneumonia.”
I sucked air from the tube while my parents hovered over me, trying not to lose their shit.
A newswoman wanted to interview me from my hospital bed, but Woody the ice cream man told her to Please get the hell out. I was still in and out of sleep the next morning, still breathing into the plastic thing, waking for vital signs and questions about what number my pain was on a scale from one to ten. The pain traveled from my side to my shoulders to deep inside my head to my badly skinned knees.
I hadn’t eaten in a day and a half, but I wasn’t hungry. The doctor wanted me to get up and pee on my own. A new nurse with a platinum-blond weave kicked out my parents so she could remove the catheter and walk me to the bathroom.
“It’s burning,” I said to the nurse, who stood in front of me while I tried to pee. I took small, shallow breaths to avoid the searing rib pain.
As the nurse helped me up, I glanced down at the plastic tub attached to the toilet seat. It was full of blood.
“Um. Okaaaaay. Uh.” I froze and studied her face, wondering if I was dying.
“It’s totally normal with a spleen injury,” she said, helping me to bed.
I had no idea what a spleen was.
Dad talked loudly on the phone in the hallway, and I tried to shush him but my breath was too shallow to make sounds. Mom worried I might get addicted to the painkillers. My grandmothers prayed to Jesus and Allah in the waiting room. They wandered in periodically to make sure I had enough blankets. At some point, I was awake enough to check my phone. I had hundreds of texts. From Shay. From Seth. From the seniors. Daniela. Some of the people in my class.
Shay had taken it upon herself to organize a get-well origami-crane project, so people were texting me images of badly made origami cranes while I tried to piece together what had happened. I remembered it in fragments: the man barreling through the farm stand, the liquor breath, and the baby girl.
The baby girl.
I couldn’t get her terrified, wailing little face out of my head.
A woman named Officer Estrada sat in the upholstered chair and asked me questions. Her pinched face and irritated tone coupled with Mom’s “Think, sweetie. Tell her exactly what happened” paralyzed me.
“Can you tell me what’s going on with the baby?” I stared blankly at the officer.
“I’m not at liberty to talk about the case,” she said.
“Aren’t we talking about the case?” I said, confused.
Finally, Dad had the doctor kick Officer Estrada out.
After a liter of water, my second attempt at peeing was more successful. I winced as I leaned forward to try to wash my hands. That’s when I saw my face in the mirror. I had a blue-black jellyfish-shaped tumor spilling out around the tight white bandage. It looked like my eyes had been hollowed out and smeared with wet charcoal.
I smiled. It hurt to move my face, but I still had all my teeth. And for that, I was grateful.
THREE
WHEN THEY FINALLY released me, I slumped in the wheelchair while an aide paraded me through the brightly lit hallways and into an elevator, where a couple tried not to stare. Mom carried my plastic breathing thing and my blood-spattered shoes. Dad ran ahead to get the car, which my grandmothers had already filled with the get-well flowers.
The wait in front of the hospital, in the heat and bright sunshine, made me nauseated. I started to dry heave, and the guy pushing the wheelchair handed me a pink barf bucket. I had never felt so awful.
That was when a woman came out of nowhere and took my picture.
“Do you need me to come home? Because you know I will,” Shay said. She called or texted me hourly. “I feel so bad I’m not there.”
“I’m okay. Just sore. It’s not like you could do anything if you came home. I’m sitting around with ice on my ribs, trying to take deep breaths and listening to my mother tell the story to the relatives over and over again. If you want to help, send me really good noise-canceling earbuds.”
“Do you like the cranes?”