I reached up with my right hand and wiped my mouth. I cringed. My lips had moved beyond chapped. It was like I’d run them through a cheese grater. Jesus, when is the last time I used some lip balm?
“Where’s the—” My brain scrambled to find the right word. “Health professional who was here? The, uh, caregiver.” That wasn’t right. “RN!” I spat out, but that wasn’t what I meant to say either.
“The nurse?” Dr. Ruckman suggested.
“Nurse,” I repeated. Nurse.
“Tish works evenings. She’ll be back at three. She’ll be glad to hear you’re more alert.” The doctor was scribbling something on a chart.
I licked my disgusting mouth. I bet when Tish came on she’d find me some ChapStick. She looked like the kind of person who would have an extra tube in her bag, along with gum, Kleenex, or an Advil if you had a headache. I felt like crying, but I wasn’t sure if it was because everything hurt, because I wanted more water so badly, or because I was scared and didn’t know why.
“Do you know what day it is?” Dr. Ruckman asked.
I opened my mouth to answer and then closed it. What day was it? They must have given me some kind of painkiller that was messing with my head. “Tuesday?” I could tell from his look I’d gotten it wrong. “Wednesday?” A buzzing sound filled my ears, like my head was full of angry bees. I wanted to get out of the bed and run away, but I suspected my legs wouldn’t carry me far.
“Take a deep breath. You’re okay,” Dr. Ruckman said. He patted my shoulder like I was a puppy who was at risk of peeing on the rug because someone had set off a bunch of firecrackers.
I shrugged off his hand. Clearly I wasn’t okay. I didn’t even know what day it was. The door squeaked as it opened, and when I looked over, I knew I was in really bad shape. My parents were there.
Both of them.
I hadn’t seen them together in same room in years. They hated each other. They didn’t even try to pretend to get along “for the sake of the child.” Now they were standing side by side.
My mom gasped when she saw me sitting up in bed.
“Mommy,” I said, and started to cry. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d called her Mommy, but it had slipped out. It felt so good to see her, like she could still make everything better by giving me a kiss. She pushed past Dr. Ruckman and pulled me to her chest. Her familiar smell, a Jo Malone perfume, a mix of lavender and amber, filled my head, and I buried my face in her sweater, crying harder.
“Shhh, baby. You’re okay,” she mumbled into my hair. I could feel the moist heat from her breath, and I wanted to crawl out of the bed and into her lap like I was six and afraid of something under the bed. She started to gently pry my fingers off her cardigan. “You need to calm down, Jill. It’s not good for you to be worked up.” She held my right hand sandwiched between hers.
“Hey, kiddo,” Dad said. He squeezed my foot. I could see him swallowing over and over, like he was about to start crying himself. There was no sign of his new wife and the replacements. My stepbrothers. Twins, no less. My stepmom insisted on dressing them alike, as if they’d just popped off a Ralph Lauren billboard. When they were around, I acted like I couldn’t tell them apart. Mostly because I knew it drove her nuts.
I took a hitching breath and tried to pull myself together. Mom passed me a tissue, and I wiped my nose. Dad pulled a chair closer to the bed for her, and she sat next to me, all without letting go of my hand. He stood right behind her.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You were in a car accident,” Mom said. Her lower lip shook.
I waited for her words to wake something up in me, but there was still nothing, just a void.
“Do you remember the accident, Jill?” Dr. Ruckman had his pen poised over the chart.
They stared at me intently. “I think so,” I lied. How could I not remember? An accident so serious I’d ended up in a hospital. No way was I admitting the huge gap in my memory. “I remember tires squealing and glass breaking,” I added, figuring that was general enough to cover all the bases.
Mom squeezed my hand. Her expression was brittle. The accident must have been really bad. I hoped the car wasn’t totaled. My dad wasn’t exactly generous with child support, and she didn’t make that much at her job. She loved that stupid Mercedes, even though it was ten years old.
“What’s the last thing you remember well?” Dr. Ruckman clicked his ballpoint pen. On off, on off, on off. It was making my headache worse.
I fished about, trying to remember something that stood out clearly. Then it came to me in a flash. “I remember being over at Simone’s. Tara was there too. We were celebrating the end of the play. We did Grease. Simone was Sandy.” It was all really vivid. I felt the band of tension around my chest loosen as the memories flooded in. The feel of the worn corduroy sofa in her family rec room. Simone standing on the cracked faux leather ottoman singing “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee” at the top of her lungs while doing a bump-and-grind number. Tara and me laughing so hard I’d been sure I’d pee my pants. “We sold out all of the performances. Everyone came.” I glanced over at my dad. “Almost everyone.”
He looked away. The show had run for four nights, and he couldn’t manage to make a single one. The replacements had a cold.
Simone, Tara, and I had lounged around, dissecting everyone else’s performance. I left out the part about how we toasted our victory with some of Simone’s dad’s beer that we stole from the fridge in the garage. I was almost sure I had planned to spend the night. I remembered wearing sweats. My stomach clenched. I wouldn’t have driven drunk. I was capable of doing stupid things, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have done anything that dumb.
“How long have I been out?”
“Your accident was just over three days ago, Thursday. This is Sunday morning,” Dr. Ruckman said. “What you’re experiencing is retrograde amnesia. It means you forgot not only the accident, but some time before and after too. It’s pretty common with head injuries. That’s also why you’re having some trouble with word finding. It’s called aphasia. I would expect both of these to get better with some time. Do you remember the ambulance?”
“No,” I said.
“How about the flight?”
I blinked. I could understand the words he was saying, but it was almost as if he were speaking a different language. They must have flown me to a bigger hospital, maybe in Detroit. There was a sense that I did remember something about flying, but when I reached for it, it skittered out of reach. Like a spider bolting for a corner. Gone.
“It’s okay if you don’t recall. You’ve been in and out since you were brought here. Your Glasgow scale score—that’s how we measure the impact of a head injury—was pretty low, but you’ve been doing well, coming up and out of it.”
“What’s a perfect score?” I asked.
“Fifteen,” he said.
“What am I?”
“Today I’d say you were a fourteen or fifteen.” Dr. Ruckman smiled.