I did keep wondering where Chip was, though.
In truth, I wasn’t feeling anything yet—at least, when my mother wasn’t around. It was like my emotions had gone offline. It was like I wasn’t fully there. Things were happening around and to me, and there was pain, discomfort, exhaustion, but it was like I was witnessing it rather than experiencing it. I was across the room, watching somebody else’s life unfold, and not even fully paying attention. Even if I’d tried, I suspected, I couldn’t make sense of the pieces and how they fit together. There was no story of what was happening. I took each moment as separate from the others and did not try to piece together what those moments meant or where they were headed.
This was probably some kind of feature of emotional shock. I’m sure it had a protective quality: my brain just refusing to grasp what it knew it couldn’t handle. But as the pieces of my situation came together, I received them all with detached interest. Like, “Oh? My face is burned? Huh.” And, “I can’t use my legs right now? Okay.” And, “My mother is going to town on my hospital room like Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment? It is actually kind of nicer now.”
No understanding at all that my life would never quite be the same.
Until I fell asleep.
The worst thing about sleeping, after something terrible happens, is that sleeping makes you forget. Which is fine, until you wake up. That night, I had my first nightmare about the crash, and in the dream, I was the pilot—in a wedding dress with a veil—and I steered us straight for the ground at full speed, sure to kill us both, as Chip shouted, “Pull up! Pull up!” But the controls were stuck. I woke just before we hit, breathing hard, tears from nowhere all over my face, thinking, Thank God, thank God. We didn’t crash.
But we did crash.
The dream receded and I was left alone in the dark with real life—which was worse, by far—my heart pounding with panic, my eyes wide. I stared at the ceiling and tried to take deep breaths—but they were great, heaving, scraping ones instead of anything close to calming. I hadn’t died, I kept telling myself.
But what if this was worse?
Now I tried to put the pieces together—but I couldn’t. My life as I knew it was over, and that was more than enough to keep me awake all night. I didn’t know what was left, or what to expect, or what it might be possible to hope for. I lay there in the dark, breathing deep, terrified breaths for endless hours. I thought about calling the nurse, but what could she do? I needed to talk to someone, but who could I even talk to? My brain raced and spun and searched for avenues of comfort—but there were none. And, for several endless, black hours, through the deepest part of that night, I fought to keep from drowning as comprehension breached the hull of my consciousness and filled it to the top.
Five
I WAS STILL awake at 6:00 A.M. when Nina the nurse and a tech came to turn me.
I was so immobile at that point that I still ran the risk of bedsores. They flipped on all the lights and talked to me about the traffic and the weather as if nothing had changed in the world. They gave me pain meds, and changed the bandage on my donor sites, and smeared the burns with Silvadene ointment using a spatula. They were almost aggressively cheerful and jocular with each other and with me. Nina liked to call me “lady”—like, “Hey, lady, how’d you sleep?”
I didn’t know how to begin.
“You start OT and PT today,” she went on. “In the rehab gym.”
“What’s the difference?”
She was fussing with my chart on the computer. “OT is like working on day-to-day tasks, and PT is like strength training.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You’ve got Priya for OT, and—uh-oh.”
That got my attention. “What?”
“There’s a mistake here.”
“What mistake?”
“They gave you the wrong PT. I’ll talk to them.”
I started to ask “What’s the wrong PT?” but before I could, the door pushed open and Chip stumbled in.
We all stared. His blond hair looked greasy. His face was covered in stubble. His polo shirt had a brown stain—Soy sauce? Worcestershire? Blood?—all down the front, and his pants were ripped. One of his shoes was untied.
He made straight for me and shoved his face down on top of mine in a slobbery kiss that tasted like beer. And dirt. And sleep deprivation.
I held my breath until he finished, and as I did, I realized what this moment was: a simple, clear, all-purpose answer to that question I kept asking.
Where was Chip? At a bar.
I pushed him off. “Are you drunk?”
Chip blinked at the question. “I think so. Probably.”
“It’s six in the morning.”
But he was studying my face. “You used to be so beautiful—and now you look like a pizza.” He made himself laugh with that one, and Nina and I stared as he doubled over for a second and hung from his waist, his shoulder shaking with chuckles. Then he stood up. “But I just kissed you anyway! Because you”—here, he held up an imaginary glass for a toast—“are the love of my life.”
I looked over at Nina, who lifted her eyebrows to see if she needed to stay.
I waved, like, No big deal. “I’ve got it.” Whatever he was about to say, I certainly didn’t want her hearing it. I didn’t even want to hear it myself.
Nina set the nurse buzzer next to my hand before going. “Call if you need me.”
I turned back to Chip. “Where have you been, Chip? I’ve been waiting for you.”
I hated the way my voice sounded. I’d learned many boyfriends back that desperation never works. You can’t ask someone to love you or be there for you or do the right thing—and you certainly can’t guilt them into it. Either they will or they won’t. I’d have sworn that Chip was a guy who would—up until the crash, at least.
Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.
“Do you know I escaped that crash without a scratch?” Chip said then. “The plane is totaled. You”—he let out a bitter honk of a laugh—“are totaled. But me? Nothing. I didn’t even get a Band-Aid.”
“Chip, what are you doing?”
At the question, he crumpled down beside the bed—literally fell to his knees on the hospital floor, his hands in fists around the bedrails—and he broke into sobs.
It was a shocking sight. I’d never seen him—or any guy—cry like that. My father never cried. He got wet eyes at funerals sometimes, but always quietly, stoically—nothing like this. This was shoulder-shaking, full-body sobbing. I poked my hand through the bars and stroked Chip’s hair.
“Hey,” I said, after a while, as he started to quiet. “Maybe you should go home and get some sleep.”
“I can’t sleep,” he insisted. “I don’t sleep anymore.”
I made my voice tender. “I bet you could, if you tried.”
He broke away—pushed off from the bed and paced to the far wall. “Don’t be so nice to me.”
“You’re overwhelmed. You need some rest.”
Now he was mad. “Don’t tell me what I need!”
“Chip,” I said. “It was an accident.”
But that just made him madder. He stared straight at me. “I ruined your life.”
“You didn’t. It was the weather! It was the wind!”
“You’re blaming the wind?”
But who else could I blame?
“You’re better at self-delusion than I thought. Have you seen yourself? Have you seen your face?”
I hadn’t, actually. My mother had covered the mirror in the bathroom with a pillowcase. Not that I could have stood up to see into it anyway.
“You’re like something out of a horror movie! Because of me! I did that.”
Wow. Okay. “The doctor said there’d be minimal scarring.”
“Not on your neck. Those are third-degree burns. They’re never going to heal right. They will look like Silly Putty until your dying day. You’ve got me to thank for that—me and my ego and my insecurities—” He shoved his hand into his hair. He looked a little green, like the alcohol was catching up with him.