This she heard clearly, in her right ear. Waking up from what? What was happening?
The warm cotton of heavy sleep began to flow through her. She recognized the feeling, a brief moment of clarity. She’d had anesthesia once before. And as she began to be cognizant of that thought, the darkness overwhelmed her.
? ? ?
Later.
Long, low beeps. Daisy could hear them clearly, getting louder and louder. The hiss of air. Her chest—oh, the pain was unbearable.
She opened her eyes. She couldn’t move her head. The feelings of claustrophobia returned; she saw Tom leaning over her.
“Oh, Daisy. Honey. Thank God. Nurse!”
Thank God for what? Tom’s face disappeared, replaced by whiteness, intense and harsh, so bright it made her reflexively shut her eyes. She tried to sit up and saw red. The pain was immediate, flaring into her brain. She stopped moving, just clenched her teeth together, prayed for it all to end.
“Daisy?”
She opened her eyes. Tom’s face was back, wavering above her.
“Baby, you were in an accident. Do you remember?”
An accident? She didn’t remember anything. She tried to shake her head, to say no, but nothing worked.
A brown-skinned sloe-eyed woman appeared. A genie. She looked like a genie. Where was her bottle?
“Daisy, I’m Rasha. I’m your nurse. You have a tube down your throat to help you breathe. You have sustained several injuries, including a broken sternum and some cracked vertebrae in your neck. You’re in a halo, to keep your head still. You’re going to be very sore, so I want you to tell me, on a scale of one to ten, how badly you hurt. So blink for me, sweetie. Blink for how badly you hurt on a scale of one to ten.”
Daisy fluttered her eyes as quickly as she could.
“Wow, okay. Let me get you some relief here.”
She couldn’t see what was happening, but within moments her body was flooded with liquid gold, warm and soft as cashmere in her bones. She tried to take a deep breath, a reflex reaction to the soothing relief she felt, but couldn’t.
It didn’t matter anymore. A gentle darkness surrounded her, carried her away.
? ? ?
The sun was coming through the blinds. Daisy could feel the shift, that instant when she knew she was awake. There was a brief, intoxicating moment while she forgot what was happening. Reality crept back in, and the pain began.
It burned and ached and simmered in her chest. Each breath was agony.
But pain was her companion. It told her she was alive.
Tom stood nearby; she could smell his fear and sweat over the antiseptic coldness of the room. The nurse, Rasha, offered more meds, but Daisy blinked once for no. She wanted to know what was going on. Where she was. What had happened.
Using only her eyes, she looked left and right and left and right, trying to communicate something, anything, so they’d know she wanted to hear about why she was here and what the hell was going on.
Tom asked her a few inane questions: “Do you have to pee? Go ahead, you have a catheter. Do you want a drink? You can’t have one, I know your mouth must be dry, but they’re giving you fluids. Do you hurt? Of course you hurt, that was stupid of me. What do you want, sweetheart?”
She shut her eyes and kept them closed. Amazing, even drugged and broken, she could still get annoyed with the man. He never had understood her.
She opened her eyes again and frowned at him.
“I don’t know what she wants,” he said, voice needy with helplessness.
A voice that made Daisy’s blood pressure tick up several notches answered. “Let me try.”
Tom’s face was replaced by the curly-haired bitch who’d gotten Josh killed.
Aubrey.
If Daisy could only raise her arms, she’d scratch her eyes out.
“Daisy,” Aubrey started in a soothing discoursing-with-the--inmates tone, “you’ve been in an accident. You drove your car into my house. You’re hurt badly, you’re in intensive care. They’ve done surgery to put you back together. Your neck was broken, they fused the vertebrae together, so you have to stay in the halo for a while. It’s screwed in, so you won’t be able to turn your head. And your sternum had a crack in it. They need to keep you as immobile as possible for the time being while things start to knit back together. Blink twice if you understand.”
As much as she didn’t want to obey the little wretch, she was more starved for information, so she blinked slowly, once, twice.
“Good. They’re going to keep you sedated until things are calmed down. You’ve given everyone quite the scare, Daisy. It’s going to be a rough few days, but they think they’ll be able to take you off the ventilator soon. And then you’ll be able to talk.”
Something in Aubrey’s eyes actually telegraphed concern. Daisy blinked twice.