Emma Fleed danced alone. A vast stage. Shafts of light beamed against her body, warming her face and dazzling her sequined skirt. It was a ballet she did not remember learning, yet her body eased into the movements like it had known them all her life. Oddly, she heard no music, just a steady humming through her body, through the room. The audience was a red-black sea beyond the footlights. She rolled onto the boxes of her toe shoes, rose en pointe. Driving her toes into the floor, she steadied her ankles and flexed her calves and stretched out of her feet, arms above her head, until it felt like floating. Then she stepped and leapt, splitting her legs in the air, and landed with such lightness that only she could hear the soft thud of her slippers on the wood. She set, pirouetted, spotting a point beyond the lights. Rising and spinning, holding her head in perfect stillness before whipping around at the last possible second. Applause shook the room. Her center was holding. Her legs were strong. In this moment, she was exactly where she was meant to be.
Then she woke up. She squinted against stark white light. The air was cold, antiseptic.
She turned her ankles, one and then the other, and they were intact and yet something was not right. The world was not the world she went to sleep in. There was the ambient clatter of metal instruments, and a machine that measured something—possibly her heart—beeped randomly.
A silver-haired doctor—white coat, blue scrubs—approached her bed. A nurse followed, took Emma’s hand and flipped her wrist, pressed two fingers to her pulse and there was the strange urgency of her blood as it throbbed against this stranger’s skin.
The doctor peered into her face. His eyelids sagged, and pink webs fractured the whites of his eyes.
“Emma? Can you hear me?” He spoke like he was announcing something to the room. “This is Dr. Kopech. Do you know where you are?”
No, she did not. The last thing she remembered was lying down, the backseat of a moving car. A beat that shook her shoulders. Voices fighting above her. Hands moving under her skirt, or just the memory of hands, sliding under her underwear’s elastic seam, her head on someone’s lap and smells of laundry detergent and leather and beer. She was trying to be where she was but the world was falling from her, she was dropping through darkness and the music pulsing harder in her bones and all she wanted in her life was to be allowed to go to sleep. She was in the car with other people—friends or almost-friends—and now she wondered, What had happened to them?
Her mother appeared at the side of her bed. “Emma?” she said, stroking her hand as though afraid to break it. (A plastic tube snaked from the vein.) “Baby?” Her mother’s body was small and swaddled in deep-green pashmina. Her mascara washed to shadows at the edges of her eyes. The light showed every hairline wrinkle in her face. It sallowed her cheeks and forehead, the green emitting from the skin as if this was truth, what had always lain beneath.
Then her father was there, in faded plaid, tall, unshaven, on the other side. Unshaven, hunched over—he was not himself. She should comfort him.
The doctor squirted gel onto his palms—Emma swooned, for it reeked of alcohol, a familiar, sickening stench. He rested one palm on Emma’s shoulder and the hand was heavy, cold. “How are you feeling?”
She nodded because it was all she could do. She wanted to ask how much time had passed, but her lips didn’t have the energy, her tongue lay slack in her mouth. Her throat ached. Her head ached. Her feet under the starched sheets felt distant and strange.
Her dad lifted her hand and clasped it between his palms. His hands were big and hot and he was holding her too hard. She wanted to pull away but he kept squinting and not talking, so she didn’t. Her mom reached out and tucked Emma’s hair behind her ear. Emma flinched. She didn’t mean to. There were too many hands and she felt they had been everywhere, all over her body, while she had lain asleep.
The doctor made his speech. It went on and on without inflection, like something he’d rehearsed the night before. The ambulance had brought her in at 1:55 a.m. (Ambulance—she did not remember.) The CT showed internal bleeding, and they had operated in order to locate the source. (Surgery—she did not remember.) Her spleen had fractured, and they had made the repair; they did not know, yet, whether it would be necessary to remove it. (Spleen—she had seen an illustration in her physiology textbook: a purplish, pulpy organ filled with branching veins. It had something to do with blood, was that it?)