The beep works like a Bat-Signal, brings a nurse thundering through the swinging door. Her hair is bright orange, dreadlocked, and she’s wearing scrubs covered in superhero cartoons.
‘Good morning, sunshine.’ She flashes her pearly whites at me and all I want to do is ask her what’s good about it. I give it a second’s thought but can’t find the energy to rouse my inner ass.
Mom scoots back, and the nurse takes her place, hovering over me. The badge fixed to her ample bosom says Carmen. There’s a bottle of green sanitizer attached to the side of my bed. I watch her pump it several times until a string of clear liquid squirts from the nozzle. It goes white and turns to foam when it settles on her palms. She rubs it all over, just like I do, making sure to get all the hidden spots between her fingers. You’d be surprised at how much of your hand doesn’t get washed if you don’t spread your fingers. Then, to my horror, the nurse, a complete stranger, touches me. Without blinking, she reaches down the front of my hospital-issue gown and pulls something sticky off my chest.
‘Don’t think you’re going to be needing these any more,’ she says, her knuckle clipping the edge of my breast on the way back up. She saunters over to the trash can, drops the sticky things in it, and hits her hands with another squirt of sanitizer from a bottle hung by the door.
I look at Mom and know my face is pulled in all different directions when she winces.
‘Just take a deep breath,’ she whispers to me. The nurse comes back. Takes what looks like a pen from her pocket.
‘Look straight at that back wall for me, sweetheart,’ she says. Turns out the pen is not a pen but a flashlight. She illuminates the end and shines it in my eyes.
‘Okay. Well, that all looks good.’ Her nose wrinkles when she smiles at me. ‘I’ll go and chase down that prescription. And then hopefully we can get you back home before the day is out.’
‘Home,’ I repeat. The one place in the world where scary things couldn’t get me is no more. Home is a word that should conjure images of thatched cottages, flower beds, and white picket fences. All I see now is skeletons and shards of glass bejewelling my bleeding skin.
‘That’s right,’ the nurse replies. ‘There’s nothing like your own bed.’ She chuckles to herself as she exits the way she entered, in an emergency-type rush.
‘They caught him,’ Mom says, doing that thing where she reads my mind. ‘Luke called the police, and they managed to catch him while he was making a run for it. Is it okay that I’m telling you this?’
I think no, but say yes.
‘Ours wasn’t the first house he hit. The guy used his job to scout locations and seek out vulnerable people. He’s going to prison for a long time.’
I think she means for this to make me feel better, but I feel nothing.
Almost nothing.
‘Is Luke okay?’
‘Worried sick about you. He hasn’t stopped calling.’ She turns, points to a table in the corner of the room. It’s adorned with two big bunches of yellow and purple flowers. ‘And he keeps sending you daisies and carnations.’
The flowers are beautiful. I close my eyes, remember how tight he held me when I fell into him. I wish he were here.
‘I told him you’d call him as soon as you could.’ And I will.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking about,’ Mom says when the silence starts to stretch. She perches on my bed, reaches over and rubs circles on my hip.
‘I don’t even know.’ My brain feels like it’s trapped in a vice and every time I try to figure something out, it squeezes tighter and tighter around it.
The intruder. My injuries. Leaving the house. Having to stay in hospital. Taking sedatives. Strangers touching me. My plate is too full. I have mental indigestion. My life is on its ass. It’s a face in full shadow, a stranger at a bar, a reflection I don’t even recognize any more.
I’m being forced to challenge ideas that have kept me safe for so long. There’s an entire library of information in my head, and suddenly I can’t decide if any of it is worth reading.
‘Get some rest,’ Mom says, leaning forward and kissing my forehead. ‘We’ll get you through this. It’ll all be over soon. I promise.’
In Recovery
Back before the black-and-white pages of frightening reality were banned from our house, I went through this stage of reading non-fiction. Celebrity auto-biographies mostly, but there was this one rags-to-riches story about a woman named Audrey Clarke. Audrey owned a small grocery store in Brooklyn during the Great Depression.
As the misery of that decade rolled on and on and on, she ended up losing most of her store stock to looters. Debt collectors took what was left after that, including her clothes. By the time the Depression ended, she had no house and no business left.
She was sleeping in a neighbour’s toolshed when she turned to writing to fill her days. Her books were good. She made quite a bit of money from eager publishing houses in the end. Lived out her life in a very affluent neighbourhood, playing golf on the weekends and collecting classic cars.