It Was Always You

by Sarah K Stephens

  The Twitterverse, as it were, seemed to not care about our debate, but Annie and I had had fun all the same.

  What r u doing?

  Annie’s reply comes back a minute later.

  Sorry, just making dinner ;) / Stir-fry and skittles tonight

  I write back, but as I do so I notice the glow from my phone is casting itself on Justin’s face. I check, but Justin is still sleeping soundly on his side, although his breathing seems shallower. I shift the light of my screen down, careful not to wake him up.

  Sounds yummy

  There’s a brief pause, the dots moving on Annie’s side, and then disappearing, and then starting again.

  So you guys talked? About everything?

  I think back to my conversation with Annie. Her assurance that Justin would love me, no matter what slippery dark things lurked around in my past.

  And then I think what it would mean to never tell him any of it.

  Yeah, we did. You were right.

  Texting makes lying to your best friend so much easier.

  I’m always right. Get used to it.

  I don’t text back. For a moment, I can’t.

  A few breaths later my phone lights up.

  Luv u she writes.

  Luv u too / gnight

  I hit send before I add something snarky to lessen the weight of it all.

  I click off, turn my phone over, and go to spoon myself into Justin’s arms. Except that his arms are stretched out in front of him now and I can only manage to touch his left arm with my fingertips. The rest of his body is too far away for me to hold. A shiver runs through me, and guilt seeps in. I resolve to tell Justin everything in the morning. All the pieces of my past I’ve left out.

  The next morning, though, I wake to Justin looking intently at my face.

  “Let’s go away together,” he says. “Let’s leave today, just for the weekend.”

  My mind is still on the edge of sleep, but the words are there, willing to be true.

  I’m. Not. Broken.

  15

  AFTER

  I think I’m awake, but I can’t open my eyes. They are swollen, or glued shut somehow from sleep. Or is there a bandage over them? My mind is awake at least, and my impulse, when I can’t open my eyes, is to reach my hand out to touch Justin. Or Annie. But instead my hand won’t move beyond what feels like some horrid claw.

  My mind whirs itself further into life, and I swear that if someone had the MRI scanning me right now they’d see my hippocampus stutter into action. Because I can remember it all. The accident, Justin’s face unreadable, my hand on the wheel over his as I try to save us, the sickening squeal as metal collides with wood, collides with soft tissue and bone. And something later on. A rustling outside the car that sits around the edges of my consciousness.

  That voice, inside my head.

  My heart falls deeper into my chest when I think of Justin unbuckling his seat belt. Deliberate and steady in that motion, despite the chaos swirling around us.

  “Where is he?” I try to ask, but there are tubes connected to my nose and gauze packs my cheeks. My tongue is desperately dry and feels swollen and brittle at the same time. I can’t seem to move it without feeling a thousand pinpricks of pain. I’ll learn later that my mouth was full of windshield glass where it fell while I was screaming. They’d had to pick out the pieces, one at a time.

  I can’t be alone, because I feel hands on me now, gentle and soft, which I recognize later is partly due to the rubber gloves everyone wears before they’ll touch me.

  “Ah, let’s get these off, now. I can see they’re making you skittish.”

  It’s a woman’s voice, and sounds vaguely Irish, which isn’t something you often hear in Youngstown. Most of our immigrants came a few generations back, at least.

  My eyes start to focus, and the dimmed lights of the room I am in come through the haze of my vision.

  “We put this on to keep the swelling down, but it seems to have slipped while you were sleeping.”

  I can still feel a stickiness in my eyes, and think for a moment it’s dried blood, but after removing the covering bandages the nurse dabs at the corners of my eyes with a wet piece of gauze and the cloth is barely streaked with dull yellows and beiges. No blood, dried or otherwise, I determine.

  “Airbags didn’t deploy, apparently.” She says this conspiratorially, as if I’m not supposed to know this piece of the puzzle.

  I start to ask again about Justin, but my nurse—I’d glimpsed the name “Deborah” on her uniform as she turned away from me—is bustling about with a tray near my bed, clanging instruments and unwinding what looks like gauze from a large roll that’s just emerged from a ripped paper packet.

  “Ah,” the nurse says as she leans over my prone body, her rather voluminous breasts pressing against my arm as she tries to adjust other bandages that blanket my head and neck. I want to reach up and touch my scalp, wondering in an unconscious act of vanity if they’ve had to shave my head, but she clucks her tongue in disapproval and gently presses my arm down with her left hand. “There we are. Best not be touching these, now. Listen to Nurse Debbie and you’ll be right as rain soon enough.”

  I try to make eye contact with her, but I hear the door to my room gasp open and she’s already moving away from my bed.

  “Dr. Holdren, how are you?” Nurse Debbie inquires of the slim blond woman who’s just entered.

  “Don’t worry about me, nurse,” Dr. Holdren says, a bite to her tone. “How’s our patient?”

  I turn my head towards my doctor and try to catch her eye and explain that I can’t seem to talk, but her eyes are drawn to the chart that sits in a basket at the foot of my bed. Even after she raises her eyes they train themselves on the blipping machines surrounding me, rather than on my body.

  I make a noise somewhere between a grunt and a cough, and then again, until finally Dr. Holdren turns her gaze over to me.

  “Please don’t try to talk,” she says, and goes on to explain about the glass she extracted from my tongue last night. “You’ve encountered severe head trauma, internal bleeding, three broken ribs, and various abrasions and bruising. Overall, I’d say you were very, very lucky. But you must be gentle in your recovery, and no talking until I do a full examination of you, including the wounds to your mouth.”

  I sit dumbfounded. Why is no one talking about Justin?

  Dr. Holdren puts her hands to my neck, just beneath my chin, and begins to press her fingertips against my skin, with the boundary of her gloves’ latex between us. I wait like a docile child, which was never my style even when I was a child, as she moves her hands and her eyes down the vertebrae of my neck. She examines the cuts and bruising to my arms and legs, murmuring to herself or perhaps to Nurse Debbie—who waits nearby, chart and pen in hand—and I breathe obediently when Dr. Holdren tells me to, her stethoscope pressed to my chest, and then again when the cold metal disk touches my back.

  Finally, after what seems to be an eternity of prodding, she asks me to open my mouth and extends a wooden tongue depressor to the right side of my cheek first, followed by my left. Her face is so close to me that I see the line of makeup foundation she’s left between her forehead and her hairline, the two tones of beige just not quite matching. And I’ll admit, as she manipulates my body like a doll, seeing this small imperfection in her makes me feel a spark of power inside the deep hole of fear that’s been growing inside me since I woke up.

  Dr. Holdren pulls away, apparently satisfied with my current physical state, and murmurs something else to Nurse Debbie, who promptly scribbles into my chart. Looking at me, Dr. Holdren offers a wan smile.

  “You seem to be in one piece. The wounds inside your mouth should heal nicely and I haven’t found any remnants of glass remaining, which is a testament to the surgical team on duty when you came in.”

  I nod as emphatically as possible, trying to express my gratitude, and hoping that this will speed along the process of my being permitted t
o ask where Justin is.

  Dr. Holdren moves away from the bed and towards the door to my room, and I realize that she’s done with me for now. I lurch forward, focusing my brain on every single muscle in my mouth as I try to get them to work together to make the words I need to say.

  “Wah ’bou Jushin?” I manage to push out past the swelling in my tongue and cheeks.

  My doctor turns, her blond hair brushing over her right shoulder in a waterfall of honey-colored highlights. “What’s that?”

  She’s asking Nurse Debbie, not me.

  “She wants to know about her boyfriend,” Debbie answers, and then gives what seems to be a meaningful look. “The man in the car accident.”

  I watch a mask go down over Dr. Holdren’s face as Debbie’s words register. The corners of her mouth inch towards her chin and her eyes narrow into a look of tense annoyance.

  “He’s not my patient,” she replies, before heading through the door and on to the next poor soul awaiting her care. “Anyway, he’s not a family member.”

  I see starbursts in front of my eyes, and I don’t know if they’re from the head trauma Dr. Holdren has just described, or from the intense anger pumping through me like adrenaline. Poor Debbie is left with me, and I am done with this shit. I sit up in bed, my balance swimming a little as I find my level, and shift my torso close to Nurse Debbie’s position at the foot of my bed. Tubes and medical tape pull against my skin, the one connected to my nose becoming detached. A machine beeps frantically.

  My face is as close to Nurse Debbie as I can get. As I start to speak, tears of frustration and fear, and whatever else my body is churning up inside, begin rushing down my cheeks in an unfamiliar torrent, and the words I’m saying dissolve even further into an incomprehensible blather. It hurts to feel my shoulders shaking up and down, and the pain in my ribs is so intense I think I might actually pass out, but I can’t stop crying.

  Dr. Koftura’s words come back to me. You deserve to be loved.

  Through the blur of my tears I make out my nurse’s eyes, nose, mouth, and if there is an opposite to Dr. Holdren’s resting-asshole-face, then that is what Nurse Debbie looks like.

  “There, there, little one,” she says, and her hand, still swathed in the gloves she has not taken off, comes to rest gently on my back. Her touch feels entirely different from Dr. Holdren’s, and I’m so relieved to have just the smallest bit of compassion that I don’t even knee-jerk grimace at her endearment.

  I am like putty at this point, so physically and emotionally drained that I mold to her every suggestion, and willingly let her nestle me back onto my bed and replace the tube in my nose. Nurse Debbie moves away from my bed, but as I start to protest she gives me a soft look and indicates the chair sitting next to what must be the bathroom door. She pulls the chair over in one swoosh of her strong arms and settles herself into it next to my bed.

  I watch her adjust her smock, and twist her wedding ring around her finger twice. She smooths the blanket where it’s bunched up next to my knees.

  She is going to tell me.

  I know it will not be what I am hoping to hear.

  Finally she looks up at me, and her blue eyes are almost like Justin’s, wide and swimming.

  “Justin is dead, love.”

  My hand on top of his. Steering us towards safety.

  I thought.

  My chest rips open. I clutch at the hole in my body I’m sure that Nurse Debbie can see growing, and growing.

  But if she can, she doesn’t make any sign. Instead she says, “I’ll stay here with you if you want.” And she holds my hand in hers, the rubber glove finally stripped away.

  16

  I must eventually have slept, because when I wake up Nurse Debbie is gone and I’m alone in my room. A machine glows with a green haze that colors the room, and since there is no clock I have no idea what time of day it is. The light coming through the partially closed blinds of the one window is anemic, like it always is this time of year, and there’s no way for me to tell from the sun whether it is morning, twilight, or already the next day.

  There’s a tray next to my bed with pink plastic covers, hiding, what I assume, is some sort of meal. I shift my body weight over towards the tray, hoping that whatever beige wonders are hiding underneath might give me a clue about the approximate time of day, but my ribs shriek in pain as I do so, and I fall back against my pillows.

  For once in my life I’m not hungry.

  And then I remember, like a freight train crashing into my brain, still fuzzy from drug-induced sleep.

  Justin is dead.

  Dead.

  I see his face—not the face of the Justin I first met, when we traded jabs about the drollness of Chomsky, or his face when he’d bring a cup of tea for me in the morning after we’d spent the night together. It’s his face as he hit the accelerator, my car shrieking into the hulking mass of that ancient tree.

  The face of a stranger.

  What happened?

  The pain is so intense I want to shed my skin and become someone else.

  I think back to our fight earlier this week, and the nasty things I’d called him. “Liar.” “Fraud.” Is that why he did this? Why he wanted to hurt himself?

  Or both of us?

  No. The answer surges up from my gut with such force it knocks the breath out of me. We were happy. We were in love.

  None of this makes sense.

  Something scratches at the back of my brain.

  It’s there, lurking after the shattered glass and the squeal of metal. I reach for it—try to hold on—but I can’t. The hole in my memory after impact is like a cut filmstrip. Just a black nothingness.

  Not again.

  I want to scream, and I start to open my mouth in an expression of sheer grief and frustration, when someone else—in fact two people—come through my hospital room door, tailed by Dr. Holdren, who’s wearing a different set of earrings and a fresh shirt from the last time I saw her.

  At least one day has passed. If not more.

  The room is full of women now, and it’s clear to me from the start that my two new visitors are not medical staff. The first, a squat woman with a short brunette crop and huge hoop earrings, wears a leather jacket that seems to be more of a blazer, jeans, and a white button-down shirt. Her partner, because I’m assuming, given the gun holster I see on the hips of both women beneath their business casual attire that they are law enforcement officers in some capacity, is tall and willowy, with high cheekbones and with her hair in miniature braids that are pulled back into a chignon at the nape of her neck.

  The tall one speaks first.

  “Ms. Kalson, I’m Detective Ormoran and this is Detective Miller.” She gestures to the brunette, who gives me the tip of her chin and an aloof stare. Detective Ormoran’s voice is lilting and honey-toned.

  Even in the state I’m in, I make a note that she’s the good cop in this duo.

  Detective Ormoran goes on, “I believe you’ve already met Dr. Holdren. She says we can come and talk to you for a few minutes, if that’s alright. . .”

  Dr. Holdren cuts her off. “Just for a brief time, and don’t excite her too much.” My doctor keeps her eyes on the detectives. She wanders over to the foot of my bed and pulls up my charting, the paper scratching against the cheap plastic of its holder. “I’ll be outside if you need me.” She leaves with my chart in her hand.

  Even though I never said it was okay for them to come in, the detectives settle themselves in the two chairs available. Ormoran glides her long frame into the chair Nurse Debbie had used—when was it, one night, two nights ago?—and her knees bump into the side of my cot. She sits closer than is comfortable. I cross my arms over my chest—gingerly, since my ribs keep shouting at me to stop breathing—and wish that I had more armor against the world than a faded blue hospital gown.

  Miller pulls her chair towards the foot of my bed and settles herself, like she’s getting ready to read a cozy book and wrap a blanket around h
er shoulders. A pad of paper and a pen are poised on her knee.

  All three of us sit, waiting for someone to begin talking, all of us accustomed to uncomfortable silence. I force myself to swallow the questions tumbling around inside my head. Because as soon as they stepped inside my room, I knew. They’re not here to help me.

  Finally, Ormoran speaks.

  “So, you’re a professor?” It’s a question, and I wonder if she’s testing me, because technically I’m not a professor. I’m an instructor, a lecturer. Tenure-track, not tenured.

  Miller says nothing and stares at me.

  While I’m weighing my answers, Ormoran moves on, not interested, it seems, in my confirmation of the fact she’s tossed out. “I went to YSU, you know. I played in the women’s rugby team.”

  “Okay,” I offer. My voice comes out clearer than it did when I last tried to speak, which makes me guess that time has marched ahead quite a bit since Nurse Debbie was here, holding my hand. My mouth is dry, but the gauze has been removed and I don’t taste blood anymore.

  “Yeah, we were State Champions a few years ago—maybe you saw the pennants hanging in Kilcawley?”

  I have no idea why we are talking about sports, but I’m certain I should play along.

  Good cop.

  “I remember reading about it in the JamBar.” Half the student newspaper at Youngstown State is devoted to campus sports, so I figure this is a safe bet.

  Miller is solemn; her head is poised over her notepad as she scratches something down on the paper. “There’s no women’s rugby team at YSU. She tells that to everybody, trying to sound like she’s some star athlete.” Her voice is pure Youngstown city proper, with the nasal Os and dropped Gs that mimic the way my students speak. The way I speak too. And Justin.

  I correct myself. The way he spoke.

  That knife in my ribs again.

  Ormoran gives a quick glance at her partner, and offers the air between Miller and me an embarrassed smile. “It’s true. I just like to try and put people at ease, you know. People—like you, dear—see two cops coming into their room; they’ve been through a trauma, and they’re just hoping to come out alive from it. I don’t want you to be nervous.”