by Amber Kizer
“I had to leave work. They called and said she was sick. I got there as fast as I could. I told them we’d take her to the doctor.” Her mom’s accent thickened and English threatened to retreat in the face of overreaching anger and years of frustration.
Misty visualized her papa’s expression. If she had bet on his next words, she’d have won.
“How do we pay for that?” he yelled.
Her mother must have shrugged. As if Misty was sick on purpose. “She’s our daughter.”
“You think I don’t know that?” He threw something made of fragile glass, shattering it against the wall. Her mother shrieked about cleaning it up. They deteriorated into jumbled threats and promises.
Misty’s eyes leaked tears and she swallowed down the urge to vomit again. Fear that she’d puke up all her insides if she started, ravaged the last of her control. She kept trying to hold her breath against the pain. Breathing hurt. She felt every heartbeat down in her gut.
There were more sounds of glass breaking and pans being thrown. Her parents reverted to their native tongue and she tried to pick out words. Money. Doctors. Sacrifice. Job.
Listening to her parents fight over money, over her, shredded her heart. She should be working instead of going to school, but her parents agreed she would graduate from college. Make enough to support them and the family still back in the old country. Pain crashed into her, curling her toes and cramping her calves. This blurred all the edges of thought.
Her youngest brother, George, slithered over to her and whispered, “Don’t worry, I called 911. The ambulance is coming.” He let her strangle his fingers.
Misty tried to stop him, but all she could manage was a tight hold on his hand. “Mad.”
“They can be mad, but you need help. Y’all yellow.” His face turned an angry red. “I’ll get a job.”
She was yellow? Yellow? “You’re eleven. You need to stay in school.”
“So?”
The sirens grew louder until it sounded as though they came from inside Misty’s chest. George didn’t leave her side. The smell of burning paper and melting plastic forced her focus over toward the kitchen. With beady eyes of judgment, their grandmother sat in the corner praying, worrying her beads and burning trinkets in a small porcelain dish. While Misty watched, she burned a photograph. After spitting on it. It was probably a photo of Misty.
George shook his head when he realized Misty was staring at their elder too. “She crazy.”
“Demons inside!” Grandmother shouted, pointing at Misty.
“What is that? Who called them?” Misty’s papa screamed as pounding erupted at the apartment door.
George scurried over to open it before anyone could turn them away. He’d be beaten for sure. Misty wondered if she died if they’d forgive George for letting the outside in.
Grandmother prayed louder, rocking. Mama stayed huddled in the kitchen while their papa tried to tell them everything was fine.
The paramedics entered, carrying their bags and a stretcher, ignoring everyone but Misty. The first paramedic who leaned down over her wore an expression of shock, then grave concern. He started asking her questions. There was a flurry of activity and Misty’s pain softened. She tried to find George to tell him thank you, but she was whisked out of the apartment so fast she didn’t see him again. Was this death?
CHAPTER FOUR
I’m that girl. That’s me.
I didn’t know if it was the bizarre ride behind the ambulance at speeds I’d never dreamed of …
Or if it was seeing that girl lifted out of the ambulance and rushed through silent doors into chaos …
Or if it was white coats hooking up machines, shouting, “Keep her going. Parents are on their way!” But one second I didn’t know what was happening, and the next I knew I was watching my life from outside of myself.
I was the girl in the accident. My mask was gone. The lace camisole shredded until they totally removed it. My new jeans were cut off with careless shears.
It’s kinda disorienting being on the outside.
Dark blood sprinkled and dripped into my newly pixied hair, making me look like an extra in a haunted house. But otherwise, a small, lumpy bruise on my forehead was the only visible mark on my body.
Questions rolled through my brain and I babbled at anyone within reach, but no one saw me, no one heard me, no one knew I was there … like the rest of my life … before.
The crowd dwindled until there was only one white coat and a few nurses in scrubs.
“Let’s get this blood cleaned up before the parents get here.”
“Stitches?” a nurse asked, peering at a gash on my head.
“Just bandage it.” He shook his head. “Page me with any changes.”
I kept floating toward the ceiling like a weird helium balloon, so I wrapped my legs around a nearby chair and held on. Gravity wasn’t helping. I should have known something applicable from physics class last term, but all I kept thinking was: Why am I out here? Am I dead? But I can’t be dead because I wouldn’t, or at least my body wouldn’t, be in the hospital. Right?
Several doctors, nurses, and kids not much older than me conferenced nearby. Are those med students, maybe? I tried to spacewalk my way toward them. They seemed to discuss me. At least, based on the pointing and sighing.
I’d maneuver closer, then be towed back toward my body. There was an unseen edge to this invisible world. A wall of maybe ten feet around the hospital bed kept me tethered nearby. In three directions, at least. I’m not ready to try walking through walls.
A nurse swooshed the curtain closed around my bed. I barely peeked at my body. I didn’t like looking at myself in the mirror. Why should I look at me now?
It made me nervous.
I stopped when I heard the curtain rip.
Mother. She looks like hell.
Father was right behind her as if they’d arrived at the same time. It was his weekend alone with Carlton. Mine was next weekend. My brother was in his Spider-Man Halloween costume, face paint smeared like he’d been crying, or he’d wiped his snotty nose on the back of his hand. I scanned down his arms. Yep, paint decorated his hand. Would the kid ever learn to use tissues?
“Where’s the doctor?” my mother demanded. “Why is she down here? We told you to put her in a private room.” Mother’s scathing tone was the one she used best, and most often, when she was nervous or upset. Straight from her gala, the black gown was wrinkled and the train torn as if she’d stepped on the dress in her hurry.
I’d really ruined her night and I was sure somewhere in her brain she was reformulating her lecture about “why couldn’t I just be a normal cheerleader and happy with my life.” She was probably asking herself, “Where did I go wrong to raise such an invisible mediocre student?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Chai, let’s step into the conference room. Jane here will stay in the waiting room with your son while we talk.” No longer covered in a white coat. This was the guy who basically called off everyone and said to tell him when the parents got here. He didn’t seem to like me. That can’t be a good thing.
“It’s Ms. Carlton. We’re divorced.” Leave it to Mother to fluster the doctor for not knowing their marriage was over. The rest of us knew it. We couldn’t get away from it. “We are not going anywhere until you tell us what happened.”
“Oh. Sorry.” With a nod to Jane, who asked Carlton if he liked candy and shuffled him away, the doctor repeated himself. “Oh. I’m sorry.” He buried his head in my chart, made a few notes, then cleared his throat. “Your daughter has sustained a severe head injury.”
“Like the soldiers coming back from war kind of traumatic brain injury? That’ll take months to rehabilitate—” She was clearly calculating the hit to her social calendar with a daughter in rehab.
“No, ma’am, this is the kind of injury that is unrecoverable.”
“She’s not dead. She’d be in the morgue if she was dead. She’s not dead, she’s right here.” Father poi
nted at my body, and the machine blew my chest up and down like a doll.
“I’m sorry to inform you, but the severity of her injury has left her brain-dead. We did everything we could, but right now it’s machines keeping her body going. Without them, she is deceased.”
“Why? Why put her on machines if she’s dead? She’s in a coma, right? People wake up from comas all the time. She’ll wake up,” Mother argued, her face draining of color until it was an inhuman shade of gray.
“She’s dead? She’s dead?” Father just kept repeating it over and over again.
The doctor didn’t know who to listen to: Father’s pacing, rambling repetition or Mother’s bitch-like interrogation. He settled on Mother.
“She can live for a very long time with mechanical help. However, she is not going to wake up. Her body systems will shut down without the interventions.”
Stopping near the head of my bed, Father said, “What happened to her hair?” he focused on my head. “Was that cut in the accident?”
“No, Richard, I told you on the phone she wanted to help sweet little girls with cancer.”
“By cutting her hair?” His tone and expression were as perplexed as I’d ever seen them. Mother thought she made perfect sense and Father never quite understood her.
How many times had my parents spoken past each other? I had never felt bad for my father before, but now I saw him desperately trying to understand how my hair might cure cancer. As if that was easier to unravel than my imminent death.
I was numb. If I thought about the whole situation, I actually wasn’t upset. Is this shock? Do dead people go into shock too?
“What happens now?” Mother asked, deflating into a chair near the bed. She was probably arming her next set of questions to lob at the doctors like grenades.
“You can take all the time you need.” The doctor closed the chart and I knew he thought his bit part in this was over. Not so fast.
“Then what? We unplug her?” Father asked, frowning.
“That’s a myth, sir, we don’t literally unplug anyone. However, there are options you need to discuss with Nurse Brady.”
Mother’s eyes narrowed. “Why can’t you discuss them?”
“Nurse Brady is our procurement coordinator—”
As if cued from offstage, a tall man with blazingly white hair and beard turned the corner and stepped forward. “Mr. and Mrs. Chai, I am so sorry for your loss. You have our deepest condolences.” The man who might have been Santa Claus at the mall wore bright green scrubs and a jacket.
“It’s Carlton. My last name is Carlton.” Mother couldn’t help herself. She patted my hand and dismissed him as irrelevant with a toss of her head. She began listing all the things I was supposed to do: homecoming, graduation, summa cum laude at a women’s college, career, wedding, babies. The list continued getting more and more outlandish, more and more detailed.
“Procurement? Where have I heard that before?” Father asked. “Like, organ donor? But how?”
The nurse smoothly murmured apologies and kind words but how could he possibly know what my parents were going on about? “Why don’t we step into the conference room for a little more privacy.” He didn’t ask, even though it was a question. His tone quietly demanded attention while still seeming sympathetic.
They nodded. Slowly shuffling in a daze behind him.
I had to hear this conversation. He herded them away and I went too, following along until I hit that invisible wall and was ripped back to the perimeter of the bed. To my body. Let me go! I strained, tried to listen, tried to scoot the wheeled bed across the room, but once they rounded the corner I heard nothing.
A doctor made notes on my chart, different numbers, different words than the others had marked down.
Yet a different woman in scrubs marched in and asked, “Should I page the team?”
“I don’t know yet. These don’t seem like parents who will see the ramifications.”
“If only they knew patients were waiting—”
“Let Brady handle it. It’s his job to educate them on donation.”
“I don’t know how he does it.” She shook her head.
“Me either. Let’s make sure we’re not missing anything, though, so she’s ready if they give the okay.”
“You know we’re not getting a miracle awakening on this one.”
“Damn it all, kids are the hardest.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Donation? Money to the hospital? To make me well? Didn’t the doctor call Nurse Brady a procurement coordinator? What did he do? Father said ‘organ donor,’ as if they connected. I needed organs? Procurement? He is a Professional Cure doctor? To cure me? Or no.… Think, Jessica. Think.
NO! I screamed, leaping at my body, trying to force myself back inside. To open my eyes. To talk. To live. Donation? I wasn’t meant to be served up. I AM HERE. YOU CAN’T JUST TAKE MY PIECES!
You can’t make me.
CHAPTER FIVE
No, you can’t do this. I won’t let you take me apart. I tried to straddle the gurney covering my body with my … my what? What or who am I now? Wake up, Jessica. Wake up now!
Nurse Brady, aka Nurse Scalpel, and several others wheeled my gurney, machines, and beepers down the hall. My parents followed and they slid us into a private room.
“Take all the time you need.” Nurse Scalpel moved away from us, his hands full of signed forms and my chart. I saw a brief glimpse of both of my parents’ signatures.
I sent him a glare that I hoped made his ass pucker and his nose itch forever.
My parents said no. They had to say no. Of course they said no. They’ll wait for me to wake up. They were the most selfish people on the planet, they were not going to let anyone cut me up and ship me around the world. Scalpel moved me out of the emergency room because they were going to wait for me to wake up. That’s it exactly.
“She looks like she’s sleeping so peacefully.” Mother patted my hand and tapped her eyes with a tissue. Ever afraid to run her mascara lest she be caught untended by someone she knows. I wanted tears, ugly sobs of grief.
“She’s not sleeping, Madeline.”
Mother shot Father a pointed glare that felt eerily familiar. I guess I know where I got that expression. “I know that, Richard.”
“I’m sure they need us to move this along,” he said, ignoring her while digging in his pockets.
“Are you sure she’s not in any pain?” Mother turned toward Father as if truly needing his reassurance. For a moment I saw the bonded trust that must have been there when they’d first married.
“They showed me the amount of pain meds in her system. She’s not feeling anything.” Father cleared his throat. He shredded an old gum wrapper into tiny silver confetti. It littered the floor unnoticed. “We should say good-bye and get out of here.”
Where are we going?
“He said take my time. She’s my baby.” Mother turned away, toward me, and studied my face as if she saw me for the first time. “She was such a giving child.”
I was? When?
Father nodded, but didn’t speak.
“She thought she was going to change the world,” Mother continued, weaving a brand-new story about my life.
“I’m sure she would have.” Father sounded like he believed her, believed in me. But then he spoiled the moment by pulling out his phone and unlocking the screen.
“You can’t have that on in here,” Mother shrieked.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” He spit back the words.
And we’re back to normal.
“She changed the world. She had plans.” Mother stroked my hair, above the Band-Aid, where the nurse tried to sponge off all the blood until my blond looked orange. I wanted to grab Mother’s hand and force her to stop touching me.
I did? When? Who are these people? Do they know nothing about me? Anything?
“We’re doing the right thing, aren’t we?” Father didn’t glance up from his phone but
his voice cracked.
Of course you are. I will wake up. I tried thrusting myself into my body. Again. I clicked my heels three times. I tried to do acrobatics and scream and sing and get someone’s, anyone’s, attention. I tried to pinch myself. Anything. Everything.
But I had no mass, no body, no nothing.
Nurse Scalpel returned and hovered at the door. “When you’re ready,” he said, before whispering to another nurse, who came in and checked the monitors, made notes, and added something to my IV bag.
Mother stood. “Carlton should say good-bye.”
“He’s too young,” Father argued weakly, as if he knew he’d lose anyway.
“No, he’s not.”
Just until I wake up, right? A “see ya later”?
In a moment, Nurse Scalpel brought my little brother into the room. Carlton looked at once like a baby and an old man. I sensed he understood better than either of my parents what was going on.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” he asked, reaching out to touch my toes but then stopping. His snotty, painted fingers retreated into knots behind his back.
You can touch me, Carlton. Touch me! Maybe I’ll open my eyes and hug you back. Please.
“Yes,” Father answered. “But she is going to help other people live.” Father? I’m here. Right here. What happens to me? When Phinny my goldfish died, you told me there was no heaven. No hell. That it was a bunch of lies people told themselves because they were afraid. That he’d rot in the sewer system. I had nightmares for weeks in first grade.
And now? Now I’m terrified. Will you flush me too?
Carlton nodded, his bottom lip held between his teeth. He was trying not to cry.
