“Get in the car!” she shouted. Eva looked up with big moon-eyes.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because we’re going.”
“Where?”
“None of your business where. Get in the car.”
“But I don’t want to . . .”
Anna swept down on her little girl, her breath rank, her eyes shot through with blood.
“Get in the fucking car,” she said.
For a while the road lay flat and exact before her, the land semi-obscured on either side under a fraying ribbon of cadmium-orange light. The air was full of what would happen next—the approaching headlights, Eva’s long scream, the swerve into the sagebrush, the flip into the night. But it’s always like that, there are never any signs. We look for signs, but there are never any signs.
The engine stopped. The night closed in. Nothing moved.
Chapter Twelve
She came to in a room with pale-green curtains and gray linoleum floors. Tubes—long, slender, perfectly transparent—looped out of her nose and arms. Her right eye was covered with a bandage; she would learn in time that fifty-five stitches had been applied, the tissues tightened around her eyeball, her sight saved over many hours by the work of many hands. She would learn other things in time, but for now it was just a slow coming to, a gradual surfacing, a prolonged peeling of layers until the sick realization.
She shot up in bed. “Where is my daughter?”
A nurse holding a clipboard to her chest turned, slid her reading glasses down her nose. “In the ICU,” she said.
Anna held herself up—chest heaving, muscles shaking, sweat gathering under her arms—on both sides of the metal frame.
“How is she hurt?”
The nurse put the clipboard down. “Mrs. A.,” she said, “your daughter is in a coma.”
Anna pulled the tubes out of her nose. She unpeeled the tape holding the needles in her arms, freeing herself as the nurse began to scream. She had her feet on the floor already, she had her eye on the door already, she was holding the nurse back as far as she could hold her when the surface of the world slipped out from under her—and everything went dark.
Hours went past before the next surfacing, the next unpeeling of layers. She was tied to the metal frame of the bed this time, bound at the wrists and ankles, unable to move an inch.
“My daughter,” she said through lips cracked and swollen. A doctor approached and stood peering down at her as she tensed against her bindings, struggling to keep the white figure in focus.
“You have sustained severe injuries. You have a fractured clavicle, four broken ribs, a punctured liver, a ruptured spleen, severe concussion, and you nearly lost one eye. You cannot move.”
Anna’s uncovered eye was dark and wide, fixed on the back of things already done.
“My daughter. I want to see my daughter.”
“Your daughter is in the Intensive Care Unit. I cannot take you down there.”
A tear as thick as blood slid down Anna’s cheek. How was the doctor to be persuaded, what argument could she use to soften his resistance?
“These beds,” she said. “These bed have wheels, I know they have wheels. I beg you, take me to see my daughter.”
“It’s out of the question.”
Anna tried to reach out with one hand but couldn’t.
“Do you have children?” she asked.
The doctor paused. “I do.”
“Imagine that was your child. Imagine that was your little girl.”
The doctor straightened, shook his head with terrible slowness.
“I would not have been driving. You had a blood alcohol content of 2.0 when they brought you in, more than twice the limit.”
Some things come with a margin, you can adjust to them, move around a little, negotiate the angle of compression, some kind of correspondence. Others don’t. They flatten the space between molecules and fill you with nothing.
“How deep is the coma?”
“Deep,” the doctor said with a voice drained of all emotion, but then something in Anna’s face must have pierced him because he added, more gently, “On a scale from fifteen to three, three being the worst, she’s around an eight or a ten. She’s being subjected to constant stimuli. It’s all we can do.”
“What are the chances she’ll recover?”
“We have no way of knowing. She might regain consciousness, or she might remain in a vegetative state. We can’t predict any of it. As soon as you’re in any shape to move, we’ll bring you down there so you can talk to her. It’s very important that she hears your voice. In fact, it’s crucial.”
“Does she have any other injuries?”
“No, no other injuries.”
Anna closed her eyes.
That night, in her dream, they were down by the river gorging themselves on sunlight, so the surfacing from sleep was as if from a fresh amputation—the lopping off of both legs at the thigh, the cut past bone, the laceration through ducts and bloodways—the pain too great to bear.
“I don’t want to live,” she said. “If my daughter dies, I don’t want to live.”
Empty words to an empty room. Time passed through a sieve of silence, faint shapes moved in and out, shadows came and went. Then Ree was there with her wide eyes, Mia with green tea. They sat on the side of the bed, holding Anna’s thinning hands, watching her slow tears.
“I need a lawyer,” Anna said, and the following day one came—large, freckled, spectacularly short of breath—and said, “As a two-time offender, not even taking your daughter into consideration, leaving her completely out of it, you’re looking at a minimum of seven days of mandatory jail time.”
“That’s the least of my concerns,” said Anna. “Do I lose custody of my daughter if she lives?”
The lawyer crossed his legs. “Depends. If a foster home is the only alternative, chances are you won’t. You’ll be subject to frequent and random testing for alcohol and drugs for a period set at the discretion of the judge, but you’ll probably get to keep her. If the noncustodial parent shows up—I understand he lives in England, so I don’t know what the probabilities are—and he sues for custody, he’ll probably win.”
“Jesus,” said Mia. “You’re freaking her out. Can’t you see you’re freaking her out?”
The lawyer considered Mia from behind lenses half an inch thick.
“Frankly, I can’t see a single reason why she shouldn’t be freaked out.”
Mia put her hands on her hips. “Her daughter is in a coma, isn’t that enough? You want her to get down on her knees? You want her to tell you she knows she fucked up? Well, she knows she fucked up, okay, fella? She knows.”
Anna raised a hand.
“Quiet,” she said, her head falling back into the pillow. “Quiet.”
In the sanitized stillness of the night, in the sterile hush that comes over hospitals after dark, there were never any nightmares, only dreams, and in those dreams there was the river rippling with its unseen catch of fish, the serrated edge between fields and pastures down by the old house where they used to live and where Eva used to run squealing from the cows. There was Eva’s knees-to-chest crouch in the observation of insect life, sandals the size of dollar bills, a swing tied to the lowest branch of a willow tree. There was Eva’s small hand in hers.
Early the morning of the third day, Esperanza walked in with a single rose in a small vase and Anna wept. Esperanza sat in a chair, head bent, elbows propped on knees.
“Did they let you see her?”
“I’m not family. It’s like I don’t exist.”
Silence fell like dust over a single ray of slanting light.
“Her father keeps calling,” Esperanza said. The two women stared at each other. Esperanza ran a hand down her face. “He’s her father, no? He has a right to know.”
“He will take her away from me, Espi. If she lives, if Eva comes out of her coma, he will take her away from me.”
Esperanza’s face was
like a fist.
“Don’t do this to me.”
“He has a right. He has a right to know.”
“Not now. Please, not now.”
“He’s her father. He has a right to know.”
Anna pulled herself up.
“You’re going to do that to me? You’re going to let that son of a bitch take my little girl away?”
Esperanza stood, and there were things in her eyes Anna had never seen before, things from her childhood—dreams of a constantly receding figure, her mother maybe, who had died in detention when she was only eight, mouthing, “Come, you’ll be late,” as the girl scrambled forward in pursuit of what inevitably turned out to be a fistful of air. Memories of hands coming down on tables, extension cords coming down on innocent flesh, doors shutting her in, closing her out, and a place in her mind where none of that ever happened.
“You don’t deserve her,” she said. “You had her, she was yours, and you didn’t deserve to be her mother.”
Anna sat up and pulled the tubes out of her nose. “And you? What about you? Look at that punk you call your son. Look at him, with chains from his nose to his nipples, with an arsenal clipped to his eyebrows, with three charges for drug possession, three more for breaking and entering, and the prize for mothering goes to you? It goes to you?”
Esperanza moved closer, one fist balled by her side. “I had my son when I was eighteen. I had no money, I had nobody. I worked my ass off to put food in his mouth, day and night I worked my ass off. You were thirty-five, money coming out of your ears, the world at your feet, and look at you, look at your daughter in a coma downstairs because you needed a fuck.”
The volume needed to come down, the pitch, the tone, the register—all of it needed to come down. Anna put out a hand.
“Please,” she said.
Esperanza plunged her own hands into her pockets.
“Maybe you’ll get her back one day.”
“Please,” Anna said, her mouth full of her own tears, as Esperanza pulled the door shut behind her.
Chapter Thirteen
A strange breakfast tray came in on the morning of day four. It was bigger than usual and had things on it Anna could not place—a slab of something pink, a layer of something yellow laid up against the bank of something nearly orange. Off to one side, something white and creamy lay quiet in its hole. Anna pushed the tray away and closed her eyes.
“You’ve got to eat.”
Anna looked up. A nurse stood there staring.
“This?” Anna said. “You want me to eat this?”
“Honey, I don’t care what it is, you have to eat it. My job is to make you eat today.”
After the big move, when Eva was four, maybe five, and had broadened her food range, Anna would stand in the kitchen and make things like risotto. She’d make the broth from scratch, she’d fry the onions, she’d throw in the rice, mushrooms, fennel, bacon, wildly fragranced pepper, and over the course of many, many minutes, she’d turn the thickening mass lovingly upon itself until it gained the right consistency and taste. She’d sink butter and Parmesan into it, put the lid on, and wait a while before calling Eva out for dinner. She’d lower the plate triumphantly to the table, only to have Eva stare at it with deeply troubled eyes.
“I don’t like it.”
“You haven’t tried it.”
“I don’t like it.”
So Anna would sit down with a fork and the fixed intent of feeding her daughter the food she had just made. Tears would start to flow, rage would rise like a black tide in Anna’s heart, Paco would retreat to some corner of the house, and only by some miracle would Anna be able to physically remove herself, sit on the toilet with her head burning in her hands, then come back and say, “You’re going to bed without dinner.” Until one day in October when the leaves were turning and the world was on fire, someone walked into her kitchen and said, “What are you doing feeding her risotto? What are you doing feeding her spinach soufflé? Feed her bread and butter. Feed her macaroni and cheese. Feed her cheese sticks. Feed her hot dogs. The day she asks for risotto, feed her risotto.”
“I want to go back in time.”
“What, honey?” asked the nurse.
“I want to go back in time.”
Hospitals occupy the coldest penumbras. Beneath the punctuality of bedside checks, of pills administered in a paper cup, underneath the orderly insertion of catheters and intravenous feeds, lies a stream of unuttered cries and broken dreams: the home run no one will witness, the first ascent no one will record, the eternally postponed walk at the end of the garden, in the shade of trees.
At night, a pall descends and much of the pretense is lost. For every mended bone, there are two that will never heal, not the right way, anyway. For every remission, two quiet deaths. These are the numbers, they’re low moans in the night.
Anna had been a sick child, she’d become familiar with the smell of hospitals very early on, but somehow, just before adolescence, every disposition toward illness had vanished and she’d been spared even the discomfort of a cold. Sickness had been a world inhabited by others, a region occasionally populated by friends and relatives, never by her. In the diseased silence of the hospital at night, Anna remembered the fear that had crowded her childhood, the dread of those early years, when she’d come to understand the triumph and tragedy of a body without a shell, eyes without real casing, skulls without plate.
Richard Strand came with flowers. He sat where Esperanza had.
“How’s Eva?” he said.
“In a coma.”
“I know. Any news?”
“No news.”
“Is there anything . . . ?”
“No,” she said, knowing what would come next.
“Anna . . .”
“No.”
Richard Strand rose to his feet. “But it’s not his fault.”
“I know it’s not his fault, but my daughter is lying in a coma downstairs, and that’s all I have time for.”
“He’s going crazy, Anna. My son is going crazy.”
“I don’t give a fuck about your son, Richard.”
Richard Strand stood at the foot of her bed, half flesh, half stone, as if held on invisible strings. Then his lips tightened, his eyes narrowed, he leaned into the metal frame of the bed and said, “Then what have you been doing with him?”
“Beats me.”
Richard Strand looked around the room. He crossed and uncrossed his arms. He turned and began pacing. He came to a stop.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Help me to understand here because my son is in a lot of pain and I’d like to be able to explain to him why he’s not allowed in this room to do the only thing he wants to do right now, which is to see you.”
Anna’s right eye began to throb. She raised a hand to it.
“Do you know what a coma is?”
“Of course I know what a coma is.”
“Would you agree with me that a coma is a pretty serious thing?” Richard Strand stared. “Can we come to this conclusion together? Is it something we can do?”
“Anna . . .”
“I have nothing more to add. I have put my daughter in a coma, and I have nothing more to add.”
“All he wants to do is help.”
“I’m sorry. There is no room for anything else.”
At the door Richard Strand turned. “What about later?” he said.
“There will be no later,” she said.
Chapter Fourteen
We run from memories, we run like hell.
Eva in the bath with a rubber toy, beating it hard against the water, crying. Eva undetected the day Anna walked in, covered in blood and dust. Eva with her back to the minutiae of frost one morning, a child enchanted by the soft geometries of snow, no hat, no gloves, as Anna locked the door thinking, You’ll find out the hard way. Eva on her knees after her first bicycle fall, her face a mask of tears.
“Get back on the bike,” Anna had said.
; “No.”
“Get back on the bike.”
Eva white-knuckled in the backseat as Anna floored the gas. Eva aching for her father’s voice.
“You’ll be late for school.”
“But it’s Daddy.”
“Tell him you’ll be late for school.”
There was no relief to be pried from the past, and soon the nightmares began. A judge sentencing her to life in prison; an endless series of doors behind which Eva could be heard but not found; an unforgiving horizon against which her little girl dissolved while trying to say something. The waking hours weren’t much better, consisting, as they did, of a single prohibition.
“It’s too soon for you to walk.”
“Then wheel me down.”
“We can’t wheel you down.”
“Why not?”
“We are not allowed to wheel people down.”
“Then let me try to walk, please let me try to walk,” and just as she was being helped to her feet the next day, just as she began to put one foot in front of another, concealing behind a fixed smile the nausea rising in her throat, the pounding in her skull, the door swung open and the lawyer walked in—slack-jowled, entirely out of breath.
“She needs to sit down,” he told the nurse.
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