With Malice (2 page)

My mom gasped when she saw me sitting up in bed.

“Mommy,” I said, and started to cry. I couldn't remember the last time I'd called her Mommy, but it had slipped out. It felt so good to see her, like she could still make everything better by giving me a kiss. She pushed past Dr. Ruckman and pulled me to her chest. Her familiar smell, a Jo Malone perfume, a mix of lavender and amber, filled my head, and I buried my face in her sweater, crying harder.

“Shhh, baby. You're okay,” she mumbled into my hair. I could feel the moist heat from her breath, and I wanted to crawl out of the bed and into her lap like I was six and afraid of something under the bed. She started to gently pry my fingers off her cardigan. “You need to calm down, Jill. It's not good for you to be worked up.” She held my right hand sandwiched between hers.

“Hey, kiddo,” Dad said. He squeezed my foot. I could see him swallowing over and over, like he was about to start crying himself. There was no sign of his new wife and the replacements. My stepbrothers. Twins, no less. My stepmom insisted on dressing them alike, as if they'd just popped off a Ralph Lauren billboard. When they were around, I acted like I couldn't tell them apart. Mostly because I knew it drove her nuts.

I took a hitching breath and tried to pull myself together. Mom passed me a tissue, and I wiped my nose. Dad pulled a chair closer to the bed for her, and she sat next to me, all without letting go of my hand. He stood right behind her.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You were in a car accident,” Mom said. Her lower lip shook.

I waited for her words to wake something up in me, but there was still nothing, just a void.

“Do you remember the accident, Jill?” Dr. Ruckman had his pen poised over the chart.

They stared at me intently. “I think so,” I lied. How could I not remember? An accident so serious I'd ended up in a hospital. No way was I admitting the huge gap in my memory. “I remember tires squealing and glass breaking,” I added, figuring that was general enough to cover all the bases.

Mom squeezed my hand. Her expression was brittle. The accident must have been really bad. I hoped the car wasn't totaled. My dad wasn't exactly generous with child support, and she didn't make that much at her job. She loved that stupid Mercedes, even though it was ten years old.

“What's the last thing you remember well?” Dr. Ruckman clicked his ballpoint pen. On off, on off, on off. It was making my headache worse.

I fished about, trying to remember something that stood out clearly. Then it came to me in a flash. “I remember being over at Simone's. Tara was there too. We were celebrating the end of the play. We did
Grease.
Simone was Sandy.” It was all really vivid. I felt the band of tension around my chest loosen as the memories flooded in. The feel of the worn corduroy sofa in her family rec room. Simone standing on the cracked faux leather ottoman singing “Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee” at the top of her lungs while doing a bump-and-grind number. Tara and me laughing so hard I'd been sure I'd pee my pants. “We sold out all of the performances. Everyone came.” I glanced over at my dad. “Almost everyone.”

He looked away. The show had run for four nights, and he couldn't manage to make a single one. The replacements had a cold.

Simone, Tara, and I had lounged around, dissecting everyone else's performance. I left out the part about how we toasted our victory with some of Simone's dad's beer that we stole from the fridge in the garage. I was almost sure I had planned to spend the night. I remembered wearing sweats. My stomach clenched. I wouldn't have driven drunk. I was capable of doing stupid things, but I was pretty sure I wouldn't have done anything that dumb.

“How long have I been out?”

“Your accident was just over three days ago, Thursday. This is Sunday morning,” Dr. Ruckman said. “What you're experiencing is retrograde amnesia. It means you forgot not only the accident, but some time before and after too. It's pretty common with head injuries. That's also why you're having some trouble with word finding. It's called aphasia. I would expect both of these to get better with some time. Do you remember the ambulance?”

“No,” I said.

“How about the flight?”

I blinked. I could understand the words he was saying, but it was almost as if he were speaking a different language. They must have flown me to a bigger hospital, maybe in Detroit. There was a sense that I did remember something about flying, but when I reached for it, it skittered out of reach. Like a spider bolting for a corner. Gone.

“It's okay if you don't recall. You've been in and out since you were brought here. Your Glasgow scale score—that's how we measure the impact of a head injury—was pretty low, but you've been doing well, coming up and out of it.”

“What's a perfect score?” I asked.

“Fifteen,” he said.

“What am I?”

“Today I'd say you were a fourteen or fifteen.” Dr. Ruckman smiled.

I smiled back, relieved. Nailed it. I needed an accounting of what else was wrong with me. “My leg's messed up,” I said, stating the obvious, since it was hanging from a sling suspended above the bed.

Dr. Ruckman lightly tapped my knee. “You've fractured your left femur. When you were admitted, we used external fixation to keep things stable, but now that you're doing better, we're going to schedule you for surgery, and they'll put in some pins.”

“Oh.” My stomach sank through the bed. This was bad. I was supposed to leave in a couple of weeks. Surgery and pins sounded serious. I'd been planning for the trip forever. “Can I still go to Italy?”

My parents exchanged a look. A thick fog of tension filled the room
Oh, shit.
My heart felt like a hummingbird trapped in my chest. They had to let me go.

“I can see a doctor over there,” I said. “And I'll do whatever exercises I need to. Or I could use a wheelchair,” I suggested, knowing there was no way a school trip was going to let me go in a chair.

“Sweetheart,” Mom said.

“I'll do anything,” I pleaded. “Don't say no now. I might be better in a day or two, and we can decide then.”

“The trip is over,” my dad said.

“Keith,” Mom said, her voice tense.

“But—that's not fair,” I said. “You can't decide now. I haven't even had the surgery yet. I might be okay—”

“No,” my dad cut me off. “I mean you already went. The car accident was in Italy.”

It felt as if someone had ripped the air out of my lungs. I'd been in Italy, and I couldn't remember a thing. It was one thing to miss some memories, but I'd blacked out the entire trip. That couldn't be possible.

“Sweetheart?” Mom patted my hand. A wave of clammy sweat broke out across my forehead and down my back.

“This is a lot for Jill to take in. We might want to give her some time,” Dr. Ruckman suggested.

“No, I need to know,” I said. The beeping from my monitor picked up speed.

“Don't be upset,” Mom said.

My mouth fell open. Was she kidding?

Dr. Ruckman picked up a syringe and injected something into the tubing that led to my arm.

“Hey,” I protested.

“Why don't you rest for a bit, and we can talk more later?” Dr. Ruckman patted my arm.

I wanted to yank away from his touch and tell him to keep his patronizing tone to himself, but my head began to fill with thick bubbles, and it seemed I could feel the cold medicine sliding into my veins, traveling through my body. I could almost trace its progress. I sank back down on the pillows.

Mom squeezed my hand. “You're going to be okay, Jill.”

“That's right,” Dad added. “You're going to be just fine.”

They smiled, but I had the sense they were trying to convince themselves more than me.

When I opened my eyes, I could tell the light in the room had changed again. More time lost. The second thing I noticed was that my headache was still there, a tight vise around my skull. On the upside, my thinking was a bit clearer. There was still a big hole where my memory was supposed to be, but it no longer felt like I was trying to think through a thick haze.

My mom was sitting next to my bed doing one of her needlepoint kits. She'd done them since I was little, initially kits from Hobby Lobby, but at some point she graduated to hand-painted canvases from England that she stitched up in silk floss and adorned with tiny glass beads. The odd thing was that as soon as she was done, she would either give it as a present or put it in the bag for the Salvation Army. She didn't actually like finished needlepoint. The whole process seemed pointless to me.

“Hey,” I croaked.

Her head jerked up. She stood and came over to the bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Thirsty.”

Mom grabbed the yellow plastic pitcher on the table and poured a glass for me, sliding the bendy straw between my lips. She brushed my hair out of my face.

“Where's Dad?”

“Lydia needed him at home.”

For a second, I didn't know who she was talking about. Usually my mom called my dad's new wife “that woman,” and I didn't call her anything if I could avoid it. Mom and I were pretty united in our shared loathing of my dad's new family.

Mom must have seen something on my face. “He had to go. He stayed here at the hospital for the last two nights.”

I picked at the blanket. My nails were long. Longer than I'd had them in a long time. There was still some chipped polish on them. Pink. “I really went to Italy?”

“Mmm-hmm. You were there when the accident happened. In a small town in Tuscany.”

“How did I get here?”

“Your dad had you flown back as soon as the hospital in Florence was able to get your condition stabilized.”

“They couldn't treat me there?”

Mom rolled her eyes, and I could picture how it went down, my dad huffing and puffing about how he insisted on the top tier of care. That was classic for my dad. He had to have the best of everything. A Rolex, an Audi, a house in the West End. Almost more important than having the best was the idea that everyone
knew
my dad had the best.

“He chartered a private medical flight.” Her hands twisted around the metal rail of my bed. “The plane belonged to some friend of his and then he paid one of those mobile health teams to escort you back.”

My mind raced. Then a fact clunked into place. “But if I was in Italy and the last thing I remember is the play closing, that means I'm missing weeks. At least a month.” The idea of all that time just being gone made me feel like I'd jumped from a plane without a parachute.

“The best I can guess is that you're missing about six weeks.” Mom took a deep breath. “The doctor says it's not unexpected, given your injuries.”

Six weeks. It seemed an impossibly long time. “What happens now?”

“Well, in addition to your head injury and your leg, you broke a couple of ribs and have some soft-tissue injuries to your neck and back. They've set up some physiotherapy for you to address those, but Dr. Ruckman says soft-tissue injuries usually take care of themselves.”

“How long do I have to be here?” I wanted to go home.

“They're going to do the surgery on your leg and then they'll transfer you from here to the rehab hospital. You'll be there for a couple of weeks.”

“I can't be gone that long. I've got—” Once again, the word was missing. It had been there and then, just before I spoke, it disappeared. “I've got, you know, with the teachers and everything.”

Mom's forehead scrunched up. “School?”

I nodded. How the hell had I forgotten that word?

“Don't worry about your classes. Your teachers will understand. I'm sure we can work something out.”

“Has Simone been by?” I wanted to talk to my best friend. I could ask her things that I couldn't ask my parents. I was close to my mom, but there were still things I didn't tell her. Simone would fill me in on the missing time. I would have texted her every day from Italy. She could make sense of things. She'd even make a joke out of it so it didn't feel so scary. One thing that was awesome about Simone, and occasionally annoying, is that she always seemed to know what to do. She didn't waste time second-guessing everything she did.

Mom turned her back and filled up my water. “The hospital is only letting family visit.”

“Can't you talk to them? Tell them Simone is family.”

“The hospital has rules.”

“But I'm closer to Simone than I am to some cousin—”

My mom dropped the glass. The plastic bounced off the tile floor, spraying water everywhere. “Dammit!” Her eyes darted around the room, looking for something to wipe up the water, and then she yanked her scarf off the back of the chair. She dropped to her knees and started blotting it up. She looked almost ready to cry. She stood and grabbed the pitcher. “I'll ask the nurse to refill it for us.”

“It's okay,” I said. The way she was acting made me nervous.

She sat back in the chair with the pitcher in her lap. The makeup around her eyes was smudged, and her skin looked sallow in the dim light.

“Have you been here since I got here?” I asked. She nodded. “Maybe you should go home too. Take a break.”

Mom sat up straighter, as if she'd been caught dozing on the job. “Don't be silly.”

“Go home, Mom. Get some sleep. The nurse will likely give me something that puts me back out in a minute or two anyway. I won't even know if you're here or not.”

She fidgeted with her hands. “I don't want you to be alone.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I'm pretty sure I won't be alone. Hospitals frown on just locking up the patients at night and leaving them to fend for themselves.”