Rosebush (8 page)

I’d shoved the dog in the back of my closet after he died and forgotten about it, or tried to, but apparently Annie hadn’t. She was holding it toward me now. “I know maybe it’s not your favorite poem anymore but, well, I figured maybe it could still keep you company.”

No,
I wanted to say.
Get it away from me. I can’t stand it. He lied. He knew he wasn’t coming back. He abandoned us and then Bonnie—

“Do you want to hear it?”

I couldn’t blink twice fast enough.
NO!

Annie nodded but slipped it in the bed next to me. If I could have, I would have pushed it away, but I couldn’t and now I was trapped. I tried to turn my face away from it but managed only to avert my eyes.

“Please, Jane,” Annie said, standing at the side of the bed, her voice so soft and small sounding. “You have to get all better. You have to come home.”

She smelled like Bonne Bell lip gloss and raspberry fruit leather. Behind her red-framed glasses her eyes were huge. She looked wise beyond her years and like a very scared little girl all at the same time. Fear and love and hope stared out at me. I had trouble swallowing. “Promise?” she squeaked.

I blinked once. Yes.

The bathroom door opened and my mother and Joe emerged. Her eyes were pink, but she’d washed her face and, of course, reapplied her lipstick.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” she said, coming to take my hand for the second time. How ironic that this was more than she’d touched me in months and I couldn’t even feel it. Her voice trembled. “I don’t know what came over me. I—we—have been so terrified. So afraid you wouldn’t wake up or when you did—” She broke off. “I couldn’t imagine losing you. And when the doctor said you would be okay, when you woke up, I guess I just—” She swallowed, dried her eyes on her sleeve. Her sleeve! “The pressure just exploded. I didn’t mean what I said. I know this was just an accident, that you didn’t—didn’t
want
this to happen. But the way things have been between us… And you sneaking off to a party…I—I didn’t behave well. I’m so very sorry. You understand, don’t you?”

She began to sob again and Joe ducked into the bathroom, reappearing with a Kleenex. She took it with the hand she’d been using to hold mine and put the other one on his arm.

I blinked once. A nice thing about not being able to talk, I was learning, was that it spared you having to say anything you didn’t mean.

I was spared even more by Loretta knocking and coming back in. She smiled at everyone, oblivious to the tension that hung like humidity in the air, and said, “It’s nearly visiting hours and I think someone here could use a sponge bath. If the rest of you will excuse us?”

Everyone filed out obediently, even Joe. Loretta, I decided, was a woman to learn from.

She wasn’t big, but she was strong and managed to get me out of bed and into a wheelchair. I couldn’t feel the floor, the chair, her hands. But it wasn’t like floating. It was terrifying, like being completely out of control. I started to breathe fast again and she stopped what she was doing.

“Look at me, sweetheart,” she ordered.

I did.

“You’re going to be fine. This is all temporary. You’ve got to calm yourself down.”

Temporary,
I told myself.
Calm down.
I nodded.

“You’ll see. Before you know it, you’ll be singing and dancing.”

My breathing started to return to normal.

“Good girl,” she said, and moved around to the side of the chair. She unhooked monitors from my fingers. “Won’t need most of this much longer,” she said cheerily. The IVs stayed with me, now hanging from a hook on my right. More tubes were gathered on the left. I was like a traveling medical exhibit.

This is all temporary,
I repeated to myself.

She pushed me into the bathroom and said, “Feast your eyes on this five-star accommodation.”

It wasn’t bad, actually. The entire room was covered in white tile. On one side were a toilet and a sink with a mirror above it. On the other, separated only by a curtain but on the same level so that you could easily move between them in a wheelchair, was a big showerhead.

Loretta talked as she carefully undressed me. “It’s nice to finally meet the famous Jane. You know your mother hasn’t left your bedside since you were brought in. Sat there talking to you the whole time. Talking
about
you, too. I hear you’re quite a girl. Good student, great sister. Popular.” She tugged the hospital gown off my arm. “Your mother kept telling everyone, wanted everyone to know how important it was that you could see, get all better. ‘She just has to be able to hold a camera,’ she said. ‘You should see her pictures. She’s a brilliant photographer.’”

I wondered how many blinks it took to say “Stop lying.”

Loretta moved me onto a bench on the shower side of the room. She turned on the hot water, then looked around.

“Someone took my bucket!” she said in mock horror. “You sit tight where you are and I’ll be right back.”

I sat there, listening to the sound of the shower and feeling the steam begin to rise against my cheek. It smelled like Coco Chanel in here, my mother’s perfume, and looking beyond the half-open curtain I saw that she’d left her makeup bag on the sink. Of course, Rosalind Freeman would never for even a moment look anything less than perfect even when her daughter was nearly dead.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes as the small room filled with steam. The warm, moist air felt wonderful, almost like normal. Maybe I was going to be okay. Maybe—

I must have dozed off. A noise roused me and I peered past the curtain to see if it was Loretta coming back, but no one was there, just the toilet and the mirror.

The mirror on which was written in all-capital letters, faint but unmistakable:

YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED, BITCH.

That’s when my voice came back in a long, gurgling scream.

Chapter 7

Loretta flung the
door open. “What is it, sweetheart? What is this fuss about?”

I gaped at the mirror. “Mirror,” I said. “Look.”

“Your voice is back, honey!” Loretta said as she turned to look at the mirror and my eyes followed hers.

Nothing was there. Opening the door had stirred up the steam and made the letters disappear. Condensation dripped down the surface, but the writing had vanished. Loretta reached out to wipe the fog away.

“No, wait. Don’t you see it? Someone wrote a message on the mirror. They wrote that I should have died.”

I thought I could make out a faint trace of the letters, but it could also just have been water droplets. Loretta peered at the mirror, shook her head, and wiped it with a cloth.

“You’re on some pretty heavy narcotics and one of the side effects can be—”

“Not a side effect. It was there. Words.” I was crying now in frustration. “A threat.”

“But sweetheart, no one came in or out of here while I was gone.”

I stared at her. “Must have.”

“I was just outside the door. Your room is empty.”

I focused on the steamed-up mirror. Was I going crazy? Had I hallucinated the words?

The only other option was—

“Loretta,” I said, trying to sound casual.

“Yes, kitten?” She was filling the plastic tub she’d gone to get with water, but she looked at me over her shoulder. Her expression was open and honest and kind and I knew, with every bone in my body, that she wouldn’t have done anything to mess with me.

“Nothing. I just—you’re sure no one could have snuck in while you stepped out? I can’t believe I just imagined it.”

“Don’t feel bad, kitten,” she said. “Nearly everyone sees something odd when they’re on as much medicine as you are.” She dipped a cloth into the basin of hot water. “Was one patient in here, swore he saw a rainbow donkey piñata hanging just above his bed like one he had at a birthday party as a child.”

She shifted my weight. “And a little girl was convinced that fuzzy mice were running around her bed. Her mother said she’d been asking for a pet mouse for ages. Best I can imagine is that the hallucinations come from something buried in your mind, maybe a wish.”

“I don’t wish I was dead.”

“No, I suppose you don’t. But it did get you talking again. Maybe you were just looking for the right trigger to get your words back.”

Maybe she was right. After all, not being able to talk had turned out to be temporary like she said.

By the time she was done bathing me, I’d stopped shaking and nearly accepted the fact that I must have hallucinated the message. I mean, if no one had come in or out of my room, let alone the bathroom, wish or no wish, it had to have been in my head.

Which meant no one wanted me dead. No one hated me. I’d made it all up.

“Your mother will be happy that you can speak again, no matter what caused it.”

My mother. She’d be thrilled with a new sign of my return to “normal,” but I was pretty sure she wouldn’t like the hallucination part.

“Is there any way we could keep this from her? I mean since it was just something I made up and not a real threat? I don’t want to make a big deal of it.” I cleared my throat. It felt raw—I guessed from the breathing tube that had been down it.

“How about I’ll tell Dr. Connolly what happened and let him decide about telling your parents, how’s that?”

“Thank you.”

“Now let’s get you dressed,” she said, deftly sliding my arms into a new hospital gown, this one white and green. She pushed me in front of the mirror as she combed my hair out.

“What do you think?”

My first thought was,
At least I still have my hair.
David loved my hair. Maybe it was that, or maybe because the swelling had started to go down in my face or because I was prepared from the time before, but this time looking at my reflection, I was more fascinated than horrified. The white grid of the tiles framed my face—black eye, hash marks on the cheek, fat lip—as though it was on a drawing board like an avatar being created. Not the avatar I would have created for myself, though. This one would definitely have been some kind of underworld villain.

But I could recognize my eyes, my hair, my lips, my smile. I could imagine them coming back how they had been. I could be pretty again. Me again.

“Well?”

“The green dots on the hospital gown really bring out the yellow around my black eye,” I said.

“There’s that twinkle in those beautiful eyes your mother told me about. She said you had a great sense of humor.”

“Is there any chance at all you could put some of my mother’s mascara on me? On my good eye. I don’t want anyone to see me like this.”

“I promise you, everyone is just going to be glad you’re alive. No matter how you look, you’ll be beautiful to them.”

“You don’t know my friends.”

“Teenagers.” She shook her head, but she rifled through my mother’s makeup bag and found the mascara. “Look down, I don’t want to poke you and cause any more damage.” When she was done, she said, “Okay, kitten, are you ready to meet your public?”

“I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“No.”

I took a deep breath.

Loretta wheeled me out of the bathroom and tucked me back into my bed, covering the diaper with a blanket, before opening the door to the outside corridor. She went out and Annie came in. By herself, I was relieved to see.

She started talking immediately. “We went to the cafeteria. They make good hot chocolate there, but Joe says to stay away from the cinnamon rolls. There’s a police officer outside waiting to talk to you. Your hair looks pretty.” She stopped abruptly, then swiveled her head from side to side as though desperate for something else to say. “Look.” She pointed at the windowsill, where a large bouquet of roses had appeared with some kind of object tucked next to it. “You got another bouquet, and it came with a teddy bear. Cute.” She picked the bear up and held it toward me. It was wearing a muscle shirt that said GET WELL BEARY SOON!

I grimaced. “That’s not cute, that’s awful. You better tell Mom who it’s from so she can add it to the list.”

“The card says ‘from your secret admi—’” She dropped the card and looked at me. “You can talk!”

She swung toward the door, clutching the doorjamb and leaning out into the hallway to yell, “Mom, Mom, Jane can talk!”

There was a chorus of
“shhhs”
from the nurses’ station, followed by the sound of high heels running up the corridor fast.

“Hi, Mom,” I said when she rushed into the room.

There were tears in her eyes. “Oh, thank God,” she said, taking up her place at the side of my bed again. “I was—we all were—thank God you can talk. How did it happen? When? Oh, thank God, thank God.”

“All of a sudden in the bathroom I just had my voice back.” It wasn’t a complete lie. My mother looked at my hand. “Just my voice. I still can’t move the rest of my body.”