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Machines that were doing everything her body had forgotten how to do on its own while she slept.
Slept.
That was the term I preferred.
I wasn't a fanciful person by nature, but my brain rebelled when I tried to refer to her as in a coma. There was something wholly unreachable about that, something seemingly permanent.
"Hey Lenny," MaryBeth greeted me from the nurse's station where she was standing in cheery yellow scrubs that were meant to try to lighten the mood, but I too-often found their false cheer insulting rather than comforting.
Don't try to tell me that there is anything cheerful about this place where everyone behind a door was in limbo, alive, but not living.
"Hey MB," I greeted her because it wasn't her fault I had to be there. And she was someone taking care of the only person in the world my shriveled little heart loved. "Kick him to the curb yet?" I asked, forcing myself to be social when all I wanted to do was throw myself behind the all-too-familiar door and have a good cry again.
Her boyfriend was six years into his fear of commitment. Which was, somehow, a bullshit line she was still buying into.
Oh, he's been hurt before.
Yeah, well, haven't we all.
Nut-up and put a rock on her finger.
I might have even said something very similar to that one particularly bad day for me when I caught him alone beside the nurse's station waiting for her.
MaryBeth's head shake was all the answer I needed.
"You're a far better woman than me, MB," I told her, and knew it was probably the truth as I moved down the hall toward her door.
Well, it wasn't just hers.
But seeing as the other person she shared it with was as equally indisposed, I figured she didn't mind my mild - and major - breakdowns.
They were getting more frequent.
After I got over the shock, I had settled into a very unfamiliar optimism. For four and a half months.
But now, closing in on six, yeah, there wasn't a speck of optimism left. Just angry, bitter, soul-deep hurt.
I moved between the beds, still going through the ridiculous ritual of pulling the privacy curtain as if it made a difference.
And there she was.
Swallowed up by the big, slightly bent upward hospital bed, the rails up though there was really no need for that precaution seeing as she hadn't moved so much as an inch in all the time she had been inside that bed with the too-heavily-bleached blankets that had not a bit of softness, and hardly enough warmth.
It was always so cold here.
And my morbid brain wondered if it was some attempt at preservation.
"Hey babygirl," I greeted her, a hitch already in my voice as I took a deep breath. "You just had a bath, I see," I told her, moving past the bed toward the window side, grabbing the chair that was always there, and pulling it closer to the side of her bed.
They didn't get bathed often.
I guess it must have been a huge hassle.
I had dry shampoo in my purse for when the spans went too long and her perfect, glossy wheat-blonde hair would start darkening with grease at the roots.
But today her hair was bright and shimmering, still damp in places. I couldn't claim she smelled like she had had a bath seeing as the shit they used in the hospital had little to no scent. But she looked better.
Well, as good as she could in a bed with tubes keeping her alive.
Letha.
The only person who mattered.
Twenty-four years old.
She hadn't even gotten to celebrate her last birthday.
It sounded like she wouldn't get to celebrate the next one either.
Meanwhile, my sorry ass just got to keep having them.
That is your survivor's guilt speaking.
One of the nurse's had told me that, making me launch into a lung-burningly loud rant about how we weren't in a fucking plane crash together. That her traumatic event had nothing to do with my feelings that the world would be a better place if I were in the bed, and she was still off living her life. That was just common sense.
She was a far better person than I ever was, than I ever would be.
Yet here we were.
No amount of ranting and raging would change the situation.
My little sister was in a bed with machines bleeping out the fact that she was alive, but just barely, not really.
I hadn't seen her eyes in six months. That cornflower blue that made everyone who crossed her path stop and admire, that were always so easy to read, that never had a hint of the guards that mine did.
And her smile.
Christ, I missed that. More than words could say. All white teeth and crinkles beside her eyes because when she did it, she did it big.
Letha never did anything by halves.
