She sat down in the chair beside my bed again, taking my hand in hers. “You were mugged in a parking lot. After a date—do you remember anything about that? It was your birthday. They took your purse and your phone, and pushed you down. You hit your head and you’ve been in a coma for…well, it’s been over forty-eight hours by now. I’m just glad they brought you to my hospital, or we might still not know who you were, I wouldn’t have known what happened to you.”
I closed my eyes. My head really did feel awful. This dull, throbbing pain that radiated from behind one eye. “I’ve been here the whole time?”
“Of course,” she said. “I wouldn’t let you out of my sight. I don’t work this floor, but I’ve made sure you have the best—”
“Eamonn,” I said. “Where’s Eamonn?”
She adjusted the thin blanket over my hospital gown,giving me a puzzled look. “Eamonn? I don’t know anyone by that name who works here, but I can always—”
“He wasright here,” I said, the vehemence shredding my throat a little. “He was sleeping next to me.”
A doctor had already come in, rubbing her hand sanitizer on as she glanced at my whiteboard. Mari waggled her eyebrows, dropping her voice to avoid being heard. “Sounds like you had some banger coma dreams,” she said. “You can tell me about them later.”
I shook my head, closing my eyes again as a tear streaked down my cheek. When I opened them, I couldn’t help but focus on the green shamrock that had been stuck to the whiteboard with a magnet.
“It’s Saint Patrick’s Day,” the doctor said, catching the direction of my stare and giving me a kind smile. “And you are oneverylucky lady.”
I didn’t get a moment to myself until it was almost midnight, visiting hours were long over, even Mari having been convinced that I’d be okay to spend a night alone in the hospital. She’d been at my side the whole time I’d been in the coma, which I appreciated so much. It felt good, to know I was that loved and cared for.
“And your parents were here over the weekend,” she assured me. “They just had a deposition today.”
Her tone betrayed what she thought of that—I saw my parents as benignly neglectful, Mari wasn’t so sure about thebenignpart—but it really didn’t bother me. That was my parents. In a way, it was comforting to know that even a coma couldn’t shake them from their routines. It weirdly felt like it was their way of telling me that everything would be okay.
I’d almost expected to see flowers from my own workplace, felt silly for even being hurt that there weren’t any, another repeat of the birthday card slight from last week that felt like it had happened to a different person. But then I realized that it was only Monday, and they probably didn’t even know that I was in the hospital. I called in, resulting in an awkward conversation that got routed through a clearly pissed-off legal assistant who’d been roped into receptionist duty for that hour, and then on to the office manager, who was quite chilly until I finally got a word in edgewise that when I said I was sick, I meant I was in thehospital, I’d been in acoma. I spared a brief moment to relish her overly concerned backpedaling, told her I was preemptively using up all my sick days, and then I hung up.
Mari filled me in on everything that had happened over the last couple of days. How scared and worried she’d been when she saw that it was me who’d been brought to the hospital. How she’d yelled at a doctor who’d come in with pamphlets about how a vegan diet was the secret to good health, and would solve all my problems.She’s had a traumatic brain injury, you fucking quack. How they’d had to put in a feeding tube and restrain my hands so I wouldn’t try to rip it out if I woke up, a panic response that was apparently common. It sounded terrifying to me, but Mari said she’d actually seen it as a good sign, that they believed so strongly that I would wake up.
When I touched the back of my head, there was a patch of hair that had been shaved there, and Mari said they hadn’t done any surgery based on what they saw in my scans, butthey’d been preparing just in case. Mari had also braided my hair and kept my face clean, although I was shocked the first time I looked into a mirror how much bruising there was around my temple and one eye.
I didn’t fill Mari in on anything about my experience of the last couple days. I didn’t even know where to start, was still trying to process it all myself. It had felt sorealto me—as real as the hospital, as real as Mari sitting next to my bed and making fun of the couple on TV whoneededfive bedrooms so he could have a man cave and she could have a craft room. When I closed my eyes, I could see Eamonn and his dimpled smile, could still feel the phantom weight of his arm around me as I drifted off to sleep.
At one point when I was alone, I lifted my hospital gown to find a small bruise on the inside of my thigh, exactly where I’d asked Eamonn to leave it.Mark me, I’d said, and I wondered if on some level I’d been thinking of this very moment, when I’d need some proof that it had all really happened. But then there were also bruises all over my body—around my eye, on my shoulder, down my arms and on the backs of my hands where nurses had poked and prodded me so many times. I didn’t know that I could take any meaning from this one.
The clock read three minutes past midnight, and I realized that was it. I was officially in my first brand-new day, one where I’d never spent a single second in a foreign country I’d never been to before with a man who apparently didn’t exist.
Thirty-Six
“I let myself in withmy key and watered all your plants,” Mari said a week later, when I finally got to go home from the hospital. “Even the one on top of your fridge, which is a bitch to get to, I don’t know why you’d put one up there.”
I appreciated everything, of course—the way she’d taken care of my place while I was gone, the way she’d brought me clothes and books to read in the hospital, even though I couldn’t focus. The way she was with me now, stepping back into my apartment for the first time since the incident. It just felt so surreal, even parking in the familiar lot, going up the stairs to my familiar door, seeing my living room and kitchen and everything just how I’d left it.
“That one’s fake,” I said.
“Why would you have afakeplant among all the real ones?”
“My parents gave it to me,” I said.
“Well, good job, I guess. It looks very convincing.”
I loved my apartment. I’d decorated it with art I’d bought at local street fairs mixed with the kind of cheesy museum prints that I’d thought were the height of sophistication in college, but I didn’t care, they still brought me joy now.Rooftops in Parisby Van Gogh.Two Ballet Dancers in a Dressing Roomby Degas.Young Woman in White Readingby Renoir. I’d bought a juicer on a whim two years ago and I still thought fresh-squeezed orange juice was one of life’s greatest pleasures. My mattress was the absolute perfect amount of firmness, and I had framed pictures propped up on my dresser of me as a kid with my parents, of me and Mari together at the botanical gardens, even a shot of the sky through two buildings I had to walk through to get to work that I saw every morning, and one day just thought looked especially beautiful. It really was the smallest things.
But I suddenly felt homesick for another apartment, one with a garage downstairs and shelves with books wedged in sideways and a spiral staircase and a bedroom I had to partially stoop in. I felt homesick for aperson, and I’d been feeling it the past week, had been hoping it would go away. Dreams always faded, didn’t they? They disappeared into smoke, the details getting fuzzier until you couldn’t make them out at all. I wanted this one to fade, so I could get back to my normal life. I was terrified that it would fade, and I really would lose him forever.
Mari had handed me the plastic bag filled with effects from the hospital, and I pulled out the blue-purple dress, leaving it folded on my kitchen counter. One of the gauzy sleeves was ripped, and there was dried blood on the back of the collar, soI knew I should throw it away. But it was hard to part with, this artifact that had been in both my worlds.
“Indigo,” I said, touching the dress. “I guess you would call this color indigo.”
Eventually, I’d told Mari all about my coma dream. Not every single part, but the broad strokes of it. She’d found it fascinating, but I could tell she was responding to it as adream, like if I’d described a vivid sex fantasy or a made-up scenario where a famous actor wanted to be your friend or how you’d once imagined keeping a wild animal as a pet.
