Chapter Three
The next day Annie was allowed out of bed. The IVs were removed, because she could eat for herself and swallow pills when they were given. Everything that had hurt—everything the painkillers had blocked—hurt more. Her arm ached and itched where the IVs had been. Her ears rang like mad, a cymbal crash that never ended, but when she shook her head, instead of clearing them, it just made the racket seem to bounce around inside, and that made an ache rise up just behind her temples. Dr. Ganz had called the buzzing tinnitus, and said it was caused by damaged hair cells, which Annie thought should be cells that grew hair but were, Ganz explained, the tiny sensory cells in the inner ear that converted sound energy into electrical signals that the brain could interpret.
She shrugged on a blue terry robe over her hospital gown and the clavicle splint she wore—basically two bands that looped under her armpits and behind her neck, all buckling together in the back, to keep her from moving her collarbone wrong (as a fringe benefit, it gave her incredibly straight posture)—and stuck her feet into the softest leather slippers she had ever found. She needed to move, to try to work out some of the kinks that had settled in from lying in bed for so long, exacerbating the aches from the bomb.
The walls of the hospital had generic, nondenominational holiday decorations hanging on them: paper snowmen, snowflakes, sleighs, and carolers, Mylar tinsel streamers and stars. Walking past a nurse’s station in her corridor, Annie saw a couple of nurses working on computers. Lights glowed on the front of a mini-stereo and she wondered if they were listening to holiday music. Would “Silver Bells” be the last Christmas song she would ever hear? It had never been a favorite, so she hoped not. These past few years, she had been partial to the Leon Redbone/Dr. John version of “Frosty the Snowman,” and she hated the idea that she might die without enjoying it again. She would even miss Wham’s “Last Christmas.” One of the nurses, a tall, skinny guy with a shaved head and a lightning bolt tattooed on his forearm, looked up at her and said something. She had no idea what, so she just smiled and kept going. She figured non-English speakers probably acted the same way, pretending they understood, nodding, smiling, and making themselves scarce.
Her room was on the fourth floor of the patient tower. She pressed a down button for the elevator and looked at the framed notices on the wall, counting on the elevator’s soft bong and the shush of the doors opening to let her know when it came. She heard neither—of course, you idiot!—and it was only a changing of the light on the wall that let her know an elevator had opened and was closing again. Annie spun around, making herself dizzy. She shoved an arm between the doors, and they opened again. She stepped inside and leaned against a wall until the dizziness passed.
When the doors opened on the second floor, a middle-aged couple boarded. Stealing a surreptitious glance, Annie could see that they were grieving, their loss fresh and raw. Tears tracked down the woman’s face, carving rivers through her light foundation. The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and his eyes and nose were as red as if he’d just stared down a hurricane.
Annie didn’t recognize them, had never seen either of them in her life, but their sorrow swallowed her whole, as if she had fallen into an unexpectedly deep pool. She caught the doors again and stepped quickly off the elevator. She didn’t have a particular destination, just wanted to walk around a bit, learn the layout of the hospital and stretch her muscles, but suddenly she knew she couldn’t bear another instant in their presence. When the doors closed, the feeling passed, leaving only a residue of grief like an oily film.
The second floor held the emergency/trauma unit, where she had been taken after the bomb at Fairhaven’s trailer, according to nurse Helen, and surgery and cardiology. The grieving couple could have come from any of those. Annie glanced at the directory on the wall and decided to go up one floor. She pushed the elevator’s UP button, this time watching for the glow to disappear. The third floor was where women went to have babies, and although Annie had never really thought of herself as mommy material, she thought looking at other people’s babies might cheer her up after that horrific moment in the elevator.
What she wasn’t prepared for was the intensity of the joy she felt, standing outside a nursery with a handful of parents and friends, looking in at a bunch of strangers’ newborns. The emotion swept her up, lifted her off the floor, until she thought her heart would burst from love for people she didn’t know, babies she would never hold, fathers and sisters and grandmothers gazing at their offspring, nieces, nephews, and grandkids.
Tears welled in her eyes. Someone spoke to her, but she looked away, pretended she didn’t know she had been addressed. Quickly, while tears of happiness glistened on her smiling cheeks, she hurried back to the elevator, back to the safety of her room.
What the hell is going on? she wondered. This isn’t me.
This isn’t me at all.