Chapter 32

CHAPTER 32

“Maddy? Maddy?”

A woman’s voice calls for Maddy somewhere in the distance.

“Oh my God! Maddy!”

Now the voice is loud, shrill, and up close.

For the briefest and longest moment, consciousness and identity interlock hands. She smells something sour and vile. She has a face, a neck, and hands, and they are wet. She blinks her eyelids open. They weigh a thousand pounds. She’s soaked in vomit.

“Maddy, what did you do?!”

The voice belongs to Gramma. Her eyes are black marbles.

The hands unclasp.

“Stay awake! Stay with me!” yells a woman’s voice somewhere in the darkness.

A light shines down on her. It’s not the sun. Above her is a ceiling, not sky.

“Maddy? Maddy, can you hear me?”

She hears her mother calling her name, but she can’t see her. She tells her mother I’m here , but the words are merely thoughts, electrochemical signals trapped inside the dark and soundless chamber of her skull. She can’t find her voice.

“Her eyes are open. Go get a nurse!”

She tries to keep her eyes open, to stay in the room with the light and the ceiling, to keep listening to her mother talk, but the effort has already worn her out.

“Maddy? It’s Mom. Can you hear me?”

She closes her eyes.

No more light.

No more ceiling.

No more mother talking.

No more.

The light on the ceiling is off. The room is dark. She turns her head to the side. Clear IV tubing snakes into a needle taped to the bony back of her hand. She’s in a hospital bed. She licks her paper-dry lips. Her tongue is sandpaper. She swallows, her saliva viscous, crawling down the corridor of her brittle throat. She takes a deep breath, the expansion pressing against her ribs like a new bruise. Everything hurts.

She turns her head to the other side. Emily is there, asleep, her small body curled up next to her. Everything hurts a little less.