Chapter 15

15

ELLE

T he jolts of pain came to her in waves at first. White foam of a teeth-grinding sensation would wash over her, then leave for a moment. In those moments in between, she would experience a rush of memories, some of them recent, some long forgotten, dug out from below the heaps of more relevant ones.

After a tiring wave of pain in her temples, she felt transported to an abandoned-by-her-consciousness beach. The white sand tickled her feet, the ocean's waves came and went in a constant whisper. The image brought her much solace, remembering the quiet morning hours, the rustling of the tent's walls when she would sneak away to run along the beach, lit by the early sun, licked by the tongues of waves.

For a long time, she didn't feel like a person, but rather a river of memories. The events of her life didn't seem to bear any connection to each other. Indeed, she couldn't think of trying to look for one. Instead, in a manner similar to that of dreams, they transported her from one place to another without any clear purpose, and the only thing she could do was to accept that as her reality, watch, as what had already unraveled did so again. Her mind existed as an eternity. There was no beginning of that state in her memory, and since she couldn't remember any other state of being, there was no reason for her to expect an end.

Some scenes she was thrust into troubled her, while others brought comfort. An exhausting slither of pain from her head down to her legs paralyzed Elle's thoughts for a moment, but soon it stopped mattering. Her hands were set firmly against a wooden surface. Her voice seemed to be raised, angry, but she couldn't understand why. Warm, dim light was falling down on her from a ceiling lamp. There was another person in the room. Her voice was equally as angry, like a storm hitting rocks on the shore.

"How could you have lied to me?"

"Fuck." Elle felt her hands go up to her temples, massaging them. She felt stressed. "It meant nothing, I told you already. I was drunk. It meant nothing."

"It meant something to me, Elle. Does that matter to you, still? And on top of everything, you lied straight to my face more than once!"

Elle's legs carried her around the room. She was only a spectator, observing from inside of her head. The words made their way out on their own. "What choice did I have? We can just move on from this, pretend it didn't happen."

The other person shook her head. Elle could see tears flowing down her face in little streaks.

"Maya," she said, coming up to her.

"I don't want to be with someone who is so casual about disrespecting me. If you can't stick to simple agreements, that truly shows your selfishness, Elle. And you know you can be selfish," Maya went to another room, out of sight.

Elle collapsed on the couch. Its softness contrasted with the sharp tangle of feelings tightening in her chest. She felt trapped within herself. She wanted to escape this place. She felt that the situation would not end well, would not be resolved within that room, and that weighed heavily on her.

But then she began slipping away, her consciousness melting into the familiar velvet black fabric of nonexistence, of pause in thought. The warmth of its embrace comforted her, carried her away from the pain of her body, high and far away, leaving her body behind, her heavy limbs too weighty for her consciousness to drag away with it. And then she sank into a state of non-being, without dreams or memories, without thought or perception. Only the body's mechanical rhythms remained, its steady rise and fall with each breath and exhale, and its ceaseless heartbeat, never abandoning its march onward.

She heard a mingling of sounds to the left. It took her some time to recognize the strings of sounds as voices, of various pitches and rhythms. For a while, it amused her to hold the threads of these voices in her mind. Not quite sure what she was supposed to do with them, she squeezed and stretched them out, felt the way they reached her. Some had a fuzzy quality to them, some more slick and oily, some raspy. She felt them nest in her mind, echo around or plunge deep.

Out of their nets emerged something she recognized only later, how the threads could be divided into chunks, little words. Uncovering the words brought her much amusement, every one word carried some image with it, like connecting tissue, like glue making collages out of the images.

Soon, she understood that the collages brought emotions with them, or new sets of memories. Like wagons, they created sentences, and the sentences played around with each other, bumped against each other like in a game of football. She made the space of her mind into a playing field, watched the threads of sounds knit words, words be glued into sentences, and the sentences be carried by trains of thought. Sometimes her understanding would be derailed. Sometimes there were too many sounds for her to follow. With time, however, out of the fog emerged full conversations.

"Will she ever fully recover?"

"The doctors aren't saying anything definitive yet."

"Is it true that her ex operated on her?"

Her ex carried something very emotional in it. Her thoughts stirred with a new substance in them, creating abstract patterns that soon descended into the reality of memories. She retrieved the figure of Maya from her memory.

The image of the living room anger floated back, as did many others. A warmth against her chest. A soothing voice. Recalling Maya brought a sudden richness to her thoughts, laden with feelings of various flavors. The recollections awakened her mind, and soon something overwhelming happened—she remembered the way to lift her eyelids, and a flood of light hurt her eyes.

"Oh my God, look! She's awake!" O'Malley pointed her finger at Elle, who, for the first time in days, regained consciousness and was now trying to process what had happened.

"Don't point fingers, that's rude." She smiled weakly.

The group of firefighters were on the verge of jumping for joy, hearing her voice. They started talking over each other, each having a question to ask, each wanting to tell Elle something important. She scanned the faces jumping around her and noticed a significant lack.

"Does Maya know I'm here?" she asked, her voice painfully weak.

Her friends looked around each other, concerned and whispering. Someone ,should probably call in the nurse. She doesn't sound well. Johnson ran out to get someone. Captain Ramirez stepped closer to Elle, touching her hand with care.

"Maya was a part of the team who drove you here." She smiled. "She stayed in the waiting room for a long time before going back to her duties. We'll call her to come here as soon as she can for sure."

Elle blinked, surprised. "How do you two know each other?"

"We got to know each other here, actually, in the hospital visiting you." She nodded. "She's a really nice woman, Elle."

Elle's eyes teared up, so she twisted her head so as not to seem dramatic. Ramirez tactfully stepped back a little and looked away.

"Elle, you looked horrible when we got you out of the building, for real," Haley said, closing the door. "The nurse is on her way."

"You scared us all." Ramirez nodded. "You must be a really tough thing to have survived that."

Everyone agreed, looking at Elle with compassion. She felt awkward, almost pitied, and wanted to change the tone of the conversation as quickly as possible.

"To be honest, guys, I feel kind of shitty. I won't be able to help you anymore, and the city is still such a mess."

"Elle, I never took you for someone prone to self-pity," O'Malley said in a mocking tone of surprise but was quickly silenced by a critical look from Ramirez and the rest.

"You're right." Elle nodded, "That is self-pitiful. But I'm also trying to be honest."

"We've got a lot of firefighters. One, even as brilliant as you, won't make such a big difference," Ramirez said matter-of-factly, but her voice carried something gentle within it, something that truly reassured Elle.

She could only say hmm, to affirm Ramirez's words. But she was afraid that if she lets the words out of her mouth, she might feel like crying again. The situation overwhelmed her, and she felt weak in the face of it, unsure of how to react or cope. She didn't want to ask her friends to leave, but also the crowd around her hospital room wasn't helping.

When a doctor together with a nurse entered and asked everyone to leave, Elle felt awash in relief. With time, increased pain entered her consciousness, and her breathing became more erratic. She grew more tired by the minute.

"How are you feeling, Ms. Rodriguez?"

What followed was tiring and long, questions about feeling in various parts of her body, the level of pain, and her clarity of thought, and Elle began feeling endlessly sleepy, as if something was tugging on her sleeve and pulling her into an abyss of dreams, rest, calm. The doctor looked worried.

"Do you not feel that, Ms. Rodriguez?"

"What?" she asked, suddenly wide awake by the nervous feeling that something was wrong, based on the doctor's expression. Something had to be wrong, and she didn't know what.

"I'm touching your leg," he explained gently.

Elle looked down to where his hand was. He was indeed touching her leg, but she couldn't feel anything. She looked up at him, terrified, seeing her entire career dissolving right in front of her eyes.

"What happened?" she asked when he removed his hand and hurriedly took notes. He looked compassionate but moved somewhat automatically, his compassion a trained and contained expression. She didn't know how to feel about that specific kind of coolness.

"You suffered a serious brain injury. Some paralysis should be expected, even considering the express first aid you received. We will work on rehabilitation, of course."

"So I will get back to the way I was before?" Elle fired, impatient.

"We can't know for sure, ma'am. For now, try to get as much rest as possible. You're still in the very early stages of recovery." He smiled encouragingly and left the room.

The nurse quickly followed, having shown Elle the way to call if she were in need of anything and supplying her with a set of new water bottles. Having learned about her state, all tiredness escaped Elle's body. She felt nervous and on edge, uncertain about her professional future, and most of all, lost. She tried remembering what had led to the accident but couldn't remember anything besides an abysmal feeling of stress. Must have been before she was hit by the debris. She grew scared that it was her own fault, that due to her being distracted, she'd made a mistake, and out of politeness, none of the visitors had told her. Fear nested itself in her stomach and sat there until her thoughts were interrupted by her phone ringing on the nightstand. Its vibrations were bringing it closer and closer to the edge of the stand, so finally, Elle reached to pick it up.

"Yes?" she said, still completely unused to the weak sound of her voice.

"Elle?" Captain Hunter, of all people, Elle was definitely not expecting it to be her on the phone. "How are you feeling?"

"Uhm… Well, difficult to say." Elle felt unprepared to describe her state, though she realized she'd have to endure many such conversations in the following weeks. "It's not a great feeling to be lying here while all of you are still facing whatever's left of the earthquake's destruction. How is it going, by the way?"

"Hmm... We managed to rescue many people from the unfortunate shopping center. You know the one. Don't beat yourself up. You know it's ridiculous to feel guilty. We're going to manage. We only need you to take your time healing, and maybe also have a good chat with Maya."

"How do you all know Maya?" Elle could swear she heard Hunter smirk while saying that last part. She had no idea what could have happened during those few days she was unconscious.

"We met her in the hospital. She was the one who sewed you up, by the way."

"What?" Elle could believe what she was hearing.

"Yeah, was I not supposed to tell you that? She was there, carried you on the stretchers and did surgery on you in the ambulance. Rode with you all the way, too. She really cares about you, so don't fuck it up, huh?"

"Well… Thanks for telling me." Her voice grew a little bit stronger with every word, as if her vocal cords were getting newly used to speaking. "And how's the.. The girl's family?"

"Oh." Hunter quieted down herself now, "Maria's? She had a beautiful funeral. Of course her family is devastated, but they knew the risk that comes with the job, Elle."

"Hmm." Elle wanted desperately to open up to Hunter about the memory of the day and the guilt that followed. It was still hiding in a corner of her mind and still weighed heavy. She wanted to connect with someone who'd been there, too, and ask how Hunter was managing the feeling herself. Elle took a deep breath, then asked, "How are you feeling about it, Hallie?"

Hunter stayed quiet for a while. Elle could only hear the occasional sounds of breathing on the line. She enjoyed this wordless moment between them, acknowledging the heavy subject lying in between them, connecting their minds with a net of grief, of something unresolved that quietly knew its place in their conversation. When Hallie spoke, her voice was slightly raspy, more vulnerable than Elle had ever heard her be before.

"I've always known the risks of this job. For a long time, I thought having a family of my own would be impossible due to the nature of my profession. I took care of new recruits, I drilled into them the risks and importance of attention to detail and communication, all that so that they wouldn't go in and get themselves killed." She paused, drawing in a long breath before continuing. "I knew all that, Elle. And still—the day Maria fell, it felt as if some door suddenly opened and sucked me in with no way back. It was a shock to all of us, and there is no shame in your grief. I'd say it's actually quite expected."

Elle nodded pensively, grateful for each word that soothed her like dripping honey. There was no rush or impatience in Hunter's voice, and she realized this might had been what she needed all along.

"I think I needed to speak to you, specifically, about this. You know, because you were there, too. I feel like even though others mean well, talking to them doesn't make me feel at ease the same way talking to you does."

"That's understandable," Hunter replied.

"I still…I feel guilty about that. Not stopping it from happening, and now surviving even though the chances were slim." Elle wanted to put the raw feeling into some delicate words, wrap the soreness of it in wrapping paper and gift it to Hunter, hoping she'd unpack the burning sensation herself.

"That's a natural feeling. If I'm being honest with you, I feel it, too, every day since the accident." She paused. "But there's nothing we can do about it now, Elle, and pondering what ifs won't change the situation. We just need to march onward, help others, teach them better, be more attentive, and allow ourselves to grieve in private. You'll have a lot of time to process everything now. From what I hear, you're not getting out any time soon."

Elle was infinitely grateful for the smooth subject change. She'd received all the reassurance she could ask for and felt a bit more comfortable with her still raw emotions. Then she looked at her legs, resigned.

"I don't know what will happen to me. I have no feeling in my legs," she said, sighing.

"Fuck."

"Yeah. They're talking about rehabilitation, though, and that it's difficult to say how well I'll recover just yet. So maybe it's not going to be that bad…" Elle said with a bit more hope in her tone than what she really felt.

"Well, fingers crossed. You know we've all got your back at the station, Elle. I need to get going now, and I'm sure you need some sleep, too, but if you ever need anything from us, then you know who to call."

Hanging up, Elle felt the need to process all the information she'd learned from Hunter. The fact that it was Maya who'd saved her life weighed heavily on her, knowing how difficult it must have been like to operate on someone she knew, and Elle's head, no less. She craved the need to talk to her but felt too depleted by all the day's encounters to pick up the phone again. Her body felt leaden, craving sleep.

Her eyes began closing, but something stopped her from falling asleep just yet. Through the remaining slits of her vision, she saw a newspaper lying on the nightstand. Curious, Elle reached for it and studied the first page.

Another firefighter gravely injured following the tragic death of firefighter Maria Smith!

"Oh look, Mom, I've made it into the newspapers," Elle muttered to herself.

The piece had a sensationalist tone, full of exclamation marks and speculative writing. The journalist tried guessing Elle's injuries but clearly didn't have any reliable sources. On the left was a picture of Maria's funeral. Elle felt strange, being lumped together with Maria on the same page. She supposed she'd been close to death, but having survived, she didn't feel the actual danger that had loomed over her before. Everything had happened to her while she was unconscious from start to finish, and she felt as if the near deadness of it had eluded her completely. She hadn't experienced any fear for her life, or at least didn't remember.

When she settled in her bed once more readying herself to sleep, the memories of her and Maya following Maria's death came to her mind. She remembered how gentle Maya was, how effortlessly caring. She hoped this would still be the case when they saw each other again. She knew she'd have to apologize once and for all, make a blank slate for both of them to rewrite their story together. The right words would have to come to her somehow so Maya would know how much she cared about her.

Thinking this through, her eyes began closing, this time finally taking her away into the soft sheets of sleep. This time she had no dreams, no memories playing in her head. Her body was thrown into a restorative kind of rest, every tissue fighting to bring her back together.