Her fingers gently comb through my hair.
I squint my eyes trying to pull her into focus. Her skin is too pale, her eyebrows too drawn together. Julia. Julia my friend, the great connoisseur of men and sex and nonseriousness, is worried about me. “What happened?” I mumble.
“Do you remember anything? We were at your apartment. You didn’t feel well, you had bad cramps. Dex came over and told you he got the results of the paternity test,” she rambles.
Oh right, yeah. My boyfriend Dex, the man I was in love with, received the surprise of his life when his ex-girlfriend went into labor and gave birth to a baby he knew nothing about. A baby they named Olivia.
“Umm,” I say, trying to keep my eyes open.
“Olivia isn’t his. He came over drunk and you yelled at each other about it. You’re both so thick-headed.”
Did he hurt me? Is that why I’m in this junk box with the wailing screams and lights?
“When he left you collapsed.” She sniffs and garbles out the words, “There’s so much blood, Jane. I don’t know what happened.”
I murmur a string of vowels even I don’t understand.
Then doors swing open and cold air blows in. The narrow mat I’m lying on lifts into the breeze, and voices and grunts are thundering all around me. Quick footsteps slap, slap, slap along floors and a ceiling of bright florescent lights flies up overheard.Hospital, I think.
The ceiling rushes past fast. Urgent voices. Scans and cold things. Tubes and lights and people in surgical masks and blue shower caps. My body gets tossed from one place to another; I try to tell them to be careful, try to ask them what the fuck they think they’re doing, but my lips won’t move. I’m too tired. Too warm and heavy to move.
A white gloved hand lowers an oxygen mask over my face. “Hello. My name is Dr. Shultz and I’m an anesthesiologist. I’m going to take good care of you…”
It smells like a plastic beach ball and…
I switch off.
I turn back on.
“Jane? Jane Nash?” a voice asks.
My brain is a mess, screaming for a thousand different things, but I’m too disoriented to process any of it. I remember there was something about a beach ball.
“Jane, my name is Alice. I’m the recovery room nurse. Don’t be scared, you’re going to feel confused and groggy for a bit, but it’ll clear up in a few minutes. Just try and relax, okay?” I hear her shift around me. “Just until your head clears.”
I try to answer but there’s a sandstorm in my mouth.What am I recovering from? What did they do to me? Where is everybody? Why are my eyelids so heavy? Fuck, were they glued shut? Am I blind?
Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God, I’m going to be sick. I have just enough energy to turn my head and dry heave into my shoulder, coughing and gasping.
“Easy now,” Nurse Alice says, softly. “The nausea will pass in a few minutes.”
To Hell with a few minutes! I want to know what just happened! I try to lift my head off the pillow and another wave of queasiness rolls through me. I dry heave again; this time emitting a loud sharp sound that came from somewhere in the back of my throat.
“What…” I croak, squinting my eyes open, “…happened?”
Her blurry form pauses in front of my head. I see the muddy motion of her hand before I feel it softly rest on my arm. “The doctor will be in shortly to talk to you. Try to settle back and wake up a little more.”
Behind a white wavy curtain, I hear another person mumbling and groaning. I narrow my eyes in the direction as a hazy Alice vanishes through the curtain to speak to another person repeating the same phrases she just said to me. Did they kidnap us and harvest our organs for the highest bidder? I try to pull myself up with trembling weak hands. I need to escape.
Another sudden burst of wooziness squeezes at my stomach and shoots up my esophagus again. More dry retching. More sharp belching sounds.
Fuck me sideways. Panic spirals in the middle of my chest. I need to know what happened and why I’m here. My heart rate raises, climbing along an invisible roller-coaster track, fueled by my exuberant imagination. An imagination I’ve built an entire career out of. This place is about to witness how an adult tantrum can clusterfuck an entire building. An uprising of emotional fury. I’m about to turn my psycho on and start a good old fucking riot in here.
Before my screams echo out, the curtain rolls open and a stunningly gorgeous man walks in smiling. He’s dressed in one of those lab coats with the end of a stethoscope dangling from one of the side pockets. I snap my mouth shut and glare at him. He is very pretty, but he looks no older than twenty. I hope he doesn’t tell me he’s a doctor.
“Hi, Jane. I’m Dr. Ames. How are you feeling?” He’s holding a clipboard that he places at the end of my bed, just missing my feet.
“Confused. I don’t know why I’m here or what happened or how old you were when you graduated medical school. Did you happen to see my insides for any reason?” I blurt.
