I’m sore, muscles throbbing from head to toe. I hardly feel like speaking, so I nod.
She retrieves a tablet affixed to the wall and returns to the monitor. Her fingernails tap against glass as she makes some notes, bobbing her head from the monitor to the tablet and back again.
“Can you tell me your name? First and last, please.”
“Lo—” My voice croaks, and I clear my throat. “Lou Adaire.”
Her fingers stop tapping as she tilts her head toward me questioningly. “Legal name?”
“Right,” I mutter. “Tallulah Adaire.” Tallulah is a family name, but Grams was always Tallulah. Mom was Talli. I’m Lou.
Her expression softens, and I wonder how she already obtained that information. “Very good, hun. And how are you feeling?” she asks, stepping closer. She sets the tablet on a table beside me and gently readjusts the IVs. My left arm rests limply in her hand.
“I’m okay, I think. Just a little soreness.”
“Mhmm. A little soreness and an angel on your side, I’d say.” She nods as she walks away, disappearing behind the front door for a second before rolling in a vitals machine.
Something sparks in my mind at the mention of an angel, and it takes me a minute to place it. Oh my god. I wasn’t alone in the lake. There was someone else. A man. No, no, that can’t be right.Come on now, Lou, don’t go losing your mind just because you nearly died. If anything, it was a dream. A remarkably realistic dream, but a trick of the mind all the same.
The woman stops at my bedside, grabs a thermometer, and sticks it in my ear. “Now, do you remember what happened?” When she blows a few strands of blonde hair out of her face, they fly up to skim grey roots.
I pause and mull it over as she withdraws the instrument from my ear. The bridge, the cold water filling my lungs, the man. Yeah, better leave that last one out of it. “I think so. There was a storm. My truck—I went off a bridge?”
She closes her eyes and gives a sympathetic nod. “You did, poor thing, straight into Tuttle Creek Lake. Dr. Perry says it’s a miracle you’re even alive.” Her hand is resting over my own now, giving a small squeeze, but I hardly feel it.
A miracle.
Miracles don’t happen to someone like me, and when it looks like they do, it’s only a sign of something worse to come. Grams used to say I was a miracle for making it through the day I was born. But I’ll never forget that my mother sacrificed her own life for that to happen. I thought I was lucky to at least still have my dad, but he could only take it for so long—life without his other half. I close my eyes before the image of his lifeless body on the bathroom floor can fully develop. I’d prefer never again having to see so much red.
“Oh, cheer up now, pretty girl.” My eyes open, the concerned sound of the woman’s voice wiping away my darkening thoughts. Her face looms over me, eyebrows puckered. “It’s not every day we get to witness miracles like this one around here, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Um, where am I exactly?”
“Oh, of course. You’re in Salina.”
I stare at the woman.
“Salina, Kansas,” she clarifies.
My brows crease. “Do you happen to know how far Ashwick is from here?”
“Oh, sure. A good half an hour’s drive.”
A light, fluttering sensation swells in my stomach as I absorb the fact that I’m so close. I’m almost there. In Grams’s hometown. Mom’s hometown.
“Now, hun, do you have anyone you’d like to call? Anyone who might be looking for you?”
“How long have I been here?”
“Just since last night.”
I close my eyes, my head suddenly feeling heavy against the pillow as her original question echoes in my mind, taunting me. Jamie’s determined brown eyes pop into my brain, but there’s no way I’m going to freak her out over this. Finally, I manage to whisper, “No. There’s no one.”
She goes quiet again, and I can feel her still standing beside me. I must be making her uncomfortable, but I don’t have the energy to do anything about it.
“Honey, how are you feeling . . . emotionally? You’ve been through something incredible, and you know, there are people you can talk to about it, if you’d like.”
I know what she’s asking, if I’m mentally stable. The answer is somewhere in betweenhell if I knowandfar from it, but I don’t want to talk to anyone about Grams, about Bobby, about the accident. Or abouthim. The impossible angel my subconscious wants me to hold onto—a sick and twisted subconscious who gets off on showing me a world where not even the other side wants me.
