“It’s not?” She is visibly relieved. “I thought he seemed a little old for you, too. Who do you mean, then?”
I describe him again, the best I can. I tell her we picked him up at Raddick, where the elderly couple got on. That he’s tall and has a local accent and wasn’t wearing glasses.
“Hmm, maybe I missed him. I have to do some charts, but I’ll check with the ER after. He might have been taken to another unit.”
When Nurse Megan comes back a few minutes later, she still has no lead. “There’s no record of him. He was probably well enough not to be admitted,” she says, sounding disappointed that she won’t get to play matchmaker tonight. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” I say, feeling silly.
It’s silly that I sent my nurse on a wild-goose chase to find a boy I spoke to for a few minutes at most. It’s silly that the memory of his smile is stuck to my mind when I don’t know the first thing about him.
Still, it feels a little sad to think that I’ll never know hisname.
“I knew something like this would happen.” Those are my mother’s first words when she bursts into my hospital room. “Iknewit.”
She seems to be on the verge of tears as she outmaneuvers the bandage on my arm to envelop me in a tight hug. She smells like the berry tea she loves, and I shut my eyes and breathe in the scent of her. I don’t know whether it’s exhaustion or the scare of the bus crash, but my own eyes prick with unexpected tears.
I blink them back quickly, because if my mother is always looking for reasons to worry, I am always looking for reasons not to worry her.
“And you wanted todrivetonight,” she says when she finally releases me. “It’s snowing now and it’s coming down hard. Even getting here, I had to go at a snail’s pace. You’d have been sitting alone in a ditch somewhere.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, technically apologizing for what could have happened instead of what did. “Where’s Caleb? Did you call Dad?”
“I did,” is all the acknowledgment she gives my last question. “Caleb was having car trouble again, and I wanted to get down here as soon as I got the call, so I couldn’t wait for him to get home. He told me to tell you he’s glad you’re okay, though,” Mom says, sitting on the edge of my bed.
“Thanks,” I say. What Mom doesn’t know is that “car trouble” is code for the rare occasions when my older brother goes to a party. They are usually high school parties, because parties thrown by people who go to the community college he attends in Lyndale are famously lame. Though maybe nothing is lamer than the fact that he has nowhere better to be on a Saturday night, despite having graduated from high school a year and a half ago. The worst thing I can imagine is being stuck the way my brother is, held in place by some invisible force, your entire life on repeat, when there’s so much else out there.
“What have they done to you?” Mom asks, jostling me out of my thoughts. She’s inspecting my bandage now, the thin hospital gown I’m wearing.
“Who? The aliens?”
Showing no relief that my sense of humor is still intact, Mom ignores me. “The nurse said they were keeping you overnight for observation because you lost consciousness. And that they had given you something for your head? How is it feeling now?”
“Better,” I say.
“When they called, I thought…” Her voice is shaking and she looks small in this brightly lit room, the way I felt when I first woke up. Maybe hospital rooms make everyone small. “If something had happened to you, Addie…I was so afraid.”
“I’m okay,” I tell her.
She nods, but she doesn’t seem convinced. To my mother, it’s always as if the worst has already happened. Or that it’s always, perpetually, on the verge of happening. “Thank God you were close to Lyndale,” she says, rubbing my back while I lean forward.
“Your father is in Florida tonight.” She says this as if “Florida” is code for the second level of hell, and not where he always has his layovers. In fact, before my parents split up five years ago, they used to talk about us moving there permanently, since my dad seemed to spend more time there than he did with us in Lyndale. “I called him, but it went to voice mail. I had toemailhim. To tell him his daughter was in the hospital.”
“He’s probably sleeping off his jet lag or something,” I say, but Mom just half snorts, like she can’t even bother with a full one.
She settles into the rollaway bed Nurse Megan arranged to have brought in for her and turns on the TV, flipping distractedly through the channels. Naturally, she stops at Channel Se7en, the station she works for, and we watch it for a while until Nurse Megan knocks and brings Mom a blanket. I told Mom she could go home and come back for me tomorrow, but she dismissed the suggestion like it wasn’t even an option.
An hour later, with the TV off, I start to feel groggy and my mind slowly hums to a stop. It’s peaceful and quiet when I drift to sleep. But then, what feels like mere seconds later, my eyes fly open and every trace of sleep is gone.
In the dark, my mind is wild with thoughts of spinning buses. The foreign shadows on the hospital wall morph into ghosts.
You’re awake.
You’re alive.
It’s okay,I tell myself.
“Air on the G String” reverbs through my mind, the whole evening reverbs through my mind, and I think of the boy again and wonder where he is tonight.
