Blink Once (9 page)

I feel like I know the answer and I shouldn’t ask.

I lift the blanket over her body as she curls in against me and wrap my arms around her. She’s thin, thinner than Allie; her body is unbelievably delicate, her hands are tiny. I curl around her tighter. I don’t want to hurt her, but I feel like I can’t hold her tight enough.

“That feels good,” she says, and lets out a sigh.

“You are all cleaned up,” the blond nurse said, rubbing a dry towel over my underarms. “Looking good, a new gown and we’re ready.” She pulled a new green-and-white patterned robe from her cart and slipped my arms into it, lifting me slightly on my side to snap the back. “And let’s sit up a bit,” she said, pushing a button on the side of the bed. She let the back of the bed come up behind my shoulders just a few inches. “Okay.” She pushed my hair back to one side, then forward over my forehead, then over to the other side. “How do you do this?” I blinked twice for no, to tell her she didn’t have to bother, but she didn’t seem to know my code. I usually just let my hair do its own thing, but Mom liked it pushed back. “Well, that looks good,” she finally said, letting it flop down like long bangs. She tidied up her cart and headed out of the room.

I didn’t even want to think about the dream while the nurse was still in here, like I was afraid something on my face would give it away. That I had a sort of dirty dream. About Olivia. Did I like Olivia? Like,
really
like her? I lay there thinking about it, playing it over in my mind, how Olivia got into bed with me, how good it felt to curl up against her … until the real Olivia walked into the room.

“Heya, handsome, nice ’do,” she joked. She pushed my hair back from my face the way it usually was and plopped down in the chair. It felt weird to have her touch my forehead, made me nervous. What if she could tell what I was thinking? Did she say that to me, or did I just dream it?

“So you must be tired this morning … I heard you were out late.” She gave me an overly exaggerated wink.

As soon as Olivia said it, I remembered. We were out last night. Not for long, but we were. Went to the TV room, watched videos on the computer. She told me she knew what I was thinking, and she did. She held my hands. We watched her dancing.

“After you were back in bed, I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d try to grab your files from the nurses’ station—you know, just to see what this crazy doctor has in mind for you. But I couldn’t get the goods. Every time I checked, there was someone there. The nurse who was on last night is lazy as hell and totally fell asleep at the desk. Usually there’s a break when I can get in there.”

The thought of Olivia sneaking to the nurses’ station at night was funny, but it was also sad. I wondered if she had ever pulled her own file—and if she had read it, how it made her feel. She curled up in the chair, pulling her IV pole closer. “Don’t look so stressed; I’m gonna try again tonight.” She looked at my face a little closer, leaned in. “You okay? You don’t look so good.” She put her hand back on my forehead. “What the hell? You’re burning up. What is wrong with these stupid nurses? I’ll be right back.” She yanked her IV pole behind her and stormed out of the room, muttering to herself.

In a few minutes, a nurse I’d never seen before came in. She checked my chart and adjusted something on the respirator, checked the tube going into my throat and adjusted my sheets. She looked at the monitor again and put her hand on my forehead. Then she made a face and marked something on the chart. After she left, I started to drift off. Being out for a midnight stroll really did wear me out; Olivia wasn’t joking.

A guy in a white lab coat came into the room, and Nurse Norris was behind him. For some reason, the room seemed darker now, like the sun was going down. But it had just been morning.

“How long has his temperature been elevated?” the guy asked.

“About twenty-four hours, low-grade on and off.”

“Hmmmm,” the guy said. He looked at my chart and turned the page. “We want to avoid any type of infection. I see here that Dr. Louis is considering a vertebrate-fusion surgery on this patient. I’d like a full workup now, so that we aren’t facing any infection-related delays later. And page me if his fever goes any higher.”

“Of course, Doctor,” Nurse Norris said. She walked out of the room with him and came back a moment later with a plastic cart full of medical stuff. “Got to take a little blood,” she explained. It was dark out. What had happened to the day? Maybe those were storm clouds.

She straightened my arm and tied it off with a thick rubber band, wiping the inside of my elbow with an icy cold alcohol pad. “Little pinch,” she said, sliding a needle into my arm. It did pinch and I flinched for a second, feeling like a baby. Nurse Norris met my eyes. “You felt that, didn’t you?” she asked me. A huge smile crossed her face. “You sure did! I knew it, you’re coming back all over.” I realized that I had felt the alcohol wipe too, the chill of it. She pulled some blood from my arm into a tube and sealed it off, pulled out the needle, and put a small bandage over the spot. “When you first got here and I did your IVs, you didn’t feel a thing. But now look,” she said, laying a cool hand across my forehead.

I closed my eyes knowing that Norris would make everything right. In a minute, the dark-haired nurse was back,
the mean one, and she had a doctor with her, a woman doctor. It was light in my room again, but I couldn’t tell if it was the next day or the same day. “It could just be a simple virus, but we need to keep an eye on him and make sure that his lungs stay clear.” She looked over at the monitor next to the bed and read the numbers. “One oh one; that’s high, but it’s not gotten any higher since last night. Ibuprofen every four hours, and I’d like the physical therapist in to tap his lungs, keep things nice and clear.” The doctor wrote everything on the clipboard, then turned back a page or two. “Has Dr. Yung seen this workup?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, glancing over the doctor’s shoulder. “He hasn’t signed it, so I guess not.”

“When he comes on shift tonight, can you have him take a look? I don’t know what he was looking for, but I’m not seeing anything out of the ordinary here.”

I loved hearing that. My blood was normal. At least one thing was working with this body.

“And who’s next?” the doctor said, pulling a small pad out of her pocket. “Olivia Kemple, shunt infection … room 203?”

“That’s right next door, I’ll show you,” the nurse said, leading her out. Shunt infection—right. That’s what happens when you constantly pull your own IV out. Olivia Kemple, you are in trouble.

I tried to listen closely to hear what was going on in the
next room, but I just heard the doctor speaking very softly, I caught only a few words. Was that Olivia talking? Or the other nurse? It was useless, I couldn’t hear enough to figure out how Olivia was going to work her way out of this one. I drifted off, feeling a little woozy, and when I woke up, it was daylight and I was lying on my side, looking out the window and someone was sort of pounding on the side of my rib cage—not hard, like a rhythmic massage. They went up one way and down the other way, hitting me with the side of a hand, in a chop-chop motion. “Okay, now we’ll go to the other side, same thing.” As she rolled me back over, I recognized the physical therapist from before, with the supershort blond hair. Kim. She moved around the other side of the bed and rolled me up on my left side, pulling my right arm in front of my body, then she started doing the same chop-chop motion up my side and down it again. After a little bit, it started to feel pretty good, like I could really get a deep breath every time the respiration pulled in. I tried to clear my throat; it felt like there was some stuff in there.

“Good job. Let’s get that stuff out, you’ve just got a little cold,” the therapist said. She rolled me onto my back again, so I was staring at the ceiling. She walked out of the room without even saying good-bye, but she was back in a minute or two with Nurse Norris. “His temp is still elevated today, but I think he’s going to kick this without
antibiotics. He’s a strong young man—aren’t you, Mr. West?” she said, leaning over me. “I’m going to pull all that stuff that Kim just loosened up out of there for you.” She pulled on something by my throat, where the breathing tube went in, and I felt a pull of air, like when you take the hose out of the vacuum cleaner.

“Almost done,” Norris said. “I’m going to suction your nose as well.” She put the tube back into my throat and secured the big plastic halo around my neck and shoulders. With a small plastic nozzle, she put a tube up my nose and pulled out some gunk. I had to remember this next time I had a cold, it worked great. “Quick look in those ears,” she said, reaching into her pocket for a small penlight. “Everything looks nice and clear in there, no infection. You just rest.” She put her hand on my forehead again and held it there for a moment. When she stepped away, I realized the physical therapist had been in the room the whole time, watching, and she had this horrified look on her face. “Can he feel that?” she asked Norris.

“Of course!” She laughed. “He can feel everything, and I bet he feels a lot better now that we’ve loosened up those lungs a little. Time for him to rest, so let’s go.” Norris put her hand on Kim’s back and guided her out of the room. I didn’t get how Kim could have any sort of medical training and still think I was a vegetable or something.

Even though Norris had cleaned out what she could, I
still had that fuzzy head feeling you get with a bad cold. I wanted to cough, but when I tried to, the tube in my throat just got in the way so it was useless. I closed my eyes and waited for Olivia or my mom to come visit me. I wondered what the doctor said to Olivia, and how she explained the “problem” with her feeding tube. But mostly I just wanted Mom to come, to sit with me and go over my MRI and talk to me really plainly about what was next for me, and when I was going to get out of here. I closed my eyes. I would rest, get better, and we would move on to the next step. I was ready.

The room is dark again; the curtains are open. I’ve been here before. I know there will be water on the floor, and there is. But those aren’t Olivia’s feet. They are sandals, small. It’s a girl, standing at the foot of my bed, in a puddle of water. She’s tiny and thin, her clothes dark and dripping wet, her hands down by her side.

“Who are you?” She doesn’t move, doesn’t answer. “Can I help you?”

She moves closer to the side of the bed, to the drawer there. She reaches out her hand to open it and I can hear her sniffling; she’s crying. I see a drop of water fall from her hand onto the floor. But it’s not water; it’s too dark, black. I trace it back up to her fingers.

It’s blood. A cloud moves slowly away from the moon,
and more light pours into the room. I can see now that she’s dripping blood, a puddle of it, streaked across the floor where she walked to the bed. She looks into the drawer, searching for something, but then suddenly her head turns and she sees that I’m there, that I’m awake—her hand shoots out from the drawer to my wrist, fast—she grips tight, tighter. It feels like she’s trying to break my arm, her hand is ice, so cold it feels like it’s burning my skin. “Let go, stop,” I tell her, but I can’t pull away. I can’t move. Her eyes are black circles. “Nurse!” I yell. “NURSE!”

“Nurse!” It wasn’t my voice, it was my mom’s.

“I heard you,” the mean nurse said, rounding the corner of the doorway into the room.

“He’s burning up—something is not right!” Mom yelled. “Look at his heart rate! What kind of hospital is this!”

“Mrs. Spencer, please calm down,” the nurse said. “He has an elevated temperature, but we’re doing everything we can to keep him comfortable.”

“It’s not enough—he’s sick, something’s wrong.” Mom’s hands gripped the rail at the side of my bed. “He’s unresponsive.”

The nurse took her penlight from her pocket and flashed it into my right eye quickly, back and forth. “He’s not unresponsive; he’s okay. Please have a seat and I’ll send the doctor in to talk to you.” She walked out of the room shaking her head.

Mom took my hand. “Hold on baby, hold on. I’m going to get you some help.” I wasn’t feeling that bad; in fact, I was feeling a little bit better than I had before I’d fallen asleep.