Everyone We've Been (2 page)

I wake up to a light so blue and harsh its mere force seems to pry my eyelids apart. The air smells like antiseptic, and I'm lying in a bed that isn't my own. Wires extend from a machine beside me like thin plastic tentacles.

I'm in a hospital room.

When I try to sit up, it feels as if someone is plucking the inside of my skull like a string instrument, but without the relief of music. I lie back down and groan to make it stop.

“You're okay, hon,” someone with a thick Southern accent says, rubbing my shoulder. “How are you feeling?”

The assault of murky, too-bright light slowly shifts into the image of a middle-aged woman in green scrubs standing by my bed.

I make an incoherent sound, but the nurse seems to be fluent in those because she nods and says, “Yes, I know. You hit your head during the crash. Do you remember that, Addison?”

My mind drifts back to the bus.

The spinning.

The boy a few rows ahead.

It takes three tries before I manage to get any words out. “Y-y-yes. Is everyone okay?”

The nurse nods. “You were all extremely lucky. Some minor injuries here and there, but everyone's going to be just fine. With how slick those roads are tonight, it could have been a lot worse. Maine in winter is no joke.”

She keeps talking, explaining that we're in Greenvale Hospital, forty minutes from Lyndale, and about ten minutes from the crash site. That we were brought here by ambulance.

“Can you sit up for me?” the nurse—a tag on her shirt says
MEGAN
—asks a few minutes later. Her voice is soothing and maternal, and it makes me feel small and safe. The way I did in elementary school, when my mom would look after me on days I was home sick. I slide up in bed, and she adjusts the pillows behind me, then lets me lean back. It turns out I'm not connected to any of the wires by the machine, so my movement is not restricted. But there's a bandage on the top of my right arm—a cut, the nurse explains, but nothing too serious.

Nurse Megan hands me two white tablets and a small paper cup half full of water. “Those will help with your head.”

The pills are huge; I can still feel them in the back of my throat after I've swallowed.

“So we've finally gotten hold of your mom. She was so, so worried on the phone, and I understand she's on her way over as we speak.”

Any other time, I'd roll my eyes at that. Of course my mom is
so, so worried.
Of course she's jumped into her car, ready to come and save me from a thousand unseeable dangers, but right now, I only feel relieved.

I could have died tonight.

“And”
—Nurse Megan scans the room and then picks up my viola case and hands it to me—“I believe this belongs to a Miss Addison Sullivan.”

“Thank you,” I say, reaching for it. I've never been more grateful for the labels across the back and stitched on the inside. I open the case and immediately begin scouring every inch of my viola for scratches or dents.

“The medics said they used it to ID you before they found your proper ID.”

“Oh,” I say. I like the idea of that, of being found by my instrument—the same way I feel found when I play.

“What's the verdict? Will it live?” Nurse Megan asks with a chuckle, and I'm embarrassed to realize I've been holding my breath. But my viola looks fine.

“I think so,” I say, shutting the case. “So, the other passengers…they're here, too?”

For some reason, the smiling boy's face keeps appearing in my mind. I want to ask about him, where he is, but I realize I don't even know his name. And is it creepy to do that? I mean, we had one conversation.

“They are. Brought most of you in ambulances. Are you worried about someone in particular?”

“Yes. Well, no. I mean…we just met on the bus tonight. It's not like we're friends or anything.” Despite the water, my throat is still parched. “We talked a little. I just wanted to make sure he was okay.”

If my rambling is evidence that my faculties are returning to me, I'm not sure being without them is any great loss.

The nurse gives me a weird look now. Knowing. “I'll see what I can find out for you. Do you know his name?”

I shake my head. “But he's tall. My age-ish. Big smile.”

Nurse Megan is grinning at me now, like she missed the part where he's a boy
I just met,
like any second now she'll break into a soliloquy about young love or Shakespeare.

Luckily, just then the doctor raps twice on the door and comes in. Dr. Kennedy is tall and in her mid-thirties, with fashionably cropped hair and tired-looking eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses. It seems like she's been up for hours, but she smiles kindly at me and says it's nice to see me awake. I guess she saw me when I was first brought in. She has me sit up now and checks my reflexes, shines a light into my eyes, and exchanges medical-speak with Nurse Megan.

“I think we'll keep you overnight, Addison,” Dr. Kennedy says. “Just to make sure you don't have a concussion and that that head is doing okay.” She inspects my right temple, which is not bandaged or anything, just heavily bruised. They don't know what hit it, and I don't remember, either.

After Dr. Kennedy leaves, Nurse Megan follows her, winking at me in the doorway. “I'll see if I can find your
friend.
”

“Thanks,” I say nonchalantly, but I feel my cheeks heating up. Thank God my skin is dark enough that you can barely tell when I'm blushing.

I'm curious to know what she'll find out about the boy. Does he live in Lyndale? What is his name? How injured is he?

I lean back and shut my eyes, trying to appreciate the lessening pain in my head, courtesy of the painkillers.

A few minutes later, Nurse Megan bursts into my room.

“Good news! Your young man is doing well. Broke his elbow, but they're putting it into a cast as we speak,” she says.

“Oh, thanks,” I say, suppressing the urge to say
not my young man.

“His name is Bo, in case you were wondering,” she says, coming around to my side of the bed. When she reaches me, I see that she's frowning. “Not that it's my place to judge, but he's a little bit sour, isn't he?”

“Sour?” I repeat while the image of his smile flashes in my mind. God, she didn't tell him I was asking for him or anything embarrassing, did she? I mean, maybe it freaked him out and that's why he seemed annoyed….

“The lip rings. The black hair. I'm sure it's my bias talking because my daughter's ex—well, one of them—was exactly like—”

“Oh, Goth Guy!” I say, remembering the glare he'd given me for talking. “That's not who I meant.”

“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 his name.

“I knew something like this would happen.” Those are my mother's first words when she bursts into my hospital room. “I
knew
it.”

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 to
drive
tonight,” 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 to
email
him. 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.

“Go to sleep,” Mom says softly into the darkness.

“How do you know I'm not asleep?”

“Mother's intuition.” I hear the smile in her voice. My mother told me once that with both Caleb and me, she would stay awake watching our chests rise and fall at night when we were babies to make sure we were alive. She felt almost that her watching us kept it happening—the rising and the falling of our chests, the breathing. And she'd do it until Dad dragged her away from our cribs and to bed. Knowing we were okay made her sleep better.

I hate that she still believes the closer we are to her, the safer we are. Her belief kept me from sleepovers and swing sets and the underappreciated horrors that are bouncy castles (she actually says this about them), and sometimes I'm afraid it could keep me from the rest of my life. She would wrap me and Caleb in Bubble Wrap and tuck us into her china cabinet if she could.

Usually I have no patience for her obsession with keeping us sheltered, but tonight her presence makes me feel safe and stable, like the bus has finally stopped spinning, like everything is going to be okay.

“Night, Mom.”

“Good night, Addie.”

I try to fall asleep so she can.