Where It Began (2 page)

There are certain unavoidable conclusions.

Even so, the girl is trying to remember the particulars. The keg, maybe. The crash. She is trying to remember who she is and what happened to whoever that person might be.

She is trying to remember she is
me
.

When I wake up, I am wired to machines. Everything looks somewhat gray. I check to see if my toes can wiggle and I start counting my fingers, which proves to be more challenging than you’d expect. I’m pretty sure they’re all there, but I keep having to start over around finger number six.

Someone speaks, but it doesn’t make sense, pieces of words and random syllables. It occurs to me that I might be on some fairly serious drugs. Then I go back to counting my six fingers.

Just after this, or maybe way later, it is hard to tell, someone else says, “Good morning, Sunshine.”

I start to say, “Good morning,” but I end up throwing up instead. Which is evidently a good thing. I am surrounded by happy, blurry, celebrating people in scrubs.

Someone grabs my hand and yells “Good morning!” again, enunciating all the consonants in case I’m deaf or speak Serbo-Croatian. My name remains a mystery of life, but I do remember this horrible story about a gray-haired old lady discovered locked up in a mental hospital in Chicago or someplace, where she’d been stuck since she was sixteen years old when a policeman found her wandering the streets speaking Serbo-Croatian. Only nobody knew it was Serbo-Croatian so they decided that she must be crazy and locked her up basically forever.

Whoever I am, I’m pretty sure that I’m not her.

Then it occurs to me that all these greenish-gray, blurry-looking figures I’ve been thinking of as people might actually be space aliens doing a bad job of pretending to be human. I
try to go back to counting the fingers, but this is hard with the big happy alien clutching my hand as if she is afraid that I might make a break for it and cut out of the mother ship if she let go.

I try to get my hand back, which is cause for further celebration.

The hand-grabbing alien is wearing a V-neck scrub shirt with bunnies all over it. “Can you tell us your
naaaaame
?” she yells over and over.

I am still trying to reclaim the hand.

I hear myself saying, “Bunnies.”

They all echo me and someone writes it down, or writes down something. I can hear the ballpoint scratch against the paper, harsh and loud.

“That’s very
goooooood
!” someone else says. I have made the space clones ecstatic. “You’ve been in a
car accident
, Bunny,” she shouts cheerfully.

The car. I sort of remember the car.

“You probably feel a little sick, but you’re going to be
fine
. Dear? We need to know your last name too. What’s your last name, Bunny?”

By now I am overwhelmed by the mystery of the situation. Although, I am in command of several key facts:

1. My name is not Bunny.

2. I have ten fingers, or at least I have six, and none of them actually seems to be missing.

3. I might or might not be in a hospital somewhere.

Ideas float through my head like big, goofy cartoons. Elephants and bunny shirts and bags.

“My ID,” I say.

“Heidi!”
they say. “That’s great! Are you Heidi?”

“ID,” I say. “Look in my bag. Give me my wallet.”

All right, so I have no idea who I am, but at least I’m not stupid. This is something of a relief.

“I’m afraid the paramedics didn’t find it, honey,” Bunny Shirt says. “Let’s see if you can tell me what day it is today.”

This seems like an exceptionally stupid, random question under the circumstances.

“Calendar,” I say.

They seem to be missing a lot of important items around here, such as calendars, and where is my bag? I remember my bag. It is the small, black fabric Prada bag, the kind with the leather strap and not the woven cloth one. The kind you can buy somewhat cheaply on the Internet and look somewhat richer than you really are. Unlike Louis Vuitton bags, which are always fake on the Internet and everyone can tell you bought some cheap, fake bag and you just look like a poseur.

There: car accident, toes and fingers, no name, no ID, and an encyclopedic knowledge of bags. I try to think about bags. What else do I know about them? I know I want mine back. Did they leave it in the car?

“Look in the car,” I say.

The aliens chirp and huddle, letting go of the hand. I think about escaping, but I don’t seem to be able to move. Also, there
are tubes coming out of the back of my hand and the crook of my elbow. There are wires glued to my chest.

“Okay, Heidi,” Bunny Shirt says, turning back with a great big toothy smile that makes her look like she might want to suck blood out of my neck. “The car you were driving is registered to Agnes and William B. Nash. Could you be
Agnes
?”

“Billy!” I say.

I remember Billy
. Billy Nash. William B-for-Barnsdale Nash. I remember him in glorious and perfect detail, his hair and his shoulders and the salty smell of him.

“Is Billy all right?”

The nurse-like creature strokes my arm. “You were the only person by the car, dear,” she says.

All right. So just after I was in some car crash that I don’t remember, I was kidnapped by helpful aliens. The first part makes about as much sense as the second part. And oh, right, I did all this without my bag, which I ditched somewhere just before losing my mind.

“Can you tell me your whole name now?” the nurse asks, still stroking my arm. “Can you remember who you are?”

How could she know that the second I remembered Billy, I knew who I was too?

So I tell them my name and they all go scurrying off someplace to celebrate without me.

MOSTLY I SLEEP THROUGH ENDLESS DAY. THE ROOM
is always light and everybody still looks slightly gray. Every time I open my eyes, I expect to see Billy—only he would be golden. He is, when my eyes are closed.

But it’s just Vivian.

She is sitting in the corner on a green plastic chair, maybe too far away for me to see her clearly. Or maybe in her quest to look as if she’s made of ten-years-younger, wrinkle-free plastic sheeting, my mother has found a way to get herself permanently, cosmetically airbrushed so
nobody
can see her all that clearly.

I think about her face melting into a fuzzy, greenish blur, and then I start thinking about the mass quantity of drugs that must be dripping into me through the IV and about how to speed it up.

This is when Vivian puts down her magazine and wafts across
the room to loom over my bed. I can see that she is wearing her tasteful mauve and plum makeup with the matte finish and matching mauve, no-sparkles nail polish she wears for funerals and teacher conferences, and it hits me that I might actually be in a real hospital on the verge of death.

I wonder what would happen if I just sort of reached up and squeezed the bag that’s feeding the IV tube.

What I say is, “Where’s Billy?”

Vivian gives me her strained imitation of a cheery smile.

“Hey, Gabby,” she says, as if she were some happy, sappy character from
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
, as if she were pretending to be somebody’s mother. “Let’s take this one step at a time, okay? Let’s just get you okay and out of the hospital.”

Brain-dead as I am, I know and she knows and everyone who ever laid eyes on me since September knows that I’m not going to be okay without Billy.

For a second I have this horrible thought that maybe the nurse is lying and something bad happened to him. Maybe Billy was run over and is crushed and dead and laid out behind a William Barnsdale Nash plaque in the Nash family crypt where we made out, Billy dressed up like a vampire and me a cross between a really slutty French maid and a zombie, on Halloween.

Otherwise, why wouldn’t he come see me?

“Where’s Billy?”

Vivian leans over the railing that’s supposed to keep me in the bed. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you plowed
his car into a tree,” she says softly, as if this could pass for some form of a helpful suggestion.

I can tell that I am crying because a tear is blazing an acid trail down the side of my face.

“Don’t touch!” Vivian lunges through the tangle of tubes and wires toward my seriously bandaged hands.

“What?” I say. “What happened to my face? Oh God, do my hands work? What did I do?”

The bed bobs and lurches like a space raft floating in the gray-green sky. I can tell that the nurse is injecting something soothing and potent into the tube that goes directly to my veins. I can tell that Vivian is saying something soothing and insincere. I open my eye and Vivian whirls into the distance in the plastic chair, her hair streaming behind her. The doctors multiply in kaleidoscope formation, at the center of which is the tiny white light that they shine into my eye.

Before sunrise, when the room is vibrating with pale fluorescent light, I can see the space debris that’s been floating in the corner of my eye is a bouquet of ugly Mylar balloons. The watercolor clouds are flowers, mostly half-dead, showy ones, with cheesy stuffed animals stuck in the crooks of branches stiff with curled, dry leaves.

I have been here long enough for flowers to wilt.

I rattle the railing on the side of the bed, wondering what happens when my feet touch the floor. If I can walk away.

As it turns out, I can’t.

Bunny Shirt and her minions tuck my legs under a warm blanket so tight I can’t move. Then they crank up the railings.

“Gabby,” Vivian whispers, “do you remember what you did? Even the tiniest, teensiest detail?”

Nope.

“Well, the doctor says that with this kind of head trauma and all those, um, substances, you might not remember . . . I guess you might not remember yet.”

Then she tries playing games.

“Okay, Gabby, let’s try this: When I say ‘party,’ what pops into your mind? Just go with it. Don’t even try to think about it.”

As if I could
think
.

“Okay, what if I say ‘Songbird Lane?’ Okay . . .
Songbird Lane
. . . Gabby, will you please just try this? The police want to talk to you, and I’m not sure how long I can hold them off.”

Songbird Lane?

I would tell her if anything was in there.

Maybe I would.

Voices drift in through the doorway.

“Even if I let you talk with her, what would be the point?” somebody murmurs. “It’s a closed head injury and she just rambles. Good luck making sense of it.”

My injured head rolls toward the sound, and there is Bunny Shirt in silhouette. Bunny Shirt and someone with a gun.

“Look, I know you’re just doing your job, but this won’t take long,” the lady with the gun says.

“You’re not going in there.”

“I just need to take her statement,” Gun Lady says. “It’ll take three minutes, tops. Can’t she talk?”

“Sure, she can talk,” says Bunny Shirt. “She thinks her name is Heidi and she lives in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Come on. You’ve got her blood alcohol level. They brought her in with car keys in her hand. What else do you need?”

You would think some part of this would have made a lasting impression.

You would think that after Billy didn’t show up and my mother kept hissing about what I did and averting her gaze, it would occur to me that there might be some serious problem here.

You would think.

WHEN I COME TO, VIVIAN IS READING THE CARDS
that are stuck in the flower arrangements, writing down who sent them in the tiny spiral notebook she carries around.

“Everybody sent you flowers,” she says. You would think this was a good thing, but you can tell it isn’t. “Everybody knows.”

“Did Billy send me something?”

“They sent you a lovely bouquet,” Vivian says, not looking up.

“The Nashes did.” She flicks away a helium-filled balloon dog that is hovering over the foot of the bed and starts foraging for the Nashes’ lovely bouquet.

I start looking around for some sumptuous floral extravaganza, given that the Nashes could basically afford to send me a whole tulip farm and a live-in Dutch florist if they felt like it. But it turns out they’d come up with a particularly weird combination of green and red oversized lilies that look left over from
Christmas with a smiley face card that says, “Wishing you all the best for a speedy recovery!!!” signed, “The Nash Family.”

Which is when it happens: when the story of my life starts to show up in mosaic splinter flashes in my head. Which is when Agnes Nash shows up in my head—with horns and a red pointy tail and little cloven hooves and an Armani suit. Which I take to be a drug-induced yet totally insightful vision of her.