Two days post-op, Darlington has no idea when I’m leaving. My whole rib cage is on fire and Mom, Dad, and I are still not on speaking terms. Things are great.
I swear my ribs are about to snap from the pain, my whole chest cavity is waving the white flag. Who knew how painful three tiny incisions could be? To top it all off, I got stepped down to Tylenol with codeine. There’s been a standing order on my chart that I get morphine for forty-eight hours after surgery. Minimum. They stepped me down after less than twenty and they wonder why I am still at an eight on the pain scale.
Between the arterial line they pulled out of my left arm and my three incisions from the lap, the weak shit that is Tylenol with codeine can’t keep up.
Dad brought DVDs of his newest sci-fi TV obsession. It’s a needed distraction to keep me from focusing on the pain.
A knock at my door is quickly followed by my current nurse. It’s too early for a vitals check, so she must be here to announce someone. She’s a rule follower, hence why I decided not to learn her name. Nurses aren’t here to buddy up to you. The last thing I want is another person meddling in my life and another tie to a place that tears relationships apart.
I expect to see my parents for their daily visit, or maybe Darlington checking in again. Please let it be morphine orders. Or maybe he thinks that’s all in my head too?
I don’t expect Ryan.
My friends—hospital and high school—have texted, but what is there to say? Everything is terrible, your well-wishes are not working? So I “lost” my phone. It’s easier than telling them the truth.
Ryan just stands there, leaning on his cane, his black hair still falling in his eyes, and my heart leaps for my throat and lodges there, too scared to beat. He smiles and the hospital falls away around me. We could be back on the couch watching BSG. All I want to do is tell him to get out. He shouldn’t be here. I hang on to the rails of my bed, trying to remember that there is ground underneath me.
“Hey, Ellie.”
I nod.
My nurse looks at me but doesn’t see me. I’ve had nurses who were near telepathic and would have whisked Ryan out of the room and made excuses—recent pain med dose, exhaustion, not up for visitors. They would have had my back.
Instead, my nurse just turns on her squeaky white sneakers and walks out, closing the door behind her. Ryan and I don’t say anything until the door slinks closed. We’re cocooned in here and I don’t think we’re going to transform into anywhere near a butterfly.
Ryan just stands there, as if to defy what I know. He almost had me fooled and believing that I was wrong about the hospital—that maybe, just maybe, this place wasn’t a life ruiner.
With an easy motion that he’s picked up pretty fast, he goes to the TV and pops in a disc.
“What are you doing here?” I should have just started with Get out. My voice rasps still from surgery, but Ryan doesn’t seem to react. He sits in the chair next to my bed, as if nothing is wrong, as if nothing has changed.
“You haven’t been responding to anyone’s texts. Plus—last episode.” He clicks a few buttons on the TV remote and the disc’s main menu pops up.
“So they sent you?”
“Well, Caitlin’s home already, Luis is in surgery, and Veronica’s got school. That leaves me, but I would have volunteered anyway.”
He says that last part quickly and I want to hold on to the feeling it gives me. That I’m lighter than air, better than what might follow. But I know how this turns out. My life is like surgery: the process is painful and something always has to be removed, restructured, and fixed.
This is a place where the fixes are sometimes too high a price, and that price always seems to be my friends.
“I’m not really up for visitors.”
“Oh?” Ryan says, and reaches in for the call button. “’Cause I thought we could catch up. You promised I had to give you final thoughts, so I thought I might as well come here and experience them together.”
“You’re not staying.”
“You said, and I quote, I was not allowed to finish this series without you being present.”
“I was wrong, okay?” My voice cracks into desperate. I just want to be left alone, but the emotion feels too raw and so I pull back, closing in on myself. “Go back to the Home and watch it there. I don’t want you here.” It’s what he’s going to do anyway. Go home, be free, leave me behind.
Ryan holds my gaze, refusing to let me off the hook with this one. It’s like we’re back on that first night. I should have told him to pack up and go back to his room, but instead I invited him in to wreck my life.
“I’m not leaving.”
“Get out!” My scream is hoarse and rips through my chest, pissing off every nerve ending. Pain twists my face and pushes my resolve. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. I don’t need Ryan here as a reminder of what might have been.
The nurse opens the door and hovers there like she’s not sure whether to intervene.
“Caitlin said you might be like this,” Ryan says.
For his part, Ryan looks like he’s been hit with a sledgehammer. I’m glad. I want him to hurt, to know what he suggested was wrong. Doctors are not here to heal me. They’re not going to fix anything or change things or make me better. If I had stuck to my guns—if I had done what I thought was right—I wouldn’t have wasted my time here.
But you still wouldn’t be healed, a small voice in the back of my head whispers. I can’t slug myself, but I can rage at Ryan.
“And what did she tell you?” My voice is venom and I want to see him hurt, even as I want to save him from the anger that breathes inside me.
“That if I wanted you, I’d have to fight for you.” His response takes me down a notch. A chink in my anger that I was not prepared for. I was calm, knew what to expect and the story that fed my ire. But not now, with the knowledge that Caitlin kept my secrets.
“I don’t want you here,” I bite back. I want him gone, even as I want him to stay here and fight. It’s so stupid to want that because he’s going to leave, float out of my life. Nothing here is permanent.
“I think you do.”
“You’re just going to leave like everyone else. Caitlin likes to say that I’m the reason our friendship’s a struggle.” This has been the thing I have clung to my entire life. How many times have I been through shit because of the hospital, because of Mom’s posts? It has to be true.
My life isn’t understandable unless pared down and spoon-fed by a normal person.
“You’re so afraid that everyone will leave you.”
With that, I erupt.
“You think you know things because these doctors have fancy degrees and are the best in the world. You think that means you follow them blindly, but you’re wrong.” Tears run hot down my cheeks, but I don’t remember starting to cry. Ryan reaches out as if to touch me, but I pull back. My stitches scream. Three little cuts and so much pain. “You told me this would work.”
“I am here, Ellie. You want to be angry at this whole thing, fine. Be angry. I’m angry for you, but don’t you dare say that this is what is pushing me away. What pushes Caitlin away. I came here to see you because I wanted to keep a promise: to watch the final episode of BSG with you. You dropped off, just stopped talking to any of us, and none of us knew what was going on. You say we all leave—but you’re the one who’s already gone. Not your doctors and not VACTERLs. You.”
I open my mouth to tell him about my parents, how they got a divorce. How the hospital just tears everything apart. But I can’t. Because maybe he’s right … maybe it is me, and that thought scares me even more.
“Come on,” the nurse says, trying to place herself between me and Ryan. Her movements set him off. He ducks under her arm and his legs betray him. He steadies himself on the bed.
“I wanted to see you. I missed you. Because I—”
I don’t want to hear what he has to say. “I have a life. But it’s not here.”
Ryan stops and pulls back against the nurse helping him out of the room. “No, Ellie. You have a dream of a life. Always wanting to get there, but never actually arriving.” His words are a slap, hard and visceral. My chest heaves; every breath makes my stitches hurt.
I want to yell at him more, but he cuts me off.
“You’ve made it pretty clear that you think I’m doing this wrong. That I listen to doctors, that I think they’re always right. Well, they’ve earned that respect.”
“What have they done for you?” It’s a question he doesn’t know how to answer, and I watch him fish for words. “Exactly,” I say. I wait for the triumph, the feeling that I won and how great that is, to settle in on me. But instead I watch his face harden. “You want to place all your faith in them, but you choose not to be active in your own treatment.”
Ryan stops. I want him to keep going, to yell at me, and to come back to this argument. But he doesn’t. He raps his knuckles on the bed and then backs up.
“You’re leaving?” I say, stunned that he’s just giving up. I want to rip the IV out of my arm and run after him. He doesn’t get to leave this fight. We are not done here.
The nurse shepherds him out the door like she can’t get free of this room fast enough. Ryan pulls away for only a moment. “Why should I stay? It’s not like you’re going to keep me around. Isn’t that how this works?” He raises an eyebrow in challenge, but I look away.
And just like that, cold settles into my bones that would rival the temperature outside.
My chest heaves as I try to catch my breath, each inflation of my lungs sprung on more pain and more hatred. For this place. For my so-called life. For myself.