The immediate view from the hospital window is of the parking lot. But beyond that the first streaks of daylight are beginning to illuminate the sandstone shapes of the desert with reds and pinks. I stand up from the plastic chair that has been my bed for the night and stretch my hands over my head, hoping to crack my back. Nothing. I go over to the window and stare out past the parking lot to the strip of stores on the main drag next to the Roswell Hospital. A check-cashing store blinks with neon lights. Someone is emptying the trash cans at the twenty-four-hour gas station next door; otherwise, everything is gray and quiet.
I look back at the bed where G is lying motionless. There is a tube coming out of her nose and an IV coming out of her arm. The right side of her face is starting to yellow and bruise, and her right leg is supported by a series of ropes and pulleys that resemble a medieval torture device. The only sounds coming from the bed are the beeps of a heart monitor and an occasional loud, snorty breath that makes me look expectantly over to see if she wakes up, even though the nurses told me she would sleep for a while.
All of these things, the colors of her bruises and the sounds of the machine, are vivid and very real. Even as G snores, I am awake in a horrible, jittery overtired way. I am here, and I’m prepared for whatever comes next, I think.
“We gave her enough painkiller for a small pony,” the short, pudgy, redheaded nurse I like best told me. Her nametag says Dolly. “A femur’s a really bad break. Your friend is probably in shock. She’ll wake up when she’s ready.”
There’s a tray of food at the end of G’s bed, delivered at some point in the night, but I feel too guilty to touch any of it. Eventually, the gross taste in my mouth is enough to push me to drink the red Gatorade in the pink plastic cup.
My backpack is on the floor next to the chair where I spent the night, but most of its contents are still back at the campground in my tent. I paw through it, even though I know there’s no food. My dead cell phone, Into the Wild, a semi-clean T-shirt, a few miscellaneous flyers from our travels, including a menu from Adelaide’s, and this notebook. This notebook with its stupid meaningless lists and no answers. G told me I should be writing things down, and I ignored her because I thought the point was to just keep moving and experience every new thing in the moment. It’s the sight of her with those tubes coming out of her nose that makes me realize what happens when you keep moving forward without paying attention to where you’re going.
I pick up the battered copy of Into the Wild—the back cover’s come off somewhere in my travels—and walk it down the hall to the family waiting room where there’s a shelf with a few other paperback orphans. I leave it there and walk away. I already know what he knows, and I didn’t have to read Tolstoy or starve myself to death in the Alaskan bush to figure it out.
It’s still early, but I know pretty soon there will be a police officer here to interview me about what happened. I didn’t even try to lie to the nurses about my age, and they told me that since I was a minor, they would have to call DSS and the local police. The thing is, I’m not even really sure what happened.
At the bottom of my bag is a capless blue ballpoint pen. I brush a few crumbs of granola and ink off the tip and find that it writes. The last time I wrote in here, I was back in Hot Springs, Arkansas, adding to my list of useful facts for life after high school—maybe even thinking that it was different than the lists that were in the divorce diary. But it wasn’t. It was missing the guts, the feelings, the parts worth caring about. Now I have to write about the hard things, the things that are going to allow me to go home a different person than I was a few weeks ago. Because if I don’t, then it’s just like G said, I’ll still be wondering what I’m coming to.
It’s a little before six now. I don’t know what time the police show up, but I figure since it’s Christmas morning, I’ve got at least a few hours to sort out the last few days. That will be a decent start, and it will at least keep everyone from getting arrested. I’m sure one of the first things they’ll do is call Mom, and I definitely need to get my story straight before that happens. G shifts a little in the hospital bed. The beeping sound of her monitor speeds up momentarily and then slows back down. The sound is unnerving. It’s like she’s reminding me to get my head out of my ass and start writing. I smile and reach over to pat her hand, avoiding the purple part where the IV is inserted. “Okay, okay,” I say softly to the beeping machines and the sleeping G. I turn to a fresh page and pick up the pen.