Where It Began

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 bu

I am still trying to reclaim the hand.

I hear myself saying, “Bu

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, Bu

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, Bu

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 Bu

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 bu

“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,” Bu

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,” Bu

“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.

II

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.