Where It Began

As it turns out, Vivian, who spent her life pathetically devoted to making it on TV until she hooked up with my dad, after which she devoted herself to pretending to be rich and making really good mixed drinks instead, who wasn’t even all that convincing in dog food commercials, is a better actress than anybody gives her credit for. Because apparently she is pretty well versed in the specifics of what deep and serious trouble I am in but she decided it would be a bad idea to share this scary information with me beyond endless bleak hints just in case I would freak out and braid the thread from my stitches into an itty-bitty noose and hang myself.

In fact, armed men with badges have been beating down the door, and she isn’t letting them anywhere near me, with the complicity of the helpful, alien nurses who have adapted to life on Earth well enough to appreciate gifts of really nice perfume from Saks. The conversation I overheard between Bu

Many many.

Thanks to Vivian, as far as the outside world is concerned, I have been barely conscious all this time, and when I do emerge from my foggy state, I can barely hum “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” or chew Jell-O jewels without drooling.

The thing is, as much as I don’t want to have a meaningful dialogue with an armed person with handcuffs, I have to go home if I want any slight chance of ever seeing Billy. Billy even thinks that phoning me at the hospital is too risky for him, which, all right, being somewhat familiar with total paranoia, I can kind of see.

But my room at home is an electronic wonderland, and even in my altered state, I am prepared to text and message and learn to wipe my hard drive clean endlessly if that’s what I have to do to talk to him. My dad is pretty much comatose half the time, my mother is out shopping, and Juanita is only there two days a week. I am prepared to hang over the edge of the balcony above the canyon and send him sappy yet un-clingy smoke signals if that’s what it takes.

But going home, it turns out, is going to be a bigger production than just pulling out the tubes and wheeling me through the front entrance. Because of the teenage felon aspect of the situation, Vivian is pretty sure that I’m going to be charged with some kind of major crime as soon as I’m unplugged and we no longer have the nice ladies in the bu

“How is a child whose head got smashed against a tree supposed to deal with the police?” Vivian says to anyone who will listen, just in case they don’t have a handle on her version of the situation.

And then she says, “Look at you! How are you supposed to talk to them and not incriminate yourself in something really serious? He never said that you could drive that sports car of his, did he?”

And I go, Shit, Gabriella. You stole the car. You’re toast.

Because: Billy would never let me drive that car. Billy wouldn’t even let Kaps drive that car around the Winston School parking lot. And it is hard to see how I am going to avoid incriminating myself about taking the car since it seems somewhat obvious that this is how I ended up in the hospital surrounded by funeral-ready floral offerings and cheesy, ozone-wrecking Mylar balloons.

To accomplish at least the temporary postponement of consequences that are too scary to contemplate without feeling sicker than I already feel, my job is to pretend I am too out of it to think a straight thought.

Vivian, meanwhile, remains obsessively devoted to getting me to look semi-normal. Which, given my new goal of getting home and somehow getting Billy to want to see me, is not what you could call a bad thing. I really wish she would spend her time getting me a lawyer in between buying all the industrial-strength makeup, but I don’t get too far with this completely reasonable suggestion.

I keep trying to explain to her that even if she gets me to remember what I did and look like Miss Teen America, it’s not going to make it so I didn’t somehow total Billy’s car with like a 98% blood alcohol level.

But she’s not listening.

“Daddy is working on it,” she says. Which makes you wonder if she could even pick Daddy out of a lineup, because he would be the one standing there sipping the dry martini and not the one doing the meticulous research on the top ten criminal attorneys of the Los Angeles basin.

“Billy says I have to get a lawyer before I talk to the police.”

“You talked to Billy Nash?”

I let her marinate in this for a few seconds. Then I say, “Yeah, but you can’t tell anybody. He’s not supposed to talk to me.”

“Now there’s a surprise,” she says.

She is not even smiling.

You would think she would be happy about the (slight) return of Billy. But she is too busy protecting me from anyone who might think she has a fu

As if I were anything other than numb and confused and waiting for Billy to figure out a way to call me again.

I can visualize the concerned faces on the other end of the line, Lisa and Anita and Huey and Huey’s mother with her herd of visiting therapy dogs all pulling on their leashes and, weirdly, Andie Be

It doesn’t matter.

It’s not as if they’re Billy.

XXI

WENDY SAYS, “THAT LOOKS LIKE PRINCE CHARMING.”

She is so enthralled with the artistic possibilities of occupational therapy with a patient over four years old that she has taken to making daily deliveries of actual, good art supplies. Then she makes me squeeze a squishy ball a couple of times and writes a chart note. And never is heard a discouraging word because I really want all that nice paper.

I say, “That’s my boyfriend.” Although, I admit, I have made him kind of glowing and unusually golden for a human. And then there’s the issue of the slightly green horse.

Wendy says, “Well, he sounds nice too.”

And I think: You can totally do this, Gabriella. Tell her. Just because he hasn’t been calling you every five minutes and he isn’t lurking by your bedside, doesn’t mean he’s not your boyfriend. Tell her.

I say, “That’s not my boyfriend on the phone.”

Wendy starts lining up the pencils on the tray table.

I say, “I don’t want him to see me when I look like this.” Which you have to give me points for, which is semi-true. “I want to look vaguely like myself and I want to be thinking straight before I even talk to him.”

Wendy says, “Oh,” like she almost believes it.

I almost believe it, too.

Eventually, though, even the perfume-smitten nurses can tell that no amount of communing with Ponytail Doc, who keeps showing up in my room trying to get me to tell her all the four-legged animals I can think of in thirty seconds, is going to get me to remember diddly about what happened; when I have exhausted the limits of playology and Wendy has taped my portraits of every medical resident, intern, janitor, and candy striper at Valley Mercy onto the walls of the staff lounge; when no one can figure out what possible reason there is for me to be sticking around, going up and down in the cool electric bed, having makeup sponged onto my face without being able to remember one single clue regarding how my face got that way, I get snuck out the side door of the hospital by the freight elevator, as if a bunch of paparazzi and the whole LAPD were just hanging around in the hospital lobby on the edge of their seats waiting for me to make an appearance.