Where It Began(2)

“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.

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.”