thing I had left to give him.
I stretched out a shaky hand for my car’s volume buttons, jabbing at the plus sign until music poured out of the speakers. The right album was cued up, of course, the handbells and electric guitar jarring compared to the soft roar of the ocean.
I rested my head on the steering wheel and listened to “Traditional Panic” as the sun rose.
My cell phone woke me, the ring startling me from sleep. I had fallen asleep sitting up in my car with my head on the steering wheel. The sun was high now, and I was soaked with sweat from the building heat of the day. I glanced at my reflection in the rearview mirror as I answered, and the stitching from the wheel was pressed deep into my forehead. I rubbed it to get rid of the mark.
“What is it, Mom?” I said.
“Are you still at the hospital?”
“No, I fell asleep in the parking lot by the beach.”
“Is that sarcasm? I can’t tell over the phone.”
“No, I’m serious. What’s going on?”
“I’m calling to tell you they finished the surgery,” she said. “Matt made it through. They’re still not sure that he’ll wake up, but it’s a good first step.”
“He … what?” I said, squinting into the bright flash of the sun on the ocean. “But the analytics …”
“Statistics aren’t everything, sweetie. In ‘ten to one,’ there’s always a ‘one,’ and this time, we got him.”
It’s a strange thing to be smiling so hard it hurts your face, and sobbing at the same time.
“Are you okay?” Mom said. “You went quiet.”
“No,” I said. “Not really, no.”
No one ever told me how small antidepressants were, so it was kind of a shock when I tipped them into my palm for the first time.
How was I so afraid of such a tiny thing, such a pretty, pale green color? How was I more afraid of that little pill than I was of the sobbing fit that took me to my knees in the shower?
But in his way, he had asked me to try. Just try. And he loved me. Maybe he just meant he loved me like a friend, or a brother, or maybe he meant something else. There was no way for me to know. What I did know was that love was a tiny firefly in the distance, blinking on right when I needed it to. Even in his forced sleep, his body broken by the accident and mended by surgery after surgery, he spoke to me.
Just try.
So I did, as we all waited to see if he would ever wake up. I tried just enough to get the chemicals into my mouth. I tried just enough to drive myself to the doctor every week, to force myself not to lie when she asked me how I felt. To eat meals and take showers and endure summer school. To wake myself up after eight hours of sleep instead of letting sleep swallow me for the entire summer.
When I spoke to the doctor about my last visitation, all I could talk about was regret. The last visitation had showed me things I had never noticed before, even though they seemed obvious, looking back. There were things I should have told him in case he didn’t wake up. All I could do now was hope that he already knew them.
But he did wake up.
He woke up during the last week of summer, when it was so humid that I changed shirts twice a day just to stay dry. The sun had given me a freckled nose and a perpetual squint. Senior year started next week, but for me, it didn’t mean anything without him.
When Matt’s mom said it was okay for me to visit, I packed my art box into my car and drove back to the hospital. I parked by the letter F, like I always did, so I could remember later. F was for my favorite swear.
I carried the box into the building and registered at the front desk, like I was supposed to. The bored woman there printed out an ID sticker for me without even looking up. I stuck it to my shirt, which I had made myself, dripping bleach all over it so it turned reddish orange in places. It was my second attempt. On the first one, I had accidentally bleached the areas right over my breasts, which wasn’t a good look.
I walked slowly to Matt’s room, trying to steady myself with deep breaths. His mother had given me the number at least four times, as well as two sets of directions that didn’t make sense together. I asked at the nurses’ station, and she pointed me to the last room on the left.
Dr. Albertson was standing outside one of the other rooms, flipping through a chart. She glanced at me without recognition. She probably met so many people during last visitations that they ran together in her mind. When she turned away, I caught sight of her nails, no longer sky blue but an electric, poison green. Almost the same color that was chipping off my thumbnail. A woman after my own heart.
I entered Matt’s room. He was there, lying flat on the bed with his eyes closed. But he was only sleeping, not in a coma, I had been told. He had woken up last week, too disoriented at first for them to be sure he could still function. And then, slowly, he had returned to himself.
Apparently. I would believe it only when I saw it, and maybe not even then.
I set the box down and opened the lid. This particular project had a lot of pieces to it. I took the table where they put his food tray, and the bedside table, and I lined them up side by side. I found a plug for the speakers and the old CD player that I had bought online. It was bright purple and covered with stickers.
Sometime in the middle of this, Matt’s eyes opened and shifted to mine. He was slow to turn his head—his spine was still healing from the accident—but he could do it. His fingers twitched. I swallowed a smile and a sob in favor of a neutral expression.
“Claire,” he said, and my body thrilled to the sound of my name. He knew me. “I think I had a dream about you. Or maybe a series of dreams, in a very definite order, selected by yours truly …”
“Shhh. I’m in the middle of some art.”
“Oh,” he said. “Forgive me. I’m in the middle of recovering from some death.”
“Too soon,” I replied.
“Sorry. Coping mechanism.”
I sat down next to him and started to unbutton my shirt.
His eyebrows raised. “What are you doing?”
“Multitasking. I have to stick these electrodes on my chest. Remember them?” I held up the electrodes with the wires attached to them. They were the same ones I had used to show the art class my brain waves. “And I also want to stack the odds in my favor.”
“Stack the … Am I on drugs again?”
“No. If you were on drugs, would you be hallucinating me shirtless, though?” I grinned and touched one electrode to the right side of my chest and another one under it. Together they would read my heartbeat.
“No comment,” he said. “That’s a surprisingly girly bra you’re wearing.”
