A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [156]
Chapter Eighteen
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I CAME BACK INTO the fold four days after the struggle and they still had not settled on the authentic version. The contest was recounted to me plenty of times with more fire and detail than I’m sure there actually was. Debbie said I threw up before I passed out. The next time Rita told the story I was vomiting blood and then bile. When I questioned her she said, “What do you know? You wasn’t even there!” Hilda, a woman who passed through briefly, spoke with a certain authority because she had two bullet wounds on her thigh. “You didn’t hear Blondy moanin’?” she’d say. She was incredulous at the group’s poor observational skills.
“She wasn’t moanin’,” Rita called.
“Shut your face! I was right there with my ear in her mouth.”
In Hilda’s version Dyshett came at me, we wrestled, I was brought to the floor, and badly beaten. The others for the most part did not try to hide their confusion about what had taken place. I had ended up in the hospital, in surgery, because a blood vessel had ruptured in the crash and was leaking blood into my brain cavity. That, at least, is how I understood the problem. I had been unconscious and apparently the doctor tried to call Howard, only to leave messages, he said, with a young girl. The jail authorities did not knock themselves out to inform either Howard or Rafferty. I knew nothing about the specifics for a few days because no one told me anything. I was shackled to my bed and there was a guard outside, one of the larger men, just what you’d expect, hairy, with unclad women tattooed up and down his arms. I knew my head hurt, and that in all probability I would live to go back to the airless vault from which I’d come. On the last day, an Iranian doctor explained in the Queen’s English just how they had put a burr into my skull to drain the fluid. He comforted me with the fact that it had been a serious procedure and that I would mend. I did feel, as Hilda later remarked, that I hadn’t really been present for much of the trauma.
When I finally saw myself in the bathroom mirror at the hospital it wasn’t the bruise on my forehead that startled me as much as my cropped hair. I had always had thick, long hair. I had been vain about my braids, but I also believed that it, the hair itself, was somehow the truest, the best part of me; I liked to think it was the feature which described me.
“Too bad they had to go so close,” the nurse said from behind, as I stared at myself. “It’s a shock, isn’t it? I’ve got a scarf you can have, if they’ll let you, an extra pink thing to cover all that up when the bandage comes off.” By “all that” she meant my head. She didn’t seem to notice my manacles and she made conversation as if I was an ordinary person who’d had an accident.
I was in the hospital a short time, but in that brief interim I tried to fill up on air and light, silence and darkness. Lizzy’s death seemed close again in the hospital setting, and I found myself welcoming the familiar oppressive images only to then fully remember their content. I sat up when I could manage and watched the sky. Despite the constraints I felt free as a bird, being able to look out a window. The blow seemed to have shifted the contents of my brain, so that the heavy portion was up front, the fluff in the back. The dull continuous ache left me dizzy. If I didn’t consciously hold my head straight I had the feeling it would fall forward to my chest. In addition to the work of balancing the new weight, I couldn’t keep from thinking about Howard. I was sure that he would have been notified, and that at any moment he would walk through the door. I kept waiting. I wanted very much to see him without the barrier of the Plexiglas.