Greywalker - Kat Richardson [3]
After that, things got disjointed: people yelling; someone’s shoes; aching in my chest and arms; someone flicking something against my eyelids; a man with an accent; a throbbing in my head like a kid kicking a merry-go-round into motion. I think I threw up. Then I slept.
That had been April first. . . .
I’d woken in the hospital a couple of days later feeling so horrible I’d figured I was going to live. If it felt that bad dying, no one would go.
Now weeks had passed, and the aches and pains, the bruises, scrapes, and lacerations were fading, but the bash on the bonce wasn’t clearing up so well. The bouts of weirdness after I’d left—some minor problems with my senses still a bit out of whack, some not so minor—had brought me back to the hospital.
Dr. Skelleher was a stranger to me—the only doctor on urgent care duty when I’d come in. He looked barely thirty and in need of coffee. His hair was short and spiky from a lack of style rather than an excess, and the dark bags under his eyes could have passed for fanny packs. His clothes under his white coat were environmentally correct. A narrow leather thong peeked over the back of his collar and disappeared below the placket buttons of his raw-cotton shirt.
The “incidents” ran past my mind’s eye like fast-spinning film as I told the doctor about them.
Sometimes things just looked misty and impressionistic—like the reflection in a steamed-up bathroom mirror.At the hospital, I couldn’t always tell when people were really in the room. They seemed to float in and out, changing shape and detail. My hearing was just as unpredictable, all buzzings, mutterings, water gurgles, and cotton wool. I’d been told this was normal for concussion patients and would get better. But . . . some of it had gotten worse.
And sinking through the hospital bed had been unsettling.
I wasn’t supposed to get out of bed without a doctor or nurse around. Call me a bad patient: I didn’t like peeing in the cup, so I decided to use the toilet like a human. That part of the job hadn’t been so bad, though it was no waltz with Fred Astaire. Getting back to the bed was harder.
Coming out of the bathroom, I’d started feeling sick. The lighting in the room had dimmed a bit and the bed seemed much farther away, deep in the steamed-mirror effect. I struggled toward it, chilled and sweaty, feeling sicker by the minute, picking up a whiff of something like autopsies and crime scenes. I plunged through the cold steam as my vision went gray, then smoky, heading for charcoal. The bed was a vague and shimmery pastel block. I reached it with a shin first, grabbed a steel rail, and dragged myself into it. For a moment, I just lay like a stunned fish on the cold, soggy mattress, panting. Then the bed shifted and I fell through.
The lights had brightened and the room snapped back into focus as I fell. A nurse came in just as I hit the floor. She scolded me, of course. Then she called an orderly and had him scoop me up and dump me into my own bed, which was about four feet away.
I’d thought there were three beds in the room, but the nurse said there hadn’t been three beds in that room since the remodel in the 1960s.
Then had come the final-straw incident, just the previous morning.
My face in the bathroom mirror was still scary. My left eye was surrounded by a livid bruise that washed up against the bridge of my nose, seeped over my eyebrow, and sagged across my cheekbone to dribble off over the corner of my jaw into a nightmare dog collar of purple and green. My lower lip and ear were both a bit tattered and swollen still. The general bruising