48 Hours
The hospital never turns its lights off.
Rory learns that first.
It doesn't matter if it's two in the morning or two in the afternoon — the hallway outside ICU hums the same way. Fluorescent lights buzzing faintly. Rubber soles squeaking. The soft, relentless rhythm of machines keeping people suspended between here and not-here.
She hasn't slept.
Not really.
There's a chair in the corner of her mom's room that folds out slightly at the bottom, like it's pretending to be a bed. Rory has been sitting in it for... she doesn't know. A day. More than a day.
Forty-something hours.
She keeps checking the clock above the door like it's going to apologize.
Her mom is swollen in ways that don't look like her. Tubes where there shouldn't be tubes. Tape on her cheeks. A ventilator breathing in and out, in and out, making a soft mechanical sigh that Rory will later hear in every white noise machine for the rest of her life.
There's a bruise blooming along her mother's temple, deep purple under hospital lighting.
Rory keeps staring at her hands.
They're clean now.
They weren't before.
—
Flash of rain on the windshield.
The wipers fighting and losing.
Her mom laughing lightly — "It's just a little storm, Ro."
The guardrail appearing too fast.
The sound wasn't a crash at first.
It was metal giving up.
—
Rory presses her palms into her eyes until she sees stars.
The doctors said words like "significant internal injury."
"Fluid in the lungs."
"Hypoxic event."
They said "We're doing everything we can."
They did not say she would wake up.
Her mom had been awake at the scene.
That part loops.
Awake.
Coughing.
Water everywhere.
"Unbuckle. Rory, unbuckle."
The water had been climbing slowly, impossibly slow, like it was thinking about it.
Rory's fingers had slipped on the seatbelt release.
"I don't want to leave you."
"I know. Go."
She hears that over and over.
Go.
—
A nurse adjusts something on the IV pole.
Rory straightens immediately.
"Is she—"
"She's stable," the nurse says gently.
Stable.
Rory nods like she understands.
She has learned the monitors.
The green line is heart rate.
The blue is oxygen.
The numbers dip sometimes and alarms chirp, soft and terrifying.
