Hailey
It took eight days, fourteen hours, and thirty seconds for my body to decide that it still wanted to live. Apparently, surviving was up for grabs.
My heart picked heads, a bullet picked tails, and the bullet lost the bet.
It took seven minutes to convince my mom to stop crying, to stop telling me everything was going to be okay when nothing felt okay, and to give me a few seconds by myself so I could cry out the kind of pain morphine couldn’t fix.
It took six security guards outside my hospital room to keep the news people from storming the ICU. They waited around for weeks with armies of cameras and questions I didn’t know the answers to and didn’t want to hear.
So I stopped listening.
It took five nurses to keep me comfortable, to keep me well stocked on sucky hospital food, happily full of painkillers, and totally out of the loop. I was the only patient in the whole hospital who didn’t have a television or anything close to a radio in her room.
VIP status for a very important person with very important problems they thought they should hide.
It took four days for me to feel decent enough to start asking questions, to start picking at the who, what, where, and why’s I needed to know to put together the pieces of a night I couldn’t really remember.
But nobody wanted to answer those questions.
Even the small ones, because they said it was too soon, and because they said I needed to be better. So I saved the most important question for when I was.
It took three months and a lot of therapy for my body to get back to being almost normal. I did a lot of talking, even more writing, and saw my psychiatrist, Dr. Greer three times a week. She had frizzy red hair, bejeweled glasses, and the kind of voice that genuinely made you feel like the world wasn’t falling apart.
So I spilled.
I let her in on the big picture and gave her the play-by-play, storyboard version of everything that happened minus me and Caleb’s story.
I didn’t even mention his name, because the secrets you love are the ones you guard the hardest.
It took two weeks for me to get used to my new home. Mom sold my grandparents’ house and moved us into a more peaceful, less pretentious part of town, which I liked. She worried that our old place had too many bad memories to go back to, but I didn’t have the same memories of that night that she did.
I didn’t have any memories of it at all.
Dr. Greer said that it was my body’s way of protecting itself, and that when bad things happen, sometimes the brain files them away in a “Do Not Touch” drawer so your heart can heal.
But mine still hadn’t.
Even though the doctors and nurses and my Mom had mostly answered the who, what, where, and why’s about that night, they hadn’t answered the one question I’d been waiting to ask.
So, on a peaceful afternoon in the brand new real-world-proofed Anderson house, I asked.
It took one minute for my Mom to tell me where he was—a little over sixty minutes north of Charlottesville in Manassas, on a quiet piece of land with his family.
It took thirty seconds for me remind myself to keep breathing even though he'd stopped breathing on the night I couldn’t remember.
But I remembered every night before that.
I remembered how he smiled, how he smelled, and how he kissed me and made me feel ridiculously complete. And suddenly hearing that he was gone seemed completely ridiculous.
So I stopped asking questions and went to my room where I could disappear, ‘cause maybe if I did, I’d find him somewhere in the dark.