The twelfth floor was the intensive ward for coma patients. All of the nurses were stern-faced and moved about the place with a serious air.
Like a bunch of worker bees in a hive they went about their work with cool efficiency. Some of the newer nurses gossiped with each other and shared jokes from across the hall—but other than that, the place was almost deathly silent.
Kind of like the depths of a crypt. Or a ghostly realm where the inhabitants had no clue they were all really dead.
Out of all the wards in the hospital, this floor was the one she liked the least.
Every time she caught glimpse of a lifeless patient through the doorway, she couldn’t but think of herself.
Was that how she looked to everyone else in the throes of her seizure?
Lifeless?
Dead?
A living breathing empty body?
It made her shiver, and a part of her couldn’t help but wonder if there would ever be a time when she never woke up at all…
If a seizure lasted too long, leaving her a proverbial Snow White trapped within the confines of her mind forever.
The thought made her shudder and clutch her backpack to her chest as she darted through the maze of nurses and family slowing wandering the corridor until she finally reached the last room on the left.
Inside was a large, private room, in the center of which rested a young girl unconscious on a narrow bed. Her skin was nearly as icy pale as the white sheets beneath her. Her body was thin enough to almost resemble a corpse with spiky dark hair that stood out starkly like shadow.
She seemed peaceful almost. As serene as a real-life sleeping beauty.
If it weren’t for the steady beep, beep, beep of a heart monitor, she could have been dead.
As she shuffled closer to drop her backpack on a bedside chair, Miriam couldn’t help but wonder what color the girl’s eyes were beneath her pale lids, set in a face as lovely as a statue’s.
A chilling gray, maybe?
Or a forest green?
Or…indigo blue?
She tried to picture the girl awake as she moved closer to the bed. Unconsciously, she reached out to slip a pale hand in her own…and flinched.
The girl was ice cold. Colder than cold.
As frozen as death.
Automatically her eyes darted to the sign hung above the girl’s bed where someone had scribbled J. Doe 1/7/10 in black marker. Somehow the sight of those simple words made it sink in.
This girl was an unknown. Someone found unconscious and brought the hospital with no identification.
No name.
No nothing.
On paperwork and in reports she would be referred to only as J. Doe 1/7/10 until she either woke up or someone came to identify her.
Until then, this girl was just a number—utterly alone.
“You’re back!”
Miriam turned, still clenching the girl’s cool fingers as a nurse barged into the room with a stack of paperwork.
“Now, all you have to do is sign here, Mr. Marexsson, and everything will be…oh…”
The nurse, a woman with graying brown hair, stopped dead in her tracks once she noticed Miriam instead of the apparent Mr. Marexsson standing by the bed.
“Oh,” she repeated a little sharper. Her gray eyes narrowed from behind the frames of wire-rimmed glasses. “This is a private room. You are not supposed to be in here.”
“I-it’s okay,” Miriam stammered. Releasing the unconscious girl’s fingers, she darted to her backpack and dug out her crumpled visitor’s pass. Her fingers shook as she held it out for inspection. “I’m a volunteer. Liza asked me to cover for her.”
“Hmph.” The nurse—her nametag read Corey—looked skeptical. Miriam noticed how that silver gaze kept darting from her face, to the tiny picture on the front of her pass, and back again as if doubtful the smiling girl in the photo was her.
Miriam figured she couldn’t blame her. That picture had been taken months ago. Long before the fear of a seizure had all but erased the desire to smile anymore.
Before everything got out of control.
The nurse had to be new. Someone who didn’t know about the fancy neurosurgeon from the city and his strange daughter with a brain disorder.
Most of the staff at least knew her name by now—even if only through gossip.
“Alright,” The nurse harrumphed finally, slapping the pass back into her hand. “But, this patient should have been taken off of the list.”
He gazed down on the unconscious girl and her frown softened. “Someone’s identified her.”
“Really?” Miriam was shocked by the pure utter relief that flooded her veins at the thought that the strange girl was no longer an unknown.
“Yep!” Nurse Corey smiled as she walked across the room to the white board over the girl’s bed.
Carefully she wiped off the J. Doe 1/7/10 with an eraserand replaced it with several neat, bold letters that spelled out a real name.
“Lizzie,” Miriam repeated, glancing down at the pale figure in the bed. “That’s pretty.”
“Yes,” Nurse Corey gushed, beaming down as if the girl were her daughter and not a patient. “Her brother came and claimed her this morning—heard about her accident from the papers, the poor dear.”
She shook her graying head.
“Accident?” Miriam repeated.
“Yes.” The Nurse nodded gravely. “They found this one unconscious under a bridge beside a note that said to take her to the nearest hospital. They think it might have been an overdose but…”
She bit her lip and abruptly turned to the door. “I guess her brother stepped out for a while,” she said, glancing around. “Though, you can’t blame him. He’s been here all morning, the poor thing.”
Poor thing.
Somehow, Mariam couldn’t muster the energy to feel any pity. Finding your loved one alive—though in a coma—might not have been the most ideal situation in the world.
But it was better than the alternative.
So much better.
Having an answer was preferable toonly questions.
Having a body was far better than having only memories shoved into an unsolved case file sitting on top of some detectives’ desk.
So much better, she thought with a pang in her chest.
The girl’s brother was lucky.
But, she knew better than to say it out loud.
“Oh, how awful,” she gushed instead, forcing some sympathy into her voice. “I-I couldn’t imagine…”
Nurse Corey glanced at her, and the brusqueness in those gray eyes eased somewhat.
“You’re a sweetheart,” she said with a nod. Her voice turned soft and soothing like a grandmother’s. “I’ll tell you what…I was going to sit with her until her brother came back to fill out the rest of the paperwork, but why don’t you?”
She didn’t seem like she expected anything other than a yes.
Miriam nodded anyway.
“Good!” She set her paperwork down on a beside-stand and hustled over the chair in the corner. The legs skidded across the floor and she dragged it closer. “You just sit here. Hold her hand, talk to her—just until her brother gets back.”
“Oh…okay.”
Miriam took a step closer as the nurse reached for Lizzie’s pale hand.
“Like this,” she explained, leaning down to coo softly near the girl’s ear. “Hey sweetie-baby. It’s just ol’ Corey, but I have a friend with me.”
She looked at Miriam expectantly.
Right. Feeling strange and out of place, Miriam reached down to pat the girl’s cool shoulder from beneath a neatly folded blanket.
“Oh, um, hi Lizzie,” she murmured awkwardly. “I-I’m Miriam…and I’m going to keep you company for a little while…”
“Perfect,” Nurse Corey encouraged. She even patted Miriam on the shoulders before slipping for the door. “Just stay here. I’ll be back in a blink!”
The door closed behind her, trapping Miriam alone with a girl who could have literally been carved from ivory.
“Hello, Lizzie,” she breathed, creeping back to the bedside.
The girl’s pale face remained eerily frozen, but with only a bit of hesitation Miriam slipped a pale hand between her fingers anyway.
“They think it’ll snow soon,” she began awkwardly, trying to attempt a one-sided conversation.
Her father always boasted that conversation was the best treatment for coma patients. Even when all the medical evidence said they couldn’t…sometimes they could hear you. Every single word—remembered even long after they woke up.
She tried to think of something comforting to say.
“You’re safe now…” She gave the cool fingers a reassuring squeeze. “Your brother found you. When you wake up, he’ll take you home—if you survive the horrible hospital food first.”
She laughed and lowered herself down into her chair, surprised that it was a real laugh for once. Not fake or forced.
It figured, that after four months in Wafter’s Point the first person she could carry a true conversation with couldn’t actually talk back.
Funny.
“You will wake up,” she insisted, lacing her fingers within Lizzie’s ice-cold ones. “And when you do…everything will be fine again…”
It didn’t feel like a lie, she realized. No, they seemed true.
Lizzie would wake up. She could feel it in her gut.
“Believe it or not, I know you feel,” she said, glancing up to gaze along the wall of flashing machinery and wires weaving a maze across the floor. “Not the coma, part—I mean. But I do know what it’s like to be in the dark…”
She trailed off as her gaze was drawn unconsciously to the front compartment of her backpack, where the pink diary hid beneath the zipper.
Only it wasn’t a diary. More like a….log. A list of dates when she had the seizures. A tally of how many days she’d been off her medication.
27, she deduced mentally.
Twenty seven days.
If someone had asked her why she stopped taking her pills, she didn’t think she could even tell them. At least not put it into words.
Not when she barely understood it herself.
Anything should have been better than the fear—the paralyzing blue. Even a bottle of medication with a bunch of nasty possible side effects.
In theory, at least.
The reality, however, was a little more…complicated.
Without realizing it, she leaned back in her chair, resting her head against her shoulder. The thick wool of her gray sweater tickled her nose as she shrugged off her winter coat.
“I know what it’s like to feel trapped between light and dark,” she mumbled in the unconscious girl’s direction. “I know what it’s like to feel dead…”
She trailed off on a whisper, feeling reassured somehow even though the only answer was the bleep, bleep, bleep of a machine. Somehow, though it seemed unlikely, she felt as if Lizzie had heard her—understood her.
Almost as if the girl had given her fingers a reassuring squeeze right back.
But maybe she was just tired?
A seizure always left her feeling exhausted in the hours after, and Lizzie’s room was toasty warm. Even the stiff chair felt comfortable.
Yawning, Marian closed her eyes and did something she hadn’t in four long months without the aid of medication or hours spent tossing and turning.
She fell asleep.