out the first tube. The pain was violent. It gave me something to hold on to.
“Just breathe. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t okay. They weren’t listening to me, and they needed to get them out. I tried to tell them, but the darkness grew, swallowing the room.
“Mara?”
I blinked, but saw nothing. The beeping and hissing had stopped.
“Don’t fight it, sweetie.”
My eyelids fluttered at the sound of my mother’s voice. She leaned over me, adjusting one of the pillows, and a sheet of black hair fell over her almond skin. I tried to move, to get out of her way, but I could barely hold my head up. I glimpsed two dour-faced nurses behind her. One of them had a red welt on her cheek.
“What’s wrong with me?” I whispered hoarsely. My lips felt like paper.
My mother brushed a sweaty strand of hair from my face. “They gave you something to help you relax.”
I breathed in. The tube under my nose was gone. And the ones from my hands, too. They were replaced by gauzy white bandages wrapped around my skin. Spots of red bled through. Something released itself from my chest and a deep sigh shuddered from my lips. The room shifted into focus, now that the needles were out.
I looked at my father, sitting at the far wall, looking helpless. “What happened?” I asked hazily.
“You were in an accident, honey,” my mother answered. My father met my eyes, but he didn’t say anything. Mom was running this show.
My thoughts swam. An accident. When?
“Is the other driver—” I started, but couldn’t finish.
“Not a car accident, Mara.” My mother’s voice was calm. Steady. It was her psychologist voice, I realized. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
More than waking up in a hospital room, or seeing tubes attached to my skin—more than anything else— that question unnerved me. I stared at her closely for the first time. Her eyes were shadowed, and her nails, usually perfectly manicured, were ragged.
“What day is it?” I asked quietly.
“What day do you think it is?” My mother loved answering questions with questions.
I rubbed my hands over my face. My skin seemed to whisper on contact. “Wednesday?”
My mother looked at me carefully. “Sunday.”
Sunday. I looked away from her, my eyes roaming the hospital room instead. I hadn’t noticed the flowers before, but they were everywhere. A vase of yellow roses were right beside my bed. Rachel’s favorite. A box of my things from the house sat in a chair next to the bed; an old cloth doll my grandmother had left to me when I was a baby lounged inside, resting its limp arm around the rim.
“What do you remember, Mara?”
“I had a history test Wednesday. I drove home from school and…”
I rifled through my thoughts, my memories. Me, walking into our house. Grabbing a cereal bar from the kitchen. Walking to my bedroom on the first floor, dropping my bag and taking out Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays. Writing. Then drawing in my sketchbook. Then…nothing.
A slow, creeping fear wound its way around my belly. “That’s it,” I told her, looking up at her face.
A muscle above my mother’s eyelid twitched. “You were at The Tamerlane—” she started.
Oh, God.
“The building collapsed. Someone reported it at about three a.m. Thursday. When the police arrived, they heard you.”
My father cleared his throat. “You were screaming.”
My mother shot him a look before turning back to me. “The way the building fell, you were buried in a pocket of air, in the basement, but you were unconscious when they reached you. You might have fainted from dehydration, but it’s possible that something fell and knocked you out. You do have a few bruises,” she said, pushing aside my hair.
I looked past her, and saw her torso reflected in a mirror above the sink. I wondered what “a few bruises” looked like when a building fell on your head.
I pushed myself up. The silent nurses stiffened. They were acting more like guards.
My joints protested as I craned my head over the bed rails to see. My mother looked in the mirror with me. She was right; a bluish shadow blossomed over my right cheekbone. I pushed my dark hair back to see the extent of it, but that was it. Otherwise I looked—normal. Normal for me, and normal, period. My gaze shifted to my mother. We were so different. I had none of her exquisite Indian features; not her perfect oval face or her lacquer-black hair. Instead, my father’s patrician nose and jaw were reflected in my own. And except for the one bruise, I did not look like a building had collapsed on me at all. I narrowed my eyes at my reflection, then leaned back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling.
“The doctors said you’re going to be fine.” My mother smiled faintly. “You can come home tonight, even, if you feel well enough.”
I lowered my gaze to the nurses. “Why are they here?” I asked my mother, staring straight at them. They were creeping me out.
“They’ve been taking care of you since Wednesday,” she said. She nodded at the nurse with the welt on her cheek. “This is Carmella,” she said, then indicated the other nurse. “And this is Linda.”
Carmella, the nurse with the welt on her cheek, smiled, but it wasn’t warm. “You have some right hook.”
My forehead crumpled. I looked at my mother.
“You panicked when you woke up before, and they had to be here when you woke up just in case you were…still disoriented.”
“Happens all the time,” Carmella said. “And if you’re feeling like yourself now, we can go.”
I nodded, my throat dry. “Thank you. I’m sorry.”
“No problem, sweetie,” she said. Her words sounded fake. Linda hadn’t said a word the whole time.
“Let us know if you need anything.” They turned and walked synchronously out of the room, leaving me and my family alone.
I was glad they were gone. And then I realized that my reaction to them was probably not normal. I needed to focus on something else. My eyes swept the room, and finally landed on the bedside table, on the roses. They were fresh, unwilted. I wondered when Rachel brought them.
“Did she visit?”
My mother’s face darkened. “Who?”
“Rachel.”
My father made a strange noise and even my mother, my practiced, perfect mother, looked uncomfortable.
“No,” my mother said. “Those are from her parents.”
Something about the way she said it made me shiver. “So she didn’t visit,” I said softly.
“No.”
I was cold, so cold, but I had started to sweat. “Did she call?”
“No, Mara.”
Her answer made me want to scream. I held out my arm instead. “Give me your phone. I want to call her.”
My mother tried to smile and failed miserably. “Let’s talk about this later, okay? You need to rest.”
“I want to call her now.” My voice was close to cracking. I was close to cracking.
My father could tell. “She was with you, Mara. Claire and Jude, too,” he said.
No.
Something tightened around my chest and I could barely find the breath to speak. “Are they in the hospital?” I asked, because I had to, even though I knew the answer just looking at my parents’ faces.
“They didn’t make it,” my mother said slowly.
This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. Something slimy and horrible began to rise in my throat.
