“Lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. Kale, broccoli, greens. Juice them if you have to. Whatever it takes to get them down him. Essential nutrients. That’s the way athletes recover.”
“Massage, fruits, and veggies. Got it.”
“Stick with the physical therapy. He’s gonna feel like it’s not helping at first, but it does. Gotta stick with it, though.”
“Okay.”
“Give him lots of, you know, attention. Touch. Like you were doing. Not that you should be crawling into hospital beds. Don’t do that again, you could pull out his I.V. or his catheter. But once the tubes are out, give him a lot of physical attention. Touch is really important. He’s a big guy and in good shape. He won’t be able to do strenuous exercise for a while. He’s gonna crash and be depressed, just ‘cause his brain isn’t getting the chemicals it’s used to. You can give him some of that back with touch.”
“Massage, fruits, and veggies, stick with the P.T., touch him when I’m not going to pull out his tubes.”
“Someone also took her smart-ass pill,” Benjie grunts.
Someone’s daddy loves her even though she’s very, very occasionally a smart-ass.
I smile at the back of Benjie’s head as the elevator doors open and he wheels Logan’s bed out.
17
It’s funny, what a damaged brain retains.
Injured.
The Caring Crows, as I’ve come to call the flock of people roosting in and around my hospital room, make faces when I call my brain damaged. I’m injured. And my prognosis is good. Or so everyone keeps telling me.
At the moment, when I can’t walk because my injured brain has forgotten how to send the correct signals to my left leg, when I can’t shout my anger and frustration, or make love to Emily, because my injured brain can’t handle the increase in pressure, I feel pretty fucking damaged.
I also can’t stay awake for more than two hours at a time. Dr. Lacey, who dazzles me each day with her rainbow collection of surgical scrubs, tells me this is normal. My body’s shutting itself down to heal the injury. Sleep, not laughter, turns out to be the best medicine. It still makes me wild with rage and frustration, that I can’t express for fear of increasing the pressure on my injured brain, to wake and discover that I’ve lost more time. Two hours, or four, or, once, eight, when I apparently nodded off in the middle of a conversation with Emily and slept through the night.
Whenever I open my eyes, my little girl is there, smiling her shy, gentle smile.
I hate that I made her worry I wouldn’t open my eyes again.
She’s amazing, the little girl who saved my life. She won’t accept any credit for it, in her self-deprecating way, insisting that Niall would have found me after I failed to check-in. Niall and I trade smiles, but we both know the truth. When we’re back home and I can take care of her again, I’ll make sure that Emily feels the full force of my gratitude.
That’s something that sticks in my injured brain. As do the hours of quiet conversation with Niall, who had a life-threatening, spinal injury six years ago. He tells me not just how he recovered, but how he topped Shaan while spending weeks in traction. I repeat those tips to myself after Niall leaves each night to imprint them on my injured brain. I’m going to need them until I’m back on my feet.
Other things? They won’t stick.
Emily has to reassure me every time I wake that Jason Merullo isn’t a threat anymore. Evidently, my injured brain is stuck on those last moments when I was sure he was going to kill me. Dr. Lacey says my mind will eventually reset. I’m not sure what that means, but I’ve dealt with PTSD before. If that’s what this is, I’ll dust off those coping mechanisms and use them again, once my injured brain recovers enough to do some self-hypnosis.
Jason Merullo isn’t a threat to anyone anymore. Nor will he be for quite some time. Despite Ed Isaak’s insistence no one involve the Mexican authorities, Captain Lopez was evidently so enraged by my injury and Emily’s distress she went completely off-piste. After finding out from Ed that I suspected Merullo, she had him restrained in a conference room until the ship docked in Mazatlán. There, she turned him over to the Mexican police. After giving her statement to the Federales, which included the brick she found on Merullo, she offered Ed her resignation. Ed’s not happy, although I gather he hasn’t accepted her resignation. Since the Mexicans are looking to charge Merullo with possession with intent to distribute and attempted murder, I’m guessing Merullo is a lot less happy.
If he didn’t want to spend quality time in a Mexican prison, he should have taken the deal I offered, instead of hitting me on the head, twice, with a bloody fire extinguisher.
The other thing that won’t stick is Miranda. After each time Emily reminds me, I take grim amusement in the idea my injured brain classifies Miranda as the same level of threat as Merullo.
She’s a threat to my damn peace of mind, anyway.
When I woke the second day after surgery and heard that Miranda was on her way to San Diego, my blood pressure went so high it set off all the machines plugged into me. The alarms caused the big, male nurse, who looks at Emily like he can’t decide whether to kiss her or put her over his knee, to come running. Under threat of sedation if I didn’t keep my blood pressure down, I made the calmest phone call to Mir I could manage. I didn’t stay calm for very long. She was still in London but only because the first flight she could get wasn’t until the next day. She insisted that she was coming to look after me, darling, because how could I possibly be left in the hands of
