Yours, Dr. Alstadt, arrived and pulled a stool up to her bed. He sat down and asked her how she was feeling, then leaned in with his stethoscope. He was so close that her gaze was drawn to the smooth spot on his neck, a shape like Kentucky just above his Adam’s apple, where the stubble had failed to grow. He smelled like mouthwash, and he used her whole name when he spoke to her. “Well then, Carol Ann Page, let’s take a look at that hand of yours, shall we?” He undid the Velcro on her glove so that the material fell away like the peel of a banana, then unwrapped the bandage from around her thumb. Later she would find herself unable to remember which she noticed first: the quarter-inch of her nail that was missing, a straight line exposing the featureless topside of her thumb, or the way the light she thought she had hallucinated was still leaking out from around the wound.
“Your color is good,” Dr. Alstadt said. “Can you go like this for me?”
She flexed her thumb in imitation of his. A thrill of pain passed through her hand, and the light sharpened, flaring through the black
“Range of motion good, too. It looks like we got to you before any major tissue damage set in. Let me wrap you back up, and you can get a little shut-eye.”
“Doctor, wait. What’s happening to me? Don’t you see this?”
He didn’t need to ask,
“I forget you’ve been sleeping all this time. Well, I don’t know much more than you do, I’m afraid. It started at eight-seventeen last night. That’s locally speaking, but this isn’t exactly local news. In fact, I bet if we… here.” He picked up the remote control and turned on the television. An episode of an old courtroom sitcom filled the screen, the one with the lecherous prosecutor and the hulking bailiff, but when he changed the station, Carol Ann saw footage of what looked like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Silver sparks appeared to swirl through the bodies of the traders like the static on a broken television. The doctor changed the station again, and she saw a child soldier with his arm in a sling and his shoulder ablaze with light. Then the president of the United States stepping into a helicopter, raising a hand glowing with arthritis at its joints. Then a pair of boxers opening up radiant cuts on each other’s faces. The images came one after another, so quickly that she barely had time to identify them. A woman in a blue burka, long pencils of light shining through the net of her veil. A team of cyclists with their knees and feet drawing iridescent circles in the air. A girl with a luminous scrape on her arm, her face caught in an expression of inquisitive fear. When the news anchor addressed the camera, saying
Dr. Alstadt had finished dressing her thumb. Gently, as though cradling a bird’s egg, he fit the glove back onto her hand. His voice came out tired and ragged. “Funny how quickly a person can get used to a miracle. Or how quickly a miracle can come to seem commonplace. If that’s what this is, a miracle.” He stopped, gave himself a derisory sniff, and for the first time since he had entered the room looked her directly in the eye. “See what I mean? ‘If that’s what this is.’ The problem is we’re in a hospital. Not exactly an environment conducive to quiet reflection. Well, Carol Ann Page,” he said, and he smacked his knees as he stood up. He told her he would be willing to discharge her that afternoon, but that the hospital would be more comfortable if she would consent to stay until Sunday morning so they could watch the area of the injury for any signs of tissue rejection.
Those were his exact words.
When she agreed to remain overnight, he returned her hand to her stomach and said, “That’s my girl.” He muttered so softly that she wondered if he realized he had spoken. As he left the room she caught the briefest glimpse of the nape of his neck, where a hundred threads of light were twisting like algae in an underwater current.
She filled the morning with daydreaming and television and eating amorphous sogs of peach and pear from the fruit cup on her breakfast tray, and around noon she swallowed some blue tablets a nurse gave her out of a Dixie cup, and shortly after, she came to understand that there was no such thing as pain or solemnity in the world, as remorse or exertion, an anxiety that would not be stilled or a mourning that would not be comforted. She was not sure how long she spent idly pinching her arm, watching the light on her skin bud open and fade like a pair of lips, nearly outside of time, but eventually a couple of orderlies wheeled another patient past her, a woman her own age, and lifted her onto the second bed. “One and two and—”
“Are you awake?”
The woman’s eyes were open, blinking every so often in a way that seemed almost deliberate, but she did not answer right away. Eventually she said, “I hope not.” It was a hope Carol Ann understood, though it was not her own. From the earliest days of her childhood she had harbored the opposite hope—that when she was sleeping, she was actually awake. Her dream life had always been filled with fantasy, whimsy, beautiful reminiscence—never a chase scene, never a nightmare. She would follow a lost ball into a forest where she could understand the conversations of the animals.
The pills must have been losing their effect because she no longer felt as if her hands had been cast off from her body, and a thorn of pain went through her thumb when she tried to bend it. She was lying on her side, looking directly at the woman in the second bed, whose blue eyes watched her as she winced and gritted her teeth. “I cut my thumb. What happened to you?”
The other woman struggled free of her reverie. When she spoke, it was like a small bird pausing to appraise the landscape as it hopped across the grass, carefully forming each sentence before moving on to the next: “The car flipped over on the interstate,” and then, “We hit an ice slick when we were going over the river,” and then, “There was the truck carrying the steel rods, which we missed, but after that there was the concrete pillar,” and finally, “Jason was driving. Not me.”
“Who’s Jason?”
“My husband.”
“Is he all right?”
“They won’t tell me. They say I need my rest. But I don’t see how he could have …” Her voice sank out of hearing. “I kept asking him if he was okay—‘Are you okay? Answer me if you’re okay’—but he wouldn’t, wouldn’t answer. He just hung there upside down in his seat belt.” Already Carol Ann had seen several hours of footage about the strange illumination of the injured. She imagined an incandescent lightbulb flooding the car with light until it burned out with a pop. She watched the woman swallow and then bow her head, inadvertently pulling her hair taut. “Every morning he left a note for me on the refrigerator with a different reason he loved me. He never missed a day. I write them down in my book. Would you like to see?”
She indicated the journal lying on the cabinet between their beds. Carol Ann reached for it and let it fall open to a random page:
