“Let me get the doctor for you,” he said, hurrying out of the curtained room.
“You better run, dude,” I mumbled under my breath, wishing I had something to chuck at his retreating frame.
“Try to be a little nicer,” the moaner on the other side of the curtain said. “Julio is just doing his job.”
What the…? She sounded old as fuck, and normally I’d humor her just for the fact that she was old as fuck, but not today. I had no humanity left for the before-dusk dinner crowd.
“Try to mind your own business,” I grumbled through gritted teeth. “And if you wouldn’t mind keeping that moaning to a minimum, Myrtle, that would be just swell. I feel like I’m in some fucking porno.”
Silence ensued. Even the beeping machines seemed to take a momentary break, no doubt fearing my wrath. And then the strangest sound came from the curtained room on my right. Laughter. Then moaning. Then more laughter. And more moaning. I wasn’t sure if she was having an orgasm or dying.
“Oh my,” she said, through a spattering of giggles. “You’re a chip off the old block, aren’t you?”
That got my attention right away. Just exactly which block was she referring to? “What does that mean?”
“Let me put it this way. If your mamma is Satan, you’re the spawn.”
My eyes widened. Well, shit. She was definitely speaking from experience, which meant dear old gold-digging mom had been here. Who’d let that woman in?
“How do you know my mother?” I asked, a cast of suspicion now settling into my words.
“I don’t know her. I just know of her. She’s a little hard to ignore. Has the entire staff terrified.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not her,” I grumbled, although I could see how she might have assumed that, based on performance. “I’m just having a bad day. Not that you care, but my foot’s gone.”
“Not that you care, but my breast is gone.”
How was that for evening the score? I had no rebuttal. Dammit, what was wrong with me? The first chance I had to prove myself a whole new man and I’d spent it being a jerk. If I wanted to rise above the noise of my former life, I had to first meet people where they stood.
“Cancer?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “Earthquake?”
“Yes. How’d you guess?”
“Most everyone in here was injured in the quake. I picked the wrong day for a mastectomy.”
The way she said it, with just the tiniest bit of snark, beckoned a smile from my lips. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.
“I’m sorry for being a jerk,” I said, taking those first few steps toward humility. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you… or Julio.”
“Eh, you’re fine. You’ve had a rough few days. Besides, I was somewhat flattered. No one’s mistaken me for a porn star in forty years.”
I laughed, the effort of which caused sweeping pain to extend outward to every extremity. Even my missing foot ached.
“Oh god,” I groaned. “Was I hit by a freight train?”
“From what I hear, close. Want my advice? Tell them it hurts before you feel pain. Make ’em keep on top of the morphine regime.”
“You seem to speak from experience.”
“I was a teenager in the sixties.”
This woman’s spunk reminded me of another: Dani, my unsung hero.
“Hey, has there been a woman in here with me? I mean not the bitchy one… someone nice.”
“Nice?” she replied. “No, nothing nice had been on that side of the curtain that I’ve heard.”
So, where was she? A moment of panic gripped me. Had she even made it out of the parking garage? I struggled to recall the details of those final minutes. The tourniquet Dani had tied around my shin. She’d grabbed my hand, the one with the knife. Our eyes locked. We both understood the gravity of what was about to happen, and we went into it with the naivety of first-time surgeons. It would be rough—that much we knew—but because my foot was already numb after hours of being crushed under a concrete block, I’d figured that would act as a sort of anesthesia.
Those first cuts proved me oh, so wrong. I wasn’t numb, not even close. The pain was unreal, cutting through cartilage and bone. Torture, pure torture. I’d made it nearly the entire way through before my hand began to shake and my vision to blur. Just a few more cuts, but I couldn’t go on. The knife dropped to the ground. Dani picked it up and tried wrapping it back into my fingers. But I was too far gone, my head swimming from the pain. I implored her to finish the job. Dani. So brave. So beautiful and so brave. She didn’t want to, of course, but she did it anyway. For me.
I remembered being cut free and her wrapping the stump. I even remembered her helping me walk with the crutch… and then there was a complete blackout. How had I gotten out of there? And where the hell was Dani? After what she had done for me, there was no way that woman was sitting idly by, waiting for an invitation.
Something wasn’t right. What could possibly be the reason Dani wasn’t here? She’d made it clear by her actions that she’d stop at nothing to be there for me, so why wasn’t she? I tapped into the rising panic. Could she be lying in a hospital bed herself? Had Dani been hiding her injuries from me, just as I done to her?
But then I realized there was a far simpler explanation for why Dani hadn’t breached ICU protocol to be by my side, an explanation that even the curtain lady had called.
If your mom is Satan…
It all became clear. The reason Dani wasn’t here was because the Grim Reaper had gotten to her first.
“Are you the singer everyone’s talking about?” the woman next door asked, clearly already knowing the answer to that.
Her question barely fazed me. I was used to being the singer everyone was talking about… or at least I had been before I’d disappeared from the public eye five months ago. But usually when someone asked me that question, it was with stars in their eyes and was referring to some kick-ass accomplishment of mine… not for being stuck like a roly-poly in a crack in the sidewalk.
By keeping me relevant in the eyes of the internet, Dani had essentially guaranteed an interest in my plight. Why wouldn’t the media jump all over this story? It had everything they salivated over: fame, pain, and an arrogant celebrity being knocked down to size.
“Probably,” I replied. “What are they saying?”
“Pretty much the same thing over and over and over.”
“That sounds about right. Do they know about the amputation?”
“People in the far corners of Antarctica know about the amputation. It’s all over the news. I had surgery two days after you’d been brought into the ICU, so I was fairly surprised to be wheeled up right next to you. Even more surprised that you were still intubated and unconscious—three days after the quake. From what I heard, it was a bit touch and go for a while there.”
“Because of my foot?”
“No. That’s the least of your problems. The pressure on your ribs from the concrete actually partially collapsed your lung, and they had to artificially inflate it, or something like that. You’re also being treating for a possible infection. Doctors haven’t ruled out pneumonia yet.”