Brain Damage, page 3
part #2 of Prescription: Murder Series
The older woman sniffs. “Well, you weren’t paying attention then.”
Amy bites her lip.
The older woman stands up. She stands next to me and lays a hand on my shoulder. I try to look up at her, but my head feels funny when I lift it. There’s something resting on my head making it hard to move. Something strange and heavy.
“You know your name, don’t you, Charly?” the woman says to me.
I’m confused. Is my name Charly then? Or is it Charlotte? Or is it Lisa? Or Susan?
For God’s sake, why don’t they just tell me my name already?
“She’s tracking better,” Amy says.
The older woman waves her hand as if this is no consequence to her. She leans forward so I can make out all the wrinkles on her skin. She is so old and smells like flowers. “You know more than you’re letting on, don’t you, Charly?” she says. She winks at me. “You know who I am, don’t you?”
I have absolutely no idea who this woman is.
“Mrs. McKenna,” Amy says in a soft but stern voice. Her pretty face looks angry. “We agreed you could sit in on my session if you promised not to disrupt your daughter’s therapy.”
Amy is angry. Really angry. What have I done to make her so angry? I must’ve done something terrible to make her so upset.
Oh my God, what have I done?
“Oh, Charlotte,” I hear Amy say suddenly. “Don’t cry! Why are you crying?”
The older woman starts asking her if it is good that I am crying, and meanwhile, Amy keeps rubbing my hand. How could it be good that I am crying? What is wrong with that stupid old woman?
_____
I am dreaming, or at least, I think I am.
A gunshot echoes in my ear, and I try to see where it came from, but I can’t. I can see the right side of my apartment so clearly—my bookcase filled with textbooks about skin conditions, a maple wood desk, and my wide-screen television. But I can’t see who’s making the footsteps coming from my left side.
Even though it’s a dream and I know it’s a dream, I still can feel hot breath against the left side of my neck. And I hear words hissed in my ear. It feels so real.
Then I wake up.
The room we are in now is real and it’s small, with only a bed, a single dresser, and a television. Nobody else is here but the two of us. This is my room. I think so, anyway. That’s what everybody says.
The older woman is with me, but she’s on the phone. She’s speaking in a hushed, urgent voice but I can make out the words she’s saying.
“Do you think you could come see her this weekend?” the woman murmurs into the phone.
The older woman is sitting in a chair next to me. I am sitting too. In a wheelchair. I’m always sitting in a wheelchair these days, even though I’m not old or sick. Well, I might be sick. I’m not sure.
The woman’s voice raises a notch. “You haven’t seen her in over a week. I don’t care how busy you are with work—she’s your wife.”
I watch the way the older woman’s face is turning red. I wonder whom she’s talking to.
“She does know who you are!” she cries. “Even if she doesn’t greet you by name, she definitely recognizes people. I’m sure of it! I know she’d love it if you came here.”
The older woman is nearly yelling now, but I get distracted by the sound of heavy footsteps outside the door. I watch the doorway, waiting to see who will appear.
It’s a man. He’s wearing a dark suit with a tie. He’s tall with a shiny bald head that reflects the lights on the ceiling. He looks important. And scary.
The older woman looks up, then quickly murmurs into her phone: “I have to go now. That detective is here.” She pauses as the man waits. “No, I don’t know. If you’re so interested, why don’t you call him yourself!”
She shoves the phone into her purse without another word. She closes her eyes for a moment then opens them again.
“Detective Simpson,” she says. “I thought we agreed you weren’t going to come here. You promised me. I don’t want to upset her.”
The man shakes his head. “I need to talk to Charlotte. I need to get a statement.”
So it turns out my name is Charlotte. Someone finally told me. Anyway, since I am Charlotte, I guess that means he wants to talk to me. Which means he is not going to go away until I do what he says or else the time is up.
“A statement?” the older woman snorts. “Does she look like she’s in any condition to give you a statement?”
“The trail gets colder every day we wait…”
“It’s been over a month,” the woman snaps at him. “I think the trail is about as cold as it’s going to get.”
They keep staring at each other, the man and the older woman. The man takes his arms and folds them across his chest so that his suit creases.
“Mrs. McKenna,” he says. “I would think that you of all people would want to see justice brought to the person who shot your daughter.”
“I told her it was dangerous to live so close to the park,” the woman murmurs. “I told her a hundred times. She never listened to me and now…”
Her eyes fill up with tears and she looks away.
“If we could track the jewelry that’s missing…” the man says.
The woman snorts. “What a waste of time. Is this what our taxpayer dollars are being used for? You should have spent more manpower when she first got shot, when there was actually a chance of catching him.”
“There were no matchable fingerprints,” the man says. “No eyewitnesses. And the weapon was your daughter’s own gun, so it wouldn’t have helped to trace it to a dealer.”
“God only knows what Charly was doing with a gun,” the old woman mutters. “She had a bad experience with guns in medical school, so it’s hard to believe she would have had one in her home. She really must have lost her mind.”
“Also,” the man adds, “there’s the matter of the rather large life insurance policy that Charlotte had. You know, her husband stood to gain two millions dollars.”
“No,” the old woman says firmly. “Clark never would have…”
“We just have to explore all avenues…”
“Fine,” she says abruptly. She turns away from both of us. “Go ahead, ask her your questions. Explore your avenues. Do what you need to do. I just… I don’t want to be here…”
The older woman races out of the room, leaving me alone with the man. His shoulders sag slightly, and he lets out a long sigh. Suddenly, he does not seem quite so scary anymore, so it’s okay that I am alone with him. He pulls a notebook and a pen from his pants pocket.
The pen has a red cap.
“Now Charlotte,” the man says to me. “What can you tell me about the night of December ninth?”
I stare at the red cap of that pen. Watch the red. Follow it when it moves. Don’t lose it, Charly. Don’t lose it.
Chapter 5
Two Months After
I wake up to the sound of voices. Angry voices. I try to go back to sleep, squeezing my eyes shut as tight as I can, but the voices won’t let me escape. They are like metal pans clanging together in my brain.
“Two weeks is the most you’re going to get,” a male voice says.
I roll my head in the direction of the voice. It belongs to a tall man with thinning dark hair that is graying heavily at the temples. He wears a long white coat that comes down nearly to his knees. He has his arms folded across his chest, and his eyes are sharp behind a pair of rimless spectacles.
“So you’re just giving up on her?”
This voice comes from the older woman, who has been around more and more. She is always sitting by my bed, talking to me in a soft, kind voice. But right now her face is contorted, making her look older and uglier.
“We’re not giving up, Mrs. McKenna,” the man says. “But she’s been here over a month and we haven’t seen anything in the way of progress. She’s exactly where she was on the first day.”
I think that they’re talking about me, even though they never say my name. Everyone comes in here to talk about me. These conversations never seem happy.
“You just said you’re not giving up,” the older woman retorts, “then you tell me that you’re giving up.”
The man sighs. I’m not sure anymore if he’s angry. He looks kind of sad actually. He shoves his hands into the deep pockets of the long white coat. I notice that his tie has cartoons of little yellow ducks on it. It makes me smile.
“We’ve given her a lot of time, Mrs. McKenna. If it were up to me, I would let her have longer. You know I would. But the insurance is cutting her off.”
“So if she gets better,” the older woman says, “you would take her back?”
The man is quiet for a long time. So long that I almost go back to sleep. My eyelids are heavy and they start to droop. Finally, he says to her, “Mrs. McKenna, you have to face the reality that she probably isn’t going to get any better than this.”
The older woman’s head droops down. “You’re wrong.”
“I hope I’m wrong. Believe me.”
The older woman just shakes her head. “So what do we do now?”
“It’s up to you,” he says. “You know how much is involved in her care. She can’t dress herself, bathe herself, eat… do you feel like you can take that on?”
I understand what he is asking. He wants to know if the older woman will take care of me. I know she will. She loves me. I can’t remember much, but I know this much.
“You have to understand, Dr. Greenberg,” the older woman says. “I have arthritis and my husband died a few years ago. I’m in my seventies. I just can’t…”
The man holds up his hand. “I understand. I’ll talk to the case manager about arranging for a nursing home.”
The older woman’s wrinkled skin turns a shade paler. “A nursing home?”
“It’s the best thing for her.”
“She’s only thirty-seven…”
A crease appears between the man’s eyebrows. “I understand how you feel. But you can’t feel guilty about this. Charlotte needs twenty-four-hour-a-day care and you just can’t provide that.”
The older woman looks over at me, and seems surprised to see that my eyes are open. She gasps slightly and clasps her hand over her mouth. “Oh my gosh, she heard all this. We shouldn’t have had this conversation in front of her.”
“Mrs. McKenna,” the man says patiently, “you have to realize that she can’t understand—”
“You have no idea what she can understand,” the older woman snaps at him.
The man looks over at me and for a moment, our eyes meet. His are brown but the whites are lined with red. He looks tired. He squints at me a minute, then he shakes his head.
“We’ll get you that list of nursing homes tomorrow,” he promises.
Chapter 6
Two Months After
The pain is like white hot coals sliding across my belly. It wakes me up from sleep, and when I realize that it has no intention of stopping, I crack open my eyes and whimper. Well, at first I whimper, but then it turns into a moan. Then a scream. Or my best attempt at a scream.
There’s a woman standing over me wearing flower-patterned scrubs with dark hair pulled back into a painful-looking bun, and she’s doing something to the tube that comes out of my belly. I hate that tube. I have tried to remove it on multiple occasions, but they won’t let me. Once they even covered my hand in a big white mitten covered in mesh to thwart my efforts.
That tube hurts so much. The skin around it on my belly is red and angry and goopy. They keep putting bandages and creams on it, telling me it will help with the pain, but it never does. Anytime anyone touches that tube, I want to scream.
I reach for the tube with my right hand, trying to push away the woman. She has bags under her brown eyes, which narrow at me angrily.
“Will you just let me do this, Charlotte?” she snaps at me. “I’m not in the mood.”
Well, I’m not in the mood to have excruciating pain in my belly. I swipe at her hand, in my best attempt to keep her away.
“If you keep this up,” the woman says to me, “I’m going to get out the restraint.”
Then she takes one hand and physically pins down my right arm hard enough that I can feel her fingernails biting into my skin. I’m sure I have another arm somewhere that I can use against her. For right now, I’m not sure where it is. And with my right arm restrained, I’m helpless. The pain commences. It’s just as white-hot as before. Burning. That’s the only word that runs through my head as tears well up in my eyes. Burning.
“Stop!” I croak. “No! Stop!”
It’s a miracle. The woman stops, her brown eyes now wide, staring at me. She doesn’t look angry anymore.
“Did you say something?” she asks me in a soft, bewildered voice.
I just stare at her. Now that the pain is fading, I feel like I could go back to sleep. I’m so tired.
The woman leaves the room. The pain in my belly has subsided to a dull ache. My eyes start to drift closed. So tired…
I am nearly asleep when the woman returns. By her side is the blond pretty woman with the ponytail and freckles. I know her name. What is her name?
Amy! That’s her name.
“Charly,” Amy says. She picks up my hand from the bed and holds it in her own. Her fingers are so soft, like a baby. “Megan says that you talked. Is that true?”
Amy’s hands are so soft. I’m so tired. I think I will go back to sleep.
“What was happening when she spoke to you?” Amy says. She is talking to the other woman now. Maybe she will leave me alone so that I can sleep
“I was cleaning her feeding tube.”
“Let’s do it again then.”
My eyes have nearly drifted shut when the pain begins again. I gasp. Why does it hurt so much? My belly didn’t hurt this much before. Although I don’t really remember that much about before.
“Stop!” I plead, because it worked before. “Stop!”
Again, like magic, the pain halts. It worked. Thank God.
When my vision focuses in again on Amy’s face, she has the biggest smile I’ve ever seen.
“Charly,” she says. “You just made my day.”
Chapter 7
Two and a Half Months After
Honest to God, my head is so itchy. I don’t know what is making it so itchy. Maybe somebody is coming in during the night and putting itching powder on my scalp. Or maybe there are tiny little bugs crawling all over my skin. That’s how it feels anyway. And all I can think of is scratching my scalp over and over until the itch goes away. Right now, that’s my idea of heaven.
But they won’t let me do it.
Every time I tried to scratch the itchy spot on my scalp, somebody grabs my hand and says, “No, Charly! You don’t have any skull under there!” Which I guess explains why my scalp is so soft and squishy.
Also, I’ve got a huge helmet on my head, so just getting my hand in there is a challenge. I’ve tried to take off the helmet, but nobody is very excited about letting me do that either. I guess because of the no skull thing.
I keep trying to explain about my scalp being itchy. I really don’t think they get it. It gets me upset because what if there really are bugs all over my scalp? You would think they would want to check and maybe try to get rid of them. But nobody seems to care.
Dr. Greenberg is my doctor here, and every day I try to explain to him about the itch in my scalp. I figure, if anyone should be able to help me, it’s a doctor. People tell me that I was a doctor before, and I know I could help myself, but that would involve taking off the helmet and scratching my head, which nobody will let me do. Since I’m a doctor, you’d think they’d let me treat myself.
“How are you doing today?” Dr. Greenberg asks me during his daily visit to see me in my room. I like it when he comes to see me. I like how he always has funny ties, like today he has balloons on his tie. He seems like a really nice man. Maybe he can help me stop being itchy.
“My head itches a lot,” I explain. I raise my right hand and try to snake it under my helmet, but earlier today, a nurse attached a thick white mitten to my hand, so I can’t really do much with it.
“I know it’s uncomfortable,” Dr. Greenberg tells me, “but you really can’t scratch there. You don’t have any skull covering your brain, so you could hurt your brain.”
“I wouldn’t hurt my brain,” I say.
“You might.”
“I already hurt it pretty bad,” I say. “How much worse could it be?”
Dr. Greenberg chuckles. I don’t know why that was funny. It’s true.
“Are you ready to do our questions?” he asks me.
I shrug.
“Tell me your name,” he says.
“Charly.”
“Charly what?”
I know this one. I stare at him for a minute, then I finally come up with, “Itch?”
Dr. Greenberg shakes his head. “No. Your last name is McKenna.”
I knew that one. If my head wasn’t so itchy, I would’ve gotten it.
“And where are we, Charly?”
I hate these questions. It’s so hard to concentrate when I’m so itchy. “We’re here.”
“But where is here?”
“My room.”
“Right, but what kind of place is this?”
“It is…” I try to focus. I know he expects me to give him an answer. But all I can think about is how itchy my scalp is. I try to scratch it again, but the damn glove stops me again. “An itch?”
Dr. Greenberg smiles at me. “It’s a rehab hospital, Charly.”
“Oh.”
“And how old are you?”
I think hard. I feel like I remember somebody saying I had a birthday coming up. So I’m going to be older than I was before. But how old am I now? “I’m going to be twenty.”
Dr. Greenberg laughs again. “Don’t we wish? Try again, Charly.”
“Twenty-two?”
“You’re thirty-seven,” he says.
Oh my God, could that be true? I try to look down at the wristband on my arm, which has all my information, but I can’t see it because of the mitten. How could I be thirty-seven though?
