Her Recovery

Emergency Room

My eyes flicker open, only to see two figures and a row of bright bulbs. A male fireman and a female doctor. My ears perk at the quiet conversation. The fireman (I can tell it was him due to the husky voice) said that the fire started with a short circuit in the bathroom's wall outlet. The nurse begins speaking, in a hushed tone, and I struggle to listen. "Are you sure it wasn't started... On purpose?" I must have opened my mouth to contradict her, because they both stop whispering. I open my eyes, and her sharp green eyes meet mine, and I see a flash of recognition in them before she rushes the fireman out of the room, practically pushing him. She waves a rushed goodbye at him, and shuts the door, turning to me. I focus on the white tile flooring and count the tiles to avoid her accusatory stare. The hospital bed I'm lying in covers some tiles from my view, so I count around the bed, listing them off in my head. At the same time, I wonder what the flash of recognition was for in her eyes. She looks at me, sighing. "I know the conditions you live in at home. I can get you out of that house, into the foster care system. It's not as bad as people say it is. Italy's finest." Her words wash over me, and realization hits. She knows. But, how much? As if reading my thoughts, she continues, "Johnny's a drunk. Rosetta's addled in the head, and everybody knows it. But she's in love with Johnny, and she'll never tell anybody the things he does. It's not safe for you there. I can get you out. Just trust me," she looks at me hopefully in her last sentence, but my eyes close, and I feel woozy, on the verge of passing out.

The last time someone said, "Trust me," I watched my mother die. I was six. Six.

Johnny, my father, came home drunk as usual. Something was different that day. His eyes were sad. His eyes are deep blue, the kind of blue the sky would be in the middle of a storm. A cloudy blue, with a circle of gray around the pupil and specks throughout. His eyes looked like a storm in the midst of its destruction; the midst of the climax. I hated his eyes. And I had the same ones.

I was in the closet in the hallway, because that's where Mother hid me. I saw everything, because the crack between the hinges and the door frame was a bit too wide. Johnny was crying, but Mother, she stood there, set as stone, brave. Mother threatened to call the police, and Johnny said he'd shoot her. She had the phone in her left palm, and the closer she lifted it to her ear, the closer he got to her. When she put the phone up to her ear, he did the unthinkable. He put the barrel on her forehead. But she didn't move. She stared at him, into those stormy eyes, for what felt like an eternity. She narrowed her eyes, and spoke. "You won't do it. You're a coward," and that moment after she finished speaking what we both were thinking, he actually did it. He pulled the trigger.

I woke up screaming. Screaming so loud that 6 nurses ran into the room. I pulled and thrashed, and a needle came out of my arm, and the heart machine started beeping wildly, with the heart rate dramatically going up and down on the screen. My screams turned into loud sobs and I heard nurses scrambling around yelling for sedatives, and I only became quiet after what I assumed to be the strongest sedative made everything go black.