60 Days of Salt and Sand

D a y ~ 2

Fact number one: Comas can be caused by a lot of things. Not only head trauma, like bleeding on the brain, but also by lack of oxygen. That's what happened with this girl. Oxygen deprivation, or in doctor-speak, anoxia.

Nobody knew who she was. They kept asking me. In fact, I was still at the hospital at one in the morning, telling the police what I found. They didn't seem too terribly excited to be here either.

She didn't have any ID in the bag I found a few yards up the shore from where she was. It was dripping all over the white tiles outside her hospital room when they looked through it. Finding nothing, the first cop I spoke to just shrugged and handed it back to me.

I took it. I'd already combed through it in the ambulance, but I didn't even know if the bag was hers. So I went into her room when the cops left, tired and ready to go home. I was just going to leave it next to her bed and hope for the best.

But then I saw her face. Her eyes were shut, and she was breathing on her own, but even from the doorway, I could see the eerie stillness in her fingers. The way her muscles never twitched and how her face was pale.

She was pretty. Even under the cuts and bruises that littered her skin, I could see it.

Instead of dropping the sopping wet bag into the chair beside her bed, I let it fall to the floor in the corner, and slowly down. Like I might scare her or something.

My eyes never left her face.