The Boy in the Suitcase - By Lene Kaaberbol Page 0,9
absurd bets of the schoolyard. Here’s a litas if you eat this slug. Here’s a litas that says you’re too chicken to swallow the earthworm alive. Then a grain of logic asserted itself. She must be in a hospital. She was in a hospital, and they wanted her to swallow a plastic tube. But why?
She couldn’t swallow, as it turned out. Couldn’t help. Couldn’t stop herself from struggling, which brought a new pain, sharp enough to pierce the fog of her confusion. Her arm. Oh God, her arm.
It is very hard to scream with a plastic tube in your throat, she discovered.
“MIKAS.”
“What is she saying?”
“Where is Mikas?”
She opened her eyes. They felt thickened and strange, but she forced them to open all the same. The light was blinding, and white as milk. She could only just make out two women, darker shapes amidst the whiteness. Nurses, or aides, she couldn’t make out the details. They were making the bed next to hers.
“Where is Mikas?” she said, as clearly as she was able.
“You must be quiet, Mrs. Ramoškienė.”
An accident, she thought, I’ve been in an accident. A car, or perhaps the trolley bus. That’s why I can’t remember anything. Then came the fear. What had happened to Mikas? Was he hurt? Was he dead?
“Where is my son?” she screamed. “What have you done with him?”
“Please calm yourself, ma’am. Mrs. Ramoškienė, will you please lie down!”
One of them tried to restrain her, but she was too afraid to let herself be restrained. She got up. One arm was heavier than the other, and a bitter green wave of nausea washed over her. Acid burned her much-abused esophagus, and the pain took her legs from her, took away all control, so that she ended up on the floor next to the bed, clutching at the sheets, still struggling to get up.
“Mikas. Let me see Mikas!”
“He’s not here, Mrs. Ramoškienė. He is probably with your mother, or with some other relative. Or a neighbor. He is perfectly fine, I tell you. Now will you please lie down and stop screaming so. There are other patients here, some of them seriously ill, and you really mustn’t disturb them like this.”
The nurse helped her back into the bed. At first she felt simple relief. Mikas was all right! But then she understood that something wasn’t quite right, after all. Sigita tried to see the woman’s face more clearly. There was something there, in the tone of her voice, in the set of her jaw, that was not compassion, but its opposite. Contempt.
She knows, thought Sigita in confusion. She knows what I did. But how? How could some unfamiliar nurse in a random ward in Vilnius know so much about her? It was so many years ago, after all.
“I have to go home,” she said thickly, through the nausea. Mikas couldn’t be with her mother, of course. Possibly with Mrs. Mažekienė next door, but she was getting on now and could become peevish and abrupt if the babysitting went on too long. “Mikas needs me.”
The other nurse gave her a look from across the neighboring bed, smoothing the pillowcase with sharp, precise movements.
“You might have thought of that before,” she said.
“Before … before what?” stammered Sigita. Was the accident her fault?
“Before you tried to drink your brains out. Since you ask.”
Drink?
“But I don’t drink,” said Sigita. “Or … hardly ever.”
“Oh, really. I suppose it was just a mistake, then, that we sent you to have your stomach pumped? Your blood-alcohol level was two point eight.”
“But I … I really don’t.”
That couldn’t be right. Couldn’t be her.
“Rest a little,” said the first nurse, pulling the blanket across her legs. “Perhaps you will be discharged later, when the doctor comes by again.”
“What’s wrong with me? What happened?”
“I believe you fell down some stairs. Concussion and a fracture of your lower left arm. And you were lucky it wasn’t worse!”
Some stairs? She remembered nothing like that. Nothing since the coffee and the playground and Mikas in the sandbox with his truck.
GETTING AWAY FROM the center was actually a relief, thought Nina, as she drove up the ramp to Magasin’s parking garage and eased her small Fiat into the none-too-generous space between a concrete pillar and somebody’s wide-arsed Mercedes. Sometimes she got so sick and tired of feeling powerless. What kind of country was this, when young girls like Natasha were compelled to sell themselves to men like the Bastard for the sake of a resident’s permit?