jeans become wet and warm with blood. Bolts of energy bounce through my skull and I slip into unconsciousness underneath a standing poster of a giant latte. I think about the muffins and have a dream I don’t remember.
* * *
The caw-caw rings in my ears and my eyes fill with inky blotches as I start to wake up. I grab at the back of my neck and try to guess what the crap just happened to me.
Did I get shot? Run over? Pistol-whipped?
Is it a migraine? An aneurysm? Cancer?
Am I dead?
The pain is insane, throbbing and piercing and making my breath ragged. I lie there on the sidewalk, rolling my head from side to side.
Can anybody see me?
Anybody?
All the maybe-heroes are inside staring at their computers while a Norah Jones CD plays, singing to them about boat metaphors. It’s just me, a village of wrought-iron furniture, and a Lhasa apso somebody left tied to a chair panting hot tuna breath into little floating balls of fog. I need a doctor. I need Jack. I need my daddy.
It takes a few minutes, but I feel clearheaded enough to sit up and lean against the window. An elderly man comes out of the shop with his drink. He struggles to push the slow-hissing door open and I wish I could help him. He ruffles the little dog on the head and smiles at me, completely unfazed by the fact that my shit is scattered everywhere and I look like I’m going to puke on myself. He walks over my tampons and pennies and hair ties and settles into a chair. Since I have a kind-of witness now, I feel safe enough to get up. I stumble to the safety of my Honda, turn the ignition, and bake in the car heat until I feel ready to drive. The migraine doesn’t quit, so I drive slow. It follows me all the way home.
When I get back to our pretty yellow house I throw the door open so hard it rattles the glass in the windows. Jack is still emerging from a hard, heavy teenage sleep. He staggers out of our bedroom and knocks his shoulder on the doorjamb.
“Shit!” he says, pouting, and wiggles his feet half into his shoes to help with the groceries. He is too drowsy to notice my crazy eyes.
“Something’s wrong!” I tell him. I lunge into his chest and press my head against the sour stink of his armpit. We sway backward.
I take a deep breath and say it again.
“Jack, something happened. Something’s wrong with me.”
He’s bewildered. It won’t sink in. His brown eyes are so wide that the crinkles in the corners disappear. It feels like the truest thing I’ve ever said but he can’t tell if I’m joking.
“Babe, what are you talking about?” he asks.
He falls into the sofa cushions and Ellie jumps onto his balls with incredible accuracy. I sit beside him as he winces and grabs his crotch. We haven’t faced a grown-up crisis of our own yet in the short, polite life we share together and he still doesn’t know that I’m serious. He doesn’t even know what “serious” would look like on me.
I tell him about the pain, the bolts of it, how it threw me down to the ground and left me with an insane, nerve-melting headache. I tell him about the little dog and the man and not being able to see properly. I tell him that I’m scared.
We don’t know how to be anything other than nice to each other, so Jack covers me in his niceness. He leaps at the opportunity to comfort me, listening, rubbing my back, and giving me tiny quick kisses on the shoulder. He still can’t understand; he just wants to make me not afraid anymore so that the rest of the day can be normal. He goes to the kitchen to get me a glass of water and stares into my eyes until the tears stop spilling over.
“I’m sure it was nothing. You’ll feel better soon.” He nudges a pair of aspirin across the glossiness of the coffee table.
No, I won’t. You don’t understand! I want to say it, but I don’t, because I don’t know how to be anything other than nice either.
There’s an awful truth in me; it settles in my bones as Jack rubs his poor aching balls and Ellie wags her tail. It says that I’m never going to be the same, that life is never going to be