Etched on Me Read online

  My gaze went gray and prickly. Off in the distance, coming closer, I could hear Bettina teasing Gemma about her date for the Bonfire Night fireworks over the coming weekend. “That wanker? Are you out of your head?”

  As she opened the loo door, her snicker turned to a scream. “Oh my God. Look.”

  Terrified, hiccupy gasps. Retreating feet.

  I stared up at the ceiling lights. Watched them flicker. My pulse felt like bored, anxious fingers tapping against my neck. I rolled over onto my back, draping my bad arm over my chest as Gemma and Bettina burst back in with Mrs. Kremsky.

  “I’ve no idea, Miss. Gem and I just found her like that.”

  “Is there anything we can—”

  “Get the nurse. I’ll stay with her.”

  My eyes flickered closed. I let out a little moan.

  “Lesley.” I felt the slender warmth of Miss’s knees next to my head. “What happened?”

  “Ceiling,” I mumbled. “Went too far.”

  Her fingers clasped mine, gently extending my hurt arm to the side for a better view. She let out her breath. “Jesus.”

  I heard the whip of fabric, then felt the press of starchy linen wound around and around in a tight, efficient circle. My arm throbbed so hard I tried to jerk away.

  “Don’t.” She held my arm fast, raising it high at an angle above my head.

  I opened my eyes to see her crouched there, bare-shouldered, in a white camisole, her long-sleeved blouse repurposed as a tourniquet.

  “You’re ace, Miss.” I closed my eyes again. Felt myself drift.

  “Don’t go anywhere, Les.” She shook my shoulder.

  “Not going,” I said. “Just sleepy.”

  She cupped her free palm against my cheek. Her skin was so warm, so dry, next to mine’s clammy sweat.

  “I know, honey,” she said softly. “But you need to stay awake, okay?”

  Yes, closet Lesley nodded.

  Door swing. “Miss, Nurse Kennedy is ringing for an ambulance.”

  A whole audience now, their feet shuffling side to side in twitchy fear.

  “Cold,” I said hoarsely.

  Miss, in her best I’m so not messing around voice. “Give her your cardigans.”

  One by one, the girls nervously stepped up. Gemma had snot dotting the hollow under her nose; Bettina’s mascara was tear-smudged into raccoony half-moons. As they draped their cardies over me and Miss murmured for me to stay with her, I wondered: Had I died? Was this some sort of motherless-daughter heaven?

  For a moment I drifted again, comforted, but when I heard the squeaky roll of a trolley coming closer down the corridor, every soft place in me went rigid. Blurry-eyed and shivering, I looked over at Miss. Mouthed the word scared.

  Soon as I said it, her brows furrowed with a sorrowful cramp, her face melting into empathetic softness.

  Nurse Kennedy flung the door open. “Stand back, girls.”

  They huddled obediently by the disabled stall as two male medics pushed the trolley inside. Soon as I saw its black webbed straps, I completely lost it, shaking my head back and forth, babbling nonononono as the medics motioned Miss back and squatted, one on either side, to unearth me from beneath the pile of woolens and pick me up.

  “Just relax, love,” one of them said. I wanted to spit at him, but my mouth was too dry.

  “Any of you coming with?” the other asked.

  “I am,” Nurse Kennedy said.

  “No.” My voice spiraled higher. “I want Miss.”

  Over by Gemma, I saw Miss bow her head and swallow.

  “Lesley,” Nurse Kennedy said, “I’m required to accompany any student who’s injured on school grounds.”

  I struggled to sit up, swatting at the medics, who were trying to fasten the straps over me. “Stop. Stop it. I’m not going without her.”

  Nurse Kennedy and Miss glanced at each other, and then Miss broke through the throng, edging over to take my outstretched hand. I lay back. Let them buckle me tight.

  They pushed the trolley so fast Miss had to run to keep up, her hair flying free of its topknot, her shoes’ heels scraping the front steps in time to the wheels’ rocky bounce. I lifted my head off the pillow for a second, taking in the school’s brick grandeur for what I sensed would be the last time.

  Inside the ambulance, the medics stationed Miss at my head and cranked my mattress all the way down. As it creaked backwards, as I fell backwards, the terror rose in me again.

  One of the medics grabbed my good arm. Swabbed it with antiseptic. The muscles in my neck clenched.

  “Don’t hurt me,” I whimpered. “Please please please don’t hurt me.”

  The other medic shook his head. “Flipping hell. Nearly severs her own artery, and she’s worried about us?”

  “She’s an abuse survivor,” Miss snapped. “And you’ve got no right to speak about her like that.” She leaned her mouth down to my ear. “He’s just putting a drip in, sweetheart. No one’s going to hurt you. I promise.”

  When the needle pierced my skin, I squeezed my eyes shut. On my other arm, I could feel the hurried unspooling of Miss’s blouse, followed by the shock of air and gauze’s rough sting. I let out a small, sharp cry.

  “Shh, shh.” Miss leaned over me, cradling my head in her hands. “Let them help you.”

  As she ducked down, her long, loosened hair fell around me, smelling faintly of rosemary shampoo, ushering me behind a dark veil.

  • • •

  When I awoke in a room at the Accident and Emergency department, it was to the startling sight of a clear bag full of blood dangling from a pole above my head. They fixed me, I thought. It’s all over.

  But then I felt a stiff ache in my shoulder, and the heat of an examination lamp’s glare. I turned my head to see my bad arm splayed across a small metal table, beside which a male doctor sat perched on a rolling stool.

  I glanced to the other side of my bed. “Where’s Mrs. Kremsky?”

  “You mean that half-dressed American who came in with you? Out in the corridor, on the phone.”

  When I heard the plasticky snap of his pulled-on gloves, the fingers of my pulse drummed along my neck once more. “What are you—”

  “Suturing this mess you’ve made.”

  I turned my head to see him reach back onto the counter for a paper-draped tray. As he swiftly brought it down to rest next to my elbow, I glimpsed the neat lineup of instruments: tweezers, scissors, an elongated needle threaded with what looked like hairy black silk.

  I was just about to rear up from the mattress in fright when Miss swooped back in like a superheroine. They’d given her a blanket, which she’d draped loosely around her shoulders like an ecru shawl. She looked tired and rumpled, but still beautiful and badass, as she shot an appraising glance at the doctor. “You’re giving her anesthetic, aren’t you?”

  “Waste of drugs.” His face and his voice were one massive sneer. “She’s obviously fine with pain.”

  My chin jerked from the tray to the doctor to Miss as my mind stuttered. Oh my God oh my God oh my God, they really are going to hurt m—

  “One quick call to her social worker,” Miss said. “That’s all it would take to open a malpractice investigation.”

  The doctor blanched. “I’ll have a nurse bring in a sedative.” Balky pause. “And a local injection.”

  “Thank you.” Miss scraped a chair up next to me, sat down, and reached a hand through the bed’s slats to hold my good one. I squeezed so hard her wedding ring dug into my fingers, no doubt hurting both of us, but I didn’t care.

  A nurse brought me a Valium in a paper cup, and the doctor a syringe. When he loaded it up and my chest began to tighten, Miss moved her chair closer. “Deep breaths, Les,” she said. “Just keep looking at me, all right?”

  I nodded. Felt the searing squirt of liquid, and then numbness. Every few seconds there came a faint tug, followed by the creepy sound of a tied-off ligature’s snip. Each time I wanted to yank away or cry out,
I fixed my gaze on Miss’s steady one.

  My tranquilizer kicked in well before he finished up. When I emerged from the chemical haze, I found my arm encased in a sturdy bandage that looked like white-and-red Christmas paper.

  In the pushed-back chair next to me, Miss was dozing, her chin bent down onto her shoulder at an uncomfortable-looking angle.

  “Miss?” I said.

  She lurched up with a snorty start. “Huh?” Dazed eye-rub. “Whoa. Sorry. Didn’t mean to nod off there.”

  “S’okay,” I mumbled.

  She pulled her chair in close again. Leaned over the bed. Reached a hand down to the collapsed spikes of my hair, brushing them back from my forehead more softly, more sweetly, than anyone had in as long as I could remember.

  Part of me wanted her to stop so that I wouldn’t break in a million pieces, and part of me wanted her to keep doing it forever. She must have seen the conflicted look on my face, because she slipped her hand away, letting it hover above my scalp, questioning. “What is it?”

  I swallowed. Blinked fast. “Hurts,” I managed to croak out, just before I burst into tears.

  Her face melted again. “Oh, lovey.” She pushed the guardrail down so that there was no metal gate separating us, and hoisted herself onto the mattress to enfold me in her arms.

  Wet-faced and mewling, I sank into her. She drew my cheek against her shoulder with one hand, rubbing my back with the other as she rocked me.

  “I’m sorry,” I sobbed, lifting my head. “I’m so sorry.”

  She took my face in her hands, tipping it back to wipe my damp eyes with her thumbs. “I know you are,” she said. “But the only thing you need to worry about right now is getting better.”

  She leaned over to pluck a wad of tissues from a box by the sink. “Here. Blow your nose.”

  Dutifully, I blew. “They’re—they’re not going to keep me here, are they?”

  She bit her lip. “Well, I’m not sure. Francesca will have to talk things over with the doctors.”

  “She’s coming?”

  Miss nodded. “Soon as she gets out of a meeting.”

  “And you’ll . . . you’ll stay with me until—”

  “Of course I will.” She drew her arm around my shoulder, and I leaned back into her.

  “I don’t want to go into hospital,” I whispered.

  “Nobody does, darlin’. Especially not for something like this. But it could be the best way for you to—”

  I pulled away. “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes.” Her voice was grave. “I do.”

  My brows furrowed. “What—”

  “It’s a long story.” She stood and motioned for me to lie down again. “Here, get comfortable while we talk.”

  I expected her to duck back to her chair, but she returned to the edge of my bed.

  “Not long after I moved here,” she said, spreading her blanket over me, “I fell in love with an English guy. We got married young. Had our son, spent ten obscenely happy years together, and then he got cancer. Dead at thirty-one.”

  “God, Miss,” I said softly. “I can’t even imagine.”

  “Well,” she said, “I had a couple months of self-absorbed sleepwalking, and then my mother flew over to help me out—”

  “Wait, the clueless cello player?”

  She smiled. “Yeah. We patched things up so well that I decided to move back to America and take a big-shot headmistress job at an international school in Washington, D. C.”

  “So you got yourself sorted out.”

  She shook her head. “Oh, no. That was just an overachiever prelude to my real crash, on the first anniversary of his death. I spent the day in back-to-back meetings, so busy I barely had time to think about it. Dropped Curran off at a sleepover. Came home, went in the bathroom to get ready for bed. Figured I’d brush my teeth, crawl under the covers, and have myself a good cry, but then . . .”

  She glanced away for a moment, then turned back to me, her gaze solemn but solid.

  “When I looked up from the sink and stared in the mirror, I saw a complete stranger. Who was she? Who was I? I literally had no idea. So I tried to orient myself by looking down at my hands. Tilted them from side to side. I could see their movement, but I couldn’t feel the motion. I had no idea where the air ended and my body began.”

  I stared down at the pale-blue diamond print of my hospital gown. Thought of the ceiling.

  “I know what that feels like,” I whispered.

  Miss gave me a soft nod of affirmation, and continued. “I put my palms up to the glass. Slid them along the outlines of the face staring back. I tried to conjure up the me whose mouth had kissed him, whose fingers had stroked her son’s hair. But I couldn’t. And so I started slamming my hands against the mirror, trying to break my own reflection.”

  I pictured blood and glass, shards and splinters. “You didn’t—”

  “Oh, no, no.” Her mouth turned downwards in a fearful frown. “Is this too much for you, sweetheart? Hearing about it? Because I can stop if you—”

  “No,” I said. “Go on. I want to hear.”

  She relaxed into relief. “Just then,” she said, “my best friend called me from London. I managed to pick up the phone, but all I could do was ramble. ‘Lost my edges, lost my edges,’ I kept repeating.” She swallowed. “And then I started babbling about needing to hurt myself to find them.

  “At that point, he begged me to go to the hospital. I kept protesting, saying I couldn’t, that no way was I leaving Curran for that long. And he kept pushing back, saying: ‘No. You need to be safe. Curran needs you to be safe.’ When he told me that, I felt myself, the mother in me, rise up, just for an instant.”

  Her voice shook a little. “I’ve done a lot of difficult things in my life. I’ve held my husband’s head over a bowl so he could retch from chemo. I’ve told an eight-year-old his father was gone and never coming back. But that was, without a doubt, the hardest thing I have ever done.”

  “Were you afraid?”

  “Oh my God, yes. I had no idea what an inpatient unit would be like, so I imagined the worst. Plus I felt like such a failure.”

  “A failure?” I repeated.

  She nodded. “I’d sworn up and down I’d never be like my father.”

  “Was he ill?” I asked. “I mean, other than the fact that he—”

  She nodded. “Committed suicide not long after I came over here.”

  Wistful, I closed my eyes. “I’d be throwing a flipping party if my dad did that.”

  Her tone was measured, with just a hint of a challenging edge. “Would you?”

  “Oh, yeah. I mean . . .” I opened my eyes again. “Weren’t you glad?”

  “No,” Miss said softly. “But I was angry.”

  She glanced away again, as if embarrassed. “At the time, it seemed like such a pathetic, selfish thing for him to do. I just assumed that sanity, that stability, was a simple matter of sucking it up and not giving in.”

  She looked back at me. “But that night, going up to the triage window and telling the nurse I needed a psychiatric evaluation, I—I realized it had nothing to do with being strong enough, because at that moment, what was happening in my mind was far, far bigger than I was.”

  “Did they section you?”

  She shook her head. “I admitted myself voluntarily. Took a few hours for them to find me a bed, so I wound up waiting in a glass-walled cubicle.”

  “What—what did you do all that—”

  “Huddled under the blankets and stayed on the line with Jascha until our mobile phones went dead. Last thing he said to me was ‘You’re brave as fuck, and I love you.’ ” She ducked her head shyly. “We’re married now. Five years in December.”

  The thought made me smile. “What was your wedding like?” Normally I didn’t go for that daydreamy, girlish crap, but in the moment what I longed for was a delicious distraction.

  “Well, we had a Russian Orthodox ceremony. Mainly to keep my mother-i
n-law, Vera, from disowning us, but—”

  “What did you wear?”

  “Oh, that was a matter of much debate, let me tell you. My mother, of course, found some prissy lavender number she was gunning for.”

  I made a face.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. Threatened to dress like a Soviet-era prostitute if she didn’t stop going on.” She tucked her blanket tighter around me. “We eventually settled on red velvet.”

  I imagined Miss walking down the aisle of some Gothic, icon-studded cathedral in the dead of winter, silvery snow crystals dusted in her upswept black hair. Smashing. “Did you wear combat boots?”

  She chuckled. “Matching heels.”

  “Damn. And your flowers?”

  “Pale, pale roses.”

  I could almost inhale them, their silken sweetness mingled with the sharp waft of incense. “Pretty.”

  From outside my door came the rumble of a food cart. I smelled meat and starch and gravy, and my stomach, empty since breakfast, let loose a roar.

  “Your stunningly mediocre dinner is served.” Miss pulled over one of those bedside tables that swing out like a bridge across you, and set down my tray: grayish Salisbury steak, a pallid plop of potato mash, and a cupful of pears floating in gelatinous syrup.

  She was right about it being blah, but I didn’t mind—at least not until I spied the cellophane-wrapped set of plastic cutlery. Even tucked inside a paper napkin, the inept knife both beckoned and tormented me.

  When she saw my stricken face, Miss grabbed the packet and hastily tore it open. “Shall I cut that up for you?”

  Not like I could do it, anyways, what with one numb hand and another taped with drip lines, so I nodded. Miss bent down with matter-of-fact efficiency, her hair swinging to the side to reveal her bare shoulder blade, on which the red-and-purple-inked image of a phoenix gleamed.

  “Your tattoo is ace,” I said. “Did it hurt?”

  She slid one finger under my milk carton’s tab to open its bland mouth. “Like hell.”

  “Was it worth it, though?”

  A hint of a smile as she loosened a straw from its paper casing. “Oh, yeah.”