Page 10 of Through the Water

In the chaos of my hacking, something popped off my throat, flying across the room before landing with a solid ping.

“Whoops, we’ve lost your speech valve. Let me grab another one.”

I waited until the woman turned her back before reaching for my face, feeling a thin tube protruding from my nose. Thinking it might relieve the excruciating pressure in my skull, I had the bright idea of tugging on it, which led right into another coughing fit

“Oh—no, no, no,” the nurse chastised as she pried my fingers away, forcing my hand back down to my side. “We don’t want to use the restraints again.”

Restraints?

What kind of hospital were they running?

And how had I ended up in it?

I remembered eating one of Sister Rebekah’s famous lemon pies, my lips puckering at the tartness. Maybe she’d poisoned it, intending to kill her grumpy husband, Brother Benjamin, but had mistakenly sold it to me. My temple throbbed like a drumbeat in response, and I scratched poison off the list.

Headache due to reading by the nightlight for years?

It didn’t seem severe enough to warrant a trip to the hospital. Maybe my horse, Pepper, had finally gotten her revenge after years of being forced to compete in equestrian sports. I couldn’t rule it out entirely. She had gotten rather sassy in her old age.

I shifted against the pillow beneath my head, needing to alleviate the ache at the back of my nose.

No, I couldn’t think about that now.

Having run out of clever ideas, I began to search the room for clues. A white piece of paper hung from an IV pole beside my bed, and I squinted at the blurred words until they shifted into something resembling a sentence.

Right bone flap out.

Which meant… absolutely nothing to me.

Moving on.

Wait, I had it. It was like that children’s song.

How’d that one go again?

Right bone connected to the—nope… still means nothing.

Obviously, my sense of humor had remained intact, or what passed for humor when it came to me. But I was still missing essential information explaining how I’d landed myself in the hospital.

I tried but couldn’t recall a catalyst any more than I could solve an algebraic equation off the top of my head. Although, it soon occurred to me that perhaps my mathematical difficulties weren’t due to any injury or illness, but a lifelong aversion to putting the alphabet into number problems. Maybe not the earth-shattering revelation I’d been hoping for, but it was a step in the right direction, nonetheless.

My nose twitched again, begging me to reach up and yank the tube out.

Just one tiny pull, and the headache would be gone.

Having fallen for the exact same thing once already, I tucked my hands under my thighs and prepared to wait it out. The date was written on a marker board hanging on the wall closest to the bed. As I read it, the chirping from the machines intensified, along with the fluttering in my chest.

The severity of my condition was spelled out in large black numbers. I’d been trapped in a void of nothingness for three weeks.

Three weeks.

Twenty-one days.

Billions of minutes—just gone.

Again, math hadn’t exactly been my best subject.

When I lost something, I typically found it by going back to the last place I remembered having it. As crazy as it seemed, maybe I could do the same thing with my fractured memory, retracing my steps until I pieced everything together.

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