Page 9 of Wait For It

Instead of waking with a pounding heart and sheets soaked in sweat, I found myself in a living nightmare where my body remained suspended in a dream-like state.

Consciousness came to me in waves, piercing the surrounding darkness with flashes of color and the soft sounds of whispered conversations before dragging me back into the abyss.

I’d resigned myself to a life spent caught between two worlds when I discovered I could make my eyelids flutter by directing all of my attention to them. It took every ounce of focus, but I did it over and over again until, at last, my eyes opened. The sensation of drowning didn’t disappear entirely, but it was more bearable now that I was awake.

“Ariana, squeeze my hand if you can hear me,” a disembodied voice encouraged from somewhere above. “You’re okay, you’re safe. Right now, you’re at St. Michael’s Hospital in Houston.”

Fatigue weighed on me like a heavy wool blanket, but I managed to squeeze the hand wrapped around mine in response. The rest was harder to process, and I blinked slowly as if doing so might bring the words and the room into focus. A doctor was paged from somewhere nearby, but in here, it was quiet, allowing me to think.

Hospital.

I stiffened when the word permeated the fog surrounding my brain. Only sick people went to the hospital.

Was I sick?

The pounding in my skull gave a resounding yes, as did the persistent waves of dizziness and nausea. Even the scent of illness hung over the room like an unwelcome house guest, dragging long-forgotten memories of Mama to the forefront of my mind.

From somewhere nearby, machines began to beep loudly, each high-pitched tone a solemn reminder of how life could change in an instant.

During the holidays, the church held a toy drive for the local children’s hospitals. Minus a routine tonsillectomy, I couldn’t recall ever being a patient in one.

“Ariana, you are safe.” Each word was slowly enunciated as if I were hard of hearing. I wondered if they were trained to repeat things like that.

Were there patients who actually believed it was perfectly normal to wake up in a hospital?

Maybe I was the only one who rationalized that if I was bound to a hospital bed with a splitting headache, then the odds were probably pretty good I was about as far from safe as one could be.

The woman’s face finally came into view. I parted my lips to say something, only to be overtaken by a sudden coughing fit. The hoarse, soupy cough rattled my aching ribs and triggered my gag reflex. I blinked away the tears and swallowed until the urge to vomit passed, wondering where they kept the trashcans.

Just in case.

Incidentally, I also began to wonder why I’d fought against unconsciousness.

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

“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.

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