The first thing Henry saw when he woke was not the ceiling. It was Denise, the mother of the woman he used to love sitting beside his bed, her hands knotted together, her eyes rimmed red, her face held more than relief. It held guilt too large to hide. The heart monitor beeped, his chest burned. The night of the storm was a black hole where memory should have been.
Her lips parted. Henry. She whispered. There's something I did two years ago before any of this. The rest of the sentence caught somewhere in her throat, and what came out instead was something smaller, something she could manage.
You scared us, she said. All of us. Love us. Henry tried to speak and found his mouth dry as paper. The room swam into focus around him.
Pale curtains, a tray of untouched water, the gray light of early morning pressing against the window. He did not understand why Denise was here. He did not understand why of all the faces that might have greeted him, it was hers. Two years had passed since he had last sat at her dinner table. Two years since he had let her daughter walk out of his life without chasing her.
And yet, here she was, smoothing the blanket over his arm as though no time had gone by at all, as though she still had some claim on his well-being. Where am I? His voice scraped out of him. Saint Bartholomew's. You've been out almost two days now.
She reached for the cup of water, guided the straw to his lips. The doctor said you'd be confused when you came around. Don't fight it. He drank. The water hurt going down, but everything hurt.
His ribs felt wrapped in wire. There was a dull throbbing behind his eyes that pulsed in time with the monitor. When he lifted his right hand, he He the bruising along his knuckles, the small cuts, the tape holding a tube to the back of his wrist. "What happened to me? " Denise's hands went still. For a moment, she only looked at him, and that same expression he had half seen on waking crossed her face again.
Relief tangled up with something heavier, something that would not let her meet his eyes for long. "There was an accident," she said. "On the mountain road. Your truck went off the shoulder in the rain. " Henry closed his eyes and tried to find it. The mountain road.