She presses her lips together, poking and prodding several frozen Ziplock bags on a small granite island. “Can I ask you something else?”
I nod, even though it's the last thing I want.
“Who contacted you about me?”
I shrug. “I think I heard from your co-workers that it was your aunt, but that's not really part of my job.”
“It's okay. It doesn't matter I guess.”
But she looks disappointed, so it does matter. “I'm sure lots of people missed you. Your aunt filed a missing persons report a while back. And I remember some women in Vegas reported you missing, too. My co-worker mentioned it to me, that there were several of them.”
She smiles a little. “I made a few friends there.” She holds up a bag. “Sausage okay with you?”
“Yeah. While you cook it I was thinking of going outside and checking out the bike. See if I can fix it.”
Her mouth pulls into a frown. “He shot the tire, so I bet you probably can't.”
“I don't know, I'm pretty handy with bikes.”
“I guess you would need to be.” She sits a pan on one of the stove's many eyes. “They must trust you a lot to send you out here with your hand the way it is.”
I bite the edges of my tongue, not sure how to take that. Is it a compliment? An insult? It isn't pity. That, I like. I don't want to talk about my non-existent company anymore, so I just shrug and say, “Guess so.”
We're quiet for a while. The kitchen fills with the smell of sausage.
She's pushing it around in a skillet when she turns back to look at me. “Don't go outside.”
“Why not?” I raise my brows. “Did something happen while I was out?”
“No, nothing happened. I just...I don't want to take any risks right now, when you just woke up. I mean...I feel like I just got you back.” Color stains her cheeks. “I’ll be up poop creek if something like that happens again.”
“Poop creek?” I raise my eyebrows in a skeptical way. She crosses her arms under her chest and I beat her to the punch. “Or maybe it’s that you…missed me?” I'm teasing, mostly because I don't know what else to say.
“I did.” She gives me that smile again. “You're not such bad company.”
I look down at my hand. “Even with my howling, moaning alter ego?”
She bites her lip. “That was pretty awful. Does it happen a lot?”
“It happens about once a month. Sometimes twice. It just depends.”
She pushes the sausage around, adding a dollop of butter to the pan. “What triggers it?”
“Stress. Fatigue. Maybe just the wind blows wrong. My neck's pretty f**ked up— fracked up,” I say as her eyebrows arch. “So it's kind of unpredictable.”
“I could tell it was your neck. Sometimes I’d rub it just right, and you’d seem to feel better.
“Really?” That's surprising. “Who would have thought?”
“A masseuse, probably. Have you ever been to one?”
“Other than you?” I look her over. “Three. None of them helped.”
“That’s surprising,” she says.
“Maybe you’re just better. Are you licensed and shit?”
“I'm not certified in America or anything, but I trained. At the clinic.”
It hits me. “The Sister, the one I met, she trained you.”
“Yes.”
“She rubbed my neck. The security sensors went off because there's metal caging in there, so she poked around.”
She cooks some more in silence. After a spell, she looks up again. “Can I ask another question?”
“Shoot.”
“How long has it been? Since your wreck?”
“Six months-ish.”
She chews her lip again, now adding some pepper. Then she looks at me. “How are you doing, if you don't mind me asking. I mean...how do you deal with that?”
“Without wanting to blow my head off?” I give her a pointed look. “Is that the question?”
She nods. “It looks so horrible. I can't imagine how you bear it.”
“What would you do?” I ask her.
“I think I'd take the drugs. A lot of them.”
The unspoken question is obvious, so I decide to tell her why I don’t do drugs. One, she’ll probably trust me more when she hears my pathetic story. Two, I want to tell someone.
Normally, it’d be hard to talk about. But with Merri, the woman I left to die in Mexico, who thinks my name is Evan…there’s no danger. She’s going to leave my life soon anyway.
I watch as she pushes a few pieces of sausage from the pan onto a plate. She carries it to me, along with a napkin, then returns to chop the link into more pieces. Her back is to me, and she seems casual. It's like she can sense that I'm about to spill.
I enjoy a mouthful of the sausage before I ask, “Have you ever taken any narcotics? You know, Morphine or codeine? Oxycodone? Dilaudid? Stuff like that?”
She nods. “A time or two, for serious pain, like when I had my wisdom teeth cut out.”
“But not for longer than a week or so?”
“No. I've never been a drug addict, if that's what you're asking. And I haven't been in much pain either, so I guess I'm lucky in that way.”
I smirk. “Yeah.” This girl is exactly who I picture when I picture 'lucky'. “Well I was on something from the moment I had the wreck, back in November, until I woke up from my coma a couple months later.”
Her eyes bulge. “Months? When you said coma, I thought you meant like a week or two.”
I shake my head. “It was a long stretch, but I had a lot going on. I guess I was smart not to come out any sooner. If I had come back during the spinal surgeries...” I rub my neck and make a face. “By the time I got moved from one facility to another, I was like a level three on the GCS, the scale they use for people in comas.”
“So you could be roused if they, like, hurt you, but not for anything else?”
“Something like that.”
She nods and takes another bite, still standing over at the island.
“When I did come out of it, I was able to get by without too many painkillers. They had me on all kinds of other shit, but the pain was kind of manageable. And then they noticed that I couldn't use my hand.” I look down at it, at the wet bandage and the semi-curled fingers. “One of my doctors—this well-known surgeon—wanted to go into my neck again. He thought that he could fix my neck and hand.”