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Authors: Elena Dunkle

Elena Vanishing (3 page)

BOOK: Elena Vanishing
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Dad finds my gurney. He's in his button-down dress shirt, ready for his workday. He's an important manager who does engineering for the Air Force; a deputy squadron commander, in fact. Dad's tall and a little scary-looking, with thinning hair and a closely trimmed gray beard.

But this year has been too much for Dad. I pretend not to notice that he's crying. I want to tell him not to worry, but it's better if we don't talk about it.

Ignoring things is what makes them go away.

Other gurneys gather on the asphalt drive outside the ER. All around me are wounded soldiers swathed in bandages and casts. “You kind of wonder what it feels like to get shot,” one Marine says thoughtfully to another. “Anyway, we've checked that box.”

This is getting embarrassing. I should be doing something to help, not lying here like this. Just last week, I met some of these same soldiers and helped get them settled in.

Nurses in scrubs go through the crowd now and prep the patients for transport. They come by and move me onto a primitive-looking stretcher with long wooden rods down the sides. The stretcher has a big feather pillow in a plastic sack that's as heavy as lead. My nurse helps them pull up an ultra-itchy dark green wool blanket that looks like it's been through World War II.

Then they tighten a strap around my middle. Now I can't sit up.

I don't like the strap. I want to protest, but if I do, they'll think I'm scared. I can't let that happen, so I smile at them as graciously as if they've just brought me flowers, and they move on to someone who actually needs their help.

Dark blue buses back up into the drive, just like school buses except for the color and the fact that they don't have seats inside.
Swinging doors in the back open, and one by one, soldiers in camouflage fatigues carry us onto the buses and lock our stretchers into brackets on the walls.

I don't want to be carried on a stretcher. I'm not a patient. I'm not a victim! But they heave me into the bus, and I grip the long poles on either side as my stretcher rocks up and down. Then, with a
clump
, they lock me into place.

“What's wrong with the girl?” I hear the wounded soldiers asking. “What's the matter with her? Will she be okay?” My stretcher is so high that it's up by the school bus windows, where anybody can see me. I can look right down to the asphalt drive below.

Now we're bouncing along the highway. Pine trees flash past my feet, and I feel lightheaded and short of breath.

You've screwed up your heart
, warns the voice in my head.
It's thin. That's what the cardiologist said.

But the cardiologist is wrong. She can't be right about my heart. And this can't be happening. It isn't happening, is it? It's like I'm watching a movie that's all around me.

The bus makes its way through square beige buildings to the flight line, where the big planes sit. The flight line is a massive concrete field with mysterious stripes and symbols painted on it. It's so wide that I can't see its edges. There's concrete to the horizon.

I've lived here for six years, and I've never even thought of walking onto the flight line. A red stripe runs around its edge, and if you stick a toe over that line, the security guards up in the tower send a jeep patrol with machine guns racing over to find out what you're doing. Breaking red is serious business. No Air Force kid would even think about it. But here I am, breaking red, rolling down the dead center of all this concrete. It's crazy. It's like I've been sucked into the middle of a war film.

The C-17 airplane is big, fat, and ugly. It looks like a metal goose. Its back end is open, with a wide ramp reaching down to the ground. The bus stops, and our nurses unlatch the doors at the back and jump out. The fingernail-screech of airplane engines gets very loud.

Knots of Army and Air Force soldiers start carrying stretchers up the ramp: six to a stretcher, three to a side, like bearers for a coffin. I don't want them to carry me that way, flopped out flat like a dead body. I don't want to watch this movie anymore.

They'll drop you
, warns the voice in my head.
They'll drop you, and your heart will burst. Feel it? Feel how it's pounding?

I struggle to sit up, pulling at the strap around my middle. My nurse from the children's ward bends over me. “I can't breathe,” I tell her in what I hope sounds like a calm, in-control voice. “I think there might be something wrong with my heart.”

Impersonal faces and battle fatigues are next to me in the bus. With a
thunk
, they unhook my stretcher. Camouflaged torsos, tan and gray, walk me under the shadow of the C-17. The noise vibrates my teeth. I can feel them grinding together.

They're going to drop you!
shrieks the voice in my head.
You're sliding backward off the stretcher!

I can't see my nurse. My heart gives a stab of pain. The hot, humid wind of German high summer rushes across the concrete and blows directly into my face.

“I can't breathe,” I gasp. “I can't breathe!”

That's all I remember.

4

I open my eyes because someone is screaming. When I open my eyes,
the screaming stops. I close them, but the screaming starts up again, so I slip away to a place where it can't find me.

Now I'm choking. There's a burning pain in my nose. I open my eyes long enough to see my pediatrician's face.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “We have to do this.”

I can't ask him what he has to do because I'm gagging on something in my throat. But I don't wonder about this. I don't wonder about anything. I close my eyes and slip away again.

Beeps. Steady, rhythmic beeps. Little by little, they pull me into myself. Wires tangle under my fingers. Sticky-tape dots itch on my chest.

Smoke over fire
, I think with my eyes closed. That's how nurses place the sticky-tape dots.
White is right.
That's how I've placed the three ECG leads on the chests of dozens of patients. But I have more leads stuck to me than that. Lines are snaking everywhere, across my chest and out the arm of my hospital gown.

Lines. Snakes. Medusa.

Another line crosses my cheek and dives down my nostril. Inside my throat, it chokes me and rubs the flesh raw. I try to open my eyes, but they're gummy, and the light from the television across the room stabs into them before I can shut it out.

“Elena, honey. What is it?”

That must be a nurse. She sounds nice. I'm going to be a nurse.

“Popsicle,” I whisper.

“Her throat hurts,” I hear Mom say. “From the feeding tube.”

A tube up your nose to feed you.

Endless steady beeps of the monitor. I try to count them, but I keep getting lost. One, two. One, two. One, two, three, four.

Even numbers comfort me. They will help me in this new world I'm lost in—a soft continent, circumnavigated by lines and tubes.

Lines. Snakes. Medusa.

Mom is here. But Valerie is not.

Where is Valerie? My sister kept me safe from the monsters. She should be here to keep me safe in this new world.

One, two, three, four.

“Honey. Elena, honey.”

A hard edge pushes against me, bringing me out of the soft darkness. I squint my eyes open. Powder blue. A plastic basin full of mashed-up popsicles. Grayish-purple slush.

I close my eyes and spoon in the icy slivers, and my burning throat gets a little relief.

Voices murmur and whisper around me. They rise and fall like the looping curves of the monitor by the bed. I've come unstuck from the day-to-day routine of life. Things I knew about myself once—these things no longer seem to be true.

You have anorexia!
he told me sternly, like he blamed me for it.
You won't have a senior year with your friends!

Or maybe it was a dream, like the dead people in my room. If I close my eyes, I don't see them. So I keep my eyes closed as the voices murmur and whisper. Valerie isn't here to tell me it's going to be okay.

One, two. One, two. One, two, three, four.

Now there's a rumbling in my ears, and my bed is shaking. My teeth are jolting together. I open my eyes and see nothing familiar in the fuzzy shape of my room. It's much too long, and the unexpected distance frightens me.

I grope around and find my glasses in my hand. I put them on.

A steel-gray barrel-vault ceiling comes into view. Yellow bundles of electrical cords and cherry-red ducts wind down it, and black stencil numbers run along its metal sides.

Where am I? What's happened to the world I belong to? I reach up and try to push this scary place away.

A man in Army fatigues catches my hand in his. I realize he's been here the whole time. His face looks young, but his hair is white, and his eyes look like they've seen everything. He's doing something with my arm. A thin line: there's an IV there.

“Elena,” he says. “It's going to be okay.”

“It is?” I ask him. This makes no sense. How can it be okay?

But then it is okay, because darkness comes back—the safe kind of darkness I'm getting used to. The man and the noise and the light all fold up and disappear together.

I feel a jolt. I open my eyes, and I'm outside in sunlight. Everything is in sharp focus this time. I reach up to find my glasses on my face.

I'm lying on a stretcher. Two men are rolling me over to an ambulance. They aren't in fatigues. They're in green scrubs. The man with white hair has disappeared.

“Um. This is for you,” one of them says. Awkwardly, he hands me a small stuffed bear.

Why?
the voice in my head frets.
Why? What's going on? Do you look okay? Is your makeup okay?

Mom is there, too. She climbs into the front seat, just beyond my head, and I hear her talking in a bright, polite voice.

Mom has a voice just for strangers, too.

I glance around the ambulance. This is an American ambulance. I know the difference. At the ER, I've helped clean vomit out of the German ones.

So they did it—what they threatened to do. I'm not in Germany anymore.

You won't see Germany again.

I wait for that to hurt, but all that comes back is dull disinterest. My life feels like a book I read a long time ago.

The man who gave me the bear climbs into the ambulance beside me, and the back door slams shut. I close my eyes as we start to move.

You won't see Germany again. You'll have a tube up your nose to feed you.

I swallow. Sure enough, I have a tube.

The ambulance stops. Doors slam. I am being wheeled down a hall and into an elevator. Once upon a time, I would have hated to feel so helpless. Once upon a time, I lived in a different world.

I roll into a room with white ceiling tiles and a view of roof gravel out a window. Its privacy curtain is covered with pink cartoon fish. The ambulance driver slides me onto the hospital bed as if I'm a doll. Then he says good-bye. He leaves me an awful plastic-bag pillow full of feathers and an itchy green wool blanket that I have seen somewhere before.

A nurse comes in and sticky-tapes me into a new harness of wires. Then she starts the hypnotic beeping of a new machine. Steady beeps are even more soothing than even numbers. I close my eyes and let them carry me away.

Now a beautiful, beautiful Indian woman with large brown eyes like a fawn's is leaning over my bed. “I'm the doctor in charge tonight,” she says. But she doesn't look like a doctor. She looks like a fairy tale. I close my eyes, then open them again. The fairy-tale doctor is gone.

Is this a movie? Is this real? Do I care what's real?

I close my eyes again.

Fuzzy gray drowsiness floats me along, like the soft waves of a sunless sea. They rock me in time to the steady beeps beside my bed. But eventually, the waves recede. I open my eyes to see where they have left me.

White ceiling tiles—big rectangles edged by metal bands. Maybe they have patterns of dots on them, but to me, they're just soft white. I touch my face. I'm not wearing my glasses.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” I announce to the white ceiling.

“Do you promise not to pass out and hit the floor?”

I fumble for my glasses and find them next to my pillow. A blond-haired nurse comes into view. She doesn't look like a fairy tale. She looks real.

“I wouldn't pass out,” I say.

“Yes, you have, every time we've let you sit up,” she answers.

I've been sitting up? When?

“I'll let you try again,” she says, “but you have to promise me to stay conscious. We don't want you cracking your skull.”

Clutching her arm, I navigate the few feet to the bathroom. My legs feel so rubbery, it's like they haven't been used in weeks. We make it back to the bed, and she hooks me back up to the machine. The end of my nose tube connects to a feeding pump.

Have they been stuffing me full of calories while I've been asleep? Have I gotten fat? What's my number?

After the blond nurse leaves, I lie there, listening to the beeping machine. I wait for the gentle waves to come back, but they don't. My bed doesn't feel like a soft continent anymore. It feels more or less like a bed. Mom is sitting across the room by the window, tapping away on her laptop. She turns to look at me, but I close my eyes.

You're trapped
, says the voice in my head.
He yelled at you, and he won.

I roll away from that thought as far as the wires will let me.

No matter how hard you fight, they always win. They hold you down, and they hurt you, and they win.

I shiver like a beaten dog, and feelings that have been numb for days burst inside my brain all at once.

Then I'm not in the hospital anymore. I'm in a dollhouse. I float down the halls and through rooms, admiring the gorgeous furnishings. I have left my body behind, the awkward, ominous girl who haunts my mirror. All that is heavy about me is gone, and I fly over the beautiful rugs and past the gilded furniture in joy and in peace.

BOOK: Elena Vanishing
11.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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