"I know a guy. I'll send you his info."
NINE
DEIRA
"Mommy, how long do you have to have those band-aids on your face?"
Makayla was sitting at the foot of my bed, frowning at the bandages that were still covering the places on my forehead and cheek that had been cut in the car accident. I wondered for probably the fiftieth time if I should have let Dani bring her here. I had been worried it would only make her upset. Dani had insisted that it would make her more upset not to be able to see me at all. But watching her face as she expressed her obvious dislike for the bandages had me worried again that I was going to scar her for life with my scary post-crash face.
"I'm not sure, baby. The doctors have to keep checking, and they'll let me know when I've healed enough to take them off."
"Hmmm." Makayla narrowed her eyes and thought about this.
I sighed. I was slowly piecing together what had been happening while I had been sleeping. I'd been brought here in an ambulance, which I didn't rememberat all. They'd checked for internal bleeding and patched up all my external injuries. Aside from the cut on my face, I had a fracture in one of my legs. It wasn't serious, but they'd set it in a cast just to be sure it healed correctly. As far as my head, so far, all the scans were clean, but the force of the impact and the length of time that I'd slept made the doctors concerned enough that they were holding me for a few days for observation.
Dani had brought Makayla over after she got out of school. It turned out that Dani had actually been in the hospital last night. She was listed in my phone as my emergency contact, so they'd called her when I was brought in. She'd gotten her mom to stay with Makayla, who was already asleep, and rushed over, only to find me in some kind of—in her words—Cinderella/Sleeping Beauty situation. That was how she described the private room and everything else that Makayla's father had provided.
She didn't know about him. Mercifully, he apparently wasn't in the room when she'd been there. All she knew was the guy who'd caused the accident was paying for the room and all my bills. I didn't plan on telling her, either. The last thing I needed was her opinion on this. She was already swinging wildly between being incredibly impressed by the fancy room and being incensed that he'd put me in danger like this. I didn't need to add any baggage to that journey.
They'd called her again when I woke up, and she'd been able to come by on her lunch break. That was when she described the whole thing from her perspective—the sudden phone call, the way her heart dropped, the bizarre experience of showing up expecting to see me in an emergency room bed and instead finding me in a beautifully furnished suite.
Dani hadn't told Makayla about the accident, another small mercy. She'd just told her I had to do something that morning, and so I'd let her stay the night. A wave of gratitude had washed over me, knowing Dani had gotten her up and ready for school, keeping things as normal as possible for her, all the while managing her own fears. When she'd come through the door and saw that I was really awake and apparently on the road to a full recovery, she'd cried.
I'd tried to convince the nurses to let me go home with Dani then, but they were insistent that I should be in the hospital for at least another day. It was truly strange. Every time I'd been in the hospital before, I'd gotten the distinct impression that they couldn't rush me out of my bed quickly enough. But now that someone was footing the probably sky-high bill, there was no rush. So, I'd finally relented and told Dani she could bring Makayla by to see me. We'd carefully gone over what we were going to tell her, which was just simply that there'd been a minor accident and I had gotten a little hurt. Watching her now, picking at the seam of the sheet on my bed and glancing every now and then at the bandages on my face, I felt like we weren't being very convincing.
"The doctors will tell you that your face is better, and then we'll go home?" she asked.
I nodded. "That's right."
"Today?"
"Umm, no. I think I have to stay a little longer." Makayla's frown deepened. I couldn't blame her. I wasn't happy about it, either. Dani jumped in, the cheerful tone in her voice only sounding a little bit forced.
"But in the meantime, you're going to stay with me, okay kiddo? We're going to have another fun sleepover tonight," Dani said.
Makayla wrinkled her nose.
"I think I should stay here with Mommy," she insisted.
Hearing her say that warmed my heart, and also broke it.
"You can't stay with me, baby. But I promise, they're taking really good care of me. And I'll be able to come home soon. Remember when you hurt your knee and we talked about how you had to be careful with it for a while? It's like that. I have to be careful, so I'm sure that I don't get hurt worse."
She nodded, not meeting my eyes, which meant she didn't believe me. I sighed again.
Dani looked me over.
"I think you should stay with me after you get out, anyway," she finally said.
"Don't be ridiculous, Dani. You've got a one-bedroom apartment that's barely big enough for you," I objected.
"Yeah, but it's on the first floor. You can't be going up and down stairs in your condition! And you shouldn't be alone, in case something happens." She glanced at my bandages now, too, and I caught a glimpse of the worry that I knew she was doing her best to hide from me. When she'd been here in the middle of the night, they hadn't been able to tell her when I would wake up. Dani rarely got sentimental, so when she'd cried, I'd realized that she'd been truly afraid I might not wake up at all.
"I'll think about it, but you really don't have to," I finally said.
Makayla frowned. "Mommy, you have to let people help you. You can't always do everything by yourself," she said.
Damn! That was something I said to her all the time. Well, at least I knew it was sinking in.