The hospital bracelet was still taped to my left wrist, the plastic edge cutting into my skin every time I shifted on the mattress. The blue ink from the discharge stamp had already smeared onto my grandmother’s white cotton sheets.
My daughter, Sophie, sat at the foot of the bed holding her plastic doll by its yellow hair. She was only four, but she had not let go of my hospital bracelet since the nurses wheeled me out to the curb this morning.
I tried to slide my back up against the headboard to get a better view of her. A sharp, hot wire of pain shot from my shoulder down to my ribs, freezing the breath in my throat.
The car accident had happened five days ago on the slick blacktop of State Route 315. I had three cracked ribs, a deep bone bruise on my left hip, and a shoulder that refused to obey my brain.
I managed to prop myself on my right elbow, but my left arm lay beside me like a heavy branch.
Sophie watched me with her large, quiet eyes, her fingers tracing the plastic band on my arm. She did not ask to sit on my lap, as if she knew the space around my middle was forbidden territory.
“Where is Daddy?” she whispered, her voice barely carrying across the quilt.
“Downstairs in the kitchen,” I said, trying to make my voice sound light and steady. “He is getting everything settled for us.”
I looked past her to the framed portrait of my grandmother hanging on the wall opposite the bed. She had built this two-story white siding house in 1952, and her steady painted eyes seemed to ask if I could hold it together.
The real question was whether I could manage Sophie’s dinner and my own medication during the night.
My left hand crept up to touch my collarbone, the skin there still tender and swollen under my shirt.
The smell of damp pine leaves from the front yard was drifting through the open window, cold and heavy with the promise of more rain. It was the same damp smell that had filled the sedan before the metal crumpled.
