Mom shakes her head. “No, honey. I’ve watched you like a hawk for your whole life, and you’ve never showed any signs of it. I’ve made a god-awful mess of your life, so if you have any—any emotional issues, they’re my fault. But I don’t think you’re bipolar.”
A nurse comes in, a stout, middle-aged black woman with gray streaks in her curly dark hair. Her tag announces her name to be Shawna. “All right, ya’ll. My patient needs to sleep. I’ve let you disturb him long enough. Now shoo. Let the boy rest.” She’s friendly and polite, but firm, hustling everyone out. Except Kylie, who remains where she is, nestled against me.
I say goodbye to everyone, hugging Mom, and then they’re gone, trooping out silently.
Shawna shuts the door and then stops in the middle of the room, staring at Kylie and me. “A’ight, honey. If you promise me you’ll let Benjamin sleep, I’ll let you stay here for a few minutes.”
“Oz. My name is Oz.” I mumble it, more out of habit.
“I promise,” Kylie says to Shawna, then turns to me. “So you’re still going by Oz?”
I shrug, a weak lift of one shoulder. “It’s who I am. It’s the name I chose for myself a long, long time ago. I’m not Ben, or Benjamin. I’m Oz.”
Shawna is checking leads, the monitor, fiddling with various things. “You need something for the pain, sweetie?”
So much has been raging in my head and my heart that I’ve almost forgotten about the pain. “Yeah. It’s starting to catch up to me.” It’s not a lie. Aches ripple through me. My head pounds, and a thousand pinpricks hit my arm and leg.
She bustles out of the room, and as soon as she’s gone, Kylie lifts up, cradles my face in her soft, trembling hands, and kisses me, hard and deep and desperate. She kisses me with the frantic need of someone who thought she’d lost her one true love. I kiss her back, holding on to the back of her shirt with my good hand.
“God, Oz. I thought I’d lost you. Again. It hurt so bad. I was so afraid. I couldn’t live if I lost you. I can’t lose you again. Please, Oz. Promise me, promise me you’ll never leave me. Thinking you were dead, not knowing if you’d be okay, if you’d wake up, it was just…hell. It was hell. I love you, so, so, so much. Don’t ever leave me. Promise me, Oz. Promise me.”
I wrap my arm around her neck and hold her face against mine. We’re both trembling, shaking, and she’s crying, and yet a-fucking-gain I’m trying not to. “I promise you, baby. I promise. I’m yours, Kylie. I’m not going anywhere. Ssshh. I’m okay. I’m okay.” Rhythmic reassurances flow from me, nonsensical and repetitive, and she eventually stills, breathes in.
“How did I fall in love with you so hard and so fast?” Kylie pulls away to look into my eyes. “It’s crazy. I don’t get it sometimes. I don’t know how it happened. It’s not just the sex, it’s…you.”
I can only shake my head. “I don’t know, Ky. I wonder the same thing.” I sink farther back into the pillows and let my eyes slide shut. “I remember everything. I remember knowing I was dying. And my last thought was you. That I loved you. That I didn’t want you to be sad for me. I remember how cold I felt. Seeing a…a light. And not wanting to go to it. I don’t f**king know. Maybe I was…imagining it, but that’s what I remember. Seeing a light and knowing it meant death. Dying. Giving up. Leaving you. And I couldn’t. I wanted to hold on, to come back. I fought it, Kylie. I fought so hard, but I…I couldn’t fight it. It pulled me under. Waking up was a surprise.”
“Thank you.”
I have to think about that one. “For what?”
“For fighting. For coming back to me.”
I can’t summon the energy to respond. I just try to squeeze her, so she knows I heard her. The door opens, and I hear soft footfalls nearing me. I force my eyes open, let Shawna help me take the pills, and then I fall under the spell of sleep, holding tight to Kylie.
* * *
A week in the hospital. Tests, scans, more tests, more scans. All making sure the blunt force trauma to my skull didn’t scramble my brains. It didn’t, it seems. Finally I can go home. Mom drives me, with Kylie sitting in the back seat of the pickup. She spent nearly every waking moment with me, as much time as she could. She’d come after school, before school, during lunch hour. She’d skip classes. Talk her way back to see me after hours. Slip into my bed with me, lie there with me and talk to me, hold me, kiss me when no one was looking.
Going home means a wheelchair, since I’m now a f**king invalid. Thank f**k the elevator in our apartment got fixed. The cast on my leg goes from above my hip to my toes, keeping me totally immobilized from the waist down. With my re-broken arm, I can’t use a crutch, and probably couldn’t with the size of my cast anyway. So I’ve got be pushed around everywhere. Helped from bed to chair and back. I’ll need help to go to the bathroom. To take a shower. Everything.
It sucks.
But as the days pass, Kylie stays with me, basically living with me now. She’s made arrangements to do most of her schoolwork here, so she almost never leaves my side. I make her go out every once in a while. I make her go see her friends. But she does everything for me. It was insanely awkward at first, but eventually Kylie and I both have become used to her being my nurse.
One of the most annoying things about the whole accident and surgery was that they had to shave the back of my head, just above the hairline. I still have my hair, but it looks weird if I keep it tied up, so it’s down all the time and gets in my eyes. Kylie showed me how to just tie back the front so it doesn’t get in my eyes, but then I look like some stupid elf or something. Whatever. Nothing to be done about it yet.
Ben came over once, on a Saturday afternoon, a few weeks after I got home from the hospital. It was supremely awkward, incredibly tense. Neither of us knew what to say, and being family doesn’t erase the conflict between us.
I’ve got family. An aunt and uncle. A cousin. A cousin with the same name as me is weird. I mean, I don’t go by my first name, but it’s still weird. Having family is weird. I don’t know what to do with it. Am I supposed to just forget the way Ben acted, simply because he’s my cousin? What is a cousin, really, anyway? I mean, are we supposed to be friends now? Is it like having an almost-brother? I don’t know. Seems silly if you’re not me, but I just don’t know what to do with family. I’ve never had any. But when Ben came over we just sat, talked. Listened to music. Turns out Ben likes similar music to me—hard rock and heavy metal—so we have something to talk about at least.