‘I’m not there, am I?’ I can remember asking whoever was in the room. But my voice was like a wisp of smoke; as it spread it got thinner and thinner until it just disintegrated into nothingness.
I wasn’t alone, I knew that much, and I thought that perhaps Signora Marinello was with me, leastways I had an image — I wasn’t sure how current — of her bending over me, that huge bosom bursting out of a nurse’s uniform, her hair springing loose from its bun, a light forming a halo behind her head. An angel. But then again how could that be? Signora Marinello was baking bread and frying squid and filling old men’s glasses with pinot bianco in a back-street bar in Venice. For a split second I imagined I could smell sizzling garlic and black pepper, drank in the flavour of that nutty olive oil, tasted the dry fruity wine at the back of my throat. But then the overwhelming presence of hospital antiseptic chased away the memory of anything even slightly pleasant, leaving me gagging, choking, gasping for air.
And as for my mother, what was she doing here? What was she doing anywhere? She had been at the squero, I thought hazily, yet I was certain she had also been there in the hospital, sitting on a bed — my bed, I supposed — her lips so pursed they looked ruffled, her eyes dark and accusing.
Well, I say I was certain she had been there but I wasn’t really. I wasn’t certain of anything. I couldn’t remember, truly remember, her presence; rather I had an impression of having seen it, her sitting there, the white lights, the loud noises, everything flashing like a murder scene in CSI. It was as though I were watching a video of my own life with some crazy person working the remote control.
I thought fleetingly of Marco then, saw flashes of my naked rump riding him in the parked-up gondola, his hands on my rib cage, his flawless features lost in ecstasy. Then a picture of Tom flashed onto the screen of my mind, him crunching on garlic seeds free for the taking at the Greenmarket, his eyes dancing with delight, my heart bursting with the simplicity of being with him. Even in my clearly incapacitated state I felt a healthy dose of good old-fashioned Catholic guilt. What the hell had gotten into me? How could I have done that to Tom? How would I ever face him? I didn’t want to. The shame made me squirm.
Then the crazy person inside my head fast-forwarded to a moving collage of Ty Wheatley and my mom and the grandfathers from the Giudecca sort of swirling around me, all melded into one and chattering at the same time, clamouring for attention. I tried to shake my head to rid myself of them — it was like being kidnapped on the inside by Casper (the friendly ghost) and his best friend Sybil (of the many personalities).
‘She need rest,’ I heard Signora Marinello say. ‘All she need now is rest.’
I clung to the word like a rat to a drainpipe. Rest sounded good. Safe. If it was dark and I was asleep then I knew where I was and what was happening. Just the possibility of that filled me with warmth and something approaching relief. I remembered the feel of Luca’s words on my skin and I longed for the sensation that had overwhelmed me as I looked into his eyes. Longed for it. Then I thought of Tom again and my disgrace chased Luca away.
‘Ooh, look, she’s crying,’ I heard an unfamiliar voice say. She sounded sort of freaked out, whoever she was. I tried to open my eyes but realised that they were already open, I just couldn’t see properly. I didn’t remember the world changing from dark to light but it had, although the whiteness of the room had bleached out all the details. Forms moved around, exaggeratedly tall and grey and thin, like aliens in a science fiction movie.
‘Crying?’ I repeated, although I’m not sure the words came out as I meant them. I didn’t mean to be crying. I didn’t feel any tears. I reached up to wipe my cheeks but to my anguish my arms stayed flat on the bed on either side of my body, ignoring my instructions for them to move. Was I awake? My God, was I even alive?
‘Her mouth moved!’ the same freaked-out voice cried out. ‘Nurse! Nurse! Her mouth moved.’
I can’t tell you the despair I felt then. If I thought I’d ever felt it before I was wrong. I felt as insignificant as a speck of dust. I had no control over anything. I wasn’t in charge of when I slept or woke or what I heard or saw or felt or thought or anything. I just lay there — but I wasn’t even sure if I was doing that. Little snatches of sight and sound kept coming and going but I couldn’t work out how often they were occurring or how long they lasted. Sometimes I knew I was awake and could identify what was happening, sometimes I knew I was dreaming — Luca was there, talking to me in soft whispers or Tom was sweating over the grill at Il Secondo. Marco’s legs were entwined in mine, Ty was showing me his new Prada shoes. I knew that time was passing but I had no idea at what rate; it came and went in surges that seemed like seconds but could have been hours or even days. You would think I might have put two and two together and worked out there was something wrong with me but I didn’t. My twos were all in separate rooms not even knowing about addition, let alone making fours. All I knew was that I couldn’t think straight and I couldn’t move and I didn’t seem to be able to communicate with anyone. I didn’t know what was happening or what had happened or what was going to happen. I was floating on never-ending clouds, unable to put my feet on the ground, unable to fly, unable to catch anything more than a morsel of comprehension at a time.
And I was tired in a way I had never been tired before. Exhaustion pressed down on me like a slowly descending ceiling, dark and heavy, pushing me through the bed and towards the centre of the earth, deep and suffocating. No longer lured by the safety of such emptiness, I battled to stay awake, to learn more, to understand what was going on. Of course, as soon as I relaxed and let down my guard, unconsciousness seeped into my bones and claimed me; the next thing I knew I was waking up again, angry at having drifted off, desperate to know what might have happened had I been there to see it.
I don’t know how long this went on for but when I think about it now I see a sort of Morse code in my mind — smooth dashes of unconsciousness punctuated by staccato dots of being awake. Time didn’t mean what it used to: seconds and minutes and hours were like words in a foreign language, I had lost the concept. I was awake or not in no particular order and my dreams seemed more life-like than my reality. But after a while it seemed that the periods of sleep were shortening and emerging from them was less of a struggle. Descending back into sleep again was also more of a smooth transition. My Morse code had turned into a smooth regular wave pattern. Voices came and went in whole sentences. People moved around me acting out sequences I could follow. I felt things on my skin, my scalp, in my heart. I sensed change. Progress, of sorts.
And then, one instant, one point in time that I couldn’t quite pin down, that same freaked-out voice I had heard earlier interrupted a dream where I was calling for Tom, begging him to take me home, to make me potato gnocchi.
‘She’s making a noise!’ the voice squawked. ‘Nurse! She’s making a noise!’
I tested my eyes to see if they were open. They were. This was good. I had meant for them to be open and they had obliged. I had made that happen. I was definitely awake. I felt my stomach muscles unclench slightly, the panic I had grown used to subside. So, the room was still a buzzing white blur, but it was a buzzing white blur that I recognised. My surroundings were familiar. This was where I was now. I knew that. As I looked around the room I realised that the general white blur was in fact separating into different shades of grey; the edges of the darker bits were becoming sharper, the blotches taking on real shapes. I could sense a window, a stout form (Signora Marinello?) shuffling in front of it, and another trim shape, clearly feminine, much closer, unmistakably leaning in towards me.
‘Emsie,’ the feminine shape said in the freaked-out voice, very close to my ear. ‘Emsie, can you hear me?’
Jesus, I thought, whatever had happened had turned me into a whole other person. Emsie? My stomach clenched again, panic returned. How was I going to sort out that mix-up when the power of speech was beyond me? How was I going to get these strangers to know who I really
was? Maybe I had amnesia. But then again I knew who I was, I was Connie Farrell, wife albeit disgruntled of Tom, daughter of Estelle and Patrick, sister of space cadet Emmet, restaurant reviewer, friend, New Yorker, human.
Tom. His face snapped into focus, clear as a bell, and for a moment I thought he was in the room with me and my heart swelled with hope. Tom would help straighten out this whole hospital mess, I thought. And then we could just get over our marital hiccup and get on with our lives and I would never go anywhere without him or sleep with drop-dead gorgeous strangers again.
‘Emsie?’ The voice said.
‘Who the hell is Emsie?’ I said. I knew I had said it yet no noise came out. I could feel my lips moving, and I was sure they were moving the way I wanted them to, but no air blew past my vocal cords, no sound permeated the room.
The feminine shape’s face peered straight into mine and before my eyes it morphed from a fuzzy blur with dark slits for eyes and a gash of pink for a mouth into a collection of crisp lines and muted colours. The face was extremely well made-up but its features were harsh and pointy and would have been ugly on a person without such flair for self-improvement. The hair was a perfectly coiffed blonde bob, razor-sharp.
‘Emsie,’ the voice said. The face’s eyes stretched wide open and its chin got longer, like a witch. ‘You’ve come back. Nurse!’ Her head twisted around yet her hair seemed to stay looking straight at me, like a helmet. ‘She’s back!’
I closed my eyes and drifted away again. I wasn’t ready to take up the challenge of not being Emsie. Just thinking about that creature’s hair had plum tuckered me out. But at some level I knew there was cause for celebration. I had woken up, opened my eyes, known where I was, and understood what was happening. That was the way things should be. A layer of fear was removed and discarded. It felt good.
When I opened my eyes again, it was Signora Marinello’s kind round face — no nasty angles there — peering into mine.
‘Constanzia,’ she said and I tell you, I was so thrilled not to be Emsie I would have wept had I been able to work out how to.
‘Constanzia,’ Signora Marinello repeated gently, speaking slowly, watching my eyes follow her lips. ‘You are in the hospital. You hurt your head. You been in a coma, Constanzia. Understand?’
I let her words sink right into me. I knew by the look in her eyes they were significant but the meaning of them at that time escaped me, rolled off me like water off an oil patch.
‘You hurt your head.’
I rolled this sentence over in my mind. Someone had hurt their head. Okay, I had that. I knew what that meant. It was bad.
‘You been in a coma.’
A coma. I thought of Karen Ann Quinlan, the only person I could think of attached to the word. She had died, hadn’t she? After years of being curled up and unconscious? So this person with the hurt head had been in a coma. I guessed that was pretty bad too.
‘Understand?’
I knew for a fact I did not understand. I couldn’t work out how this information she was imparting was connected to me. My eyes remained fixed on her face, searching her benevolent expression for clues.
‘You have two surgeries on your brain,’ she said. ‘You lucky to be alive.’
‘You have two surgeries on your brain.’
Something about that notion gripped my heart with an icy cold claw and squeezed it. I could hear it beating in my ears, felt the hot flush of shock in my cheeks. ‘You have two surgeries on your brain. You hurt your head. You been in a coma. You have two surgeries on your brain.’ Her words were hurling themselves at me like a battering ram.
‘You lucky to be alive.’
‘You.’
Oh my God. She was talking about me.
I had hurt my head? I had been in a coma? I was lucky to be alive?
She saw the panic in my eyes, the horror of comprehension, and her face crumpled like cocoa-coloured satin.
‘Is all right,’ she hushed me. ‘Ssshhhh.’
Of course when I thought about it, it made perfect sense. There was something wrong with my brain. That was why I couldn’t think straight, why I couldn’t tell real from imagined or now from then. But what did it mean? How long would I be like this? How long would it last, this awful cloudy soup in my head? How long would I be trapped inside this foreign personality? Questions jangled inside me, fighting for attention, leaving me struggling to separate one from the other.
‘But where are we?’ I eventually managed, although again my lips formed only useless soundless words, puffing vacant queries into the room. Signora Marinello placed a cool hand on my cheek and the comfort was such I had to use all my willpower to resist the urge to drift off to never land again. I was hanging on to a thread of understanding, within reach of getting somewhere, of making the missing connection.
‘No talking, Constanzia,’ Signora Marinello said soothingly. ‘We put tracheotomy in your throat, help you breathe. Hook you up to ventilating machine.’
I was suddenly aware of the suck and hiss of a mechanical lung reverberating somewhere behind me. I lifted an arm and, to my great joy, it didn’t stay lying flaccidly on the bed at my side, it did what I told it to. I brought my hand to my throat where my fingers clumsily butted into a cold hard plastic pipe sticking out of my skin. My eyes widened. This was serious stuff. I had pipes sticking out of me. I had a machine doing my breathing.
‘Okay, Constanzia,’ Signora Marinello told me, calming my panic. ‘It come out soon. Only helping you a little bit now. You get better. Need rest.’ Her fingers stroked my cheek and although my heart was bursting with uncertainty, I just soaked up her touch and slithered off into the murky dark whirlpool my mind had become.
When I woke up again it was daytime and I knew it was daytime so I guessed that was a step in the right direction. It felt good to know something, comforting. I winced, though, when I thought about what else I knew, when I remembered that the poor wretch who had hurt their head and been in a coma was me. I had hurt my head, I accepted that. Deep down I somehow knew it to be true even though I didn’t even have as much as a headache, not like the one I’d ended up with on the Giudecca. It certainly explained the mulligatawny in my head. But the coma? Well, I had trouble with that. I mean I believed Signora Marinello, of course I did; she had no reason to lie to me yet it was a big mental adjustment to take someone’s word on something so intangible. I didn’t know what a coma meant. I had buffeted the word around so much in my head it had become meaningless. And something else nagged at me constantly, namely, my whereabouts. I still wasn’t sure if we were in New York or Venice.
‘Did it happen when I fell on the bridge?’ I asked.
‘How many times do we have to tell you, Emsie?’ the blonde bobbed woman asked in a voice decorated with forced brightness. Had she been there all along? I couldn’t remember how long I had been awake. ‘It was by the Boat House.’
Did she mean Luca’s workshop? How could I have hurt my head there, I wondered? I remembered feeling dizzy and faint but I couldn’t remember anything dropping on me or banging into me, or anything but Luca and Marco, anger and disillusionment.
‘What day is it? What year is it? Do you know where you are?’ A different strange voice was suddenly firing questions at me, questions I couldn’t answer.
What day was it? I panicked, my mind a blank slate, but I took a deep breath and willed myself to take it slowly, start with the first question, not worry too much that I didn’t have a clue about the rest. I could do this, I told myself silently. I could work it out methodically. I had gone to Venice on Sunday, stayed there two nights, or was it two with the time difference? Or did the time difference matter? It would have helped to know which side of the Atlantic I was on but I pushed that aside. Two days, that made it Tuesday, although I had hurt my head and been in a coma. How long did comas last for?
‘It’s today,’ I answered, ‘the day after yesterday.’ And I heard a snort that could only have come from a nostril belonging to my mot
her.
‘Always, she’s got an answer.’ My mother, sure enough, was standing at the end of the bed, looking not at all blurry. She had on an orange sweatshirt I’d never seen before and a pair of slim brown pants. She looked small and rumpled and almost unfamiliar. ‘She’s been like it ever since she could talk. You know, the first time.’
‘She need rest,’ Signora Marinello said and I heard the clip-clop of my mother’s tiny heels across the linoleum of my hospital room floor. ‘She no good for your head,’ Signora Marinello whispered into my ear. ‘She no good for anyone’s head.’
Two things, both good, occurred to me very clearly then. One was that it obviously wasn’t just me my mother drove bananas, and the other was that I had said something and actually been heard. And with that thought, the fuzzy pieces of the jigsaw puzzle I had been trying to fit together in my mind sharpened up and started gravitating towards their rightful places. I drifted off again, happy in the knowledge that something was coming together, that understanding was close at hand, that things were getting better.
I dreamed of Venice, but I knew it was a dream, everything was sinister and black, not the magical mother-of-pearl colours that the city radiated in real life. I ran through the alleys calling out for Fleur and Marco, Ty Wheatley’s spiffy shoes pattering irritatingly on the cobbles behind me, my mother turning into a hideous gargoyle at every turn, old men with strollers coming at me with evil eyes, gondoliers gathering on street corners, their cruel laughter echoing between dripping walls that leaned in too closely for me to get through.
It was a relief to wake up and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was clear-headed, I definitely had a level of knowledge, of comprehension that I hadn’t had the day before, or whenever it was I had last been thinking.
I took stock. I was still lying down in what I thought was the same bed but the room seemed quieter than other times I’d been awake. I thought perhaps there were not as many machines surrounding me. I put my hand to my throat and there was no tracheotomy, just a bandage that, when poked, produced enough pain to make me think there was a hole in my skin underneath it.