Dark Room

*1*

She clung to sleep tenaciously, wrapped in beguiling dreams. It was explained to her afterwards that they weren't dreams at all, only reality breaking through the days of confusion as she rose from deep unconsciousness to full awareness, but she found that difficult to accept. Reality was too depressing to give birth to such contentment. Her awakening was painful. They propped her on pillows and she caught glimpses of herself from time to time in the dressing table mirror, a waxen-faced effigy with shaven head and bandaged eye-hardly recognizable-and she had an instinctive desire to withdraw from it and leave it to play its part alone. It wasn't her. A huge bear of a man with close-cropped hair and close-cropped beard leaned over her and told her she'd been in a car accident. But he didn't tell her where or when. You're a lucky young woman, he said. She remembered that. Forgot everything else. She had a sense of time passing, of people talking to her, but she preferred to drowse in sleep where dreams beguiled.

She was aware. She saw. She heard. And she felt safe with the pleasant female voices that smoothed and soothed and petted. She answered them in her head but never out loud, for she clung to the spurious protection of intellectual absence. "Are you with us today?" the nurses asked, pressing their faces up to hers. I've been with you all along. "Here's your mother to see you, dear." I don't have a mother. I have a stepmother. "Come on, love, your eye is open. We know you can hear us, so when are you going to talk to us?" When I'm ready ... when I'm ready ... when I want to remember...