A Christmas Caroline by Camilla Isley
Nineteen
Back to the Real World
I blink awake in a panic, staring at a ceiling I don’t recognize. A young girl’s voice screeches next to me, “Mom, she’s awake.”
Tiny arms wrap around my neck, and on instinct, I hug my daughter to my chest and smell Jo’s hair. Only the scent is wrong. I pull back and find Harper’s hazel eyes staring back at me instead of Jo’s blue ones.
I peek over her shoulder, where my entire family is holding their breath—Mom, Dad, Fan, Elijah, and their other three kids perched around the room like little monkeys. My eyes keep searching the space for Sam and Will and Jo, and who’s taking care of Bram while I’m here?
Wait, where am I?
I must’ve asked this last part aloud because my mother replies, “The hospital, honey, you fell last night and hit your head, remember?”
I stare at my dad, looking for confirmation. “Merry Christmas,” he says. “You gave us a fright.”
“Christmas?” I ask. “Christmas was two months ago.”
The adults blink at me and then exchange weirded-out side glances.
“Where’s Sam?” I ask no one in particular.
“S-Sam?” My dad stutters back.
My mom looks at me, aghast. “You mean Sam,” loaded pause, “Crawley?”
“Of course. Who else? Is he looking after the kids? Is that why he isn’t here?”
“Whose kids?” Fan asks.
“Mine,” I reply indignantly.
At which Fan bursts out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” I ask.
“Sorry,” she replies between chuckles. “It’s just that the idea of you with kids is so… so…” she can’t even finish because she laughs again.
Tears well in my eyes and I stare at my mom. “Mom, where is Sam?”
Mom, looking sympathetic, wrings her fingers together as she replies. “Sweetie, you broke up with him—what was it now? Six? Seven years ago?”
“And we never got married?” I ask, my lower lip wobbling.
Mom shakes her head, dismayed.
“And I don’t have kids?”
Fan stops laughing. “Are you being serious? You pity people with children!”
The reality that I’ve come back to my barren, childless, Sam-less universe hits me in the chest all at once and I start sobbing uncontrollably.
At this point, my family freaks out for good and while Elijah ushers the kids away from the crazy aunt, Dad goes searching for a doctor, while my mother and my sister sit on either side of my bed trying to console me.
I’m inconsolable.
A nurse has to come in and give me a mild sedative while a doctor explains to my family that a state of confusion is perfectly normal after a head trauma and a night spent in a pharmacological coma.
Ah,I retort in my mind, try spending two months in an alternative universe, and then you talk to me about confusion, Doc.
After a while, I get the sobs under control. The sedative has forced my heart to stop beating so hard and fast it felt as if it was trying to escape my ribcage to go jump out the window and drown its sorrow into the Hudson. Poor heart, can I blame it for wanting out? In the past two months, it has received more love and joy than in the past seven years of my life combined.
I have to push the thought away to stop another panic attack from coming.
Once I’m calm enough to speak, I study my family, now warily reassembled into the room, and ask, “Why aren’t you home celebrating?”
Mom steps forward. “The doctor said they’d wake you today, and we didn’t want you to spend Christmas alone in a hospital ward.”
That’s the final straw. The tremble in my lower lips returns, and I turn into a sobbing mess again—only this time it’s for gratitude instead of loss.
My relatives stay with me all day, and the nurses close an eye on the violated visiting hours with it being Christmas and all. But as the sun sets outside, not even the kinder nurse can pretend it’s normal to have five adults and four kids crammed into a tiny room and my family has to go.
Mom offers to stay with me. I’m tempted to accept before I notice the dark circles under her eyes and remember she’s already spent last night with me, reading Little Women. Such a long time ago to me, but for her, it’s only been half a day. I send her home and once I’m alone, I quietly cry myself to sleep thinking how I’ll never be able to read Jo or Will another bedtime story. Or tell Sam that Bram spoke his first word, or say I love you to any of them.
***
A weight shifting on my feet wakes me. For a moment I think it’s Mr. Winkle-Whiskers who has come to sleep on our bed and I push up on an elbow, elated, deciding the hospital scene has only been a bad dream. But when I blink twice to shake away the sleep haze, my eyes focus on the person at the foot of the bed and narrow.
“You,” I hiss, and sit upright.
The movement is too sudden and makes me so dizzy I have to sink back on the pillows.
“Careful, Caroline,” Melodie mocks me from the other end of the bed. She’s back to wearing her white tunic, and her annoying hair is up in a ponytail. “You’ve hit your head pretty hard, you should take it slow.”
“Go away,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest and turning my face to the side.
“Oh, tsk, tsk, is this the way to greet an old friend?”
“Friend? We’re no friends… Before I met you, I was perfectly happy and now I’m miserable. Thank you very much for nothing.”
Melodie arches an eyebrow at me. “Were you… happy?”
Whatever I was about to retort dies on my lips and I have to close and open my mouth before I admit, “Okay, no. I wasn’t happy. But I had no idea how unhappy I was, which made me at least… I mean, at least I could function, and now, now…” the wobble comes back and I let out an inhuman scream before I start crying again.
“Good, good,” Melodie says. “Let the beast loose, it’s therapeutic.”
“Therapeutic? Are you delusional? All that crap about it’s better to have loved and have lost than never to have loved is bullshit,” I say. “Blissful ignorance is my jam. But thanks to you I’ve never felt worse in my entire life.”
“And what are you planning to do about it?”
“What do you mean? What can I do?”
“Anything… everything?”
“How?”
Melodie hops off the bed and stands behind it, placing her hands on the horizontal foot bar. “You’re not dead, are you? And your stubborn, albeit slow-to-catch-up brain has taken a hit but is still working, right? I’m sure you’ll find a way.”
“To do what?”
A bell chimes in the distance, and Melodie floats off the floor and drifts toward the window. “To turn your life around, Caroline, I thought it’d be clear by now that was the whole point.” Her contours are becoming more luminescent and less defined by the second. But I can still make out her eyes as she winks at me. “Merry Christmas,” she says, and then disappears in a flash of bright white light just as the bell outside rings its twelfth stroke.