O) Oubillete billet-doux

Days in the hospital blur together for me now. I remember the lighting: blue like the entire facility was under the bio-dome of an enormous urinal cake. Like being underwater, but a little bit brighter than it needed to be at night, and a little bit darker than necessary during the day. My sleep schedule thrown way off, I was constantly drowsy and felt guilty sleeping at night when there was so much to see in the half-light, even with my limited vantage point- the door to the corridor at 45°- and lack of nocturnal activity.

I was 15 years old and resilient. I had three broken bones and bandages wrapped around my neck and the top of my head that muffled all sounds. Everything sounded subdued, which was proof that there was good in even bad things that happen.

I remember the view out the window to long green fields and tall cloudy skies. The green was extra bright, the clouds ungodly sharp, and it hurt to move so of course I wanted little else but to be out of there and running through those fields to those skies.

The morning nurse was a middle-aged woman named Maureen who was shaped like a soft pear, and never had anything to say except comments about baseball. I hated sports, but I had stolen my brother's Red Sox hat-- had been wearing it before (and therefore during) the accident. Covered in blood and they had thrown it away, but Mr. Ambulance Driver had, apparently, felt pity on the poor kid and bought him a new one. I didn't wear it. I figured it rightfully belonged to my brother. How was I going to tell him? If only they'd let me keep the old one, to show him how fouled up it'd been.

Maureen had a disproportionately small head. A short straight bob of dyed brown hair, a tight thin-lipped mouth wedged between symmetrical bony cheeks and somewhere between two to four beady little eyes, depending on whether or not she had raised the glasses up from where they dangled from a metal strap atop her billowous breasts to read something. She appraised the hat where it sat on the stand beside my bed.

“Quite the season they're having,” she said in her mousey distant way, “home game tonight I think.”

“Cool.” I said, grinding my teeth. I pretended to be asleep until she had done what she needed to do and slipped quietly into the hall.

The night nurse was a different story altogether. A love story. Could've been a whole novel if I'd been a few years older and it had been wartime or something dramatic like that. Bridgette her name was, and she was the embodiment of wonderful. At last that's what I thought.

I was 15 so this story took place before I fucked around all the time. I didn't drink, I didn't smoke and I wasn't messed up like I am today. I still had a relatively firm grasp on reality, and my impression of myself was still pretty accurate. I thought myself a shy, talented young guy who would one day work hard using his talent to become a really popular talented man. I fantasized about it constantly, and invented aliases for my selves who had already made the leap, characters who were already sociable and successful, with names like Adolphus Gainsworthy or Duke Clemenceau. (We were foreign dignitaries, apparently.)

And although I wasn't so naive as to know nothing about women, my grasp on their role in the grand scheme of things was not thoroughly commanding. I knew about relationships, and I knew about sex, but I didn't know how the two fit together. Somewhere between episodes of Full House and late-nite skin was a behavioral bridge I had not yet observed. Soft-core Porn was deceptive, in that people in it somehow spoke very very little and ended up very very quickly engaged in the kinds of moving positions I found very very interesting. It all seemed so straightforward: man looks at woman, woman looks at man, sex happens. But I was afraid to look at women, especially beautiful women, and when I did summon up the courage or, more often, forget myself staring, women rarely looked back, and if they did, it never amounted to anything.

Bridgette smiled. Her wide eyes were freckled blue and her dimpled cheeks were freckled pink. She had brought me dinner, she said. I had never heard anything so lovely as her voice. She set down the tray and I appreciated the contour of her fingers, the softness of her hands, the way the V-Neck scrubs she wore gave way to the freckled skin plunging down the front of her neck...

“Is there anything else you need that I can get you?”

“Yes.” I answered straightaway, my voice cracking. But what? What was it that I needed. Oh yeah! “Yes. I wondered if there was any paper lying around. I've been thinking about some stories and I'd like to write them down, before I forget them.”

“Oh! Some stories? What kind of stories?” Her eyes were alight and her smile was angelic.

“Fairy tales, I guess you'd call 'em. I dunno.”

“Wow! Well I'll see what I can do. Will you show them to me, when you finish writing?”

“Yeah. Sure, of course!” That 'of course' came off a little to strong, but otherwise I felt alright. Flushed and sweating and dry-mouthed and heart-racing and shaky, sure, but otherwise of the finest kind.

I was already asleep when she brought the paper. I awoke and wrote my way through three pens before I was done. I wrote about princesses and knights, dragons and castles and magic and destiny and love. It was three in the morning or thereabouts. I slept a few hours until the morning rounds started, and slept a few more hours until the sun was high in the windowed sky. I read the best story to Bridgette that night, and I remember the hint of a tear in her eye at the hero's happily ever after with the beautiful woman. Secretly of course, the cavalier was a prince, but even more secretly the prince was me.

“Can I borrow that, to show some of my friends? That was wonderful!” she commended.

“Keep it,” I said. She thanked me profusely, looking very very happy and proud. Happy that I had made her happy, I slept again.

That's about all I remember from the hospital. Its like a strange dream to me now. I must have left soon after but I do not recall seeing her again. I don't know what happened to those stories, that Red Sox hat. I don't know who came to pick me up, or how hot the remainder of the summer days, or if I had completely healed. I don't know how soon after school began.

What I do remember is that Bridgette got married that fall. I saw it in the paper and was sad. She looked so happy in the black and white photograph with her baby-faced fiance. So happy that my sadness was mixed with a strange kind of what I think was hope. I'd shared with her my stories, my dreams, my love I suppose. And even though she was never mine to lose, her smile was like a contract sealing up all the tiny affections I had invested. If she had been sad in the photograph it would have all been a lost. But her smile wrapped up everything I had given her, everything lost in a way, a way that ensured I was gaining something new, something I had never felt before.