“You’re doing okay,” one of the doctors reassured Liz after she asked this question for the third time—as if all she wanted was reassurance as opposed to, say, actual information. “Most of the damage to your throat is just swelling and bruising. Your hyoid, which is a little bone that sits right here under your chin, isn’t broken, and there’s no vertebral fracturing.”
“Lucky me,” Liz said. Her voice came out as a croak. Her throat had started to ache badly in the car and it hurt to talk. The doctor was younger than she was, and she didn’t want to give him a hard time. She did want an answer, though, so she gave it another try. “Look, what’s this TBI? Please. Inquiring minds want to know.” She smiled to take the edge off the insistence.
“It’s a complication we see sometimes in cases like this,” the doctor said. “Brain-related. It’s not common, though. It would depend on how long your husband was actually applying pressure to your throat.”
“Ex-husband.”
“Ex-husband, sorry. Anyway, with strangulation there are a whole lot of collateral conditions we have to test for. I mean, even if we’re pretty certain that everything’s okay. There was a case last year where a man was discharged from hospital after a manual strangulation attack and he died a week later. That was because he got a heart attack, but the brain damage from the throttling brought it on.” The doctor seemed to regret sharing this little anecdote as soon as it was out of his mouth. “Not that that’s going to happen to you,” he added hastily. “The odds are way, way long.”
Never play the odds, a friend had told Liz once. Go into everything expecting the worst. Owning it like you already bought it. That way you had no beef and no regrets.
“So I’m guessing the B in TBI stands for brain.”
“Yes, it does,” the doctor admitted.
“And the T? Terrible? Traumatic? Tangerine-flavored? Just give me a clue.”
“Traumatic, yes. Traumatic brain injury. But again, Ms. Kendall, you’re not at risk. That guy I mentioned was in his sixties. You’re clear on the MRI scan. Nothing weird in your tissue densities, no edematous masses. So unless you’ve got any reason to think you might have a brain injury …”
Liz hesitated. She didn’t want to say it. She could imagine how it would sound if a lawyer stood up in court and read it aloud. But maybe what she had experienced was an obvious symptom of a known condition. Maybe if she didn’t speak up it would happen again. Keep on happening. Get worse. Maybe she’d lose her mind and never get it back.
“There was one thing,” she said in the same ridiculous croak. “I mean, there might have been something.”
She did her best to describe how she had felt when her hand picked up the vinegar bottle and hit out with it. As though she was watching it happen rather than deciding on it and controlling it.
She had been in a band once. Briefly, in her early twenties. If anything, it had felt just a little bit like that: like the displacement you got when you were playing and everything flowed so seamlessly you kind of became a machine, the movement of your fingers on the strings like something flowing into you instead of out. Like you were a receiver, picking up whatever was out there. This had been like that, only without the euphoria.
The doctor heard her out, nodding from time to time to show he got it. He was professionally interested, but not alarmed.
“That doesn’t sound like any kind of brain damage I ever heard of,” he assured her. “Well, some kinds of right-hemisphere lesion maybe, but nothing you could get from choking or concussion. Has it recurred since?”
“No.”
“There you go then. Trauma artifact, for sure.”
The doctor asked her a few more questions. Had she ever experienced anything like this before? Did she have any sense right now that her feelings or her thoughts were not her own? Was there any residual tingling or numbness or paralysis of any part of her body? No, no and no, Liz told him.
“I think you’re fine in that case. But I’ll mark it up on your file. If the condition recurs, you should come in and maybe have a psych evaluation.”
“Sure,” Liz said, slightly reassured. “I will.” That sounded like a good thing to do, if it didn’t turn out to be an exclusion on her insurance. If Carroll Way did psych screenings. And if the bill for tonight turned out to be less than an arm and a leg. Which meant she definitely wouldn’t be doing it because who was she kidding? The only treatment she could afford was crossing her fingers and hoping for the best.
They still weren’t done. A male nurse took her on another wheelchair outing to yet another department where she was given a laryngoscopy. This was probably the most physically uncomfortable procedure out of all of them: in spite of the topical anesthetic they sprayed down her throat, she could still feel the optical filament scratching down there and the sensation gave her an unexpected surge of panic. She almost jumped up off the table, but a hand grabbed hold of hers and squeezed at just the right moment and she was able to keep it together.
The hand turned out to belong to Beebee. Liz was amazed to discover that the policewoman was still around. “Don’t you have crimes to solve?” she wheezed. “I’m grateful, but I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
Beebee shrugged. “I wanted to make sure you were okay,” she said. “Plus I didn’t take your statement yet, and I didn’t want to do it while you still sounded like Darth Vader choking on a peanut. But we can totally book another time, if you’re not up to it.”
“I can talk,” Liz said.
“Okay.” Beebee got out a tiny device that looked like a BIC lighter but turned out to be a voice recorder. She clicked it on. “Let’s start with tonight and work backward. What time did your ex-husband roll up?”
Liz described the whole encounter concisely but fully. There wasn’t all that much to tell. The only hard question was what specifically she had said to make Marc lose it. She found to her embarrassment that she couldn’t remember. “When he’s in that mood, it seems to make him mad that I’m talking at all. Like, I should just say, ‘Yes, Marc,’ and leave it at that. When we lived together, I’d sometimes go hours and hours without saying a thing.”
“Candidly,” Beebee said, “that sounds fucked up.”
“Yeah,” Liz agreed. “Hence, you know, ex-husband.”
“But it took you a while to get to that point?”
Liz sighed. The breath caught painfully in her bruised throat. “It took me sixteen years. That’s how long we were married.”
“And he was like that the whole time?”
“No, it happened gradually. He was different when we were … you know. Courting. He could be an asshole at times, but everyone has their moments, right? And the rest of the time he was really sweet and attentive. Maybe a little controlling, but to be honest I had a hard time telling that from the attentiveness. The one thing kind of merged into the other. Like, he was interested in everything I did, which was nice, but he also had an opinion on everything I did, and sometimes it was that I should stop. I gave in too easily. I always do, I guess. And by the time I realized it was a pattern, it was hard to break out of it.”