Brenda and Cindy look at me expectantly. I announce, “I don’t have the right phone number for my mom.” As if that isn’t a giant red flag. It’d be one thing if I didn’t have an entry for my mom at all, like we were estranged or she died. But to have the wrong number? That’s weird.
I say, “Siri, call home.”
An old lady with a quavery voice answers the phone. “You’ve reached the Nelsons. Hello.” I imagine Auntie Em and my home in Kansas perhaps. “It’s Mia.”
“Mary?”
“No, Mee-uh.”
“I’m sorry, dear, but I think you have the wrong number.”
Don’t I have any decent relationships? I’m a Millennial, clearly, but Millennials have mothers, too.
One more try. Someone from my contacts list must know me. I click on a recently dialed number—someone named Crystal. Maybe she’s a friend or a sister or…literally anyone who knows me. She has to know me. I talked to her for three minutes and twenty-eight seconds a few days ago.
She answers on the first ring. “Hello?”
“Hi, this is…” I pause. My name is strange on my tongue, not because I don’t like it, which I don’t, but because it’s my name and it feels downright foreign. Like when it takes months before your cat really feels like a Marmalade instead of a Kit Kat, which in retrospect sounds like the more fitting name—not that I remember owning a cat or anything…(Am I a cat lady?) “I’m Mia.” Might as well be Kit Kat. “I don’t know if you remember me,” I say. A tear leaks out.
A half second later, she answers, “What are you calling me for? I told you, I’m done.”
The line goes dead. What. The. Fuck. I’m a disaster, a hot mess, exactly the kind of person you’d expect to land in the ER in a party dress on a Tuesday. I drop the phone in my lap and try not to look as straight-out-of-a-country-song desperate as I feel. I don’t need Brenda feeling like she has to be my only source of emotional support, even though she totally is.
“I’m cool. Crystal and I weren’t close, I guess.” Understatement of the year. “I think I’ll take a break.” How much rejection could one girl handle right after surviving a major head injury?
Brenda looks at the clock. “Lunch time. What do you think, would you like to order something?” When I don’t respond, she says, “The egg salad isn’t bad. Not as good as a hamburger, but…” As if there’s any saving things.
Who could think of egg salad at a time like this?
“It’s really good, sweetie.”
Cindy agrees. “It sounds gross, but everyone likes it.”
“Does it have onions?”
Brenda shakes her head.
Anything for Brenda. “Okay. I’ll have an egg salad. And could one of you turn on the Kardashians again?”
* * *
After another binge session of nearly a whole season of the Kardashians, a knock on the doorframe makes me look up—Dr. Patel, this time with his hair brushed and a few more hours of sleep, it looks like. I set down my phone, which yielded no more information—just a bunch of apps: a weather app, a banking app, Facebook (which I don’t seem to use), and some kind of off-brand dating app.5 “I ordered your discharge papers, Mia.”
“Discharge papers?”
The doctor nods. “Yep. There’s nothing more we can do for you, medically speaking. It’s just a matter of giving yourself time to heal and, like I said, surrounding yourself with familiar people and things.”
“Doctor, I don’t know anything about myself.” Except for my first name. I don’t even have a first and a last name, unless you count “4Realz.” Like an idiot, I use a cutesy nickname instead of a real name on every app. I can’t even Google myself. My phone is a digital trash can. No one has called me and I have nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep tonight besides this hospital bed. “Is there any way I could stay just one more day?”
Two hours later, Brenda wheels me out to the curb. I’m wearing the clothes they say I arrived in: a lemon-yellow cocktail dress. It’s Prada6 and has a fitted bodice with sequins scattered about, spaghetti straps, and a short skirt. The shoes and cape (you heard me right) are dyed to match. The cape, technically a capelet, ties with a big floppy bow over one shoulder.
I left the tiara at the nurses’ station for Cindy. Maybe it’ll give her a thrill. A rhinestone-studded clutch just fits my phone. Besides the phone, there’s a receipt for a Smartwater, a bobby pin, and two keys to who-knows-where on a rabbit’s foot key chain. My lipstick is Chanel (!) in a shade of red called Pirate. (Thank you, Chanel. I needed that.)
I look pretty good except for the bloodstains, mostly on the cape besides a rusty smudge on the hemline that doesn’t look too gruesome. “Sorry we couldn’t wash it, sweetie. It was dry-clean only,” Brenda says.
I rise from the wheelchair and take a deep breath. The traffic blurs past. I might as well be a superhero trying to jump onto the roof of a moving train, but I’m just a normal girl (I assume) trying to hop aboard life.
As such, I untie my cape. Minus the cape, which took the brunt of the blood spatter, the dress looks nearly perfect. With a sigh, I shove the cape into a nearby trash can. It’s overflowing with fast food cups so I have to jam it in. Good-bye, designer cape.
“You can do this, Mia,” Brenda says.
Do what? is the question. I have to do something, though, even if it’s stupid. I can’t sit in front of the hospital all day.
“I’m giving you my number. Text me when you get wherever you end up going.” Brenda wraps me in an antibac-scented hug. She’s a big woman and I just want to stay there wrapped in her soft hug forever, which is pathetic. Brenda probably has a real family. Did I ever even ask?
“Thank you. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” As I say it, I know it has to be the weirdest hospital good-bye ever. She might only know my first name and that I might be vegetarian, but she knows me better than anyone else. I can tell that she knows it, too; the poor woman looks like she feels responsible.
When I glance over my shoulder for a final good-bye, I see Cindy prancing in my tiara in the lobby just beyond the sliding doors and Brenda making a cut-it-out motion. I’m tempted to run back and ask if I can just hang at the nurses’ station, but I can’t. It’s just me and my phone.
* * *
In a stroke of brilliance, I look up my last Uber trip and enter in the same destination: the Long Beach Museum of Art. It sounds important, just like me.
The app shows a dot where I’m supposed to meet the driver. Like a cat following a laser pointer, I walk a few feet down the block, then across the street.