Tuesday, January 3, 2012. 9:30 A.M.
Her mom is alive.
Mostly.
In, like, the most basic sense of the word.
Her heart beats. Blood pumps. Lungs inhale and exhale.
Well, with help from a giant plastic tube lodged down her esophagus.
She was put into a medically induced coma. Her brain had been so catastrophically injured that it wouldn't stop swelling, and if the doctors didn't keep her asleep she would probably die. Daphne saw her, briefly, yesterday, and things didn't look nearly as bad and she had expected.
But that was yesterday.
Today, Daphne thinks, she might be sick.
The bruising on the right side of Regina's head had bloomed and darkened overnight, painting her face a dark red and black mottled mess. The swelling had worsened, too, and all Daphne could think is that it was grotesque. Her mother looked deformed, like Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Her mouth fills with saliva once again. She's absolutely positive she's going to be sick, and barely makes it to the giant red biohazard trash can before the shitty hospital coffee she'd just finished makes its reappearance. Another lurch of her insides, and there's a hand on her back, and another smoothing the hair away from her face. Kathryn, probably. Maybe John, but that's highly unlikely. She spits out the acrid taste from her mouth, and realizes that there's hot wet tears flowing down her cheeks. A quarter of a turn and there's a parka-covered shoulder for her to press her face into, snot and all.
Later, when her tears are all cried out, Kathryn tells her that the doctor came by. Things aren't as terrible as it looks. Regina is stable, and that means there's a good chance her brain will start to heal.
Saturday, February 4, 2012.
Weeks pass, and Regina does start to get better. Her brain is swollen a microscopic bit less with each passing day. Daphne, however, seems to only get worse. She feels like a ghost, floating through the house, and school, stuck to her same routine with no particular feeling other than dread. Wake up, visit her mom, go to school, visit her mom, go to sleep. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes she'll still gag when she walks into the intensive care unit, or a lesson in science class gets too visceral for her.
Eating is little and less a part of this routine. Her diet now is mostly coffee, and mostly from the vending machine in the ICU waiting room, or the gas station near the highway. And the cardboard-esque cheese pizza she gets from the Carlton cafeteria; the only thing that she can seem to stomach these days.
Emmett has been shuttling her on her daily route - home, hospital, school, hospital, home - with few conversations exchanged between the two. When she's home, Kathryn will bring her breakfast and dinner (rarely ever eaten) with pitying concern painted all over her face. Daphne has been thankfully excused from her courses at Buckner Hall, so she hasn't seen or spoken to Wilke since before the new year, even if he has sent her a few blessedly mundane text messages.
Despite her basically liquid diet, she's convinced she must be having a post-pubescent growth spurt or something, because she's digging thru her closet looking for the pair of jeans she was given for Christmas that were two sizes too big, and her own are digging into her skin in a way that seems to have gotten worse recently. Finally, her eyes land on the neon orange of a price tag, and she triumphantly snatches the jeans from the back of her closet, revealing a tightly wound plastic bag shoved into the corner.
Oh, fuck.
She'd forgotten all about it: the cursed bag of pregnancy tests that she'd hidden away because she had gotten her period, all those weeks ago. Before her world went to shit. But she's had another one, right? She thinks back over the past two months. Nothing. Okay, well, she hasn't been eating or sleeping and she's stressed, and all of those things can make her miss one or two. But she thinks again, of other things. The fatigue, the nausea, the too-tight jeans. The lack of a period.
Oh, fuck, is right.
She thought that she was smarter. Better, even. She was not the type of girl that these things happened to. Now, sitting on toilet with a handful of pregnancy tests held between her legs, again, she thinks she doesn't know what type of girl she really is.
A pregnant one, more likely than not. A really freaking unlucky one. There were other girls at school that had pregnancy scares, and none had ever been pregnant. It was a cruel twist of fate that she, a self proclaimed goody two-shoes, would be the first. Daphne knows it's going to be positive before she even looks.
Now, she wonders how she could have ever forgotten. Even with the horror of her mom's accident, she should have been paying attention. She shouldn't have been so dumb. A sick sense of deja vu creeps over her. She'd thought that before, too, back during Thanksgiving break. A lot of things she shouldn't have done.
She can think of one thing she should do: get to a doctor and get this thing over with.