Page 14 of Brain Damage

“Charly,” Amy says. She picks up my hand from the bed and holds it in her own. Her fingers are so soft, like a baby. “Megan says that you talked. Is that true?”

Amy’s hands are so soft. I’m so tired. I think I will go back to sleep.

“What was happening when she spoke to you?” Amy says. She is talking to the other woman now. Maybe she will leave me alone so that I can sleep.

“I was cleaning her feeding tube.”

“Let’s do it again then.”

My eyes have nearly drifted shut when the pain begins again. I gasp. Why does it hurt so much? My belly didn’t hurt this much before. Although I don’t really remember that much about before.

“Stop!” I plead, because it worked before. “Stop!”

Again, like magic, the pain halts. It worked. Thank God.

When my vision focuses in again on Amy’s face, she has the biggest smile I’ve ever seen.

“Charly,” she says. “You just made my day.”

11

BEFORE

“Oh my God, this would look so cute on you!”

As I huddle between two large racks of dresses at Macy’s, trying not to feel stifled by the crowds of Saturday shoppers, I wish I could be anywhere else. Somehow I’ve allowed Brigid to talk me into a shopping trip in honor of my upcoming date tonight with Clark. I didn’t even want her to know I had a date, but I accidentally let it slip, and I swear, she’s more excited than I am.

It’s been a while.

“You need to try this on,” Brigid insists. She’s holding up a green dress that’s covered in shiny beads and sequins. What sort of person wants to be seen in a dress that looks like that? Do adult women actually wear dresses with sequins? The sight of it makes my eyes hurt.

“I don’t think it’s me,” I say. I gently attempt to pry the dress out of her fingers and return it to the rack.

“And what’s so wrong with that?” Brigid says.

“Because if I show up to a date wearing a dress that’s not me,” I explain, “then the guy won’t actually like me. He’ll just be liking some weird bead/sequin girl. I need to be myself.”

“Yeah, and where has that gotten you?”

Ouch.

Okay, to be fair, I haven’t been out with a man in close to a year. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure how that happened. I used to go out on dates, I swear. Things have just gotten so busy at work, and more and more, my dates were beginning to feel like a huge waste of time. They felt more like a chore… the obligation of trying to find another person to spend the rest of my life with. There was certainly nothing enjoyable about the forced, awkward conversations with variably attractive men.

So I took a break.

A year isn’t that long though. It isn’t like it’s been decades or something. It’s just a short dry spell. Brigid is really overreacting.

Brigid reluctantly drops the green dress and makes her way to a rack of little black dresses courtesy of Ralph Lauren, while I nearly get elbowed in the boob by two eager shoppers. Why is it so crowded here? Don’t people have better things to do on a Saturday than go shopping for dresses? I want to shake them and tell them to enjoy the sunlight.

“Okay, how about one of these?” Brigid asks.

The Ralph Laurens are classy, at least—something I could conceivably wear. I pick up the price tag on one of the dresses and gasp.

“Brigid!” I cry. “Look how expensive these are!”

Brigid rolls her eyes. “Charly, you can afford a stupid dress.”

My financial situation has improved recently, so at the moment, I can afford it, but it’s hard to wrap my head around that fact. Brigid had money growing up, and you can tell by the way she shops. Watching Brigid shop is more mesmerizing than watching a lava lamp. She can pluck a thousand-dollar vase off a shelf and buy it without a second thought. She doesn’t seem to experience the soul-crushing guilt that I feel whenever I spend a lot of money. Right now, she’s in her second trimester of pregnancy, but instead of food, she craves clothing. It’s the weirdest thing ever.