I was in the pediatric ICU at Mercy General. They told me that later, when I could stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time.
I had severe hypothermia. My heart had stopped on the side of the road. The doctors called it a cardiac arrest from the cold. They had to warm my blood slowly, through tubes, over hours, because if they did it too fast my heart could stop again.
I had pneumonia from breathing in rainwater. I had two cracked ribs from the CPR. I had frostbite on three fingers of my left hand and two on my right. They didn’t know yet if I’d lose any of them.
I had a breathing tube for the first two days. It was out by the time I woke up, but my throat still felt like I’d swallowed sandpaper.
“You died for a little while,” the ICU doctor told me on the fourth day. Her name was Dr. Feldman. She said it gently, sitting on the edge of my bed. “About fourteen minutes. You’re very lucky. Cold can do that sometimes. It slows everything down. It protects the brain. If you’d been found any later, or if that woman hadn’t known CPR…”
She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to.
The woman with the gray curls was Roz.
She’d come to the hospital every single day. She sat by my bed after her shifts, in her scrubs, reading her Bible and doing word search puzzles. The nurses told me she’d been there when I first opened my eyes, and that she’d cried so hard the charge nurse brought her a whole box of tissues.
“Who are you?” I croaked the first time I could talk.
“I’m the lady who broke your ribs,” she said. “I’m sorry about that, baby.”
Then she told me the whole story. The garbage bag. The white sneaker. The fourteen minutes of counting.
I lay there listening, and tears ran out of the corners of my eyes and into my ears, and I couldn’t wipe them because my hands were wrapped up like boxing gloves.
“Why did you stop?” I whispered. “Nobody else stopped.”
Roz thought about that.
“Because I saw you,” she said. “And once you see somebody, you can’t unsee them. That’s the whole thing, baby. That’s all of it.”
My father was there too.
I didn’t see him at first. Roz told me he’d been there since the first night. He’d been sitting in the family waiting room down the hall, because the hospital social worker hadn’t allowed him into my room until she’d talked to the police.
When I finally saw him, it was the fifth day.
He was standing in the doorway of my room. He was wearing the same gray sweatshirt I’d seen him in that Tuesday night. He hadn’t shaved. His eyes were red and swollen and there were deep purple circles under them.
He looked about twenty years older than he had five days ago.
He didn’t come in. He just stood there, holding onto the doorframe with one hand, the way he must have held onto the kitchen wall.
I looked at him. He looked at me.
Neither of us said anything for a long time.
Then I turned my face toward the window. I didn’t decide to. I just did it.
When I looked back, he was gone.
Chapter Six: The Label
On the sixth day, a woman named Angela Reyes came into my room with a clipboard.
She was the hospital’s pediatric social worker. She was young, maybe thirty, with braids pulled back into a bun and a soft voice. She sat down in the chair Roz usually used and pulled it close to my bed.
“I need to ask you some questions,” she said. “Some of them might be hard. You can stop anytime. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“When a child comes into the hospital the way you did,” she said carefully, “we’re required by law to report it. To Children’s Services. There’s a caseworker assigned to you now. Her name is Mrs. Bell. And the police have an officer looking into what happened.”
“Officer Daniels,” I said. Roz had told me his name.
“That’s right.”
She asked me to tell her what happened that night. Everything. From the beginning.
So I did. I told her about the algebra homework. About Karen coming down the stairs. About the orange bottle and the label turned toward Karen’s palm. About Dad not asking to see it.
I told her about the phone call on Sunday. Dad saying, She’s not available to discuss a prescription. Dad saying it was an insurance mix-up.
Angela Reyes wrote it all down. When I got to the part about the phone call, she stopped writing and looked up at me.
“The pharmacy called your house,” she said slowly. “About a prescription in your name.”
“I guess so. I don’t know. I’ve never taken anything.”
She wrote something down and underlined it twice.
Officer Daniels came that afternoon. He was a tall man with a shaved head and a quiet, deep voice that made you want to tell him the truth. He stood at the foot of my bed with his hat in his hands, the way police officers do in movies when someone has died.
“I talked to your dad,” he said. “The night you came in. I asked him about the pills. The ones your sister said she found.”
“He believed her,” I said.
“I asked him to show me the bottle.” Officer Daniels paused. “He went home and got it. Brought it to the station the next morning. He hadn’t read the label until I asked him to.”
He looked at me steadily.
“The name on the bottle was yours.”
My heart did something funny in my chest. The monitor above my bed beeped faster. A nurse looked in from the hallway.
“I didn’t…”
“I know,” he said, holding up a hand. “Listen to me. I know.”
He pulled a chair over and sat down.
“Oxycodone. Ten milligrams. Sixty tablets,” he said. “Prescribed through an online telehealth clinic. A company out of Florida that the state attorney general has been looking at for about a year. They write pain prescriptions after a five-minute video call. The patient fills out a form online. Name, birthday, insurance card.”
“I never did that.”
“Somebody did. Using your name, your birthday, and your insurance information off your father’s family policy.” He paused. “The prescription was filled at the CVS on Main Street. Twice. Once in August and once in October.”
He took a folded paper out of his jacket pocket.
“Here’s the thing about oxycodone,” he said. “It’s a controlled substance. When somebody picks it up at the pharmacy, the pharmacist has to check ID. Every time. And it gets logged in the state’s prescription monitoring program. The name on the prescription and the name and ID number of the person who picked it up.”
He unfolded the paper. He didn’t hand it to me. He just held it so I could see.
It was a printout. Two lines highlighted in yellow. Two dates. Under Patient, my name. Under Picked Up By, a different name, and a driver’s license number.
Karen Elizabeth Walls.
