Where She Went Read Online Free PDF Page B

hospital bed in the ICU, her taciturn grandfather having drawn the short straw, I guess, because he was the one chosen to break the news that her parents, Kat and Denny, had been killed instantly in the car crash that had landed her here. And that her little brother, Teddy, had died in the emergency room of the local hospital where he and Mia had been brought to before Mia was evacuated to Portland. Nobody knew the cause of the crash. Did Mia have any memory of it?
    Mia just lay there, blinking her eyes and holding onto my hand, digging her nails in so tightly it seemed like she’d never let me go. She shook her head and quietly said “no, no, no,” over and over again, but without tears, and I wasn’t sure if she was answering her grandfather’s question or just negating the whole situation. No!
    But then the social worker stepped in, taking over in her no-nonsense way. She told Mia about the operations she’d undergone so far, “triage, really, just to get you stable, and you’re doing remarkably well,” and then talked about the surgeries that she’d likely be facing in the coming months: First a surgery to reset the bone in her left leg with metal rods. Then another surgery a week or so after that, to harvest skin from the thigh of her uninjured leg. Then another to graft that skin onto the messed-up leg. Those two procedures, unfortunately, would leave some “nasty scars.” But the injuries on her face, at least, could vanish completely with cosmetic surgery after a year. “Once you’re through your nonelective surgeries, provided there aren’t any complications—no infections from the splenectomy, no pneumonia, no problems with your lungs—we’ll get you out of the hospital and into rehab,” the social worker said. “Physical and occupational, speech and whatever else you need. We’ll assess where you are in a few days.” I was dizzy from this litany, but Mia seemed to hang on her every word, to pay more attention to the details of her surgeries than to the news of her family.
    Later that afternoon, the social worker took the rest of us aside. We—Mia’s grandparents and me—had been worried about Mia’s reaction, or her lack of one. We’d expected screaming, hair pulling, something explosive, to match the horror of the news, to match our own grief. Her eerie quiet had all of us thinking the same thing: brain damage.
    “No, that’s not it,” the social worker quickly reassured. “The brain is a fragile instrument and we may not know for a few weeks what specific regions have been affected, but young people are so very resilient and right now her neurologists are quite optimistic. Her motor control is generally good. Her language faculties don’t seem too affected. She has weakness in her right side and her balance is off. If that’s the extent of her brain injury, then she is fortunate.”
    We all cringed at that word. Fortunate . But the social worker looked at our faces. “ Very fortunate because all of that is reversible. As for that reaction back there,” she said, gesturing toward the ICU, “that is a typical response to such extreme psychological trauma. The brain can only handle so much, so it filters in a bit at a time, digests slowly. She’ll take it all in, but she’ll need help.” Then she’d told us about the stages of grief, loaded us up with pamphlets on post-traumatic stress disorder, and recommended a grief counselor at the hospital for Mia to see. “It might not be a bad idea for the rest of you, too,” she’d said.
    We’d ignored her. Mia’s grandparents weren’t the therapy types. And as for me, I had Mia’s rehabilitation to worry about, not my own.
    The next round of surgeries started almost immediately, which I found cruel. Mia had just come back from the brink of it, only to be told her family was dead, and now she had to go under the knife again. Couldn’t they cut the girl a break? But the social worker had explained that the sooner Mia’s leg was