The first thing I noticed when I woke up in the hospital was my mother’s smile. Not a relieved smile or a worried smile—a practiced smile, stretched too tight at the corners like she’d been rehearsing it in the bathroom mirror while waiting for me to open my eyes. “Hey, honey,” she said, her voice dripping with syrupy sweetness.
“There you are.”
My tongue felt like sandpaper. My head throbbed in slow, deliberate pulses that seemed to match the beeping of machines I couldn’t quite focus on. The fluorescent lights stabbed behind my eyelids, and when I tried to sit up, my body protested like it belonged to someone else entirely.
“What happened?” I managed to croak out. Mom’s smile widened impossibly further, and that’s when I noticed her hands—folded perfectly in her lap like she was posing for a photograph. Her nails were freshly painted.
Her hair was done. She looked like she’d come to a social event rather than a hospital emergency room. “You fell down the stairs, sweetheart,” she said with the warm, certain tone of someone telling a bedtime story they’d memorized.
“Too much wine at Thanksgiving. It got a little silly.”
I stared at her, my brain struggling to process the words through the fog. “I don’t drink,” I whispered.
Mom blinked once—sharp and quick—and then the smile returned even stronger. “Oh, honey. You had a little.
Everyone did. It’s Thanksgiving.”
A nurse walked in to check my IV, glancing between my mother and me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Something flickered across her face—discomfort, maybe suspicion—before she smoothed it away into professional neutrality.
As she adjusted the drip, she leaned closer and lowered her voice so only I could hear. “Your family is interesting,” she said quietly, then looked pointedly at the bedside table where my phone lay untouched, screen dark, positioned with unnatural precision. After she left, I stared at that phone, and something cold slid down my spine.
The last thing I remembered was walking into my parents’ house with a store-bought pie, the November air sharp in my lungs, steeling myself for another performative family gathering. Then—nothing. No dinner, no football, no conversation.
Just this hospital room and my mother’s plastic smile. “What time is it?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. “Late,” Mom said, reaching for her purse like she’d been waiting for that question.
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