Chapter 2: The Hospital

Zoey woke up to her mother’s voice.

Not words at first. Just the sound of it. She followed it up out of the dark and broke the surface into fluorescent light and her mother sitting close enough to touch, dried mascara at the corners of her eyes, hand wrapped around Zoey’s like she’d decided she wasn’t letting go.

“Hey,” her mother said.

“Hey,” Zoey said back. Her voice came out thick and strange.

Her mother pressed her forehead down against their joined hands and shook silently for a moment. Then she pulled herself together because that was what her mother did, and lifted her head, and her face was mostly composed again.

“Your father’s in the hall. He’s been there most of the night.”

Her father came in when he heard her voice. He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at her and said, “You scared the hell out of us,” and his voice only broke on the last word.

He was not a man who broke easily.

The neurology resident explained the injury to her parents while Zoey sat in the adjusted bed and listened. Frontal lobe contusion. Bruising, not bleeding. The frontal lobe handled impulse control, decision making, social behavior. With that region involved, patients sometimes experienced disinhibition — acting on impulses they would normally redirect, saying things they would normally keep to themselves.