I woke up from the coma on a Tuesday.
That is how Lucía tells it, precisely, the way she tells everything that matters. Not sometime in the morning, not in the early hours. Tuesday, at four forty-seven, because she had been watching the clock on the wall above the door the way people watch clocks when they have nothing left to do but wait and count the seconds between the thing they dread and the thing they are hoping for. She was holding my hand when my fingers moved, and she told the nurse before I had even opened my eyes.
I remember very little of the first day. Light, voices, the particular antiseptic smell of a hospital room that tells you before anything else does where you are. I remember Lucía’s face close to mine, her eyes red in a way that told me she had been crying for a long time, and I remember feeling confused in the way that people feel confused when they have missed a portion of their life and the world has continued without them. I did not know yet how long I had been unconscious. I did not know what had happened to bring me there. I did not know that I had already heard things, that somewhere in the dark behind my sealed eyes the sounds of a room had reached me with perfect clarity, that conversations held beside my bed in the certainty that I could not hear them had in fact registered somewhere beneath the surface of my stillness.
That came back to me slowly, over the first two days, in fragments that arranged themselves into a picture I did not want to complete.
