When I open my eyes, the first thing I notice is the brightness of the room. It stings. The second thing I notice is the array of tubes and wires that are hooked up to the person on the bed—me. The stuff you'd attach to a mechanical entity, a robot, an experiment. Not a human being.

There's a monitor beeping and clogging the padded silence I've craved. I'd clasp a hand around my mouth so my howls wouldn't surface if I could, but I can't move or make a sound.

Is this how dying feels like? That you are frozen in a limbo of pain, dozing off to somewhere you are not sure you want to go to?

I struggle to stay awake. My blurry gaze fixates on the crawling red line across the screen—just like you see in the movies.

Something fragile falls on my limp hand, the one that's not decorated with an IV drip. I turn my head in its direction, or at least I think I do, wondering what has landed on my ferny arm. It's not what I expected.

"Dawn, sweetheart... Can you hear me?" Mom's voice sounds a million miles away. Is it real? I try nodding, but I've gone numb.

"You are at Providence Hospital. The ambulance brought you here, my colleagues informed me right away." There it is again, she's saying something about being taken somewhere... While the world swayed, a piercing sound of sirens blasting invades my thoughts.

"You were in the ICU for a few hours, but now that you're stable, the doctors have transferred you to the psych ward." There's an awkward pause after these two last words. "This is where you must stay."

She looks diluted, dissolved. I stare at her and I try to say, "Sorry," but I'm so drugged up that I gape at her like a fish, silent, lost. My apologies ricochet in my head, bouncing off snippets of what happened.

She reaches out for my forehead but snatches her hand back, as if she's afraid to touch me. As if I might break. I want to tell her she shouldn't worry about that, because I'm already shattered. Splintered in gazillion pieces, unable to discern what's this all about.

"What happened, Dawn?" Mom's whisper is gut-wrenching. It's like she's talking to herself instead of seeking answers.

I try swallowing the lump in my throat. "Everything," I want to say, and "Dad's dead." but my eyelids close. When I open them again, she's gone.

When night time comes, it's terrifying. There's a lot of crying and the doors echo when they close. I think of all the patients that are here, imagine them crumpled up in their beds like I am. I cover my ears so I won't hear them anymore. Their torn sobs... I can't help them. Nobody can.

A white ghostly light tiptoes into my room. It's the moon luring me. I stare at it against the dark, papery sky. I'm her. A bright, round, scarred ball.

Why am I not dead? I feel dead, but the tag on my left wrist says 'Dawn Gray Brooks, fern girl gone dry.'

"Look at what you've done to yourself, baby bee," Dad says, "Shall we go hang out over the moon's curl?" He laughs, and I wonder why it's such a strange sound.

"Why don't we scoop some of it's soft surface, pretend it's Roquefort? You loved it when I grilled cheese sandwiches."

I say nothing while he keeps talking, "I can read you so many stories tonight, one about a flamingo that lost her way in the jungle and—"

Fuck off. You're not my Dad's voice. You're not him.

Silence envelops the room like the white sheet that wraps around my aching bones, hiding my scars so the world won't know I'm back.

Time folds. I don't know if it's been hours, days or an eternity. Sometimes I open my eyes and there's sunlight seeping through the blinds. I blink and there's darkness around me. I'm shaking like a leaf. My teeth rattle as I whisper, "I'm sorry, Daddy, please come back. I was confused, but now I know it was you before. Maybe you found a way back to me after all. I'm so afraid. I'm so alone."

I wait, watching, listening, peering into the dark corners of my room, hoping the shadows will morph into my Mom's silhouette. There's nothing, only the headache splitting my skull and my eyes dry from not blinking.

Dad, please.

I sob his name, hoping he'll respond, but the hours tick by, and I'm alone.

His voice awakens me. He's singing lullabies. There's something wrong in his cadence.

Dad, I need you.

"I'm here, baby bee. Come find me." A shadow of the door opens and Elsie's lake shimmers in the moonlight. I tug my hands free from the restraints and wade into the water. Its cool embrace is refreshing and comforting, but then something tugs at my ankle and won't let go. I go under and can't resurface.

As I sink, the water whispers, "He won't rescue you this time." 

But I don't understand what that means.

There's a woman in my room today. Her name is Elena Jackson, and she's my new psychiatrist, or so she tells me. She's flown all the way from New York, as a favour to Mom. Her eyes seem kind, and I like the jungle of her golden charm bracelet when she gestures to me. She has a paw print charm dangling from it, and I miss Clover.

"Dawn, I want to help you understand what's happening. You've been through a tough time, and your mind had to get creative to cope. Which is okay, or else we wouldn't have inventions like a toaster or music or art?" She smiles like someone with a hedge cutter does, armed to strip away the leaves of my ferny branches. Her high-heeled shoe taps on the white tiles.

Tap. The things I think are real might not be, she explains.

Tap. Something about trauma—but her words don't make sense.

Tap. Something about grief.

When it's my turn to talk, I tell her how we are all molecules, and how one day she'll become water for my ferny leaves. Mom squeezes my hand tight, worry contorting her face as if I'd said something wrong.

Elena clears her throat, waiting until I look at her. "Let's focus on your human needs first, shall we?"

The pills she's given me blur my focus, deafen my vision, so the conversation she shares with my mom beside my bed is in murmurs, like they're underwater with me, swaying their ferny arms with the undercurrents.

Mom says, "Dawn—is she? How did she?"

The psychiatrist says, "Your daughter—father's death—did you—" and Mom sobs, and her voice breaks, and it turns into a song—the one I heard by my window whenever the mourning dove came to visit. It tears at my soul, but I don't have the energy to figure out why.

There's a boy in my room today, he's sitting by my side. I like his soft curls that sway when he reaches for my hand. I let him hold it, don't know why. He waits for me to speak. I don't know what to say, I don't know who he is or what he'd like to talk about.

"Hey," he says. A smile plays in the seams of his full lips but doesn't reach his kind eyes.

"Hello," I croak. My words are like bubbles, they burst before they reach him. I think he knows me. There are droplets hanging from his long lashes. Odd... Has he been to Elsie's lake today, gone for a swim?

"I'm sorry," I say.

"For what, Dawn?" He enunciates my name with such care as if it were brittle, as if it would splinter at any second.

"My brain is broken. I think. Sorry, I don't know who you are. I'm sorry..." His face, I can't read it, the surprise, the compassion. "I'm really sorry," I tell him again. Is this my new word? Sorry for existing and being broken. Sorry for scaring and making people cry around me. Sorry for not remembering your beautiful face and dragging you here.

"We are good friends, Dawn. You can't remember me, but we have a lot of adventures and stories to tell. I'll help you walk off this wrong chapter."

I want to keep listening to his voice. It brings sunshine and echoes of singing birds and water flowing.

"What's your name?" I ask him, gripping his fingers, not wanting him to leave me. The reassuring warmth of his touch is a haven for my broken bones and shattered memories.

"I'm River," he says, his gaze foggy with the weight of a thousand worries.

A nurse chases him out and the moment his hand pulls away, my fingers freeze. I shake and shake and never stop.

A door slides open, and my heart flutters for a second. I watch his elegant hand closing it behind him.

It's River visiting again. I tell him my brain is still broken, and he listens to my apologies again and again. He smiles and says, "Do you know there are eighty-nine billion neurons in the human brain? Almost the same as the number of galaxies in the observable universe, Dawn."

I stare into his azure eyes and the mesmerising grey of his high cheekbones. He looks so pale. Is he a patient too? Is he sick like I am? Did I use to know why? I think I knew things about him.

"The mind is miraculous," he says and squeezes my hand. Its warmth seeps into me again, and I let it spread all over the rest of my molecules. "You've got a fucking miraculous mind, Dawn."

I close my eyes and try to turn on my miraculous mind. Try to find him. Any minute spent with him. A millisecond. I'll take anything, please.

"I brought you something I made," he says, producing a purple cardboard bag with a pink bow on it. It's got lilies, and it's so pretty. His fingers tremble as he pulls a paper crown out of it. He puts it beside my bed, and I can't stop staring at his eyes and back at my gift. I ask him to place it on my head and he does. I think I feel one of his fingers locking a strand of my hair. Then he holds my hand, and I hold his until another nurse chases him out too.

Mom looks tired. I am tired. She sits with me and leans her face against my hand. When she thinks I'm sleeping, she runs her trembling hands up her hair and weeps silent tears.

When I'm awake, she tells me about Bree and her spelling contest, Tommy and his chipped tooth and Clover. She tells me she didn't know about my struggle and how deep my grief-well was.

"If I had known, I would have put us all in a bubble, Dawn, baby. I wouldn't have come back here, I'd have taken us all to a cottage over a mountaintop. I would have put my body in front of yours so nothing would hurt anymore. I would've stopped the van with my bones." She peppers these words with half-hiccups, half-sobs.

I don't want to tell her our mountain top would have crumbled. That the white van would've found a way to hit me.

We can't escape our pain. It's embedded in our blood. It flows without us noticing.

I lock gazes with the one person that's been a constant in my life. Her stare is overwhelming.

"Mom, I—"

"I love you, Dawn," she says, garbled by her tears.

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

"Why?"

"Why what, love?"

"Why do you love me?" I ask, my gaze set on her pieced-together smile, the wobble of her.

She hiccup-laughs. "Oh, my darling girl... I love you for so many reasons." She scoots over my bed, wraps me in a tight hug and lists them. There are indeed so many that the days slip away while she has me blanketed in her embrace.