The Color of Waking

The ER waiting room was painted in that particular shade of institutional orange that somehow managed to be both cheerful and nauseating. Sarah sat there, phone in hand, scrolling through messages that felt like they belonged to another lifetime. Her iphone battery was at 12%, blinking its final warning like a slow heartbeat.

She'd been moving like a zombie for three weeks since the accident. Not the horror-movie kind—hungry for brains and groaning—but the modern kind: hollowed out, going through motions, responding to texts with three-word replies, feeling like she was watching her own life from somewhere far above it.

Her phone buzzed. Fox.

Just the name, no emoji, no greeting. Mark Fox, her friend from college, the one who'd always been too honest for his own good. The one who'd told her at her wedding reception, "You're making a mistake, you know. He doesn't see you." She'd laughed it off, another person in her life who couldn't just be happy for her.

Now she was sitting here, alone, while her husband lay in ICU. He'd been driving drunk—again. She'd been in the passenger seat, lucky to walk away with just a concussion and some bruises.

The phone buzzed again. "I'm at Methodist. Which entrance?"

Sarah's fingers hovered over the screen. She hadn't told anyone she was here. Hadn't wanted the pity, the "I told you so," the careful way people looked at you when your marriage imploded in spectacularly public fashion.

Mark had always seen her. Really seen her, even when she was pretending everything was fine. Even when she was pretending she didn't have feelings for him that went beyond friendship, back when they were both too young and too cowardly to do anything about it.

She typed back: "Main entrance, by the elevators. You shouldn't have come."

"Was already in town. Be there in five."

Sarah set down the phone and looked around the waiting room. For the first time in three weeks, she didn't feel like she was underwater. She felt something sharp and real and terrifying: hope. The kind that could break you all over again.

Her phone screen went dark, the final death spiral of a dying battery. But she didn't need it anymore. The living world was about to walk through those automatic doors.