I Attended My Own Funeral

The first thing I heard was the beeping. Steady. Rhythmic. Merciless. It dragged me out of darkness like a hook through flesh. My eyes opened to a ceiling that was too white, lights that were too bright, and a smell that lodged in my throat like a fist. Antiseptic. Plastic. The particular sterility of a place where people come to either survive or stop. I was in a hospital. I tried to sit up. Pain detonated across my ribs, my left shoulder, the entire left side of my skull. My hands went to my face and found bandages. My fingers searched for something familiar and found nothing but gauze and tape and the cold metal rail of a bed that wasn't mine. What happened? The accident came back in fragments. Rain on a windshield. Headlights swinging the wrong way across the road. The sound of glass. Then nothing. "You're awake." A nurse stood in the doorway, clipboard pressed to her chest, expression carefully neutral. She looked at me like I was something she hadn't expected to see. "Where am I?" My voice came out wrong — dry and thin, scraped hollow. "St. Mercy General. You've been unconscious for three days." Three days. Which meant no one knew where I was. Which meant Adrian — "I need my phone." I started pulling at the IV. "I need to call someone. My — there are people who will be —" "Ms. —" She caught my hands. "Please. You need to stay calm. You cannot be pulling at —" "One call. Sixty seconds." She didn't move toward a phone. She looked somewhere over my left shoulder — the expression of someone who has been told not to say something and is deciding whether to say it. "I'll get the doctor," she said. She left before I could argue. I lay on the bed and tried to breathe. My name is Serena Voss. I was twenty-nine years old. I had driven home from the gallery opening on the night of the fourteenth and something had happened on Reedmore Bridge. Someone knew I was here. Hospitals required identification, next of kin. Someone had been notified. So why did the nurse look at me like that? The doctor arrived eleven minutes later. I counted. He was a compact man in his fifties with reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead and the look of someone who had rehearsed what he was about to say. "I understand you'd like to contact someone," he said. "My fiancé. Adrian Hale. Just give me a phone for thirty seconds —" "Ms. Voss." He sat down. Doctors who sit are never delivering good news. "There are circumstances surrounding your admission that are complicated. We've been asked to keep your presence here confidential. No outgoing contact until —" "Who asked you?" He stood. Crossed to the television in the corner and turned it on. He didn't change the channel. The news was already there. Reedmore Bridge, lit up with emergency lights. A reporter in the rain. A graphic in the corner of the screen in neat block letters against a red banner. My name. Serena Voss, 29, confirmed dead following a collision on Reedmore Bridge. The room tilted. "There was another woman," the doctor said quietly. "Found in the water. Similar age, similar appearance. The identification was made in difficult circumstances. By the time the error was discovered, the story had already —" I stopped hearing him. On screen, the broadcast cut to a different location. A church. Steps framed by white lilies — my favorite, the ones I had pointed out to Adrian in passing and never thought about again. He was there on those steps in a dark suit, one hand pressed flat against his chest the way he always did when something cut too deep for words. He was planning my funeral. He thought I was dead. The heart monitor exploded into alarms as my own funeral flashed across the screen.