“What happened?” I try to say, except my mouth feels dry and gummy. It comes out as a garbled, “Whaaa...ed?”
“You had an accident, but don’t worry. We’re taking care of you.” She beams at me with a megawatt smile.
I don’t remember an accident. All I remember is Peter and the barn fading around me... I must have reappeared somewhere dangerous, like in the middle of a highway. I remember the Missing Man saying Claire would reappear where she was lost. I’d been on a road.
“You’re very lucky,” the doctor says. “Do you remember the car accident?” I shake my head, and pain shoots down my neck. I wince. She checks one of the IV bags. There are three hanging from hooks beside my bed. “Probably just as well. Your ribs were broken, but they’ve healed now. You’ll feel some residual soreness in your chest, and your legs will feel stiff for a while. We kept your muscles active, but you’ll feel unsteady on your feet at first. Does anything hurt now?”
I feel achy, but not hurt. “M’okay. Want to get up.” It feels as though my mouth is remembering how to talk. My jaw feels wooden.
She laughs but it’s not an unkind laugh. “Not just yet.”
“How long asleep?”
“Let’s check you over, okay?” She doesn’t wait for my response. I feel myself poked and prodded. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Lauren Chase.” I’m here anonymously?
“That’s right.”
Not anonymously. That’s good. “What happened?”
“What do you remember?” she asks.
Peter and the barn, fading. I open my mouth and close it. I can’t say that. She’ll think there’s more wrong with me. “Don’t remember car accident.”
“Your memory may return in time, or it may not. Often traumatic events are lost to our short-term memory. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything serious.” She proceeds to ask me a series of basic questions. Where I live. Where I work. What’s five times five and other basic math and trivia. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
I think I can tell the truth but omit the impossible details. “I was in a little town with...some friends. Visiting them. My car broke down, ran out of gas, but the town was so small that it didn’t have a gas station. And lousy cell phone reception. And...” I didn’t sound any more believable that way.
Her smile disappears for an instant but then it’s back. She looks so cheery that I think she’s about to burst into song. They must teach that in medical school. Perkily, she says, “Your car was found upside down on Route 10. You’d driven off the side of the road, hit a ditch, and flipped it. A trucker found you. Saved your life.”
I frowned. That couldn’t be right. I hadn’t been in my car since it ran out of gas. It was still sitting outside Lost. It hadn’t flipped. “I was in Lost. The town was called Lost. I left home on March 23 and was stuck there for weeks. Months!” My voice is shrill. I struggle to sit up. She puts her hand on my shoulder. I flop back down. Wince. The hospital light is glaring in my eyes. I look down at myself. I see wires running to blue stickers stuck to my chest, and more wires running down my faded blue hospital gown. An IV is stuck in my right arm. The nurses and doctors are murmuring to each other, but the auburn-haired doctor stays by my side.
“You were in an accident on March 23.” The doctor’s voice is gentle, kind. “You have been in a coma for the past three months.”
Things I lost:
my clothes (I hate hospital gowns)
use of my bladder (though I’m told it will return)
the potential for true love (even if it was all in my head)
the little sister I never had
my wallet
my car
my sanity
Chapter Twenty-Two
I sit by the hospital window in a padded faux-leather chair. I still have one IV and various monitors attached, but they’ve removed a few of the more serious tubes: breathing tube, feeding tube, and catheter. My throat feels as though I’ve swallowed nails, and the two times I’ve tried to pee, it burned like a hot glue gun between my legs. A nurse with wrinkles and a thick accent told me not to worry. My insides need to remember how to work. And once they do, I’ll be able to go home.
Home.
It won’t feel like home. Mom’s not there. She’s here, in this hospital, three floors down. The auburn-haired doctor whose name I can’t remember promised that she’d have Mom’s doctor stop by to update me. In the meantime, I am to concentrate on getting better. My mother won’t want to see me weak. The doctor actually wagged her finger at me as she said that, as if I were an errant toddler.
Outside, the palm trees sway in a light breeze. Cars wait at a red light to enter the hospital parking lot. My car isn’t in that parking lot. It’s either outside an impossible town or it’s totaled in a junkyard somewhere. Or maybe it’s totaled and in Lost because I’ve lost it. Except that Lost doesn’t exist.
The auburn-haired doctor showed me photos of when I’d arrived, the X-rays from my initial examination, and the daily nurse reports. I had been here three months, which meant I couldn’t have been in Lost. I’d imagined it, like Dorothy and Oz. How cute. How quaint. I want to put my face in my hands and cry, but I don’t want another conversation with the nurses or the extra cheerful doctor.
At their insistence, I have eaten a little, liquids only. I didn’t have much appetite. A few spoonfuls of soup before I felt as if I was going to vomit. I pushed it away before I did. I’ve also walked around the room. Felt as weak as a baby and had to rest. They wanted me back in bed; I pleaded for the chair.
A man knocks on the open door. “Hello, Ms. Chase? I’m Dr. Barrett.” He carries a clipboard, and he has a koala bear clipped to his stethoscope. He’s young, early thirties I’d guess, and handsome, like a doctor in a soap opera. He has killer blue eyes and a lopsided smile to accompany his calm, baritone voice. In short, he’s exactly the kind of doctor that a coma patient is supposed to open her eyes and see and fall madly in love with.
Unfortunately, I’m already awake and don’t feel at all like Sleeping Beauty with my hair matted and my limbs shaking and bruises up and down my arms from all the needles that have been jabbed into me over the past few hours. Or three months.
“Are you the psychiatrist?” I ask. They promised one will come talk with me about my feelings regarding my lost three months. They said this completely oblivious to the appropriateness of the phrasing. My “lost” three months.
“I’m your mother’s primary oncologist,” he says.
“Oh.” I sit up straighter.
He lays out the diagnosis in plain terms in his soft, calming voice. Stage four ovarian cancer. It’s spread to the lymph nodes in the abdomen and to the liver. They suspect it may also be in her lungs and bladder. Her body is essentially riddled with cancer. As he tells me this, his blue eyes are full of compassion. I nod in all the appropriate places. And then I ask as calmly as I can, “Can I see her?”
He nods. “Of course. I’ll ask one of the nurses for a wheelchair...”
“I can walk.”
He looks at me dubiously but he doesn’t contradict me, which I appreciate. Pushing on the arms of the chair, I grit my teeth as I stand. My legs feel shaky, and my head spins. I wait for it to pass. Maybe my mom shouldn’t see me like this. I need real clothes. And a brush through my hair. Makeup wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. But handsome-doctor-guy whose name I have already forgotten has one hand under my elbow. “One step at a time,” he says. “You can change your mind whenever you want. It’s not as if it’s hard to find a wheelchair around here, being a hospital.”
I crack a smile since that’s obviously what he wants.
“Your mother is a very brave woman, you know. She’s a fighter. That’s why she’s held on as long as she has. She’s talking about what plants she’s going
to put in her garden and how no one has weeded.”
“She’s beaten this before,” I say through gritted teeth.
“Yes, she has,” he agrees. But he doesn’t say she will again. He also doesn’t say she won’t, and human bodies are so complex with all sorts of factors. He can’t know for certain that she...
Stop it, I tell myself. Stop denying. Stop making excuses. Stop running away. My entire coma-induced hallucination had an obvious point. It was clearly my subconscious helping my conscious come to grips with my mom’s death.
I won’t let leaving Peter and Claire be pointless.
Even if they weren’t real.
Hobbling, I follow Dr. Handsome into the elevator. I sag against the wall. He watches me. “She’s rallied quite a bit since she heard you woke,” he says. “But I need to caution you...sometimes it’s a shock to see someone you love here.”
“I’ve seen her in the hospital before.”
“She’s weak.”
“I’ll be strong for her.”
He nods approvingly. “Good. She needs that.”
“That’s why I came back.”
I don’t know whether I mean back from Lost or back from the coma. I don’t think it matters. He seems satisfied, at any rate. I watch him out of the corner of my eye. His hands are clasped on his clipboard, and he’s watching the numbers tick down on the elevator. It’s a slow elevator, and it rattles a fair amount for what should be a smooth ride for patients. It’s also twice as large as a normal elevator with railings on all sides for handicapped. I’m clinging to one of the railings and trying to act as if I’m leaning casually against the cool metal wall. Half the other walls are filled with posters describing what to do in a medical emergency. “I’d really hope that here of all places those posters wouldn’t be necessary.” I’m trying to joke. I don’t really succeed.
“Emergencies happen.”
“But aren’t you guys supposed to be trained?”
His lips curve up into a smile, and I notice he has nice lips. I don’t know why I’m noticing this now, when I’m on my way to see my mother. My brain’s way of distracting me. Even my subconscious has avoidance issues.
I think of Peter’s kisses, and I have to turn away from Dr. Barrett.
See, I did remember his name. Funny that. I hadn’t realized that I’d committed it to memory. “How long have you been Mom’s doctor?”
“Three years.”
“Oh.” I’d never met him before. “I thought it was that man with the white hair...”
“Dr. Scola? He retired a year and a half ago. I inherited his practice. Your mother has been coming to see me regularly for a while.” He looked at me. “Don’t feel bad. You aren’t expected to know her doctors. I don’t think she wanted you so involved.”
“She did. I didn’t want to be. I wasn’t ready.”
The elevator dings and the doors slide open. “Are you ready now?”
It’s a genuine question, and I wonder how many deaths a doctor has to see to stop caring, how many until the soul scabs over, how many until the losses stop hurting. “Yes.”
He holds open the door for me.
I don’t move. “Honestly, no, I’m not ready. I should be. But I’m not. Is anyone?”
He considers it. “Sometimes. But usually, no. If you’d like to talk afterward, have the nurses page me.”
I dismiss this as politeness. He’ll be too busy afterward.
“I mean it, Ms. Chase. I hope you’ll take me up on my offer.” He leads the way out of the elevator and then pauses as I hobble out. He holds out his arm.
I wonder at the fact that he’s taking the time to do this at all, to escort an obviously slow walker all the way over here. In my experience, this isn’t how people act in hospitals. They’re nice enough, they care, but they’re harried. He must have other patients, appointments, things to do. “Why are you being so nice?” I know I’m being blunt, but I can’t help it.
“It’s my job.”
“Seems above and beyond. Not that I don’t appreciate it.”
“As I said, your mother is an extraordinary person,” he says. “When my father died, she went out of her way to be kind to me. I owe her.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that.” I guess I didn’t know a lot of what my mother did while I was at work, including her friendships. I feel an unpleasant flash of anger, then jealousy... But I wanted her to hide this from me, all the details of her dying. She was only doing what she thought I wanted. “I think I have a lot to talk about with her.”
“She tires easily,” he warns me.
I flash him a wan smile. “So do I.”
We’re walking very slowly now. He’s holding on to my arm, and I’m leaning against him more than is polite, but if I didn’t, I think I would melt into the linoleum floor and not be able to rise. I see him glance at a wheelchair.
“I don’t want her to see me in that,” I say. “I want to be strong for her.”
He nods, and he doesn’t look at a wheelchair again.
“In retrospect, I should have used one until here and then ditched it.”
At last, we’re outside her room. He knocks on the door. “Mrs. Chase? I have someone here to see you!” His voice is cheerful again. I wonder if he practices that, the cheerful voice. It’s not quite as singsong as my doctor’s, but the tone is the same. Maybe they have group cheerfulness training. “Brace yourself,” he says to me softly, very softly. I’m not quite sure if he said it, or if it’s my own inner voice telling me to be strong.
I walk into the room.
Mom lies in the hospital bed. She looks as if half of her has melted away. Her skin sags against her bones, and she looks ashen-yellow. She has multiple IV needles puckering the skin on the back of her hand and tubes taped to her arms. Her body is under the thin sheet, but her face is so very thin. Still, she brightens as I hobble into the room.
“I look terrible, don’t I?” she says.
Clearly, I haven’t done a good job at hiding my expression. I consider lying. “You look like how I feel.”
She points imperiously to the chair by the window, a twin to the one I was sitting in when Dr. Barrett came to fetch me. “William, you should have wheeled her here. She didn’t need to walk.”
“She insisted,” he says. “She has your stubborn streak.”
“Stupid streak, you mean.” Mom glares at me. “You had me terrified, you know. Aged me at least twenty years.”
“Barely shows at all.”
“You mean beneath the emaciated ill look?”
“Right. That kind of overshadows everything else.”
“Dying is a helluva diet. I don’t recommend it.” She points again at the chair. Dr. Barrett, William, guides me over to it. His hands are warm and strong, and I think of Peter’s hands. They’re similar. Hands that are used often. In Peter’s case, it was to climb onto roofs. In William’s, I suspect it’s saving lives. Or maybe golf. It occurs to me that I have done such an excellent job of avoiding talking to any doctors in the past few years that I don’t know if golf is still the standard cliché.
“Do you golf?” I ask him.
If he’s startled by this change of subject, he doesn’t show it. “Not regularly.”
“He plays basketball with friends,” Mom says.
“Sometimes. There’s a league in the hospital. We meet at lunch whenever we can.”
“Lauren likes to swim,” Mom says. “Or did. She used to be a fish.”
“Still am,” I say without thinking.
Mom snorts. “You haven’t been in the water since...well, she used to be an excellent swimmer. I’m sure she still would be if she’d make time for it.”
“I have. I mean, I will.” I feel myself flushing red. “Mom, are you trying to set us up?”
/>
“I’m compressing three months of mothering into three minutes,” she says. “Now, give your phone number to the nice doctor, sit up straight, and don’t let your mouth gape open. You’ll catch flies that way, and while they are high on protein, it’s not attractive in front of a potential mate.”
I am blushing furiously now. “You’re right,” I say to Dr. Barrett. “She is extraordinary.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lauren.” Mom snaps her fingers. “Hand me a pen, William.”
Bemused, the doctor obeys. Mom scrawls on a napkin on the side of her lunch tray. I notice that she’s barely touched the food. I also notice that her hand is shaking as she writes. Her hands were always so steady. A few months ago, she could thread the tiniest needle in a half-lit room and then sew a button without even looking at it, much less piercing herself. If I attempted that, I’d bleed all over the button. She shoves the napkin at him. “Now give us some privacy, and call my daughter later.”
Wordlessly, he accepts the napkin. I suppose they didn’t cover this in medical school.
“You really don’t have to,” I tell him.
“I’d never dream of disobeying your mother.” He tucks the napkin into his clipboard, and then he leaves. Mom is chuckling. She then sobers and looks at me.
“Have a nice nap?” she asks.
“Tolerable,” I say. “Weird dreams, though. And terrible morning breath.”
“Don’t scare me like that again. Whole upside of cancer is supposed to be that there’s no chance that your children die first.” She looks at me as if expecting me to tell her not to talk like that, to tell her she’s not going to die. But I don’t say anything. Softly, she says, “I really look that bad.”
I don’t want to answer that, neither with a lie nor with the truth. “Want me to tell you about my weird dream?”
“Does it have someone attractive of the male persuasion?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, it does.”