A Breath of Eyre (12 page)

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Authors: Eve Marie Mont

BOOK: A Breath of Eyre
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I walked over to the vanity and found the chain from my necklace and carefully slid the dragonfly on it, then fastened it around my neck, feeling the weight of the pendant return to my chest. When I looked in the mirror, I reeled backward with shock and recognition. For it was not Jane who stared back at me, but another girl. A girl I’d almost forgotten.
Her name repeated in my head like an echo, and then faces came flooding back to me, their names slowly returning to my consciousness: Michelle, Owen, Dad, Barbara, Grandma. I tried to call out to them, but their images hovered in front of my eyes yet out of reach.
I knew that I was connected to each and every one of them, and I had to find my way back. Clutching the necklace, I prayed to my mother for assistance. If anyone could help me now, it was her. I cried her name and wept and fought with my memories to sort out the truth from the fantasy. All that had happened here at Thornfield—my position as governess, my friendship with Mrs. Fairfax and Adèle, my love for Rochester—it was all illusion. My true destiny lay somewhere else.
Mother, please, help me! Help me fight my way back. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to live my own life. I want to go to Paris. I want to write a novel. I want to fall in love. I want so many things.
Miserable and exhausted beyond measure, I crawled into bed, hearing the sound of my name repeat over and over again in my head, two syllables, so rhythmic and comforting they sounded almost like a heartbeat.
PART 3
C
HAPTER
13
I
thought the pulsing sound in my ears was my own heartbeat, but it was too high-pitched, too mechanical. I tried opening my eyes but felt like a baby mouse prying his eyes open for the first time, awaiting a harsh and terrifying world.
When my vision sharpened, I saw that I was in a hospital room, hemmed in by metal rails with tall machines on either side of me, humming and beeping steadily, presumably keeping me alive. I heard someone stirring beside me and turned to look, but my movements were restricted. I panicked. I tried to say something, but all that came out of my mouth was a moan. Oh God, I couldn’t speak.
“Emma?” a voice said. “Emma, Emma!” My father’s face appeared above me, tearstained and pale. I tried to reach for him, tried to say just one word, but I couldn’t speak or move. “Doctor, she’s awake! Dr. Gupta!” my father shouted, jumping to his feet and running out of the room.
Where am I? And where did my father go?
A few minutes later, he returned with a woman in a white lab coat. She was small and dark and disconcertingly young. She examined my eyes and said in a tiny little voice, “Emma, can you hear me?”
“Yes! Yes!” I wanted to shout, but I could only utter a gasp.
“What’s wrong with her, Doctor?” my father said. “Why can’t she speak?”
“It’s not unusual. I told you there might be complications.” The tiny doctor took my father aside and whispered something, but I could hear her plainly. “Paralysis. Brain damage. We’ll need to wait and see.”
Paralysis? Brain damage? There is absolutely nothing wrong with my brain!
I tried to shout again and felt exhausted by the effort. My father came back to my bed and seized both of my hands. “Emma, you’re awake, that’s all that matters. And I’m here.” Tears filled his eyes. “Can you hear me? Do you understand me?”
I focused all of my power into nodding, just once, and it seemed to do the trick because my father dropped his head down onto my chest and broke down, crying. I began crying, too. It had been so long since he’d touched me, and now he was embracing me. When he lifted his head, tears were streaming down his cheeks.
“She can hear what I’m saying, Doctor,” he said. “She just can’t answer.” I tried to say something again, anything to reassure my dad I was back, but the intense concentration was too much. I felt myself being sucked back into sleep.
I slept frequently over the next few days, waking for brief stints, during which doctors and nurses crowded around me with miniature flashlights and equipment, prodding and poking me until I fell asleep again. My father was worried, but the doctor assured him excessive sleep was normal for someone coming out of a coma. It took time to readjust to waking life.
Here is what I learned over the next few days. I had not been struck by a car, and I was not paralyzed. I had been struck by lightning. Yes, I was one of the two thousand people struck by lightning each year, approximately sixty-five of whom would die from their injuries. I had been flown by helicopter to Children’s Hospital. They didn’t think I was going to make it. Survival rates for coma patients are usually less than 50 percent, especially for people who lose consciousness for more than a few hours. I had been in a coma for three weeks. I had forgotten how to walk and talk. And I remembered no lightning storm at all and nothing from the time I was under; in fact, the last thing I remembered was getting dressed in my Wednesday Addams costume on Halloween.
Doctors came in and out of my room constantly, but I slept through most of it. Little blips of their conversations entered my subconscious, phrases like “external stimuli,” “Glasgow Coma Scale,” and “frontal lobe activity.” But my lucid moments were few and far between.
After a few days, I was able to stay awake for longer periods. Dr. Gupta came to speak with me, calling it the first of her “cheerleading sessions.” It was going to be a long road to recovery, she warned, but I was making phenomenal progress already. My MRI was normal, I had no permanent paralysis, no skull fracture, no brain damage. All in all, I’d been extraordinarily lucky.
“I’m sure it’s quite frustrating that you can’t remember anything about the accident,” she said. “But temporary amnesia is quite common after a trauma like this. Don’t worry. The memories are still there. You just need to retrieve them. Re-teach yourself. You will walk and talk again.”
After a week, I was allowed to have visitors, but I still couldn’t talk very well. My father stayed with me every night, refusing to go home. Barbara and Grandma Mackie came the day after Thanksgiving and brought some stuffing and cranberry sauce, even though I couldn’t eat solid food. The smell was comforting all the same.
Michelle and Owen visited that Sunday. It was good to see my friends again, to hear their voices filling the stale hospital room with lively gossip and Lockwood drama. Owen sat on the edge of my bed, wearing a T-shirt with a cartoon piece of bread and a dialogue bubble that read:
I’m toasted!
Michelle seemed agitated and chatty, pacing around the room like a wild animal. In my groggy state, she was making me dizzy. She filled me in on our Halloween excursion to Braeburn and its aftermath. Dr. Overbrook had blamed Michelle for the infraction, sentencing her to fifty hours of community service, which she was completing five hours at a time at a women’s shelter in Waverly Falls.
“One more incident and I’m expelled,” Michelle said. “But you were absolved completely. Overbrook said I put undue influence on you, and you were not responsible for your own actions.” I wanted to apologize to her for the injustice of it all, so I tried to reach out my hand, and Owen grabbed it. “Hey, your fingers are moving,” he said. “That’s good. That’s real good.”
“You didn’t tell her the really exciting news,” Michelle said, an edge of sarcasm to her voice.
“Oh, yeah,” Owen said. “Michelle’s going to compete in the riding championship! My dad’s company is sponsoring her.”
“So, basically,” Michelle said, “I’m indebted to Owen and his father for, like, the rest of my life.”
“That’s not true and you know it,” Owen said.
“Whatever. It’s fine.” Michelle fidgeted with the sash of the window. Something seemed off between them, but I didn’t know what. “Oh my God, I almost forgot to tell you!” she said, grabbing the bouquet of flowers from the windowsill and bringing them over to my bed. “Guess who these are from?”
“She can’t guess,” Owen said. “She can’t speak. Just tell her.”
“Gray Newman.” She brought over the flowers—enormous rainbow-hued Gerbera daisies that didn’t look real. The card attached said,
All Naturals
. I wanted to tell Michelle that the flowers were probably Simona’s idea, not Gray’s. Just like my journal. “He came to visit you,” Michelle said. “He seemed really worried.”
“Worried he was going to get in trouble,” Owen said. “How many wine coolers did he make you drink that night?” I tried to shake my head. Owen had the wrong idea. “There’s something about that guy I don’t trust.”
“What do you mean?” Michelle said.
“I don’t know, I’ve heard some bad things. Emma’s too good for him.”
“You never told me what happened between you two on Halloween night,” Michelle said. “When you came back from that walk, you seemed upset. Of course, you probably don’t remember now. The doctor told us you have temporary amnesia. How cool is that? It’s like something from a movie. I still can’t believe you got struck by lightning... .”
She kept prattling on, but suddenly I wanted them gone. I was overwhelmed, tired, starved for sleep. I didn’t want to think anymore or talk to people or deal with all this light and noise. Fortunately, the nurse returned and told Michelle and Owen that visiting hours were ending. I watched my friends leave with relief.
Even though I couldn’t remember what had happened to me while under the spell of the coma, I often felt a force calling me back to slumber, back to whatever twilight world I’d lived in for those weeks. Images loomed on the horizon of my brain of peaceful meadows and crackling fires and of something larger and more powerful, something vague and frightening but also exciting. I was desperate to remember.
Sleep seduced me for those first few days, pulling me under again and again and releasing me for only hours at a time. But by the following week, I was feeling more energetic. I had regained the ability to speak, and this gave me motivation to stay up for longer periods. Maybe if I began to talk, I’d start remembering what had happened to me.
Feeling motivated by this prospect, I began working with a physical therapist to retrain my muscles, and by the end of the second week, I was out of the wheelchair and conversing with the staff. The doctors were amazed by my rapid recovery. Apparently, I had been an 11 on the Glasgow Coma Scale, a score that made it probable I would survive and make a full recovery, but likely that I would sustain some permanent physical and cognitive impairments. However, the doctors weren’t seeing any evidence of this. In fact, I was speaking normally and had transferred to crutches by the beginning of the third week. Dr. Gupta said it usually took months of recuperation before a coma patient could walk and talk on her own, but my body seemed to be working overtime to restore all my functions.
“You’re an interesting case study,” she said. “You were in a coma for three weeks, but you showed extraordinary activity in your right frontal lobe. We usually don’t see that.”
“What’s the right frontal lobe?” I asked, my voice still sounding strange to my ears.
“It’s the part of your brain responsible for creativity and imagination. It’s very rare for it to be so active during a comatose state. We’re all very curious what was going on in there while you were under,” she said, tapping the side of my head.
Despite some reservations, Dr. Gupta decided to release me after only three weeks of recovery in the hospital. Although I was fit enough to leave, she wanted me to make up any schoolwork from home and not return to Lockwood until after the winter break. That way, my dad and Barbara could keep an eye on me and make sure I didn’t have a relapse.
The next few weeks were rigorous as I made up the work I had missed, worked on my
Jane Eyre
essay, and met with the physical therapist. Since life for a fisherman is slow in the winter, my dad had picked up some construction jobs and was gone five or six days a week. Barbara had offered to work from home so she could look after me. I tried to stay out of Barbara’s way, but she insisted on checking up on me about every five minutes, cell phone attached to her ear, big hair bouncing, phony smile gleaming. I couldn’t wait to get back to school.
Michelle called every few days to keep me up to date on my assignments and all the Lockwood gossip. The one person she didn’t mention was Owen.
Finally I asked her, “What’s the deal with you and Owen? Don’t you like him anymore?”
“It’s not a question of like,” she said. “He’s just so ... immature. He’s always hanging out with that kid Flynn, who I really can’t stand, and he doesn’t have any idea what he wants to do with his life. He actually thinks he’s going to roam around Europe with his guitar after he graduates. I mean, come on. Grow up already.”
“Hey,” I said, “just because you’re on the fast track to MIT and a career in astrophysics doesn’t mean the rest of us have it all figured out.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s not just that. I’m uncomfortable with this whole training thing.”
“What do you mean? It’s so nice of Mr. Mabry to sponsor you.”
“Yeah, but you know I don’t like owing people.”
“I’m sure Owen doesn’t see it like that.”
“It just makes me feel like I’m indebted to him in some way. Like I’m his charity case.”
I knew what she meant, but sometimes the chip on Michelle’s shoulder was so big it blinded her from seeing a good thing for what it was.
In mid-December, I had a follow-up appointment with Dr. Gupta. My dad and Barbara had been acting strange around me for the past week, but I’d written it off as pre-Christmas jitters. When we arrived at Dr. Gupta’s office, it seemed my intuition had been right.
While we were talking, a middle-aged man in a tweed sports coat and khakis entered the room, introducing himself as Dr. Reese. He took a seat by us and smiled at me. Something about his face reminded me of a fish. “The reason I brought Dr. Reese here today,” Dr. Gupta said, “is that your parents have expressed some concern about your mental health.”
“My mental health?” I looked at my dad, whose eyes were fixed firmly on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Gupta said, smiling kindly. “I know that term must be a little alarming. It’s just that after a traumatic experience like the one you’ve had, many people become depressed and start exhibiting uncharacteristic behaviors in order to cope.”
I turned to my father. “Have I been showing uncharacteristic behaviors?” I asked.
“No, honey,” Barbara said. I hated that she was answering for him. “We’re just worried about you. Since you’ve woken from the coma, it’s like you’re a different person. You seem empty and disconnected, like you’re all locked up inside yourself.”
I felt like a wounded zoo animal, with four adults staring at me from outside the bars. “I’m fine,” I said. “It’s just, I miss my friends. I want to get back to school.” That wasn’t entirely true. I had been feeling empty lately, like something was missing. Something I couldn’t put my finger on.

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