Glimpse (7 page)

“Biology lab.” I recognized Lisa's voice from somewhere behind me and spun around. Tiny pieces of debris clung to her hair, which was now gray rather than the usual deep brown. Soot coated her face, smearing around her eyes and cheeks as though she had been crying.

“Jeez, Lisa, are you okay?”

“I'm not hurt. It was the biology lab.”

“Where were you?”

“History. Whatever happened blew a hole in the wall to our class.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

Lisa's lip quivered, and she looked as if she wanted to say something but wasn't sure how to form the words. My stomach twisted. I suddenly had a sinking feeling that what she wasn't telling me involved Colin.

I looked past her, over the groups of people huddled nearby. “Where's Colin?”

“Colin's fine,” Lisa said. “He's looking for you too. We both were.”

My pulse slowed. “Thank God. But if you knew it was the biology lab, why'd you worry? You know my schedule. I had English.”

She blinked and turned to the crowd.

What isn't she telling me?

“Colin!” she raised her hand. “Over here.”

Colin weaved through the crowd. When he made it over to us, he looked back and forth between Lisa and me like he was waiting for me to react to a joke that I hadn't yet heard. “Well? Did you tell him?”

“Tell me what?” I asked.

“I didn't tell him yet,” Lisa said. “I wanted to wait for you.”

“Tell me what?”

“About Mrs. Farnsworthy.”

“What about her?”

Colin looked at Lisa, then back to me. “The explosion, Dean. She was right in the middle of it.”

“W… what?” My earlier hallucination of her screaming face flashed in my mind. No way. It couldn't be related.

“Look, we don't know anything,” Lisa said. “But she was just standing there, and then the wall behind her exploded. I saw her getting taken away by the ambulance. It didn't look good.”

“What the heck happened?” I asked.

Lisa shook her head. “All I know is that the biology lab exploded. And a bunch of people are hurt. Loads of people have been taken to the hospital on stretchers. But the paramedics were doing CPR on Mrs. Farnsworthy. I saw it.” She looked at me as if I had the answer to some riddle scribbled on my forehead.

“What?” I asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“When did you have your vision?”

“Vision? You mean my hallucination?”

“Start of first period,” Colin said. “Maybe ten minutes in.”

I blinked. What was she getting at? I opened my mouth. “Are you saying that—”

“I'm not saying anything. Yet. But I think it's pretty clear what we have to do,” she said.

“Is it?” Colin asked.

“We go to the hospital.” She looked back at the school. “Dean, you said yourself that you saw Mrs. Farnsworthy, right? I think we need to go see her.”

“You think Mrs. Farnsworthy has something to do with my hallucinations?”

“She
was
your hallucination, Dean.”

Colin nodded. “She's got a point. I say we go.”

 

***

 

We each called our parents and told them not to worry. It took the better part of twenty minutes to convince my mom that we were fine, and by the time she let me hang up, we were already on the bus, halfway to the hospital.

“What do we do if she's not okay?” I looked at Colin, then Lisa. “What would that mean?”

Lisa shrugged and then cleared her throat. “Isn't that guy from the alley in the hospital too?”

Colin sprang up from the seat. “We should go see him.”

I turned to Lisa. “Don't tell me you're buying into Colin's curse theory now.” She shrugged and I added, “The last thing that man needs are visitors.”

“It's not all that far-fetched,” Colin said. “You save him, he mutters some cryptic word at you, and all of a sudden you go nuts.”

“He's not nuts,” Lisa said.

Colin drew a breath. “Well, he's nuts or…” He chewed his lip for a second. “You have some kind of psychic ability.” His eyes widened. “I've heard of people becoming psychic after getting into an accident.”

Lisa wiped a sleeve across her face and turned to me. “I'm not saying I believe Colin. I still think your hallucinations have to do with stress. But it might help for you to see that he's okay, and that Mrs. Farnsworthy is—” Her voice cracked.

“She'll be okay,” Colin said. “She's ex-KGB, remember? It's going to take more than a little explosion to hurt her.”

Lisa looked at her shoes. “You didn't see her.”

Colin opened his mouth then closed it. He cocked his head as if he wanted me to say something to make Lisa feel better. “Fine. We'll go see him,” I said.

Lisa looked up.

“Good,” Colin said, relieved. “It's settled then.”

“Do we even know what we're going to say to him?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Colin said. “We're going to ask him what kind of voodoo spell he cast to make you see…” He trailed off and glanced out the window. “What is it you're seeing anyway? Visions? Aberrations?”

“Apparitions,” Lisa said.

“What?”

“You mean apparitions, not aberrations.”

Colin shrugged and turned back to me. “I mean ghosts, the otherworldly, the—”

“I get it,” I said.

“Look, guys,” Lisa said, “let's just take this one step at a time, okay? First, we check on Mrs. Farnsworthy. Then we find the guy from the alley, and we talk to him. Let's not jump to conclusions here. Dean's been going through a lot: the stress of final exams, the stress of witnessing a crime…” Her eyes glossed as her voice trailed off. She turned her head and wiped her eyes again, leaving fresh smudges on her face.

Though she had mentioned it before, it only just hit me that Lisa had witnessed the explosion firsthand. Seeing something like that would have to be difficult to come back from. I wanted to reassure her that things would be okay, but the words just wouldn't come. After the past few days, I wasn't sure things would be okay.

Luckily, Colin picked up the slack. “Everything's going to be fine,” he said unconvincingly. “Don't worry, we'll help Dean sort out…” He and Lisa both glanced at me for a fraction of a second before looking away.

Great. Now my friends couldn't even talk or look at me without wondering if I was a freak. “It could all be just some bizarre coincidence,” I offered.

“It has to be,” Lisa said, mostly under her breath.

 

The hospital was at a level of chaos I couldn't have imagined. Ambulances lined up one behind the other, waiting their turn to drop off an injured student, only to leave with their sirens on, no doubt going back to the school. Inside was even worse. Droves of parents clogged the nurses' station, desperate to know the condition of their children.

“We're never going to get any information there,” Lisa said, pointing to the crowd.

Colin placed his hands on our backs and pushed us forward, through the crowd and toward the elevator. “We don't need to wait,” he said. He punched the UP button. “There's a nurses' station on every floor. And each floor can tell you what you need to know.”

Colin certainly wasn't the sharpest kid you'd meet, but if he said something about hospitals, I believed him. He had broken more bones than anyone I knew, and over the years, I'd visited him dozens of times. Usually he ended up in the hospital after doing something stupid—last time he'd broken a couple ribs falling out of a tree while chasing a squirrel. The time before that, he thought it would be cool to try riding his skateboard while wearing roller blades.

We stepped off the elevator at the second floor and squinted against the harsh lights reflecting off the polished linoleum. The area seemed utterly deserted compared to the floor below. Colin wasted no time and walked straight to the nurses' station. “Excuse me, ma'am.”

A middle-aged nurse stood up from behind her counter. She had short, boy-cut hair and wore purple scrubs. She peered down at the three of us. Concern flashed across her face when she saw Lisa's soot-covered face. “You kids must be coming from that school explosion. Are you okay?”

“We're fine, ma'am.” Colin leaned against the counter. “We're just trying to find out if our teacher is okay. Her name's Mrs. Farnsworthy. We would've asked downstairs, but it's just crazy down there.”

The nurse nodded. “I've been down there.” She looked off to the left and sighed. “Those poor parents must be terrified.” She turned to her computer and tapped a few keys. “That's nice of you kids to come see how your teacher is doing.” She tapped a few more keys. “Mrs. Farnsworthy, you say?”

Colin nodded.

A moment passed while the nurse read whatever was on her screen. “I'm sorry, there's nothing in my computer yet—they're busy down there; it might not have been entered yet. Don't you worry, though, I'll bet your teacher will be fine.”

She smiled, and then when she looked at me, her eyes widened.

“Wait. You're that boy.” She shuffled some papers on the desk and held up a copy of the
Abbotsford Gazette
. “That's you, isn't it?”

“That's him, ma'am,” Colin said. “Our local hero.”

“That was just the bravest thing I had ever heard of, young man.” She leaned over the counter. “Is it true you fought them off all by yourself?”

“He did, ma'am,” Colin said, slapping my back. “Dean's the bravest kid I know. He took on a group of murderous thieves just to help his fellow man. Can you imagine the courage?”

I rolled my eyes. “It really wasn't like—”

“That's the other reason we're here,” Lisa said, squaring her shoulders. “We'd really like to see the man Dean saved. You know, just to make sure he's okay.”

The nurse's lips thinned into a grim line. “Mr. Vidmar is down the hall. But I'm sorry to say that it doesn't look good. He's in really rough shape.”

Vidmar
, I thought. The name sounded foreign. “Is his family here?”

She shook her head. “He has a brother. The admitting doctor spoke to him when we finally tracked him down. I know he's on his way, but he might not get here until tomorrow.

“Do you think we could see him anyway?” Lisa prodded. “We came a very long way.”

The nurse smiled. “I don't see the harm, but you'll need to make it quick. The doctors will be making their rounds soon. Besides, some visitors might do the poor man some good.” She gestured down the hall. “He's in Room 245, but he might not be awake.”

“We'll just look in on him then,” Lisa said. “Thank you.”

Room 245 was at the end of the curved hallway, and outside his room was a metal trolley covered in binders. “VIDMAR” was written on one of the binder spines, and all three of us stopped when we saw it.

“You think it will say if he's going to make it?” Colin asked.

“You can't read that,” Lisa said. “It's private.”

“Please. Don't you think there might be something useful in there?” Colin reached over and pulled the binder from the stack and opened it up. Lisa and I leaned over Colin's shoulder and glanced down at the page.

Notes scrawled in black ink covered the whole page. There were also a series of dates with notations beside them. Some of the writing was hard to read, but several key words jumped out.
Electrocution, multiple beatings/muggings, mentally unstable, delusional, committed to psychiatric facility
. I scanned over the rest of the page and stopped at a note at the bottom: “
Brother reports several suicide attempts, the latest being January 2008—patient jumped from a bridge.
”

“That's enough,” Lisa said, reaching out and closing the binder. “We shouldn't read that stuff. It's not right. Let's just talk to him.”

All of us were shocked by the things we had read. The chart was nearly an inch thick. We hadn't really expected the man I saved to be—I searched for the word—unstable. Now the fact that Mr. Vidmar was still even alive defied logic. “You're right, Lisa. Let's go.”

The three of us entered the room and stopped by the door. “Rough” didn't begin to describe the shape of the man. Purple, orange, and brown bruises, along with at least a dozen lacerations, covered his face. Dark hair poked out from below a white gauze that formed a thick band around his head, and his arms, from wrists to armpits, were set in white casts. Machines running wires to his chest
beeped
and
hummed
out various rhythms that let us know he was at least alive. I guessed that he was in his mid to early thirties, though with all the bandages, it was difficult to tell.

Lisa peeked in a small backpack next to his bed. I recognized it from the alley.

“Stopwatches,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“This bag.” She reached in and pulled out a handful of stopwatches. “There's got to be a dozen of them here. She flipped one over in her hand and examined the back. Then she grabbed another and examined the back of it. “They all have initials on the back. R.T., G.H., D.C., S.W.—”

“Dean Curse,” Colin interrupted.

I looked at him, confused.

“D.C.” He pointed over the bed to Lisa. “She said one of the initials was D.C., like Dean Curse. Maybe he was going to give it to you for your birthday.”

“Don't be an idiot, Colin,” Lisa said as she stuffed the watches back into the bag. “They could mean anything.”

Colin shrugged. “I wasn't being serious.”

“He's asleep,” I said. “We should go. Maybe come back tomorrow.”

Lisa plucked up a newspaper from a table beside the bed. “Looks like he was reading your article.” She turned to put the paper back on the table and inadvertently knocked a cup of orange juice over Colin's shoes. “Oops.” She tossed the newspaper to the foot of Mr. Vidmar's bed and reached for the stack of paper towels on a nearby shelf.