Lurlene McDaniel (6 page)

T
hey don't know I can hear them talking about me. They say my name, these strangers, using unfamiliar terms—edema, telemetry, NG tube, urinary catheter—but I can't reach out to them. I try, but I'm trapped in darkness again, aware on one level that there's something beyond me, pinned in place on another level I can't understand. I want to float out of my body. I want to see the light like I did before.

I have no sense of time passing, just an awareness now and then of rising to a surface I can't break through. I'm a swimmer, ever seeking the water's top side but never quite able to find it. I slip further below, working to free myself.

I hear my mother's voice. She's begging me to open my eyes.

“I'm here! Mom! Help me!”

“I love you, little girl,” she says so many times into my ear.

“Come back to us, honey,” Daddy says.

“Analise, Analise,” Mom whispers.

How can I let them know I hear them? That I want to go to them?

“She moved her hand!” I hear Mom say.

“It's just a reflex,” says a stranger's voice. “Common in coma patients.”

“No, no, I saw her hand move when I said her name.”

“Please, Mrs. Bower, your daughter's in a deep coma. She can't respond.”

Liar!

“They tell me that coma patients can hear.”

“That's often true. Those who recover report conversations they've overheard.”

“So they can hear, but they can't move?”

Yes, Mom. Yes! Don't give up on me.

“Her hand movement was a reflex. I'm sorry, Mrs. Bower.”

“She—she's our only child.”

Don't cry, Momma. I'm here.

“So very, very sorry.”

I struggle for the surface. The darkness oozes around me, like primal mud. I sink.

I go to the hospital as soon as school's out on Friday. I ride the elevator up to the neurology floor, to the ICU. The Bowers are in the waiting area. Both of them. Usually at this time of the afternoon, only Sonya is here when I show up, and Jack is working. He comes after five. But now they both look at me, and I don't like their expressions. “What's wrong?” I ask. My insides go ice cold.

“They're prepping Analise for surgery,” Jack says.

“S-surgery?” I sound like a snake. “But why?”

“The edema … the swelling of her brain. It's causing problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

Jack answers, “If they don't relieve the intra-cranial pressure, her brain can herniate. It can push down on her brain stem and she could die.”

“How … how—?” I can't get my question out, but Jack understands.

He says, “Her doctor will remove part of her skull to let her brain expand. When the swelling goes down, they'll put the bone back in place.”

I feel sick to my stomach just imagining it. “I— I … isn't there any other way?”

“They've tried everything else.” This comes from Sonya. Her mouth is set in a hard line and her skin looks as pale as paper. “There's something I have to do,” she says. “I'll be back.”

Jack and I watch her go down the hall and disappear into the unit where Analise lies. I want to follow her. I want to see Analise so bad I can taste it. I guess Jack can read me because he says, “She'll be okay. Her surgeon is one of the best and the surgery isn't difficult. We can see her once it's over.”

“I—I guess I've seen too many horror flicks,” I say lamely, trying hard not to picture part of Analise's skull being removed.

“She'll be okay,” he repeats, and I think he's talking more to himself than to me.

There's something I want to say to him, but I'm not sure I should. I take deep breaths, screw up my courage. “Um, I—I drove up and down
Thompson Mountain a few times.” He looks at me. “I went to the place where she was rescued. Where they brought her up. I keep trying to figure out how it happened. How she fell over the side. I mean, Analise is a good rider. She shouldn't have fallen. There's a break in the guardrail about twenty-five yards up from where she landed. So … so I keep trying to picture how it happened.” I stop talking, wait for a reaction.

“So do the police,” he says.

“They do?”

“Her bike's being examined at the crime lab. And the guardrail too. It was mangled and bent back, and there might be paint or marks on her bike that will give them some clues.”

This was all electrifying news. “What do they think happened?”

“That a car crowded her. Swiped her.”

I think about this. “Wouldn't someone know if they hit a person on a bike?”

“You'd think so.”

As the implications sink in, I feel a hard knot of anger build inside me. “So if someone hit her and drove off … I mean without even checking …”

“A crime was committed,” Jack finishes for me.

The click of Sonya's heels coming back down
the hall interrupts us. She's holding a sack and she's crying. Jack catches her in his arms. “I'm all right,” she says. “I—it's just so hard, that's all. They're taking her to surgery now.”

“Let's wait down there,” Jack says.

I want to go too but don't want to be in their way. Sonya takes my hand. “You can come.”

We go to the elevator, punch the button and wait.

“What's in the bag?” Jack asks.

She opens it, stares at the contents, reaches in and pulls out a wad of sleek dark brown hair. “Analise's hair,” she says. “They had to cut it off for the surgery. I know what she wants done with it. Why she was growing it. I couldn't let it get thrown away.”

I don't know Analise's reason. Jack and I wait for Sonya to regain her composure.

“Locks of Love,” Sonya says. “It's a program for people to donate their hair to cancer patients for wigs.”

My heart squeezes.

“Oh,” Jack says.

“She was going to cut it off at graduation and donate it,” Sonya says. “She had it all planned out.”

My eyes get misty and I duck my head. This
sounds like something Analise would do: surprise us all at graduation with short hair to give her pride and joy to charity. I think of all the times I've run my fingers through her hair. Sometimes, when we've been totally alone, she's let me brush it with strong, even strokes that leave it as soft as silk and shining like mahogany. I like to wind it in ropelike tendrils around my fingers, gather it by the fistfuls and bury my nose in it. The smell of it, the feel of it, always turns me on. Once she asked, “If I didn't have long hair, would you still love me?”

“I'd love you even if you were bald,” I told her.

“Bald?”

“As a cue ball.”

Sonya drops the hair back into the sack, pauses, reaches in and pulls out a smaller clump. She offers it to me. “The program will never miss this much.”

I take it, hold it like it's something holy. “Thank you,” I say. My voice cracks, but I'm not embarrassed.

I pass him in the halls at school. Her boyfriend. Judie told me his name is Jeremy. He's cute. Brown hair that needs cutting. Brown eyes. Sharp angles in his face. Muscular body. He wears silver studs in his ear. I think he looks like a pirate, kind of dark and dangerous. He mostly looks sad, and I feel sorry for him. I begin to think that Analise is lucky to have a boy that crazy about her. I envy her that—having a boy in love with her.

I see Quin in the commons and in the cafeteria. Sometimes he acknowledges my presence on planet Earth. If he feels like it. It makes me mad because he has no reason to ignore me. I didn't do anything to have him blow me off.

“Except say no,” Judie reminds me. “It's probably a word he hasn't heard since he was two.”

Judie makes me laugh. “He could be nice to me. It wouldn't ruin his day to be nice to me.” I
tell her what I think about Analise's boyfriend. “She's in a coma and he's not staking out other girls. I admire that, don't you?”

“Face it, Laurie, Quin is only out for Quin. He's got an agenda and it doesn't include ‘forever’ with anyone in his high school.”

“I know that. But just treating someone nice, being polite and acknowledging her existence … what's wrong with that?”

Judie shrugs and I watch her big shoulders roll. “Nothing. But I sure wouldn't look for it from Quin.”

“What? No date?”

Mom asks the question as if I never sit home on a Saturday night.

“Judie's coming over and we're giving each other manicures and pedicures.” I keep my voice light when I answer, although I want to yell,
“No date, Mom! Face it, your daughter's a social reject.”

“Do you speak to that nice Quin at school? Because often boys need to think a girl is interested before they make a move.”

He already made a move.
“He's interested in someone else, Mom.”

She looks disappointed. “When I was your age—”

I don't want to hear another story about high school being the best years of my life. “You know what, Mom? High school's different now, not the same as when you went.”

“Certainly, you have harder work and more choices, but the basic boy-girl stuff will never change. Trust me.”

I grind my teeth. When the doorbell rings, I shoot off the sofa. Judie's waiting on the welcome mat, her face glowing. I can read her like a book. She has something she wants to share. In my room, I say, “Cough it up before you burst.”

“I overheard Amy, that friend of Analise's, talking in the girls’ bathroom yesterday afternoon.”

By now, I know most of the cast of characters in Analise's life. Everybody does. “Go on.”

“I was in a stall and they didn't know I was in there.” Judie likes to drag out her stories. “Well, Amy was telling another girl that Analise had
brain
surgery last week so she wouldn't die! They had to take part of her skull off to do it.”

I recoil. “Gross.”

“Well, she's better now. Still in a coma, but alive.”

I can see that there's more to Judie's story, so I wait patiently for her to get on with it. Finally I say, “And … ?”

“And the night her accident happened, the police think she was hit by a car and knocked over the side of Thompson Mountain.”

“The police?”

“Yeah. Amy said the cops found auto paint on Analise's bike and on the broken guardrail.”

“The guardrail was broken?”

“Pushed clean open. The hole was huge. Big enough for a bike to go through.” She leans in closer. “And someone had dragged branches over to the break. Hiding it, the cops think.”

Judie leans back. Her expression is smug. “It's looking like what happened to Analise Bower was no accident. I mean, not one she caused herself. It looks like she was a victim. You know … a hit-and-run.”