Fly Away (10 page)

The music is still blaring downstairs. I’d drunk too much wine and forgotten to turn
it off last night. Prince.
Purple Rain
.

I get to my feet, feeling weak, but at least I have done
something
. This will make Johnny’s life easier when he gets back. It is one difficult job he
needn’t do.

Downstairs, the music snaps off.

I frown, turn, but before I leave the closet, Johnny appears in the doorway.

“What the
fuck
?” he yells at me.

I am so taken aback, I just stare at him. Was it today they were returning from Kauai?

He glances past me, sees the boxes lining the wall with labels like
Kate’s summer clothes,
and
Goodwill,
and
Kate, misc
.

I see his pain, how he is struggling for composure as his children come up behind
him. I push my way into his embrace, waiting—waiting—for him to hold me. When he doesn’t,
I step back. I feel tears burn my eyes. “I knew you wouldn’t want—”

“How
dare
you come into this house and go through her things and box them up as if they’re
garbage?” His voice breaks, words vibrate. “Is that her sweatshirt you’re wearing?”

“I was trying to help.”

“Help? Is it a
help
to leave empty wine bottles and food cartons on the counter? Is it a help to blast
music at the edge of pain? Do you think it will
help
me to look into her empty closet?”

“Johnny—” I reach for him. He pushes me aside so hard I stumble and almost drop the
journal.

“Give me that,” he says in a voice that is trip-wire tight.

I hold it to my chest and back away. “She entrusted it to me. I’m supposed to be with
Marah when she reads it. I promised Katie.”

“She made a lot of mistakes when it came to you.”

I shake my head. This is happening so fast I can’t quite process it. “Did I make a
mistake in cleaning out her closet? I thought you—”

“You
only
ever think about yourself, Tully.”

“Dad,” Marah says, pulling her brothers in close. “Mom wouldn’t want—”

“She’s gone,” he says sharply. I see how the words hit him, how grief rearranges his
face, and I whisper his name, not knowing what else to say. He’s wrong. I meant to
help.

Johnny backs away from me. He pushes a hand through his hair and looks at his children,
who look scared now, and uncertain. “We’re moving,” he says.

Marah goes pale. “What?”

“We’re moving,” Johnny says, more in control this time. “To Los Angeles. I’ve taken
a new job. We need a new start. I can’t live here without her”—he indicates his bedroom.
He can’t even look at the bed. He looks at me instead.

“If this is because I tried to help—”

He laughs. It is a dry, scraping sound. “Of course you think it’s about you. Did you
hear
me? I can’t live in her house.”

I reach for him.

He sidesteps me. “Just go, Tully.”

“But—”

“Go,” he says again, and I can see that he means it.

I clutch the journal and ease past him. I hug the boys together, holding them tightly
and kissing their plump cheeks, trying to imprint their images on my soul. “You’ll
visit us, right?” Lucas says unevenly. This little boy has lost so much and the uncertainty
in his voice kills me.

Marah grabs my arm. “Let me live with you.”

Behind us, Johnny laughs bitterly.

“You belong with your family,” I say quietly.

“This isn’t a family anymore.” Marah’s eyes fill with tears. “You told her you’d be
there for me.”

I can’t listen to any more. I pull my goddaughter into a fierce, desperate hug so
tight she struggles to break free. When I pull away and leave the room, I can hardly
see through my tears.

Six

“Will you
please
stop humming?” I say to Kate. “How am I supposed to think with you making that racket?
It’s not like these are pleasant memories for me.”

I am not humming
.

“Okay. Quit beeping. What are you, the Road Runner?” The sound is soft at first, like
a mosquito buzzing near my ear, but it amplifies steadily, becomes ridiculously loud.
“Stop making that noise.” I am starting to get a headache.

A
real
headache. Pain sparks to life behind my eyes, seeps out, turns into a hammer-pounding
migraine.

I am as quiet as the grave over here
.

“Very funny. Wait. That’s not you. It sounds like a car alarm. What the fu—”

WELOSTHER, someone says, yells, really. Who?

Beside me, I hear Katie sigh. It is a sad sound, somehow, like the tearing of old
lace. She whispers my name and then says:
Time
. It scares me, both the exhaustion I hear in her voice and the word itself. Have
I used up all the time allotted to me? Why didn’t I
say
more? Ask more questions? What happened to me? I know she knows. “Kate?”

Nothing.

Suddenly I am falling, tumbling.

I can hear voices, but the words make no sense and the pain is so pummeling, so brutalizing,
that it takes everything I have not to scream.

ALLCLEAR.

I feel my spirit ebbing away, draining out of my body. I want to open my eyes—or maybe
they are open—I can’t tell. I just know that this darkness is ugly, cold, thick as
coal dust. I scream for help, but it’s all in my head and I know it. I can’t open
my mouth. The sound I imagine echoes and fades away, and I do the same …

September 3, 2010
6:27
A.M.

Johnny stood outside Trauma Nine. It had taken him all of five seconds to decide to
follow Dr. Bevan to this room, and it took him even less time to decide to open the
door. He was a journalist, after all. He’d made a career out of going where he wasn’t
wanted.

As he opened the door, he was bumped into hard, pushed aside by a woman in scrubs.

He moved out of her way and slipped into the crowded room. It was glaringly bright
and swarming with people in scrubs who had collected around a gurney. They were talking
all at once, moving back and forth like piano keys in play. Because of their bodies,
he couldn’t see the patient—just bare toes sticking up from the end of a blue blanket.

An alarm sounded. Someone yelled, “We lost her.
Charge
.”

A high humming sound thrummed through the room, riding above the voices. He felt the
vibration of the sound to his bones.

“All clear.”

He heard a high
wrrr
and then the body on the table arched up and thumped back down. An arm fell sideways,
hung off the side of the gurney.

“She’s back,” someone said.

Johnny saw heartbeats move across the monitor. The swarm seemed to relax. A few of
the nurses stepped away from the bed, and for the first time he saw the patient.

Tully.

It felt as if air rushed back into the room. Johnny finally took a breath of it. There
was blood all over the floor. A nurse stepped in it and almost fell.

Johnny moved in closer to the bed. Tully lay unconscious, her face battered and bloodied;
a bone stuck up through the ripped flesh of her arm.

He whispered her name; or maybe he just thought he did. He slipped in between two
nurses—one who was starting an IV, and the other who had pulled a blue blanket up
to cover Tully’s bare chest.

Dr. Bevan materialized beside him. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Johnny waved the comment away but couldn’t respond. He had so many questions for this
man, and yet, as he stood there, shocked by the extent of her injuries, what he felt
was shame. Somehow, some way, he had a part to play in this. He’d blamed Tully for
something that wasn’t her fault and cut her out of his life.

“We need to get her to the OR, Mr. Ryan.”

“Will she live?”

“Her chances are not good,” Dr. Bevan said. “Step out of the way.”

“Save her,” Johnny said, stumbling back as the gurney rolled past him.

Feeling numb, he walked out of the room and made his way down the hall and into the
fourth-floor surgical waiting area, where a woman sat in the corner, knitting needles
in hand, crying.

He checked in with the woman at the desk, told her he was waiting for word on Tully
Hart, and then he took a seat beside the blank television. Feeling the first distant
ping of a headache, he leaned back.

He tried not to remember all that had gone wrong in the Kate-less years, all the mistakes
he’d made—and there were some doozies. Instead, he prayed to a God he’d stopped believing
in on the day of his wife’s death and turned back to when his daughter disappeared.

For hours, he sat in the waiting room, watching people come and go. He hadn’t called
anyone yet. He was waiting for word on Tully’s condition. There had been enough tragedy
calls in their family. Bud and Margie lived in Arizona now; Johnny didn’t want Margie
to rush to the airport unless it was absolutely necessary. He would have called Tully’s
mom, even in this early hour, but he had no idea how to reach her.

And then there was Marah. He didn’t know if she’d even take his call.

“Mr. Ryan?”

Johnny looked up sharply, saw the neurosurgeon coming toward him.

He wanted to stand, to meet the man halfway, but he felt weak.

The surgeon touched his shoulder. “Mr. Ryan?”

Johnny forced himself to stand. “How is she, Dr. Bevan?”

“She survived the surgeries. Come with me.”

Johnny let himself be led out of the public waiting room and into a small, windowless
conference room nearby. Instead of a floral arrangement in the middle of the table
there was a box of tissue.

He sat down.

Dr. Bevan sat across from him. “Right now, the biggest concern is cerebral edema—the
swelling in her brain. She sustained massive head trauma. We’ve put a shunt in to
help with the swelling, but the efficacy of that is uncertain. We have lowered her
body temperature and put her into a medically induced coma to help relieve the pressure,
but her condition is critical. She’s on a ventilator.”

“May I see her?” Johnny asked.

The doctor nodded. “Of course. Come with me.”

He led Johnny down one white corridor after another, into an elevator and out of it.
At last they came to the ICU. Dr. Bevan walked over to a glass-walled private room,
one of twelve placed in a U-shape around a busy nurses’ station.

Tully lay in a narrow bed, surrounded by machines. Her hair had been shaved and a
hole had been drilled into her skull. A catheter and pump were working to relieve
the pressure on her brain. There were several tubes going into her—a breathing tube,
a feeding tube, a tube into her head. A black screen behind the bed showed the intracranial
pressure; another tracked her heartbeat. Her left arm was in a cast. Cold radiated
off her pale, bluish skin.

“Brain injuries are impossible to predict,” Dr. Bevan said. “We don’t really know
the extent of her injuries yet. We hope to know more in twenty-four hours. I wish
I could be more definitive, but this is uncertain territory.”

Johnny knew about brain injuries. He’d suffered one as a reporter covering the first
war in Iraq. It had taken him months of therapy to become himself again, and still
he couldn’t remember the explosion. “Will she be herself when she wakes up?”

“
If
she wakes up is really the question. Her brain is functioning, although we don’t
know how well because of the medications we have her on. Her pupils are responsive,
and that’s a good sign. The coma will give her body time, we hope. But if a bleed
develops or the swelling continues…”

He didn’t have to finish the sentence. Johnny knew.

The ventilator’s
thunk-whoosh
reminded him with every sound that she wasn’t breathing on her own.

This was what it sounded like to play God and keep someone alive—a cacophony of beeping
monitors, droning indicators, and the whooshing ventilator. “What happened to her?”
Johnny finally asked.

“Car accident, from what I’ve heard, but I don’t have any details.” Dr. Bevan turned
to him. “Is she a spiritual woman?”

“No. I wouldn’t say so.”

“That’s too bad. Faith can be a comfort at times like this.”

“Yes,” Johnny said tightly.

“We believe it helps to talk to comatose patients,” Dr. Bevan said.

The doctor patted his shoulder again and then headed out of the room.

Johnny sat down beside the bed. How long did he sit there, staring at her, thinking,
Fight, Tully,
whispering words he couldn’t say out loud? Long enough for guilt and regret to turn
into a knot in his throat.

Why did it take a tragedy to see life clearly?

He didn’t know what to say to her, not now, after all that had been said—and left
unsaid—between them. The one thing he knew for sure was this: if Kate were here, she’d
kick his ass for how he’d unraveled after her death and how he’d treated her best
friend.

He did the only thing he could think of to reach Tully. Quietly, feeling stupid but
doing it anyway, he started to sing the song that came to him, the one that had always
reminded him of Tully. “Just a small town girl, living in a lo-nely wor-ld…”

*   *   *

Where am I? Dead? Alive? Somewhere in between?

“Kate?”

I feel a whoosh of warmth come up beside me and my relief is enormous.

“Katie,” I say, turning. “Where were you?”

Gone,
she says simply.
Now I’m back. Open your eyes
.

My eyes are closed? That’s why it’s so dark? I open my eyes slowly, and it’s like
waking up on the face of the sun. The light and heat are so intense I gasp. It takes
seconds for my eyes to adjust to the brightness, and when they do I see that I am
back in the hospital room with my body. Below me, an operation is going on. Several
people in scrubs stand around an operating table. Scalpels and instruments glitter
on silver trays. There are machines everywhere, beeping, droning, buzzing.